D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Bae'zel]

It's less that AC should be ascending or descending and it's more that either everything goes up or everything goes down.

Sorry, that's what I meant: be consistent. I agree with you.

 

[Mournblade94]

I played during the Thac0 years and I still don't know what it is.

I still play 2nd edition. It's the simplest arithmetic. It's just not hard

 

[The Firebird]

Here's where I see a point of stasis I want to poke at, because I disagree. WotC has stated or implied that (at least some of) their* depictions of orcs are flawed or immoral. And, again for some of their depictions, this is hard to argue against. The Orcs of Thar and Drums on Fire Mountain have straight-up yellow peril and bunga-bunga spearthrower vibes in them, straight-up correlating orcs with real world cultural groups (in a game that still treats them as the throwaway villains). Later, The Complete Book of Humanoids gave them a revisionist western Native American overlay. They screwed up orcs in a way that their subsequent depictions have to tread a very fine line. If (the proverbial) you want to depict orcs in a different way (perhaps even mining from their previous less-problematic depictions), that is a different situation. I disagree that their doing something that is, for them (and based on their situation) "necessary for inclusivity" implies, suggests, or infers that your preference for any specific depiction of orc is opposed to inclusivity**.
*or TSR's, to which-- through their IP acquisition --they now have association.
**mind you, it still could be (if your preferred depiction is the Drums on Fire Mountain one, you might want to think on that), but it isn't an inherent inference of the burden WotC faces.

So... I actually bought this one. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but, well, what I got wasn't it. There's not much to argue there. It treated real world, modern (at time of publication), Romani people as a fantasy species. It was not good. It is an embarrassment for everyone involved. I don't think it is the defense of your position that you think it is.

This is a great post, clear and well-argued.

I agree in the first place that some of the official d&d depictions of orcs have issues. I especially agree with the Vistani. I was shocked by what they published in 2016.

It's wise that WotC has not chosen to go through the old catalogue to determine which depictions exactly are acceptable and a blanket statement is defensible on those grounds.

I agree with your point narrowly, that WotC saying "as the IP holders we must change this" does not imply that other depictions are bad and wrong.

That said, they could have done a better job of making this case. I think its reasonable to expect people who liked the older content to feel, "oh, are you saying that you think I'm a bad person? That my fun is bad and exclusionary?"

And a community that empathized with and wanted to include these people would be more proactive and less tone-deaf in their approach to relations. The perception that WotC doesn't care about/dislikes older gamers may be false, and the orc changes may not be condemning those gamers...but cracking jokes about Thaco the clown, posting that you don't care what grognards think, and the like, don't exactly help.

If we think this perception exists mistakenly, we should take steps to correct it, not double down on the actions causing it.

 

[Mournblade94]

I mean, Thac0 as a mechanic was considered confusing and counterintuitive when it was the default combat resolution. It was only used because it was less space intensive than full table matrixes. I've been in the gamer space for 30+ years and never heard anyone opine fondly for the mechanic. Well, not until WotC opted to make it's first jest about it but putting it in the 2014 PHB index. Then, mocking Thac0 started becoming an act of violence against the OS community. There was no great revelation about the mechanic, no hidden brilliance was discovered. Thac0 just became a bloody shirt people who disliked newer editions used to prove how oppressed they are.

Thac0 just was never hard. Ever. If you played D&D then negative AC was the norm. Nobody i knew had a problem with this.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

But companies that are not people really shouldn't. There's too much to lose

There is a lot more to lose by not doing so.

Disney has lost a lot of the conservative family audience

And now they are losing the liberal and international audience.

Try and sit on the fence and you get hammered by both sides (and splinters up your backside).

 

[AlViking]

Thac0 just was never hard. Ever. If you played D&D then negative AC was the norm. Nobody i knew had a problem with this.

Pretty much everyone I played with either actively hated it or found it completely unnecessary. It was a barrier to entry for many and needlessly complex.

I don't remember a single person saying they thought the change made in 3e was a mistake. I personally had no issue with THAC0 but I thought the new method was an improvement that should have been done by TSR.

 

[Mournblade94]

Nope because one side's premise for having a game they enjoy seems to be based on the other side not being allowed to change anything me to acomodate them...

People have plenty of games to acomodate them. I think it is actually worst to come into a game you weren't part of and demand change.

Especially now. No need to stay with it if Demons and Evil Orcs offend you. Go play whatever games cater to your taste. Don't demand others change because your tastes don't match the community you entered into.

