Some of these anecdotes really illustrate the loss suffered when a group is insufficiently diverse. This one in particular struck me as a demonstration of the high value of a range of perspectives:
On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They’re going to starve if they don’t get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We’ve got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan. …
“It’s rusty too,” intones the Dungeonmaster, “and pieces of it keep breaking off. Look, you’re not supposed to be farming. You’re supposed to go into the forest and find the dark elves. I don’t have anything else about the farmers. The elves are the adventure.” Reluctantly, I give up my agricultural rescue plan and we go into the forest to hack at elves.
All too often, people focus on how gender discrimination is unfair to those who are excluded or minimized, but it’s also a loss to the group and its goals as a whole.
This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I’d be really happy with them. Of course, in my own campaign world, I’ve also set up a complicated tea culture with some of the high noble families trying to out-do each other by finding expensive teas from exotic locales to show off. So I may not be very representative.
“Did I say rusty? I meant the elves have stolen the plow blade, and the spare plow blade, and everything that could be used as a makeshift plow blade!”
This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I’d be really happy with them.
Yes and no. It could also be a sign of a broken group- If two of the people love killing dark elves and hate farming, and two of the people love farming and like killing dark elves, the group should be killing dark elves, or there should be two groups, one which farms, while the other one kills dark elves.
I also didn’t get the gender-related feeling; one of my wizards got called “Angseth from Accounting” because he kept the party records, treasury, and was constantly trying to buy / found businesses and do other economic things, rather than just murdering for fun and profit.
Yeah, a creative DM might treat this as an opportunity for a campaign in which the players are more involved, as opposed to a railroaded dungeon crawl. But that demands a good deal of preparation or improvisation skills.
In that situation I’d probably have the farmers tell the players that the harvest is doomed because the Harvest Goddess is displeased with the Dark Elves’ Unholy Rituals, and will not bless the land—a situations the players can solve by either kicking Dark Elf ass as originally planned, or by having the group’s Cleric bless the lands, or by doing something to please the Harvest Goddess (organize a great feast, bake a legendary apple pie, find the rare Papilla Gourd that grows deep in the forest), or even having the farmers convert to the Dark Elves’ Nature Goddess who will bless the crops (for a small price).
Plow one of their fields, and you might feed some of them for some time (if they can get some more farming done in between attacks). Kill their dark elves, and they can feed themselves just fine.
I’d call that reasoning the epitome of shortsightedness; but the DM should’ve been more flexible and let you plow their field and later contrive a way for your party to learn that the crop failed anyway and everyone was killed or enslaved or starved to death.
The plan was to sow one field and then kill the dark elves, as far as I can tell. I agree that it would not have been a good idea to just plow their field, since obviously that was what had already not been working, but it also seems to me like a very perceptive insight to realize that even if the elves were killed, the already-emaciated farmers might still die without help on the farm. It’s also an insight that appears, within the story, to have derived from the presence of an alternative viewpoint.
Why would plowing one field make a difference to their survival or death? Especially when plowing one field is taking up time to the detriment of going after the dark elves. Indeed, if they cared about the farmers, wouldn’t a cash transfer make infinitely more sense? No, this looks like the usual signaling about caring: “but they care so much, they even went and plowed a field to help them out!” (As opposed to working on the real problem, or giving them a gold coin which is probably worth several fields of food given the medieval setting and also doesn’t have the minor problem of it likely failing anyway since it’s going to be plowed by complete amateurs with broken equipment at the wrong time...)
I can’t testify as to the actual value of the planting or whether or not this was necessarily the best plan. There are probably many more plans that would be better, including giving them a gold coin. Or perhaps the farmers in the magical world of dark elves who make armed sorties against impoverished serfs could have been better served by a political upheaval and the installation of democracy. Or maybe because the farmers plant only the magical dubbleboo bean, they would have been able to reap a harvest only if they planted before the next evening’s full moon.
