... okay, well... when you put it like that, specifically, with the 12 and up marker I can see how it's more difficult to produce, yeah.
Even the kindest version of Dark Sun feels like it's a 16+ product, to me.
Topics like cannibalism and eugenics aren't really something I wanna try to talk about in any meaningful way with a 12 year old. I don't have a background in education, and making a setting for them which includes it -does- sound hard.
I wonder if part of their "Inclusion Standards" is them feeling like they can't do proper 5e Dark Sun Art because the older players would wanna see the traditional scantily clad female characters and bulging mountain of muscle male characters, though...
I feel like that might be part of it. Feeling like they can't really "Do" a lot of variety in character presentation while still being true to the setting.
I don't know. We know Kyle wasn't the most effective communicator, so I'm not 100% sure what he meant. But I agree that it's probably more to do with relatively mature content, when their publishing approach is generally to appeal to the widest possible share of their customer base.
Again, there are more games now than ever. And most fly under the radar. But if you have any amount of visibility, you definitely have had to check yourself in the past ten years. I have seen it myself first hand and heard it directly from other designers, and you see it in end products on the shelves. I am not saying you can't do dark and edgy but it has to be done in a narrow way I think if you don't want push back. But importantly, that is changing. The tide is shifting in this respect and things do seem to be opening up again
There is a range but social pressure by aggressive dogpiling and mobbing on social media. The callout culture in general. However I am not going to play twenty questions either on this. I think it is pretty obvious people have to be cautious about anything that could be perceived as problematic even if it wasn't a problem (it is about the perception). You can deny that is a thing, but I think everyone knows it has been a big thing for the past ten years
What's "narrow" about the variety of dark content shown in, again for specific, real-world examples, Midnight, Xoth, Lamentations, Hyperborea, Viking Death Squad, and Shadowdark?
Who has gotten aggressively dogpiled, and exactly for what? What's "obvious" to you doesn't seem apparent to me. The books I see getting published seem to show the opposite. People can and do publish all sorts of stuff.
But those standards shifted as a result of public pressure and I am not sure he is strictly talking about WOTC's own standards. His first sentence is it is problematic. And this gets to exactly what I have been discussing (because it isn't problematic, it is dark and has upsetting content because it is trying to explore a grim idea and bleak world------but the message is a pro-environment message).
I think he's talking about trying to sell mature content to a general audience, and about their own publishing policy about portraying particularly brutal subject matter, like slavery. I think the particular "problematic" elements they're mostly dealing with are A) slavery, B) cannibalism, and C) Psionics, just logistically because they haven't figured out a way to do it that they like.
What's your alternative theory?
Again I am not playing twenty questions here, but just to use an example, if someone writes for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is probably the big one for edgy content these days, they are going to be tarred by that association. But it extends to all kinds of sectors of the hobby where people are guilted by association (it has happened to me too, so I have seen how it plays out first hand)
You think writing for LotFP tars one by association with edgy content? Or is the association issue the fact that James Raggi III strongly supports ZS, a writer who's a
notoriously abusive and nasty narcissist, and
apparent domestic abuser?
We lost our ability to see beyond the optics of a thing, to intuit peoples intentions and understand content and message are not the same. We've lost more than that of course, but that is the big thing I had in mind. And we have become more cruel to one another over these issues.
I think we are manifestly and clearly more considerate and less cruel than we were, for example, when GAZ10 The Orcs of Thar was published, chock-full of insulting stereotypes about and jokes at the expense of, Native Americans. I don't think there's anything cruel about pointing out that things can be harmful even if they're "just a joke, man" and the writer insists that they didn't mean to be hateful.
