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

Remathilis · Oct 8, 2016

doctorbadwolf said:
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.

Not to knock the struggle for equality or anything, but do you really think having a paragraph expressing that your PC can be non-binary is in ANY WAY equivalent to the real struggles of minorities fighting for Civil Rights?
[MENTION=10754]Evile[/MENTION]eyeore has a (rather poorly stated) point; the paragraph was a nice gesture to the LGBTQ community, but it hardly moved in the needle in terms of acceptance. The Baldur's Gate expansion NPC proved that. I seriously doubt anyone who was remotely interested in RPGs was ever stopped by the lack of such a statement, nor do I think anyone who was predisposed to hate such people found the Light after reading it. In essence, it was a nice sentiment but if anyone things it helped/harmed 5e's sales, they are seriously giving to much credit to gender politics and need to get out Tumblr/Twitter/YouTube echo chamber for a while...

ad_hoc · Oct 8, 2016

Remathilis said:
I seriously doubt anyone who was remotely interested in RPGs was ever stopped by the lack of such a statement...

You are wrong.

doctorbadwolf · Oct 8, 2016

ad_hoc said:
You are wrong.

Can confirm. The hobby is more welcoming to trans people, and that paragraph literally got dozens of people I know of interested in the hobby, not to mention the ppl who had been curious, but thought of DnD as a place where they weren't welcome.

not-so-newguy · Oct 8, 2016

I can not confirm, though I have noticed an expansion of folks who play RPGs within my lifetime. The statement isn't world-shaking, but it does help. Acceptance and tolerance comes in drips and dribbles, tiny realizations that tell a person their personal experience through this world is not the only one.

happyhermit · Oct 8, 2016

GAAAHHH! That feeling when you reply to a thread about one thing (a positive thread about how well the PHB is selling) and then get sucked back into reading a thread about politics, by that bright green arrow. If I have to read this stuff and this thread is ruined as far as the OT is concerned then I might as well spew my own thoughts.

I LOVE the increased level of diversity in the art and the bit of text that make it clear that the game is intended to be inclusive, I think these are wonderful. I was even a bit excited to see these when I got the books and happy to see the reaction to it by the females and (admittedly few) visible minorities involved with D&D that I know. Their reaction; a triumphant and resounding "meh". ETA; also a close relative that is trans.

One of the first (Basic) games I played (and ran) decades ago all of the people I played with were female, not out of any sort of choice, it just wasn't a big deal to any of us at the time. When I ask them now if there was any sort of barrier to them playing that they had to overcome it is pretty unanimous that there was only really one; "It was soooo nerdy".

More women are playing video games by a huge degree, not because games like PONG, Centipede, and Pac Man were not inclusive enough, but because many of them are open to more "nerdy" things and/or these things are perceived as less "nerdy". Women in general, especially in the teen and pre-teen years are under a huge amount of pressure from their peer groups to act in certain ways, as a group the "social sphere" is a HUGE concern for them, and the way other females view them is very important.

The same thing has happened in the table top gaming world, perhaps to a larger extent than in RPGs, there are MANY more women playing than ever before and it is clearly NOT because Cosmic Encounters, Diplomacy, or Catan were less inclusive than new games.

Overall though, there is no evidence to support the argument that inclusiveness in the books is CAUSING more people to buy the books, and that that is keeping the PHB in an (IMO) amazing position, #9 in all books in Canada today, for so long. In fact, other "nerdy" fields which have not made their products more inclusive may actually be doing better with those demographics.

pemerton · Oct 9, 2016

Remathilis said:
Not to knock the struggle for equality or anything, but do you really think having a paragraph expressing that your PC can be non-binary is in ANY WAY equivalent to the real struggles of minorities fighting for Civil Rights?

Who has said that it is?

Struggling for civil rights is just that - struggling.

Having a publisher of fictions tell you what they envisage occurring in their fiction isn't a struggle (except perhaps by the author against an editor who may have had a different conception of the gameworld - but I have not heard of any leaks from WotC about this).

Arguably, in fact, it's one outcome of a struggle - as a result of struggles to encourage a more expansive conception of the scope of the real world, commercial publishers are also publishing fictions with more expansive conceptions of who inhabits those imaginary worlds.

Remathilis said:
the paragraph was a nice gesture to the LGBTQ community, but it hardly moved in the needle in terms of acceptance.

Whose acceptance of what?