That ship has sailed. Dungeons and Dragons has become Legends and Lattes. But since I am playing the game with the person I love most (my daughter and wife) I would love to drop the Latte and go back to the Dungeons and Dragons.

I'm just glad my daughter got into gaming through reading books.

 

[Mournblade94]

Pretty much everyone I played with either actively hated it or found it completely unnecessary. It was a barrier to entry for many and needlessly complex.

I don't remember a single person saying they thought the change made in 3e was a mistake. I personally had no issue with THAC0 but I thought the new method was an improvement that should have been done by TSR.

I loved 3rd. You're not going to get an argument from me there.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I suppose so, but what people say still matters I think.

It does matter what people say, but I surmise not in the way you think it does.
What people say to us says a lot more about them than it does about us.

I'm getting this from a book called The Four Agreements.
The second of these agreements - and these are agreements which we make with ourselves - is: Don't take anything personally.
It's not easy to do, and I'm by no means an expert at maintaining it, but I find when I do keep that agreement with myself, I have much better days.
The third agreement is: Don't make assumptions. This is where, rather than get offended by the words of others, we ask questions to discern true intent. If the intent seems malicious even after clarification, refer back to the second agreement.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think a lot was done to sanitize medieval Europe as well. Serfs come from slavery, the name servus in Latin, is slave, the modern word slave, comes from enslaving Slavic people, using them as galley, and plantation slaves. In turn the word for Gulag, comes from the Belarus-Russian-Ukrainian word Katorga, a transliteration of a Greek and Turkish word for galley, as in the ship. The Genonese slave-raiding colonies, Garazia, was in constant warfare with the Mongols from the 13th to 15th centuries. In one siege the Mongols used artillery to launch Black Plague infected corpses over the walls of Kaffa, likely a vector of how it entered Europe.

Then one gets to the expulsion of the Jews in the 15th and 16th century, places like Judenburg Austria has a caricature of a Jewish person in their coat of arms still: Judenburg - Wikipedia even though they were expelled. Gone east, into Slavic lands, and what eventually forms the Pale of Settlement.

There were sumptuary laws, by class, telling people how they could dress, and peasants would have worn more raw natural cloth, much of this is due to industry. Dyes are more of a 19th century thing, tying into industrial development on the Rhine, and ultimately, chemistry, to WW1 and high explosives. Arms and armor as well, there was not a science behind it, the classic plate, comes from being cheaply made after the invention and spread of the trip hammer, and armor acted as durable uniform.

You are right though, a lot of the romanticism of the middle ages is from the 19th century, and D&D inherited that.

Nevertheless, it isn't a society I would have liked living in.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I am VERY happy I live in an era where my need for glasses doesn't make me half-blind, my need for asthma medication doesn't make me a pauper, and my allergies and sensitivity to illness as a child didn't result in my painful death. (I survived a case of strep throat that became scarlet fever. Had I lived 200 years earlier, it would have killed me.)

Re: Dyes, while the full extent of cloth-dye stuff that we have today is certainly way bigger than what they had back then, there were still plenty of natural dyes. They were just harder to use, and the best were almost always more expensive. But you'd have celebration days (e.g. May Day) that would get plenty of colorful flags and streamers and such. The idea that middle-ages life was uniformly drab and colorless is just as much an invention as the romanticization from the 19th century.

Or, as Blue of Overly Sarcastic Productions put it, "The 'Dark Ages' is a myth perpetuated by Big Renaissance to sell you more paintings." Obviously this is an intentionally comedic Hot Take summary, but the rest of the video is a comprehensive look at how our "Dung Ages"/"Dork Ages" view of medieval history is WOEFULLY inadequate and heavily incorrect. The Medieval Period had LOTS of things that sucked--and many of them sucked a LOT. But so did the Roman era that preceded it and the Renaissance that followed it.

After all, burning people at the stake for being a witch? Yeah, that's a Renaissance thing. Catholic doctrine was, and still is, that witches didn't exist, so it was heresy to accuse anyone of witchcraft. It was only after the Renaissance, and the publication of things like the Malleus Maleficarum...which the Catholic Church expressly rejected as heretical...that you started seeing the witch-burning craze. And most of that was at the order of civil authorities--since, again, accusing people of witchcraft was officially heretical, to the point that the bloody Inquisition itself opposed the Malleus.