D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Belen]

Ten years ago we were busy dealing with chainmail bikinis and sexy sacrifices being the primary ways women were depicted in fantasy.

I disagree.

That is decidedly not the case. There have been strong women characters in fantasy for more than 50 years. D&D novels and books have depicted strong female characters for decades.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Maybe that's more about who you talk to rather than the actual community?

Hard to know. Who's to say who has more non forum gamers on their side? There's been a lot of pressure online to agree with one side or the other or remain silent. Reasoned discourse without assumptions of being right, or even proposing a moderate point of view, is a rare thing.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Hard to know. Who's to say who has more non forum gamers on their side? There's been a lot of pressure online to agree with one side or the other or remain silent. Reasoned discourse without assumptions of being right, or even proposing a moderate point of view, is a rare thing.

Again, I don't find arguments about a "silent majority" to be very convincing, especially given the age of new gamers and who is popular. More than that, it seems that Wizards and other publishers don't buy into it either.

 

[Incenjucar]

I disagree.

That is decidedly not the case. There have been strong women characters in fantasy for more than 50 years. D&D novels and books have depicted strong female characters for decades.

You disagree about the conversations we were having? I literally had someone recruit me to help them with art for their RPG because of a long discussion about the male gaze in the sample art for 4E back on the WotC forums.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Hard to know. Who's to say who has more non forum gamers on their side? There's been a lot of pressure online to agree with one side or the other or remain silent. Reasoned discourse without assumptions of being right, or even proposing a moderate point of view, is a rare thing.

Also to hit this again: you say "There's been a lot of pressure online to agree with one side or the other or remain silent", and again I am asking for an example of people who are looking to remove these things from games actually doing this. You keep trying to equate the two, but that is not at all visible in who we see getting harassed online and driven out of the community. It is almost always targeting minorities and women, and almost always comes from people who do not desire change.

 

[Belen]

Again, I don't find arguments about a "silent majority" to be very convincing, especially given the age of new gamers and who is popular. More than that, it seems that Wizards and other publishers don't buy into it either.

I am not sure anyone said anything about a silent majority.

Hard to know. Who's to say who has more non forum gamers on their side? There's been a lot of pressure online to agree with one side or the other or remain silent. Reasoned discourse without assumptions of being right, or even proposing a moderate point of view, is a rare thing.

I agree on this point. There seems to be a distinct lack of reasoned discussion.

 

[Micah Sweet]

OK. On multiple threads you've been active on, including this one, I've spoken about Spire--a game all about bigotry and slavery (and fighting against the bigoted slavers)--and how I think it's well done. I've even mentioned writing slavery into a non-D&D setting I co-wrote with a friend.

What shouldn't be in new games is turning something as serious as bigotry and slavery into a just another encounter in the monster books or making all members of a species be evil, just because there are GMs who don't want to bother to come up with other motivations for the bad guys to make them deserve to be killed, or because "it's realistic" while not bothering to think about how the presence of fantastic elements would make a fantasy world end up very differently.

Things like that can stay in the old books--which are not going to disappear as long as there are pdfs of those books available. And even if WotC et al stopped selling those books today, there's still going to be plenty of copies floating around out there.

I have acknowledged Spire above. Not the style of game I enjoy from a design perspective, but I see what you're saying and I apologize for ignoring it.

As far as realism goes, three things. One, verisimilitude or simulation are far better terms than realism to apply to fantasy gaming. Two, there's no reason to assume that fantasy elements would have to lead to the elimination of social constructs like slavery; that is one possibility out of many, and no more narratively relevant. Three, no fantasy setting that I know really looks all that hard into what fantastic elements would do to an otherwise mundane setting, logically, so that argument is IMO too open to be meaningful.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I am not sure anyone said anything about a silent majority.

Micah is absolutely saying that, among others. What do you think "pressured into silence" implies?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Again, I don't find arguments about a "silent majority" to be very convincing, especially given the age of new gamers and who is popular. More than that, it seems that Wizards and other publishers don't buy into it either.

Publishers listen to who yells at them, both praise and scorn.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Again, I don't find arguments about a "silent majority" to be very convincing, especially given the age of new gamers and who is popular. More than that, it seems that Wizards and other publishers don't buy into it either.

There are plenty of times in history when people are reluctant to speak up when they feel something isn't right, is off, or a bad idea has taken root. And it is doubly hard to speak up when it seems proponents of a view who are gaining in the culture have positioned themselves as having the moral high ground (and doubly doubly hard, if they paint fairly mild positions around gaming tropes as connecting with genuinely serious and egregious atrocities and oppressions in history). I think here, it is honestly hard to say where things are. I don't know what the numbers are here. I can say I hear so much from people who express concerns privately but won't do so publicly for fear of being dragged through the mud. I can also say I even hear from people who pretend to agree but are afraid to say otherwise. And I think people really should bear in mind, most of the critiques in this thread of the kinds of constraints on gaming we are discussing, are really quite mild. These are not extreme views at all. Believing it's okay to have evil orcs in your campaign, or that it should still be okay for mainstream products to have them, that isn't some raging extremist view. It is a different viewpoint about whether a media trope is bad. Believing that games can include bigotry between fictional races and that those races are not stand ins for real world racial groups, is also not an extreme view by any stretch of the term. Now I think these things are perfectly debatable but part of the problem is when people try to take these positions in this thread, a lot of the responses either try to cast them as being some kind of bad person, or will try to attach a bad idea to their idea (i.e. they aren't said to just believe its okay to have half elves in their games who face bigotry, they are said to support racist tropes in RPGs----or pick your variation).