Sexuality is part of our games. From the archetypal "Ale & Whores!" to simple married peasants to kings and queens and plots about lineages and inheritance to carousing tables to nymphs and succubi...it's part of human life, so of course it becomes part of our games. If you're not including a diverse range of sexuality and gender identity in your games, and having that be just as important as "you're a half-elf, what's your parents' story," then it's just....kind of a shame? A really narrow campaign world? Leaving awesome plot-hooks on the table? ("I'm a half-elf who was raised by two dwarven men; they never mentioned who my mother was, but when I was setting out for a life of adventure they gave me a battlaxe and a letter written in elvish...")
ExploderWizard said:
It much simpler to default to the everyone is accepted policy then point to specific groups and say " OK you, you, you, you,you, and you are accepted". That means anyone NOT getting a specific shout out is thus NOT accepted. Its stupid.
Like the lady said, representation matters. It's not like the groups of people we need to include is ever complete or that any game ever represents everyone, it's just an awareness that you can always do more, that there are plenty of stories about how people love and live and what people understand themselves to be that make for really compelling material for characters and stories in our D&D.
Forex, your comment about the disabled got me thinking about
Eberron and The Last War, and how the technology exists to make the perfect soldier but maybe doesn't exist to repair one infantry grunt's lost legs and how interesting it would be to play a character who, two short years ago, could bounce his child on his knee and now must learn how to deal with a body he feels alienated from. Maybe he'd be a NPC patron, who wants the PC's to do a quest to support House Carnath because he wants them to make him some warforged legs someday. Maybe he's a PC who is
in debt to that House because of his warforged legs! Maybe he's got a bit of PTSD, too, so he drugs himself with hard liquor during his short rests, seeing the faces of his war buddies on the faces of some of those kobolds he killed. That sounds much more interesting, much more particular to the setting, than ignoring it would be!
The idea isn't tokenism - there's not just gonna be some kid in a wheelchair in my next adventure because I have a
marketing team's understanding of diversity. It's also not perfect representation - there's not an end point to inclusivity, a point at which you are finally perfectly inclusive and there's nothing left to do. The idea is that looking beyond the blandness of your typical majority experiences can add depth, believability, and interesting nuance to your game world. There's ALWAYS going to be some group of actual human beings you overlook, and actively seeking to include more groups of actual human beings can help bring more interesting details and stories into your games.