What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Faolyn]

And being technically correct is of course the best kind of correct.

The point being not too many people were institutionally murdered over the course of several centuries. The same is not true of slavery.

Well. Jews, maybe, since the bigotry and violence against them didn't start with the nazis.

But fantastic racism with antisemitic roots is another thing that is hopefully being removed from more and more games.

 

[Irlo]

So we are back in the camp of genocide is OK sometimes but slavery never is?

@Faolyn literally just described her setting that included slavery. Who is saying that depicting slavery is never okay?

It doesn't take much nuance to distinguish between an undead menace intent on the destruction of every living thing and a fantasy depicition of a society that systematically murders people (esp. if that genocide parallels real world atrocities).

 

[Imaro]

Looking into them means knowing that those third-party products exist in the first place, and being able to find them without undue difficulty. Given that "controversial" products are usually made by smaller publishers, who are less able to defend themselves against haters who say that their products offend their sensibilities and so either shouldn't exist or shouldn't be easily found by consumers – typically by way of leveraging harassment via unflattering coverage in game-specific coverage online and campaigns denouncing sales venues that carry them – their existence is thus not a given. Hence, it's on them, not us.

Google is a wonderful tool. If you are keyed in enough to be playing D&D and want something specific for your game I don't think it would be a monumental task to do a couple searches. Even bad press is still press.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@Faolyn literally just described her setting that included slavery. Who is saying that depicting slavery is never okay?

It's her own table game. What appears to be being said is that  publishing slavery is never ok. With which I don't agree.

 

[Imaro]

Why do you feel like it's a good enough fantasy buffer from reality to excuse a kobold bandit trying to kill you in a mugging but not apply the same fantasy buffer to snake-guy wants to kidnap you and take you to a hidden desert lair to toil in mine?

What does the snake-guy kidnapping you and you becoming a slave entail? Seriously. Is it ok for slavery to feature beatings? torture? murder? rape? Slavery encompassed all of this so with slavery we're already covering the area that a kobold mugging you does and then kept going... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. So is there a limit when we say slavery is ok or is anything that was done to slaves during slavery open fodder for a game?

EDIT: Also is it open season on players or is this purely a done to NPC thing? What's the recommended age for this product?

 

[Micah Sweet]

What does the snake-guy kidnapping you and you becoming a slave entail? Seriously. Is it ok for slavery to feature beatings? torture? murder? rape? Slavery encompassed all of this so with slavery we're already covering the area that a kobold mugging you does and then kept going... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. So is there a limit when we say slavery is ok or is anything that was done to slaves during slavery open fodder for a game?

Are required to show all those things if you're using slavery at all?

 

[Alzrius]

But what's the justification for slavery? Just to show how evil someone is (as has been suggested elsewhere in this thread)? There's other ways to do that that don't involve slavery.

There are multiple justifications, but with regard to the context of presenting it from a standpoint of world-building, the justification is verisimilitude. Simply put, there's a point where all of the underlying factors that should result in institutionalized slavery are present, and so its not being there becomes noticeable enough that it impinges on suspension of disbelief.

For most fantasy role-playing games, the presence of a medieval (European) culture is presented as a pastiche rather than any sort of serious historical work. That said, part of that pastiche involves certain aspects of the cultural development of the societies involves, which includes a marked lack of civil infrastructure and social support networks. The result is that it's taken as self-evident that such societies necessarily involve their people living under a greater degree of threat, not only from monsters, criminal elements, and other mayhem, but also from what we'd describe (for the sake of convenience) as ill-fortune, such as sicknesses, poverty, famine, etc.

That's important to take into account, because even in settings with semi-ubiquitous magic, interventionist deities, and all sorts of lifeforms, it's virtually always understood that none of these undercut the aforementioned medieval pastiche in any meaningful way. Specifically, scarcity is still an economic reality in the context of the game world, as is natural selection and other forms of Darwinism.

The result is that all of the reasons for enacting slavery are present, and most of the controls which would be able to prevent slavery's institutionalization are either lacking or anemic. A pseudo-medieval world, where survival is still a very real struggle for most of the background characters who make up the setting, is likely either not going to have organizations dedicated to protecting human (or rather, sapient) rights, or if such groups do exist, they're simply not going to have the level of outreach and authority necessary to protect those rights on any sort of pervasive scale.

Meanwhile, there's going to be villainous groups who do have the means, motive, and opportunity to enact slavery, since a workforce which you don't need to pay is a self-evident economic boon, even if it's morally repugnant, and that boon helps immunize them from the aforementioned threats that people in that society live under. The possibility of a slave uprising is likewise fairly easy to control if you keep the slaves oppressed (which goes with them being slaves), and is likewise not going to be a risk that outweighs the benefit(s) of having an oppressed class. And that's without issues of how it obviates the need for jails if you use slavery as a punishment for (alleged) criminal activity, or engaging in genocide if you conquer an enemy in a war, etc. Slavery is morally abhorrent, but if evil people don't care about the moral aspect, it has a lot of pragmatic dimensions to it.

So assuming the setting isn't a utopia, slavery's absence can be fairly stark.

And that's not even getting into the fantastical aspects of it. If we assume that evil deities have a vested interest in people doing evil things, then at least some of them should have slavery as an aspect of their religious portfolio. Devils and other corruptive influences will also push that idea. Magic makes such things possible as well, once you start looking into perpetual charm magic, etc.

There's no reason why slavery has to be present in a setting. But how you present the setting necessarily opens it up to questions about its internal logic and self-consistency, which means that if you have all of the underlying ingredients there, it becomes odd that nowhere has anyone put two and two together. If we take it as a given that people want to interrogate how their settings work, because a greater understanding of them is more enjoyable, then laying all of the framework for slavery, even inadvertently, and then having it not present is something that people who enjoy world-building are going to notice and comment on.

 

[Faolyn]

Okay. I don't see it, but I'm not going to argue the point. Nothing in those comments indicates to me that either poster had concern for Soth's victims, and there's no indication that WotC revised Soth's backstory because they wanted to protect a fictional woman and baby.

Since I'm the one who wrote that comment. No, I'm not trying to protect a fictional woman and a baby. But it annoyed me that the original backstory had given him a chance of redemption after that sort of crime, when he also hadn't been really repentant of that crime.

 

[Imaro]

Are required to show all those things if you're using slavery at all?

So we're back to minimalizing the experience of slavery... Oh slaves were just workers in bad conditions.

 

[Alzrius]

Google is a wonderful tool. If you are keyed in enough to be playing D&D and want something specific for your game I don't think it would be a monumental task to do a couple searches. Even bad press is still press.

Correction: Google is an imperfect tool. Appealing to it as all that a third-party publisher needs to connect them to potential customers comes very close to saying that advertising and marketing are pointless, since said potential customer base will always be able to find your stuff simply by Googling the theme(s) that they cover.

Naturally, even a casual examination of the topic should make it clear that's not the case.