TSR The Full & Glorious History of NuTSR

I guess what really chaps my hide about posts like that? They complain about being bullied. Yeah, we got teased, but do you know who had it worse? People like this guy.



So Alex or whatever his name is can sit down and be quiet. Especially since he's the same type of person who is now complaining and attacking the people who had/have it much worse than we ever did and just want to be represented in the game. The cognitive dissonance is literally mind blowing with these people.

IMNSHO, we've come to the point where the worst bullying is coming from inside the RPG community, not from outside it. Folks like Justin Lanasa, Dave Johnson, and Ernie Gygax are the prime examples.

Ralif Redhammer said:

My assumption is that they're operating under the idea that old school D&D stopped after Gygax was booted from TSR. Either that or they're 36.



The idea that we should be giving anyone a free pass anymore is ludicrous. Also, the "worst abuse?!" I got bullied plenty when I was a kid, but there are so many marginalized communities that had it way worse. I am, after all, alive to type this.

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Same. I got teased a bit for being a generally nerdy AV/SciFi/Fantasy kid but never anything specific to D&D. I'm 54 and the dad of a 14 year old trans kid and a 17 year old LGBTQ+ kid and what I had to deal with can't even be compared to the actual bullying my kids get. So these jackholes can eff right off with their whining about how they were bullied over D&D. No one was actively trying to deny their existence or kill them.

I'm 62!

do I win?

Steampunkette said:

Anyone under 35 was born in 1987, and hit high school around '01 so they didn't get bullied in high school over being D&D nerds, I guess?

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Sacrosanct said:

What a pile of horse dung. The 80s were my formative years, and while we got teased, it was for being nerds in general, not D&D specific.

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Fundamentally, people were bullied in high school because teens/pubescent kids in general and high schoolers specifically are horrible to each other. Full stop. Just a huge pack of minimally formed quasi-proto-adults readjusting to a world where they are chock full of hormones, have a minimal amount of responsibilities, and are thrust into a new situation where everyone doesn't have the same interests (recess and candy!) and instead are left to their own devices to form interests and then form social groups around them. Sure if you were a RPG gamer at the time, someone would use that as a weapon against you, but it wasn't because of RPGs. Even then, oftentimes it wasn't because that was a shared hobby. I manage a group of programmers and data scientists, and we've gone over those days many times (another trend I've noticed: nerds reliving high school). For every story about that one time they got pushed down or humiliated or whatever by a jock or 'one of the cool kids,' there seem to be dozens where the people who were the cruelest and most horrible to high school nerds were other high school nerds (playing lord of flies, marking territory, or sometimes just being inept teenagers running roughshod over the feelings of those most often around them).

Sacrosanct said:

Even outside of that, the argument is a pile of pucky because you can't say "let them create their own game" and when they do start shouting at clouds about how they are ruining the game. We (us older gamers) didn't keep the game alive like we are super special or anything. It's like any other game. If anything, our generation tried our best to kill the game through horrible management of TSR starting with Gary and ending with Lorraine. WotC kept the game alive despite grognards best efforts to kill it. And finally, saying "I was bullied" is no excuse to bully others or mistreat others or otherwise act like a bigot.

It's like that saying, "There are two kinds of people. Those who say 'I suffered so I don't want others to" and those who say 'I suffered so why shouldn't everyone else.'" Don't be the latter. That person is the latter.

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In the end, this is just a continuation of a trend of the dedicated online alt-right* of continually reframing the discussion to where they are secretly somehow the real victims in the situation, no matter how horrific they have been to anyone or everyone, nor how much of their of their problems are self-inflicted wounds (or even just someone else saying that they do not like what they said, which is, amazingly, not them being picked on).
*which is not the same as the right, right? We're talking white nationalists and MRAs and the SNL 'drunk uncle' types of the word. I'm just making that clear.

As I get older, I have to check myself sometimes that I'm not becoming the "grumpy old guy". Maybe people just don't realize when they become outdated and maybe some people just don't care and evolve.

Cordwainer Fish said:

So close to self-awareness.

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So close, but yet so far.

It looks like NuTSR is back to attacking @Wizard Tower Games games again:



Erika LaNasa is Justin's wife (Reich is her maiden name). Looks like Don's already on top of it.

So what he took from repeatedly being told to leave people's wives out of it is that his wife is a perfect shield and/or catspaw, I see.

Thourne said:

Yah, I don't understand that age line.
Besides that, I am in my 50s and been playing since the 70s.
I got occasionally teased for being on the tennis and golf teams rather than basketball and football, but never not once for playing ttrpgs.
I carried my books around the school, wore them old tsr t-shirts (3/4 length colored sleeves with white mids and graphics, yah I know but that was style then) to school and talked about gaming all the time.
If someone had that many issues with other people, It had a high likelihood of having more to do with them than their social activities, Id wager.

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I'm 59, got passed over for a promotion in the military because of "devil worshiping naughty word" by my flight sgt.

It was a different culture back then (at least rural VA, and the military in the late 80's). Didn't feel comfortable sharing my hobbies to anyone but friends.

But all that is in the past, and I am glad folks no longer have to put up with it.