There are all kinds of factors or problems that might have complicated the additional idea of plowing the field, and we shouldn’t forget that this is a bunch of teenagers, so it’s probably not whether this idea was really the optimal emaciated-farmer-assistance program. But instead of exploring these and determining what was the best option, the entire avenue of helping the farmers in a domestic sense was blocked off. It was a set of ideas that was unknown and unwelcome, even though it might actually have been interesting to solve that problem, as well.
Yes, these eleventh-graders might not have been practicing an ideal form of aid, and if they had read some literature on rationality and gone to an agricultural program they might not have thought that plowing one field was the best decision. The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options. It’s not the perfect parable of how value can be found in diverse opinions, because that perfect parable would have the eleventh-grade girl whip out a well-researched proposal on farm aid. But I do think it helps illuminate the problem.
This does seem to start falling pretty heavily into something very close to the MST3K mantra with the note that this was a highschool game.
or giving them a gold coin which is probably worth several fields of food given the medieval setting
And given my above suggestion, I’m going to refrain from ranting about how little sense D&D economics make other than to note that adventuring parties seem to be one of the strongest argument in favor of fiat currency ever.
This does seem to start falling pretty heavily into something very close to the MST3K mantra with the note that this was a highschool game.
If someone wants to say ‘this is a great insight which demonstrates the value of diverse viewpoints!’, it’d better be a great insight, and not one that fails multiple ways.
Well, how much would killing the dark elves have helped either? In the context we have two proposed solutions, neither of which really actually does much. One of the solutions is arguably obvious to the traditional male gamer, and the other (which makes about as much or as little sense) does seem to show some degree of diverse viewpoint arguably (although as I commented above, I don’t think this one is really gendered related as much as it is to bad DMing).
Well, how much would killing the dark elves have helped either?
It is specified the dark elves are the entire problem. The crops are now not being planted or tended because the dark elves are raiding and there weren’t raids before. I uh can’t see how killing them would not help.
If the farmers already are emaciated they aren’t going to be able to survive that long even if they do plow and plant (it takes a long time). Moreover, plowing takes a lot of effort. The most likely result if they do kill the dark elves in a marginally realistic situation is that the farmers will still starve. The whole situation is poorly thought out (and becomes even more poorly thought out as the DM claims that the farmers don’t even have functioning farm equipment and thus that the dark elves aren’t the only problem).
It seems obvious to me that even if many had died in the famine, not all would have. Once the famine was over there still wouldn’t be any dark elves causing them problems. Also a good way to help them is to share some of the stuff you looted from the dark elves.
Ironically as far as signaling goes, unless the DM is at least fair-to-middlin’, the time spend plowing is a rather cost-less signal, since it can be handwaved away, unlike real life.
All too often, people focus on how gender discrimination is unfair to those who are excluded or minimized, but it’s also a loss to the group and its goals as a whole.
I don’t see how this story has anything to do with gender discrimination, unless it’s trying to reinforce some stereotype of “Women can come up with peaceful solutions to problems, but men always resort to violence immediately.”
It’s not just a stereotype, it’s the (exaggerated) truth. For example, in polls about whether citizens approve of whatever war is happening that decade, men are generally more in favor of the war than women.
EDIT: Changed “not a stereotype” to “not just a stereotype”.
I don’t think “it’s the exaggerated truth” is necessarily an excuse to perpetuate stereotypes.
For example, suppose the writer was a white person who played games with a black dungeon master, who had himself previously played mostly with other black people. One game, the writer tries to solve a problem through negotiation when the DM had planned things so that you were supposed to shoot the bad guys. The writer phrases this not as “The DM had failed to plan for this contingency” but instead as “This is why it’s hard to be a white person trying to hang out around black people; they just try to solve every problem by shooting at it and don’t accept that we white people might think differently than that.”
When someone notices this is perpetuating a stereotype, I don’t think it would remove the problem to say “No, seriously, black people are involved in a disproportionate number of shootings”, even if this were true. The point isn’t that every group is demographically exactly the same, it’s that we are trying to avoid creating a climate where we immediately and unreflectingly associate certain groups with the worst characteristics they contingently hold in our current society.
