D&D 5E After 2 years the 5E PHB remains one of the best selling books on Amazon

seebs · Oct 7, 2016

doctorbadwolf said:
That's what literally 90+% of scientific research on the subject of emotional trauma suggests, and general research into social behavior, and individual behavior, and neuroscience, and camparative study of different social species, and...yeah, basically all the evidence that could possibly be relevant.

Humans are affected by the behavior of other humans.

Also, one needn't be emotionally hurt by a thing to have good reason to avoid it.

(fixed typo)

I would point out, there are exceptions. They're just... pretty rare, and not usually regarded as healthy. ASPD is not usually adaptive.

doctorbadwolf · Oct 7, 2016

seebs said:
That might happen among the people who go out of their way to tell others. But it's not the majority of the reaction. Mostly people panic and freak out.

Gosh, you're right. There's never been a civil rights march of any kind, Pride parades never happened, and there was no movement for women's sufferage. How silly I was to think that those things could have happened. Obviously, it's impossible for people who are afraid to try to do something about the circumstance in question.

... To be slightly less snarky about it: If you're gonna get hurt anyway, you might as well get hurt trying to improve things. Yes, this really is a way people think sometimes.

And to drag this back on topic: One of the things D&D offers us is a chance to explore thinking like that without the risk of dying in the process. But never forget that it's an actual thing that people do in real life too.

thank you!

Like...in what made up world do people not work past their fear to stand up for what's right?

Yeah, the Stonewall Riots, various Civil Rights marches and other actions....you can't do that without some courage. But that is what people do when they're being marginalized or otherwise mistreated. Sure, there are those that can't summon the courage to "throw their bodies upon the gears and levers and all the apparatus of the machine and make it stop", but even those folks can, in the digital age, get online and work to support those who are out in the streets risking everything. And plenty of folks go out there and do what's needed to effect change.

Trans people aren't just trying to elicit sympathy, they are being beaten, thrown out of housing, fired, driven out of town, spat upon, raped, and murdered at a higher rate than pretty much anyone else in the country, all while being treated by a large segment of the nation as if they are the threat to "normal" folk. There is a reason trans people commit suicide more than any other demographic, and that reason is that our culture treats them as unwelcome freaks, and puts them in near constant danger.

Inclusion matters. Representation matters. Because people are actually dying out there. Dismissing their fear, and the importance of finding a places where they feel welcome, is more disturbing than I have adequate words to express.

That DnD is becoming more and more a place where everyone is explicitly welcome, and that wotc and other companies are working to make the community as safe and welcoming as possible for people who haven't felt safe or welcome here before, is a huge deal. Regardless of what it does or doesn't do to the sales figures.

doctorbadwolf · Oct 7, 2016

seebs said:
(fixed typo)

I would point out, there are exceptions. They're just... pretty rare, and not usually regarded as healthy. ASPD is not usually adaptive.

pretty sure autocorrect auto-uncorrected me on that one, thanks for the catch.

And yeah, being fair, there are exceptions. I do know one person with ASPD, and she definately is still affected, though. Just not nearly as much as people without that condition, and not in the same ways. She definately gets worse if she isn't around people semi-regularly. OTOH, she can disassociate really badly if forced into too much interaction, as well, so it's a balancing act.

But i I take her word for it that her father is literally just detatched, and like...chronically disassociated. And cruel. :/

anyway, sorry for dbl post, folks. Pain in the butt on mobile to multiquote

Bagpuss · Oct 8, 2016

seebs said:
I am not inclined to believe that "just gets giggles when receiving death threats" is actually a common trait, so I think I'll stick with my theory that the people who can actually be hurt emotionally by other people are probably the overwhelming majority.

Pretty sure most people just block and move on, chances are the person sending a death threat isn't even on the same continent, let alone State.

Harzel · Oct 8, 2016

Bagpuss said:
Pretty sure most people just block and move on, chances are the person sending a death threat isn't even on the same continent, let alone State.

Um, really? Have you ever gotten a death threat? I must admit that I haven't, but my intuition is that I would probably be seriously worried.

pemerton · Oct 8, 2016

evileeyore said:
All movies made in countries that depict only those countries* show only the way that country views and responds to things.

This isn't true. Movies don't have to be parochial per se, anymore than books have to be.

Nor do all movies made in all countries (or even all movies made in the US) depict the experiences of those countries as universal for humans in general. One recurring problem with Australian films, for instance, is that they are often too self-consciously Australian.

evileeyore said:
pemerton said:

Sometimes the disregard can be so total that it seems to exclude alternatives by implication.

Click to expand...

That is an artifact of the viewer far more often than an imposition placed by the creator. And this is where we come back to the 'frail' portion of the conversation: If you cannot view a work and understand the context in which you are viewing it is coloured strongly by your own preferences, then you may be 'weak' or 'frail'.

Of course the context of engaging with a work is coloured by the viewer. That has no bearing on whether or not it excludes alternatives by implication.

