D&D 5E D&D Promises to Make the Game More Queer

[Caliban]

Offended no. Concerned, yes.

Gotcha. It's OK as long as it's kept quit and no one tells you about it. Just like being Gay!

 

[Lanefan]

People are fine with ignoring the absolute importance of Christianity when playing a Medieval-inspired game because our Western society has long since embraced the idea of religious freedom.

More or less.

Quite a bit of what's being said here reminds me of what was being said in the 1980's about the game (supposedly) promoting witchcraft and the occult through its inclusion of devil/demon write-ups and of variants on (mostly) historical real-world polythestic religions, even though as far as I know no such promotion was intended by the designers.

And yes, this is one area where things have changed a whole lot for the better in the intervening 30 years.

Lanefan

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

(Now, you *could* make gay characters the majority in your setting and let an interesting background story evolve from the question why this is the case...)

Smurf reproduction?

 

[Trudy]

If he didn't make the statement, I wouldn't know he was pushing an agenda and therefore we wouldn't be having this conversation.

First, what you do at your home game, if none of my business. If you brought an LGBT character to table at my home game, I would love to see the faces of the other players at my table who it would made completely uncomfortable. Other than that, I'd be cool with it. If you brought it to the game I run at a local private school, I'd make you OK it with the other players and make everyone swear not to tell any of the teachers or the school director, because they would probably fire me for allowing you to play it (although they would probably fire me anyway if they knew I was playing board games with students on the premises).

The thing is... gay people exist. They don't ask permission to exist, they just do. And sure, this is a gay character and not a gay person, but it seems like you're making an ideological statement yourself by expecting people to ask permission to play queer characters in your game. Do you ask people to ask the entire gaming group if it's okay they're playing a character of a certain alignment? If they're playing a specific race? If they're playing a person of color?

 

[schnee]

No. But if you tell a new source that you included the NPC in order to further your ideological agenda, like what happened in this case, it doesn't leave much to the imagination.

Yes, 'acknowledging people who exist and treating them as people' is surely a sick, sad agenda.

 

[Mallus]

But if you tell a new source that you included the NPC in order to further your ideological agenda, like what happened in this case, it doesn't leave much to the imagination.

As far as I can tell, Crawford's ideological agenda on display here is:

1. There are gay people like me.
2. They belong in D&D stories.
3. Being gay shouldn't be the crux of their stories. It's just an everyday part of who they are.

As "ideological agendas" go, it's a few gulags short of hardcore Stalinism. More on the order of "I like Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream". Which, by the way, I do and therefore saying so is totally a part of my ideological agenda.

As for the whole "justifying the presence of X"... I can't speak for gay people. I'm straight. But I'm also not white. People who look like me are under-represented in American media. A little more representation would be nice. But I don't want or need "justification" - I want to be included because me and people who look like me are as American as anyone else, i.e. we're part of the culture. Maybe our ethnic heritage is the cornerstone of our identity, maybe it's not. But you sure as hell don't need a special reason to put us in the stories told about or created by our culture.

Or the culture of the Forgotten Realms, as the case may be.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[tombowings]

The thing is... gay people exist. They don't ask permission to exist, they just do. And sure, this is a gay character and not a gay person, but it seems like you're making an ideological statement yourself by expecting people to ask permission to play queer characters in your game. Do you ask people to ask the entire gaming group if it's okay they're playing a character of a certain alignment? If they're playing a specific race? If they're playing a person of color?

Don't take this the wrong way, but, Dude, I live in a country in which being gay can get the local priest to ask his choir boys to come over and drown you in a river - and it's not a uncommon occurrence. It is sensitive topic. Honestly, I would be doing it just as much for your safety as I would be for theirs, because it word got out that there was a chance you could be gay, your life would be in serious danger.

 

[Trudy]

Don't take this the wrong way, but, Dude, I live in a country in which being gay can get the local priest to ask his choir boys to come over and drown you in a river - and it's not a uncommon occurrence. It is sensitive topic. Honestly, I would be doing it just as much for your safety as I would be for theirs, because it word got out that there was a chance you could be gay, your life would be in serious danger.

I'm really sorry you live in a place like that.