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Why? We "eliminate" things from history all the time in creating games - including unpleasant things or things we don't find interesting. And we create new things in our games all the time that never existed in the real world.

I’m baffled why accurately pointing out that Campbell’s monomyth does not accurately reflect real-world myth is “extremist”. To me, “extremist” would be saying that Campbell’s views are actively harmful and should be scrubbed from all fiction going forward. I guess if you really like the guy’s...

I genuinely don’t know why you think this is an “extreme” or even what the other “extreme” is?

Campbell himself was one of those shoehorning self-important academics. He himself could not identify a single myth that fit precisely into the 'monomyth' structure - even ignoring that there is no One True Version of any myth, he picked and chose various elements to cobble this together. Its...

What you seem to be saying is: you've had negative experiences with players who privilege their characters' success over all other things, and ruin everybody's fun if they don't get that; therefore you believe players should not be attached to their characters very much at all. That seems like a...

Fantasy is 'based on' our reality. Reality is a big place. Do I really need to point out the irony of complaining about things that are supposedly inextricably "human" in worlds where we happily include thinking people who aren't humans? Ingroup/outgroup distinctions are not synonyms for...

Your summary of the original post is exactly backwards. The original post was arguing that we must not "erase" or "scrub" things like slavery from our game worlds, because if we do so, we lose important stories that we could tell if we kept them in. (And that point is emphasized in the title of...

I want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding your argument here: you are claiming that people who want to publish games or supplements that include real-world horrors (like slavery) cannot do so because "the entire weight of the internet" will fall on them? If I publish an RPG supplement that is...

So was this guy's objection that the people creating the game couldn't possibly know anything about the subject matter? Or was it something else, like the specific way the subject matter was being handled? Or were they instead complaining that the people writing the game were a group of white...

Er, yes? What I'm not following is the assertion that since fantasy is just made-up, we can put slavery or bigotry or whatever in our fantasy worlds and it doesn't matter. I hope I'm misunderstanding, because "none of this matters, it's all make-believe" is a pretty startling claim coming from...

All right, I'll bite: how does featuring misogyny and racism in made-up worlds "distance ourselves" from real history and real suffering and the real people who were - and in many cases still are - affected by it? Your argument is that because the worlds are made up, nothing in them matters or...

Though even improv exercises, which are literally storytelling practice, are called “games” and have rules. “Yes, and” is a rule. Zip-zap-zop has very minimalist but ironclad rules (not that you’d build a campaign around it). At this point my test for rules is, can I get enough mastery with...

Ironically, the starting premise of this thread was being upset about NOT having slavery in a game. The very title assumes “we” suffer a loss if we leave those “controversial” elements out of our games.

There’s even an Internet name for this: “JAQing off”. There’s also a famous quote from Satre about bad faith arguing. He was speaking specifically about anti-Semites, but the principle is the same for all sorts of bad faith arguments. The colloquial American version of this is a caution about...

"Not following Debate Club rules" isn't the same as suppressing free speech, though? And is it irresponsible to point out, correctly, that somebody is a bad person and is saying bad things? Gonna jump in here to note that for somebody who is strongly advocating avoiding attacks on character...

Not being snarky here, I genuinely don't know who is saying this or why it would be true. If a 3-hour gaming session has half an hour of fun and 2 1/2 hours of tedium, that sounds like a problem with the GM, players, or both, not a problem with the gaming system. Even in a spreadsheet game like...

Is it? