brendan mcleod

my actual opinion about baldur's gate 3 is that i am having fun if i treat it as a fun and kind of unserious romp and that if i start thinking about dnd racial politics even slightly instead of just reacting to things as they come up i'll spontaneously combust

#baldur's gate 3

kavita @yrgirlkv9/13/2023, 4:39 AM

actual minor spoilers

the opening act of baldur's gate 3 has the following plotline: there are a bunch of tiefling refugees who are leaving their home city because they all got blamed for a disaster there. they were on the road to another city, but they got attacked by goblins on the road and now they're trying to hide in a druid's grove. however, the druids are racist and want to kick outsiders out of the grove and hide it with magic. there are essentially two main resolutions to this plotline:

side with the tieflings, in which you assassinate the 3 goblin leaders responsible for their newfound violent urges. if you play it really smart you can probably kill them and them alone, but if you don't happen to be equipped with foreknowledge of the map and all the intricate little events, you wind up killing a decent number of people. mostly those people are soldiers/raiders, but i very nearly watched two goblin children bite it, because they like. were throwing rocks at a bear druid the goblins had captured and apparently the bear druid considers this an executionable offense. thankfully he wound up having bigger fish to fry in the ensuing fight and the kids made it out; he turns out to be the leader of the druids and he makes them stop being racist as the tieflings prepare to make their way to the new city in safety
side with the goblins, in which you stage an attack on the druid's grove and kill them and the tieflings. god only knows why you'd do this; the goblins are managed by a dark elf who made some kind of racial insult to my half-high elf protag literally immediately. like literally her first sentence was like, "ugh, a [FANTASY RACIAL SLUR], i can't believe i have to put up with this."

and just like. fine, okay, coming off the bioware standard it's nice to just be able to wreck someone's entire shit for being openly racist or wanting to do slavery whereas in dragon age you just kind of had to put up with it for centrism reasons, but what is it with the selective application of who does and doesn't count as people in a game whose entire theme is about the selective application of who does and doesn't count as people?

like in a plotline about how the (entirely non-tiefling druids) don't think of the tieflings as real people, no one seems to think of the goblins as real people, and like, fuck, dude, maybe they're all so disdainful of everyone else for a fuckin reason, man! like i'm not about to let a bunch of refugees be slaughtered but literally the journal entry for one of those goblin leaders is "she might've been able to help up with the Main Plot, but being a goblin proved fatal for her," and when the circumstances of your birth serve in and of themselves as justification for your death i can see how you'd decide that it's only fair you get to treat the rest of the world the same way too.

idk. idk! maybe there's some stupid dnd lore about how goblins aren't actually the same kind of sapient as other species or some bullshit, but i just truly don't understand how the quest about how one fantasy race would like to not be treated as worthless is itself one which treats another fantasy race as worthless. this seems like such an obvious inconsistency to me that i genuinely don't understand how it happened, or, for that matter, how it keeps happening

#baldur's gate 3 #i thought about dnd's racial politics even slightly

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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

yuri @dawnbreak9/13/2023, 5:44 AM

a semi-serious answer to "how the quest about how one fantasy race would like to not be treated as worthless is itself one which treats another fantasy race as worthless"

There are numerous nations and caucasian ethnicities that have been beaten to dirt by the efforts of imperial powers and treated as less-than-human. Notable examples include the Irish or Polish. Both suffered immensely at the hands of empire and have faced a ton of discrimination. "They're taking our jobs!!", ethnic cleansing, lots of awful shit. And there are 100% still racist ass Irish and Polish people. There's not much about facing bigotry that prevents you from perpetuating bigotry yourself.

Being queer is similar as well, where you can definitely be racist, or transphobic, or just awful even as a deeply marginalised person. People will punch down because it makes them feel as if they still have some sort of power. It makes them feel less worthless to know that there's someone even they can deem worthless.

But like... They probably just didn't think about it when making the quest.

kavita @yrgirlkv9/13/2023, 6:03 AM

if the characters were like that, that would be one thing. authors should know about themes!

Bad Quail Games // G. Michael Truran @Bad-Quail9/13/2023, 12:32 PM

Yeah. I'm super not happy with how the game handles goblins. But, also, I don't think mainline D&D is ever going to give up on "goblins are evil cannibals."

megano!@mkpatter9/13/2023, 12:43 PM

Oh D&D evil race stuff is absolutely problematic, and this game really doesn't know what to do with it. I DO think they do a good job of making the goblins like actual characters (for those that bother to talk to them), but this game has a lot of inconsistency with grappling with the question of what evil is, and not just with the goblins. Can't really say more because it's a huge spoiler.

M A R M @virtualmarmalade9/13/2023, 4:18 PM

thats Dungeons And Dragons, babeyyyy

Noel B @NoelBWrites9/13/2023, 4:29 PM

DnD's original sin, and one that they don't seem interested in getting away from, is the whole "alignment" system. "Evil" and "good" are baked into the mechanics of the game, let alone the lore of the world. This is a world in which entire species are inherently, ontologically evil. Which makes it okay to treat them as "not people" because they are actually evil so getting rid of them is good.