I admit that I am holding this post to a higher standard than I would hold other posts, because it is itself a post about social justice. This might sound like I’m being deliberately annoying and trying to say “gotcha!”, but it’s not just that.
It’s more of a sense of fair play and reciprocity, that the would-be social justice crusader understands that watching your speech to avoid stereotypes is kind of difficult and contrary to usual habits of thought, maybe not the hardest thing in the world, but also not so drop-dead simple that you can immediately assume any failure is due to evil intentions. And so they make a good-faith effort to show that they’re going to try to be respectful to your group, even if your group doesn’t desperately need the respect. It just makes you feel like they’re working with you instead just being someone who yells at you. Like there’s a dialogue going on where both sides follow rules when talking to one another, instead of “Shut up and listen why I tell you why you’re offensive and how you’re going to stop.”
I totally admit that as a male I’m not too worried that the stereotype of men as thoughtlessly violent is going to have huge effects on my life, and I’m not seriously offended. But it’s like...more like how workers get upset when company executives give themselves huge bonuses, then cut worker pay because the company is under financial pressure. And then say that if the workers worry about the pay cuts they’re “not team players”. The executives might be right when they say financial pressures necessitate pay cuts for workers. They might even be right that giving themselves large bonuses makes a negligible impact on the company’s bottom line. It just seems like a potentially disrespectful gesture.
I assume that just like the DM in the story, those polls also don’t allow people to choose a “let’s plow their fields” option. Although in some situations it could actually be a very good choice.
The socialization of children into gender roles of conciliation and confrontation begins very early, as can be seen in a study by Clearfield and Nelson. Accordingly, it is not surprising (and jibes with our common sense) to note that men and women tend to respond to challenges in different ways. I think it’s probably too broad to say that men “always” resort to violence “immediately,” which seems like a deliberately weak phrasing. Rather, I’d say that men and women find different solutions, because of their different perspectives.
“The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options.”
If playing D&D with a bunch of girls consistently leads to solutions being proposed that do not fit the traditional D&D mold, that can teach us something about how well that mold fits a bunch of girls. More generally, the author is a pretty smart woman who thought this was a good example—you’d do well to take a second look.
Some of these anecdotes really illustrate the loss suffered when a group is insufficiently diverse. This one in particular struck me as a demonstration of the high value of a range of perspectives:
All too often, people focus on how gender discrimination is unfair to those who are excluded or minimized, but it’s also a loss to the group and its goals as a whole.
This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I’d be really happy with them. Of course, in my own campaign world, I’ve also set up a complicated tea culture with some of the high noble families trying to out-do each other by finding expensive teas from exotic locales to show off. So I may not be very representative.
(In which I solve the wrong problem)
“Obviously”, you have the dark elves attack the farm while the adventurers are trying to help get the field plowed. ;)
“Did I say rusty? I meant the elves have stolen the plow blade, and the spare plow blade, and everything that could be used as a makeshift plow blade!”
:)
Yes and no. It could also be a sign of a broken group- If two of the people love killing dark elves and hate farming, and two of the people love farming and like killing dark elves, the group should be killing dark elves, or there should be two groups, one which farms, while the other one kills dark elves.
I also didn’t get the gender-related feeling; one of my wizards got called “Angseth from Accounting” because he kept the party records, treasury, and was constantly trying to buy / found businesses and do other economic things, rather than just murdering for fun and profit.
Yeah, a creative DM might treat this as an opportunity for a campaign in which the players are more involved, as opposed to a railroaded dungeon crawl. But that demands a good deal of preparation or improvisation skills.
In that situation I’d probably have the farmers tell the players that the harvest is doomed because the Harvest Goddess is displeased with the Dark Elves’ Unholy Rituals, and will not bless the land—a situations the players can solve by either kicking Dark Elf ass as originally planned, or by having the group’s Cleric bless the lands, or by doing something to please the Harvest Goddess (organize a great feast, bake a legendary apple pie, find the rare Papilla Gourd that grows deep in the forest), or even having the farmers convert to the Dark Elves’ Nature Goddess who will bless the crops (for a small price).