For instance, if every single character ever presented in a work is white; yet the work purports to be set in a place where we know that there are, in fact, significant numbers of people of colour; then the work is going to convey something about whom the author sees as part of the world whether or not the author wishes that to be so. And this may affect the extent to which some people are able to imaginatively project themselves into that world - something of particular significance for a RPG.

evileeyore said:
If someone cannot join a group out of self imposed fears and demands are made that said group change to accommodate those irrational fears, then they are emotionally frail.

<snip>

And if in your you flee from something needlessly ("I can't play D&D because I saw a chainmail bikini/bare midriff or thigh/buff dude, those sexist pigs!") or loudly demand the work or those enjoying it change to suit your preferences instead of creating your own work or group to enjoy the other work, well... then, yes, you are emotional frail.

<snip>

Demand it's changed to suit you? Again, create your own gameworld or group within which to interpret the gameworld, or recognize you are joining a larger group and may have to bend a bit to fit in.

The only poster in this thread who has demanded that the 5e PHB be changed is someone upthread who complained about cultural Marxism. I think that poster wanted the reference to non-straight, non-singled sexed people removed.

(I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the same poster, if aware of the halflings with cornrows in the 4e PHB, would want them removed too.)

Others have simply noted that the PHB, by presenting the game's fiction (and, by implication, the game's audience) as expressly including certain sorts of people, makes the game more appealing to certain potential audience members. That has nothing to do with anyone making demands.

Bagpuss · Oct 8, 2016

Harzel said:
Um, really? Have you ever gotten a death threat? I must admit that I haven't, but my intuition is that I would probably be seriously worried.

One I would consider serious no, but most death threats online aren't serious. But yeah I've seen general threats, and considering the nature of them at the time I did find them funny, since they were clearly from someone immature and in another country.

pemerton · Oct 8, 2016

evileeyore said:
one paragraph in a book is not the reason for 5e amazing success. It was largely unnecessary and irrelevant, though I do not decry it's existence.

As I posted a long way upthread, without the sort of market research information that only WotC would have it's more-or-less impossible to no how important that paragraph has been to 5e's success.

But I don't know why you say it was unnecessary or irrelevant. WotC clearly though it helpful, even if not strictly necessary (but in RPG pubishing what is strictly necessary?) - because they wanted to send a signal about whom they envisage being present in the fiction of the game. Presumably they wanted to do this because they want that fiction to speak to those people - I imagine for a mixture of reasons, including but not only the desire to have a wide range of people buy their books.

As to irrelevance - I assume you mean irrelevant to you. (Though oddly you keep posting about it - so do seem to feel it has some relevance to you.) It's clearly not irrelevant to everyone, because at least one person has posted in this very thread that the paragraph in question spoke to him (that was [MENTION=6704184]doctorbadwolf[/MENTION], if I'm not misremembering).

evileeyore said:
don't presume you have the privilege to change how I run mine.

<snip>

A person who fears a group does not stand on the street corner shouting that said group must change to be more inclusive of them.

<snip>

And those people do not then go on campaigns to force themselves into those groups. They create their own groups which hopefully eventually outnumber the previous groups, or the previous group slowly changes it's behavior as a reaction to shifts in the greater society.

This seems confused, in two respects.

First, no one is telling you how to run your game. No one in this thread. Nor, presumably, WotC - just because they envisage a gameworld that includes non-heterosexual people, or people of no or indeterminate sex and/or gender, doesn't mean that you have to. (Just as, as you have posted upthread, the fact that the 1st ed AD&D PHB didn't identify any such people in the gameworld didn't stop anyone inventing gameworlds with such people.)

Second, WotC expressly identifying such people as being among the people of the gameworld that they envision, as the publisher of D&D, is exactly an example of a "previous group slowly chang[ing] its behaviour as a reaction to shifts in the greater society." In other words, the process you said you hope is taking place, is taking place.

(A possible third confusion, mentioned by others, is that your post seems to imply that the change in question happens without anyone who wants the change actually expressing that desire. I think the history of modern social movements - especially around sex, sexuality and gender - shows that that is not the case.)

Mark CMG · Oct 8, 2016

doctorbadwolf said:
That DnD is becoming more and more a place where everyone is explicitly welcome, and that wotc and other companies are working to make the community as safe and welcoming as possible for people who haven't felt safe or welcome here before, is a huge deal. Regardless of what it does or doesn't do to the sales figures.

I hadn't read deeply into this thread before but odd that I have today of all days. I had a dream last night that I had been asked to tend bar at a place where I used to do so and when I got there in the dream I saw all sorts of friends and family, one of whom was one of several trans people I have known for years. I would not necessarily have recalled that if not for this thread since, like most dreams, I tend to forget dreams unless something relevant comes up soon after. Apropos of nothing, perhaps, but I like that everyone is accepted in my subconscious world view. I hope that becomes normal for everyone in my lifetime. It's a happy place, I can assure you.

seebs · Oct 8, 2016

Bagpuss said:
Pretty sure most people just block and move on, chances are the person sending a death threat isn't even on the same continent, let alone State.

The issue isn't the likelihood of anything happening. It's that someone being that mad at you is in and of itself hugely upsetting to people. I mean. "Block". Why would you block them? Because it's unpleasant to most people.

I don't block them, I respond mocking them in the hopes that they'll send more.