WotC Older D&D Books on DMs Guild Now Have A Disclaimer

Ruin Explorer said:

I'm not calling them that, and I haven't done so. I'm saying I'd be within my rights to regard them as such. I'm not going to go around haranguing them, am I? Come on.

Further, acting like BoVD is just a normal book is being disingenuous. It's a book designed to troll. That is the purpose of BoVD, just like BoEF. They're designed to troll, to create pointless controversy, and to get people talking about a deeply mediocre product. It's a game company being edgy for the sake of being edgy. It's definitely super-lame.

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Sounds like you're back-tracking. You called them losers - own it, rather than calling me disingenuous.

Mercurius said:

You made a leap there.

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I think everybody in this thread is guilty of making leaps at some point, myself included. I apologize.

I think that, ultimately, creators should strive to be conscientious of whether their work contains content that could be perceived as "problematic" (dear god, I hate that word).

For example:

• Actively endorsing genocide, slavery, and other atrocities.
• Promulgating rape myths, such as "only women are raped."
• Depicting an entire group as a one-note caricature or otherwise badly represented, such as generic barbarians, noble savages, the virgin/whore complex, falling the Bechdell test, women in refrigerators, etc.
• Promulgating real world ethnic stereotypes, including fantasy counterpart cultures (i.e. space jews).
• Othering or exoticizing foreign cultures and persons, including fictional ones.

Personally I'm going to continue as a DM running adventures/campaigns as I have before. If my group thinks something is out of line, they'll let me know. I'm not changing anything based on a disclaimer.

BoxCrayonTales said:

I wasn't talking about Tolkien specifically, and his work has its own problems.

Firstly, depicting the dwarves as semitic received its own backlash.

Secondly, Tolkien described orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." So now they're anti-Asian stereotypes.

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Ah, yet more goalpost shifting. First it was "goblins are caricatures of Jewish stereotypes." Then it was "I meant fantasy, not fairy tales." And now "Well, LoTR (the biggest influence on fantasy) doesn't count because those were Asian stereotypes."

Which is it? Seems like you keep changing your criteria. You said goblins were caricatures of Jews, and now also say they are caricatures of Asians. Can't have it both ways.

That describes most warfare throughout history, including cannibalism. You are trivializing the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

The goblins aren't any worse than the Visigoths, the Mongols, the Aztecs, the Spanish, the French, or the British. They are hardly in the same league as the Nazis, unless you want to argue that all of those nations were as bad and/or worse than the Nazis... which both trivializes and normalizes the Nazi death camps.

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No, it doesn't. Pointing out how other cultures in human history did things just as bad (and worse) than the nazis doesn't trivialize the nazis. No one is saying what Nazi Germany did wasn't horrific. No one is denying or whitewashing the human rights atrocities they did. And no one is normalizing them. That's not what that word even means. What you're basically saying is that no one can talk about the horrors other cultures did because it would normalize them? And would somehow trivialize the holocaust? it's not a competition. Or pie. Talking about one doesn't take away from the other. The nazis committed genocide, torture, human experimentation, and scorched earth destruction. So did a lot of cultures throughout history. Talking about how the Japanese in WWII did human experimentation, committed genocide, engaged in massive scale rape (both comfort women and the rape of Nanking), and tortured and murdered prisoners kept in death camps doesn't mean I'm trivializing the nazis or normalizing them. Good lord. Heck, I myself stood at the mass graves and prison camps in Bosnia in the mid 90s (when I was part of the peacekeeping effort there), where the Serbs did pretty much the exact same thing as the nazis in WWII to the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), including concentration camps where they were tortured and killed. Talking about that and equating the two isn't normalizing or trivializing Nazi atrocities. It's literally comparing similarities of actual events.

Firstly, yes we do get upset. People were livid about Scramble for Africa because it trivialized the colonization of Africa, resulting in it being cancelled.

Secondly, wargames don't depict barbarians as "wholly evil and worthy of destruction." The wargames don't endorse genocide.

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OK, that's false, since some do. The goal is to wipe out the other side/culture completely in many of them. But even outside of that, where is the outcry about Mythic Rome, where anyone not of Rome is described as "barbaric and decadent" and how Rome was the place with culture and society? I'm picking on Mythic Rome, but many games where you play the Romans are described very much in the same way--European and British Isles people are described as uncultured, barbaric, and in pejorative ways. I can show you several threads just in the past couple weeks of people upset about how Orcs, Roma, and others are depicted. if the outrage is the same, then surely you can provide me of equal frequency and dated outrage about how the European and British tribes are portrayed in many of these games.

