Is Biological Determinism the Root of Racism in D&D?

 

TL;DR: Dungeons and Dragons builds biological determinism into its rules, and biological determinism is a key element of raciest thought. Not all TTRPGs do this, but D&D does so as if it were the natural and only way to model a person.

 

Game mechanics define a world.

Whenever we engage in a tabletop roleplaying game, we are making certain assumptions about how the world works. Those are the things that we don’t need to say (or write in the rules) because everyone understands them—at least, close enough.

DM: “All of your characters have met at the tavern.”

Assumption: Taverns exist. People can meet at taverns. Etc. etc. etc.

When we write the rules to a game, that is when we write the mechanics by which event happen in our fictional world, we are creating the framework in which a group of people are going to collaboratively tell a story. The mechanics create both implicit and explicit statements about how the world of this joint story telling works.

 

Biological determinism

Biological determinism is the idea that most behavioral and physical traits of a person are “inherent” to that person, or that they arise from a person’s genetics which they inherited from their parents. Hardcore biological determinists believe that a person who engages in criminal behavior, for example, would engage in criminal behavior no matter how they were raised or what opportunities they were given. These biological determinists believe human social problems stem from human biology and not from the human environment.

I know people who argue that human intelligence is mainly (actually, in the case of some [REDACTED] poorly-informed people I know, exclusively) the result of their genetic profile. They have argued, in public, that educating those people with this “genetic inferiority” is a waste, as (they incorrectly assert) “those people can’t learn.”

Likewise, biological determinists frequently argue that successful people are successful because of who they are biologically, not because of the role of their environment. Unfortunately for the biological determinists, real world humanity went through a genetic bottle neck a few tens of thousands of years ago, and we have almost no genetic diversity, at least not compared to “typical” mammalian species and every time someone carefully looks for a biological basis for major human behaviors or abilities, they fail to find it.

The lack of human biological diversity is easy to see. Take a simple example, when I was young, I could run a mile in five minutes. I was not in any way considered fast or fit, but when I was jogging daily, I got to a point where I could run around a five-minute mile. The world’s record, set over a quarter of a century ago, is roughly 33% faster than that. Not twice as fast, that would require a two-and-a-half-minute mile and certainly not five times as fast, requiring a one-minute mile. When we look at something easily measured, there is about a 33% difference between an average guy and the world’s best.  And that’s the total variation, without even looking at the question of genetics versus environment.

Every time we look carefully, we see that biological determinism plays a weak role in setting the human condition. But a lot of people believe in it.

 

Biologically Deterministic Game Mechanics

Which brings us to D&D. Building characters is, inherently, a task of modeling the differences between people. How is my character different from yours? If you are old enough to have played Steve Jackson’s game Car Wars, you may recall that all drivers and gunners had three hit points. That game was about the differences between cars and the differences between humans was insignificant compared to that of cars, so they just called all people all the same.

When you look at character generation in those games derived from Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin’s original Runequest, the d100 games (Mythras, Call of Cthuhlu and modern Runequest being three obvious examples), you will see that characters are differentiated by their culture and their occupation (except C of C doesn’t worry about culture).

But not race.

Games derived from early D&D, like D&D 5e and Pathfinder, model the differences between characters as coming from their race and their profession. Race, not culture! An orc raised by humans will be an orc. In early versions, that orc would even still be evil—just like mom and dad. But even now their physique is inherent to them; they will be big, strong, and (until recently) dim witted.

This sits very well with those people who believe in biological determinism in humans. They will argue that humans have inherent cultures and that the cultures reflect the inherent underlying biology of the people in them. Orcs become a “stand in” for some human culture they view as “orc like” and elves are a stand in for some “elf like” group.

The d100 games, Runequest, have never had this idea of race and have never been as popular in areas where most people are biological determinists. (I’m basing this statement of my own lived-experience in the rural American Midwest and South, and I could be wrong about that—but this is my blog and I’m going to say it and if you think I’m wrong, you will need to show me some data.)

But d100 games do have species…

Most d100 games do have the idea of species. But it was never a common element of play that characters would be from a group of different species. If you are playing Elf Quest, you play elves, if you are playing Runequest, you play humans. Classic Fantasy being an obvious exception, but there it is purposefully attempting to capture the mechanics of OSR games.

I will add here that my game, Rubble and Ruin, very purposefully has biological determinism in the form of intentional genetic engineering. My goal was to show a world where people actually had substantial levels of genetic alterations which were purposefully induced. Basically, the biological determinists got to create the world they wanted to be true, and things went bad as a result.

The idea in d100 games is that there are biological elements that differentiate members of different species, and then their different cultures get layered on top of that. In the real world we only have humans, so we can differentiate them with their cultures, but in our imagined worlds we can imagine different species like elves and orcs coexisting with humans.

“Yeah, hey, that’s what we’re doing in D&D too,” one might say.

But we’re not. The existence of half-elves and half-orcs and half-demons and half-dragons and elemental bloodlines and all the other things is an implicit statement that all these different beings are elements of humanity. The differences between an orc and a “human” are cultural.

 

What do I want from you?

First, I hope that readers will think about how the mechanics of the games you play reflect assumptions about how the imaginary world being created works. I believe it is worthwhile to consider worlds with biological determinism, heck, I purposefully wrote a game with it. I want players to think about what it would be like to live in worlds where these beliefs were actually true. I would like all players at the table to be aware that the game they are playing assumes (or does not assume) biological determinism, and why. In Rubble and Ruin, it exists because pre-war billionaires employed genetic engineers to create it—and this is the world they left behind. In my understanding of Tolkien’s world, it is because there is a magical “absolute evil” which can corrupt bloodlines and this is the world created by that power.

Second, I would love to see people look into the actual science regarding their beliefs. Don’t take my world on the failure to find any profound basis for biological determinism. Start reading peer-reviewed literature on the topic. A reasonable open-access place to start is here.