John Kovalic on racism in RPGs

[esmeraldus_neo]

Dork Tower is a webcomic about gaming. John Kovalic posted these two strips about the absence of characters of color in miniatures gaming (which is, or has been true of other types of games as well). I saw the strips, but hadn't posted until I saw major_clanger's post detailing that Kovalic's comic strips had gotten feedback from fans--most, but not all of it

Comments

[heronymus_waat]

It's nice to see SOME part of fandom that's both aware and intelligent about POC issues...

[_paradoxboy_]

Yeah, this has been brewing in some parts of the minis community for a while now. I know I caught wind of my first iteration of the debate somewhere around 2002 or so. (Somewhere around there was when I made the conscious effort to paint lots of different skin tones on the human models in my various games, anyway.)

[hafwit]

This is very interesting. Thanks for the links.

[fortinbras16]

Interesting read. We had a small discussion relating to this on RPG.net recently (apparently, the reason you see the character "Regdar" dying so much in 3E D&D artwork was partially because he was a mandated "white human male fighter" character that marketing made them include in the iconics. A lot of the writers and artists were apparently not pleased.)

One of the things mentioned is how, when Mage first game out, all of the African-American gamers kept asking the line head how he got away with putting a black character on the cover. And none of the white gamers interested in the game seemed to notice at all. So, really, the argument of "we need white people on the cover for the majority of gamers to identify with" seems to be bullshit.

[q99]

Ooh, not my fav comic in general, but something that needed saying and he said it well :)

I do think it's something that could/should be changed.