Plow one of their fields, and you might feed some of them for some time (if they can get some more farming done in between attacks). Kill their dark elves, and they can feed themselves just fine.
I’d call that reasoning the epitome of shortsightedness; but the DM should’ve been more flexible and let you plow their field and later contrive a way for your party to learn that the crop failed anyway and everyone was killed or enslaved or starved to death.
The plan was to sow one field and then kill the dark elves, as far as I can tell. I agree that it would not have been a good idea to just plow their field, since obviously that was what had already not been working, but it also seems to me like a very perceptive insight to realize that even if the elves were killed, the already-emaciated farmers might still die without help on the farm. It’s also an insight that appears, within the story, to have derived from the presence of an alternative viewpoint.
Why would plowing one field make a difference to their survival or death? Especially when plowing one field is taking up time to the detriment of going after the dark elves. Indeed, if they cared about the farmers, wouldn’t a cash transfer make infinitely more sense? No, this looks like the usual signaling about caring: “but they care so much, they even went and plowed a field to help them out!” (As opposed to working on the real problem, or giving them a gold coin which is probably worth several fields of food given the medieval setting and also doesn’t have the minor problem of it likely failing anyway since it’s going to be plowed by complete amateurs with broken equipment at the wrong time...)
I can’t testify as to the actual value of the planting or whether or not this was necessarily the best plan. There are probably many more plans that would be better, including giving them a gold coin. Or perhaps the farmers in the magical world of dark elves who make armed sorties against impoverished serfs could have been better served by a political upheaval and the installation of democracy. Or maybe because the farmers plant only the magical dubbleboo bean, they would have been able to reap a harvest only if they planted before the next evening’s full moon.
There are all kinds of factors or problems that might have complicated the additional idea of plowing the field, and we shouldn’t forget that this is a bunch of teenagers, so it’s probably not whether this idea was really the optimal emaciated-farmer-assistance program. But instead of exploring these and determining what was the best option, the entire avenue of helping the farmers in a domestic sense was blocked off. It was a set of ideas that was unknown and unwelcome, even though it might actually have been interesting to solve that problem, as well.
Yes, these eleventh-graders might not have been practicing an ideal form of aid, and if they had read some literature on rationality and gone to an agricultural program they might not have thought that plowing one field was the best decision. The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options. It’s not the perfect parable of how value can be found in diverse opinions, because that perfect parable would have the eleventh-grade girl whip out a well-researched proposal on farm aid. But I do think it helps illuminate the problem.
This does seem to start falling pretty heavily into something very close to the MST3K mantra with the note that this was a highschool game.
And given my above suggestion, I’m going to refrain from ranting about how little sense D&D economics make other than to note that adventuring parties seem to be one of the strongest argument in favor of fiat currency ever.
If someone wants to say ‘this is a great insight which demonstrates the value of diverse viewpoints!’, it’d better be a great insight, and not one that fails multiple ways.
Well, how much would killing the dark elves have helped either? In the context we have two proposed solutions, neither of which really actually does much. One of the solutions is arguably obvious to the traditional male gamer, and the other (which makes about as much or as little sense) does seem to show some degree of diverse viewpoint arguably (although as I commented above, I don’t think this one is really gendered related as much as it is to bad DMing).
It is specified the dark elves are the entire problem. The crops are now not being planted or tended because the dark elves are raiding and there weren’t raids before. I uh can’t see how killing them would not help.
If the farmers already are emaciated they aren’t going to be able to survive that long even if they do plow and plant (it takes a long time). Moreover, plowing takes a lot of effort. The most likely result if they do kill the dark elves in a marginally realistic situation is that the farmers will still starve. The whole situation is poorly thought out (and becomes even more poorly thought out as the DM claims that the farmers don’t even have functioning farm equipment and thus that the dark elves aren’t the only problem).
It seems obvious to me that even if many had died in the famine, not all would have. Once the famine was over there still wouldn’t be any dark elves causing them problems. Also a good way to help them is to share some of the stuff you looted from the dark elves.
And delicious dark elves.
