What's so deeply frustrating to me is that this culture shift is so piecemeal and incomplete.
Like, I don't want to get into specific politics, but if you tune into practically ANY country's election coverage these days, you're likely to see proud bigots and predators who try to and often succeed in laying claim to large swaths of the cultural sphere, even as more milquetoast centrists decry anything that smacks of asking them to change (be it issues of race or gender or even just "kids these days and their protests" or being "cancelled" or not having "free speech").
Yeah, reactionary politics are rough to deal with. The good news is, they are a sign of progress. It’s a long observed pattern that whenever big strides are made towards social equity, there is pushback in
reaction to that progress. Sometimes those reactions can be quite extreme, and it can be rough to live through a period where reactionary politics are on the rise. But in the long term, that pushback eventually subsides, and net progress is made. The road is long, but it bends towards justice.
D&D is doing OK, but it is still grappling with honoring its legacy without carrying over the rough stuff. It's hard to be anticolonial when an iconic D&D experience is killing creatures with green skin who have an "evil culture" in their homes and taking their stuff.
Yeah, this is the part I personally struggle the most with, because I really love a good, classic dungeon delve with iconic monsters as enemies, but that premise has deeply colonial underpinnings. I don’t think there are any easy answers when it comes to decolonizing D&D, but I think it’s a worthwhile goal to pursue.
It's hard to be sympathetic to the mentally ill when you've got Pandemonium and eldritch horrors from beyond the stars that cause madness.
I think this one is a matter of deconstructing “madness” and reconstructing something else to fill its thematic space. Part of how Lovecraft played on the fear of mental illness in his work was to imply that what we consider sanity is really just blissful ignorance, and what we mistake for madness is just deeper insight into truths too horrible to accept. I would recommend those who want to play with themes of cosmic horror lean into that. Glimpsing the horror of the far realm doesn’t “drive you insane,” it’s just deeply traumatic. For a good example of this done well, I look to Bloodborne, where instead of a depleting sanity score, you have an increasing Insight score. With higher Insight, you start to see things that were there all along, but your mind couldn’t accept; and once you see them, and they see you seeing them, they pose a greater threat to you.
It's hard to have a Barbarian class and not live dangerously close to racist beliefs about nomadic peoples.
It’s a shame we’re stuck with the name Barbarian, because I don’t think the class is all that bad at a base mechanical level. A warrior who uses an altered state of consciousness to enhance their fighting abilities is cool, and has plenty of mythical and historical precedent across many cultures. But the name Barbarian and the altered state being called Rage are anchors around the class’s neck.
It's hard have Intelligence as a numerical stat, or to have an exclusively human kingdom in a world where ethnostates are actively being pursued. Not impossible, but something to treat with care and concern.
We are seeing a move towards more specially diverse humanoid settlements being depicted in WotC’s settings, which I think is a move in the right direction. Intelligence as a stat is another case where the need to stick with old naming conventions holds us back. It’s functionally just the “pass more knowledge checks” stat, and for wizards rhe “cast spells better” stat, which fits with their story of gaining magic through studious dedication.