IWhat it shows is that WotC have a wider conception than previously - or, at least, are being more explicit about it - as to who inhabits their imagined gameworld. That makes the gameworld more inviting than it might otherwise be to some of those who want to imagine themselves in the gameworld.

As far as I see, this is not about individual gaming groups being more or less racist, more or less homophobic, etc. It's about the conception of the gameworld, and thereby of who is (potentially) part of the game, being projected by WotC. It's about WotC's communication to the potential market of D&D players.

Remathilis said:
I seriously doubt anyone who was remotely interested in RPGs was ever stopped by the lack of such a statement

It depends on what you mean by "seriously interested". If the rulebooks give the impression that the gameworld does not contain a certain sort of person, than a real-world person of that type might not become seriously interested, precisely because s/he assumes that the gameworld, and hence the game, is not something for him/her.

I certainly know people who are "seriously interested" in movies or TV shows and will choose not to watch ones that have no people of colour in them, because they're sick of engaging with fictional works that they are not invited to imagine themselves a part of. Which, to me, makes [MENTION=6704184]doctorbadwolf[/MENTION]'s and [MENTION=6748898]ad_hoc[/MENTION]'s reports of similar responses to D&D in relation to sex, gender and sexuality very plausible.

Bagpuss · Oct 9, 2016

seebs said:
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.

Not when it is strangers, certainly not hugely, and especially not when you don't think your in the wrong.

I mean. "Block". Why would you block them? Because it's unpleasant to most people.

It's about as unpleasant as say having a fly buzzing around your house. It's annoying and there is a simple measure to deal with most cases which is Blocking.

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

I'm the same and yet you seem to think majority of people will be hugely upset by it? Do you have any evidence for that?

Bagpuss · Oct 9, 2016

doctorbadwolf said:
Inclusion matters. Representation matters. Because people are actually dying out there.

Nobody is dying because of a paragraph in a D&D book, it previously wasn't exclusionary. That there is more representation now is a good thing, but people weren't excluded just because they weren't represented.

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.

It has become more explicit recently but all sorts of people have always been welcome before, nothing in the industry has ever explicitly barred anyone from playing.

Individuals in the hobby might exclude people from their groups based on their prejudices (not that I have ever seen any evidence of this), but I doubt a paragraph in D&D manual is going to make them more welcoming if they weren't before.

pemerton · Oct 9, 2016

Bagpuss said:
Individuals in the hobby might exclude people from their groups based on their prejudices (not that I have ever seen any evidence of this), but I doubt a paragraph in D&D manual is going to make them more welcoming if they weren't before.

This seems plausible to me, though stranger things have happened. Given that RPGers follow the instructions of WotC in all sorts of other areas where one might expect them to use their own judgement (eg following rules even when they can see them not working in their own games; following setting "canon" rather than their own fiction/creativity) maybe the same thing will happen here!

Bagpuss said:
it previously wasn't exclusionary. That there is more representation now is a good thing, but people weren't excluded just because they weren't represented.

<snip>

nothing in the industry has ever explicitly barred anyone from playing.

Just because there is no explicit bar doesn't mean that there may not have been exclusion by implication.

As I posted upthread, an author can exclude - or maybe it would be better to say, can paint a picture of the fictional world in which some sorts of people are implied as absent - not through express words, but through unrelenting failure to depict certain sorts of people even though the audience in question would expect to see them there.

If every picture shows adventurers, and background characters, as northern European whites, that can generate an implication as to whom the game designers envisage being part of their world. If prospective audience members who are sensitive to that cue - because they find it hard to project themselves into the gameworld as northern European whites - take the hint and deal themselves out, well the fiction is just achieving its apparent goal.

Conversely, if you want a certain sort of person to imaginatively project him-/herself into your fiction - which is a pretty important part of a RPG - then stating and/or showing how they are part of it makes sense.

doctorbadwolf · Oct 9, 2016

Bagpuss said:
Nobody is dying because of a paragraph in a D&D book, it previously wasn't exclusionary. That there is more representation now is a good thing, but people weren't excluded just because they weren't represented.

It has become more explicit recently but all sorts of people have always been welcome before, nothing in the industry has ever explicitly barred anyone from playing.

Individuals in the hobby might exclude people from their groups based on their prejudices (not that I have ever seen any evidence of this), but I doubt a paragraph in D&D manual is going to make them more welcoming if they weren't before.

You clearly didn't actually read the post you're quoting.