What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[S'mon]

I thought The Aeneid was written by Virgil.

Yeah, sorry! In school Latin class we did Metamorphoses & The Aeneid together, I mixed up the authors.

 

[Hussar]

As long as you're consistent. If you're cool with Scarlet Johansson playing The Major in "Ghost in the Shell", you have to be cool with Hallie Berry playing "The Little Mermaid".

See, I absolutely am.

Funny thing is, most people will complain about Halle Barry or Jodie Turner-Smith playing Anne Boleyn or Noma Dumezweni playing Hermione Granger FAR sooner than they'd complain about Adam Driver playing a Pharaoh or Russel Crowe playing Noah.

Since, well, we want to be consistent right?

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

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...

You can't discount a level of what they call Oppositional Defiance Syndrome in some of these discussions. By that, I mean people on both sides reacting to any level of push back on what they feel, and the Internet amplifies that with what Penny Arcade made a strip about of the Jon Gabriel Greater Internet Dickwad Theory ( Normal Individual + Anonymity + Audience = Dickwad) and its corrolary (Normal Individual - Consequences + Audience = Dickwad)

I think it's perspective. With our culture where everything gets ramped to its greatest hyperbole, saying WotC won't publish a certain material/setting feels to some people like the Next Step is WotC is going to start policing their tables or taking their dice.

Maybe it's just the same level of ownership people feel over GRRM's writings or the direction Star Wars has taken, for example - that the fans get to have a vote not in what's presented but HOW it's presented, if that makes sense. And you see negative behavior rewarded when DC caves in about the Snyder cut - which they caved in, and for what? It didn't get Snyder his job back - James Gunn is in charge now.

And going back to the old Gygaxian games based on those old tropes, that's why I'm going to take a suggestion I've seen and run with it: you get XP for the gold you loot, BUT you can only spend it on things without lasting value - so no bonus XP for taking that hoard and buying magic armor, but you get the XP for spending the loot on ale and wenches. Pretty on trope.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

But this is no fear: it is happening.

Right now major game companies are cherry picking random things they don't like and removing them from their games forever.

Everything in every game comes from some culture, and if you can't have anything from any real world culture....that is everything. And again major game companies are removing cultures they have a problem with, right now.

I don't know about you but major gaming companies do not run my table.

I recommend looking at the beginning of gaming - anything was fair game to put into a game and was statted and made by the people at the table. That's why there was an Alice in Wonderland module in the late 70s. That's why, I believe it was either Myrlund or Mordenkeinan who dual-wielded pistols despite being an archmage. No gaming company is going to come take your gaming books away for including meat-eating or anything you want out there

I understand why you may feel that way, given that we live in an America where we keep having to have court cases about whether bakeries can refuse to make cakes for certain people.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

Homer didn't see blue; Ovid did see yellow, AFAICT.

Of course Queen Dido of Carthage is more myth than history, and even if she was an historical figure ca 800 BC there's no particular reason to think Ovid ca 10 BC was giving an accurate account of her hair colour! Ovid's description is only really evidence that the Romans were aware of blonde hair & saw it as noteworthy.

Well, there's also the interesting history of the color orange to consider
edit: Not being sarcastic. The history of the word 'orange' involves the fact there was not a word used for orange until oranges were discovered and brought to Europe, I guess?

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

Note that the 1st amendment only effects the government. And just like the government did with Facebook and YouTube all they need to is "ask"(tell) the companies what to do and the companies say "ok".

Thank you.
People forget that: 1) the First Amendment only applies to government placing restrictions on speech - a publisher can choose what to publish or not; and 2) companies will do whatever they think will maximize the profits for the least amount of 'greasing'

 

[Staffan]

And going back to the old Gygaxian games based on those old tropes, that's why I'm going to take a suggestion I've seen and run with it: you get XP for the gold you loot, BUT you can only spend it on things without lasting value - so no bonus XP for taking that hoard and buying magic armor, but you get the XP for spending the loot on ale and wenches. Pretty on trope.

I think Mongoose's Conan RPG had a rule about PCs spending half their cash on party rocking every week unless they were specifically saving up for something.

 

[Cadence]

Everything in every game comes from some culture, and if you can't have anything from any real world culture....that is everything. And again major game companies are removing cultures they have a problem with, right now.

So Paizo's just announced return to Tian Xia isn't based on what I think it is? Or do they not have a problem with anything in those cultures at all?

Or did they hire a few professionals to help them avoid things a lot of their fans think are tired tropes where possible and put in some of the hundreds of other things that haven't been highlighted before?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Thank you.
People forget that: 1) the First Amendment only applies to government placing restrictions on speech - a publisher can choose what to publish or not; and 2) companies will do whatever they think will maximize the profits for the least amount of 'greasing'

Loud voices on the internet can be just as influential as any government in this matter. It's not the 1st Amendment, but the principle of restricting free speech remains the same.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thank you.
People forget that: 1) the First Amendment only applies to government placing restrictions on speech - a publisher can choose what to publish or not; and 2) companies will do whatever they think will maximize the profits for the least amount of 'greasing'

Of course you can make an argument that in the modern era when most avenues of speech are, in practice, controlled by one company or another, its questionable what "free speech" even means. My own feeling is that it means what it always did, which is that whatever speech isn't socially acceptable is suppressed; all that's changed is how that's being done.