Look, you made a claim that goblins were caricatures of Jewish people. You haven't been able to back that up and keep shifting the goalposts and cherry picking. It was an false claim to make; just own it.

Hiya!

Hussar said:

So, your position is that your right to play a game that you KNOW offends people (and you know that because they've told you) in a public place, such as a convention, trumps their right to feel safe and welcome at the same place.



That's just sad.

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In short, yes.
Yes it does.

Public is public...not private. In public you have no "right to not be offended by others". Period. How someone can think otherwise is baffling to me.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

Late to the party as usual... however, I've been concerned about all of this ever since my friend and co-host of the Inappropriate Characters talk-show, RPG Pundit, made me aware of the problem's depth years ago.

Anyway, I have a petition to get WotC to remove their legacy content disclaimer. Feel free to sign (by commenting on my blog post) the petition if you're also disgusted by what's going on: WoTC Disclaimer - Sign The Petition

Thanks,

VS

Hussar said:

So, your position is that your right to play a game that you KNOW offends people (and you know that because they've told you) in a public place, such as a convention, trumps their right to feel safe and welcome at the same place.

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Sometimes. We've already established that D&D is problematic in it's depictions of fictional races, the very mechanics surrounding race during character generation (selection, attribute bonuses, etc., etc.), and the colonial aspects which are at the very root of the game itself. No doubt there are people who feel unwelcome because of those mechanics. Should someone stop running their 2nd edition Forgotten Realms adventure because someone finds it offensive? On the flip side, if someone busted out FATAL I'd kindly invite them to leave.

So it's not exactly a binary situation there. More of a continuum.

VengerSatanis said:

Late to the party as usual... however, I've been concerned about all of this ever since my friend and co-host of the Inappropriate Characters talk-show, RPG Pundit, made me aware of the problem's depth years ago.

Anyway, I have a petition to get WotC to remove their legacy content disclaimer. Feel free to sign (by commenting on my blog post) the petition if you're also disgusted by what's going on: WoTC Disclaimer - Sign The Petition

Thanks,

VS

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Quitting RPGs and not using forums about them until it was fixed would send an even stronger signal of your disgust than a mere purchasing boycott, wouldn't it?

Fascinating discussion. I only post irregularly on Enworld over the years, but it sure is interesting to see how a forum's culture changes as the years go by.

Somebody upthread brought up 3.5's Book of Vile Darkness. Great comparison.

I remember how Tracy Hickman at the time wrote a scathing public response to it, saying it was utter trash and really vile, should not have gotten published, and was an assault on his moral sensitivities.

And he got laughed at, perhaps even: laughed out, at Enworld back then.

Not for being wrong. I mean, BoVD is an assault on your senses - those illustrations are often nothing short of puerile. There's something hapless about having pierced nippled and guys with chains and leather depict moral depravity. It was like the boy scouts dress up evil fest.

No, Hickman got laughed at for being paternalistic - not only in his wanting to compel Enworld to have the same response to said material, but in feeling compelled to have a different response to BoVD in the first place ("oh nooooes these corporate baddies at Wizards want me to endorse eeeeevil").

The whole beauty of "Parental Caution Advised" is that's an advisory disclaimer exercised in and at the viewer's discretion. Being told "You are hereby expected to spontaneously, sincerely, and honestly develop moral emotion X in response to product Y" is just plain ridiculous. The whole point of a moral response is that you can't compel it. It's that simple.

Reading some of the responses here or on other forums, you'd believe that WotC had put out a disclaimer to that effect, like they did in 2002, except that Hickman's response is the new chique. "How dare they compel me to insult Gygax?"

I get it, I don't like publishers to compel a response from me either. But this lukewarm label they just put out? "This product may contain ethnically insensitive material." That's so broad that it basically demands you to exercise your own critical sensitivities. Which content? Insensitive in what way? Insensitive to who exactly? When? How? It's so watered down and inarticulate, you'd have to squint extra hard to make that compel anything in you other than a probing reflection in your own sweet time. How dare they? Those fascists!

How does everyone feel about McDonald’s putting a label on their coffee saying it’s hot because 1 person?

What parallels can be drawn from that to this discussion?