I had a character who was famous for his kobold stew. I bet elf tastes like pork.
If humans are ‘long pork’, and elves stereotypically taller than humans, does that make elf ‘longer pork’?
Ironically as far as signaling goes, unless the DM is at least fair-to-middlin’, the time spend plowing is a rather cost-less signal, since it can be handwaved away, unlike real life.
This was clearly not a very good DM.
I don’t see how this story has anything to do with gender discrimination, unless it’s trying to reinforce some stereotype of “Women can come up with peaceful solutions to problems, but men always resort to violence immediately.”
It’s not just a stereotype, it’s the (exaggerated) truth. For example, in polls about whether citizens approve of whatever war is happening that decade, men are generally more in favor of the war than women.
EDIT: Changed “not a stereotype” to “not just a stereotype”.
I don’t think “it’s the exaggerated truth” is necessarily an excuse to perpetuate stereotypes.
For example, suppose the writer was a white person who played games with a black dungeon master, who had himself previously played mostly with other black people. One game, the writer tries to solve a problem through negotiation when the DM had planned things so that you were supposed to shoot the bad guys. The writer phrases this not as “The DM had failed to plan for this contingency” but instead as “This is why it’s hard to be a white person trying to hang out around black people; they just try to solve every problem by shooting at it and don’t accept that we white people might think differently than that.”
When someone notices this is perpetuating a stereotype, I don’t think it would remove the problem to say “No, seriously, black people are involved in a disproportionate number of shootings”, even if this were true. The point isn’t that every group is demographically exactly the same, it’s that we are trying to avoid creating a climate where we immediately and unreflectingly associate certain groups with the worst characteristics they contingently hold in our current society.
I admit that I am holding this post to a higher standard than I would hold other posts, because it is itself a post about social justice. This might sound like I’m being deliberately annoying and trying to say “gotcha!”, but it’s not just that.
It’s more of a sense of fair play and reciprocity, that the would-be social justice crusader understands that watching your speech to avoid stereotypes is kind of difficult and contrary to usual habits of thought, maybe not the hardest thing in the world, but also not so drop-dead simple that you can immediately assume any failure is due to evil intentions. And so they make a good-faith effort to show that they’re going to try to be respectful to your group, even if your group doesn’t desperately need the respect. It just makes you feel like they’re working with you instead just being someone who yells at you. Like there’s a dialogue going on where both sides follow rules when talking to one another, instead of “Shut up and listen why I tell you why you’re offensive and how you’re going to stop.”
I totally admit that as a male I’m not too worried that the stereotype of men as thoughtlessly violent is going to have huge effects on my life, and I’m not seriously offended. But it’s like...more like how workers get upset when company executives give themselves huge bonuses, then cut worker pay because the company is under financial pressure. And then say that if the workers worry about the pay cuts they’re “not team players”. The executives might be right when they say financial pressures necessitate pay cuts for workers. They might even be right that giving themselves large bonuses makes a negligible impact on the company’s bottom line. It just seems like a potentially disrespectful gesture.
I assume that just like the DM in the story, those polls also don’t allow people to choose a “let’s plow their fields” option. Although in some situations it could actually be a very good choice.
The socialization of children into gender roles of conciliation and confrontation begins very early, as can be seen in a study by Clearfield and Nelson. Accordingly, it is not surprising (and jibes with our common sense) to note that men and women tend to respond to challenges in different ways. I think it’s probably too broad to say that men “always” resort to violence “immediately,” which seems like a deliberately weak phrasing. Rather, I’d say that men and women find different solutions, because of their different perspectives.
Yes, I agree that contingently there is statistically more aggression in men. I don’t think that’s the point; see my response to Miley.
From AlexanderD’s comment:
“The point, though, is that the narrowness of focus in the adventure precluded exploration of a large set of options.”
If playing D&D with a bunch of girls consistently leads to solutions being proposed that do not fit the traditional D&D mold, that can teach us something about how well that mold fits a bunch of girls. More generally, the author is a pretty smart woman who thought this was a good example—you’d do well to take a second look.