What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[halfling rogue]

It's okay to portray Pharaohs as white

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think they exist because they're a science fiction theme so old it can order off the senior menu.

Yes but I do not think that is why they were there this time.

 

[Krachek]

Games of thrones is still an acclaimed tv show and books despite a lot of controversial subjects.
so a game or setting designer can aim to get even with GOT.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

View attachment 276803

A good reason that not every societal evil needs to be published in a roleplaying game. Once upon a time, people made campaigns out of whole cloth with just what they wanted to loot from Lankhmar or Conan or Grey Mouser, Vance or Anderson.

 

[Staffan]

Historian and Egyptologist Joann Fletcher asserts that the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great and members of the Macedonian-Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenistic Egypt had blond hair, such as Arsinoe II and Berenice II.

The documentary evidence clearly shows Alexander as having brown hair:

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Games of thrones is still an acclaimed tv show and books despite a lot of controversial subjects.
so a game or setting designer can aim to get even with GOT.

I think a novel, show or video game can manage it more than an rpg module because in all the others the story is a realised thing and the evil of those thing are clear from the consequence to the victims. In an rpg module they are unrealised potentials.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

I think a novel, show or video game can manage it more than an rpg module because in all the others the story is a realised thing and the evil of those thing are clear from the consequence to the victims. In an rpg module they are unrealised potentials.

I think the 'unrealized potential' part is key here. People talk about GoT and its issues, and like you said - the show, and others like it, are completed. These subjects can be addressed if you let people know - hey, grown up things ahead, and here's a keyword list of the triggers in it.

RPGs are movies/comics/books not fully written, for tables of people who will never meet each other. I think what we see in these discussions are just the same discussions we're seeing writ large in America and the world. I think with the fact the country seems to have lost the ability to have civil discourse, along with all the revisionism going on, keeps publishers from being able to safely put out a book, fully with trigger warnings, and say 'Here we go.'

Almost makes one miss the 'glory days' of Book of Erotic Fantasy or whatever it was and Vile Darkness, don't it?

 

[Fenris-77]

A good reason that not every societal evil needs to be published in a roleplaying game. Once upon a time, people made campaigns out of whole cloth with just what they wanted to loot from Lankhmar or Conan or Grey Mouser, Vance or Anderson.

I don't think anyone said that it was necessary, and I would agree that it's not. But not being necessary is very different from not being permissible. Also, those games you mention have all manner of what probably make the grade as societal evil baked right in. So there's that...

 

[Krachek]

I think a novel, show or video game can manage it more than an rpg module because in all the others the story is a realised thing and the evil of those thing are clear from the consequence to the victims. In an rpg module they are unrealised potentials.

Indeed if the game allow the players to help or use the « bad » guys and thus promoting bad behavior, the designer can have serious problems.

 

[Lanefan]

D&D-like games set in an historically accurate 16th century are rare to non-existant. People might think of D&D as set in the past because of the assumed technology level, but we don't have to assume that history and social and family structures mirror our world at the time.

Fair enough; though I'll say they don't have to mirror our world as it is now either.

We bring in a lot of baggage (sometimes intentionally, sometime unthinkingly) when we import trappings into a fictional fantasy world. The intent I think is to evoke a sense of the world, but doing that without analysis and intention can lead to some cringe-worthy worldbuilding. I'm not being judgemental here. I'm as guilty as anyone -- well, guilty isn't the right word. It's not a crime. Let's say that I've done it -- I've tossed in a pastiche of tropes into game settings without really thinking about whether it's what I really meant to include.

Yep, me too - I just chuck all the tropes into the same blender and see what comes out. A vague parallel would be the Xena-verse, where Caesar's Rome happily co-exists side-along with pre-Roman Greece, 10th-century Norse, 10th-12th-century China, and so on; except my setting goes all the way from Babylon-era Sumerians to early-Renaissance Europe.