And it's almost worse when they try to interrogate this like "oh how awful this people are racist against goblins or drow or whatever" because at the end of the day, the goblins or drow or whatever have the "evil" trait just by being born, so the way the world is set up almost justifies being racist against them.

So the actual reason why the grove mission treats goblins and tieflings differently is because goblin stat blocks are in the monster manual and tieflings in the player handbook. Goblins are evil always and tieflings can be any alignment.

Anyway I agree, I'm enjoying the game when I don't think about it, same as I enjoy DnD when we don't actually pay attention to alignment at all...

kavita @yrgirlkv9/13/2023, 8:20 PM

see it's the thing in this second paragraph that really fucks me up: you can interrogate the idea all day but you have to come to some kind of conclusion about it. are the goblins actually inherently evil, or is the magic that labels people as such wrong? or are people misinterpreting the magic? but it's like there's no desire to actually do anything with the results of that interrogation, for whatever little presence it actually has, right, it's just "man, well. i guess that's kinda fucked up huh. makes you think" and it's such a deeply frustrating thing because there are SO many dozens of obvious solutions to resolve this quandary. several of them are even bad! but they're at least more consistent than what we have now

Noel B @NoelBWrites9/13/2023, 8:55 PM

Inconsistency is just the thing. Because "good" and "evil" are not really descriptions of any specific behavior, they're just like... tags. You can be "good" and serve a "good" god and slaughter hundreds of people but as long as they are flagged as "evil", then you're still "good". Regardless of what those people were doing in the first place. Maybe they were just chilling in their camp. Maybe they were literal children. But they're "evil" so you're good. And so is the god that asked you to slaughter them in the first place.

Now those drow? They serve an evil goddess, what with all the slaughtering they do. They kill children at her behest, even! How evil of them.

Evil and good are functionally aesthetic preferences in this world and a lot of players treat them as such. "I want to play a big tiddy goth gf, so I'll be a fem Lolth drow" kinda thing

And like you said, they could go somewhere with this. They could explore how good and evil are literally just words. They could make it so characters recognize them as team colors for specific gods that are petty assholes with their own conflict. Or they could make it so all the abilities that mechanically depend on the "good and evil" tags end up being about the character's conviction or their alignment with a specific divinity or literally anything else! Hell, BG3 has the whole undercurrent of authority as a theme, turn that into a way to observe who decides "good" and "evil"

But they never do, in the end is just "some people are born evil and it's okay to kill them." What makes them evil is that they do evil things. And evil things are evil because they're done by evil people."

kavita @yrgirlkv9/13/2023, 10:14 PM

i had a check the other day that shadowheart got advantage on where the reason was listed as "evil cleric" and i just despaired

Noel B @NoelBWrites9/14/2023, 1:28 PM

Evil Shadowheart, who approves of every time you help someone, or are kind to a child, or pet a dog...

oddstrangepenes transgaystrange @oddmerit9/16/2023, 7:41 PM

i've been watching some streamers play bg3, and i had to watch someone in a chat say something to the effect of "bg3 does race better than vanilla dnd because the problem races aren't Biologically evil, they're just Culturally evil" about the goblins being "evil" bc the plot makes them worship another (culturally but also biologically) Evil Race, and it's like... you (general "you", not You The OP) understand a race of people being Culturally Evil isn't any better, right?

there was also a post going around on tumblr, early in the game's full release, praising bg3's handling of race as "revolutionary" and "antifacist" and i have to wonder if they downloaded the Secret Version of bg3 where it doesnt have the same pitfalls as vanilla dnd wrt race, lmfao. i appreciate people talking about how it kinda sucks actually

kavita @yrgirlkv9/16/2023, 8:36 PM

i saw that post and it raised one hell of an eyebrow and now that i'm playing it i can confidently state it's flat-out wrong

inkcorvid @inkcorvid9/16/2023, 8:57 PM

The bar might just be hellishly low. Too many D&D players I encounter have racial politics that could charitably be described as terrifying. A large and vocal segment of D&D's fanbase hates the newer editions, and early D&D was absurdly, stomach-churningly racist. I've argued myself blue trying to convince players that omnipresent bigotry adds little to the setting and its absence isn't "historically inaccurate".

Plenty of (particularly older) D&D fans slavishly venerate a rose-tinted good old days, and strive to recreate it wherever possible. The slightest change is seen as radical and unwelcome. A lot of median D&D fans are nerdy white men who think anti-racism means only saying racial slurs in private, and that "the SJWs" are "divisive", "reverse racists" who "make people upset" by "going too far" in "the other direction".

By that rock bottom garbage standard, BG3 probably does look bold and revolutionary.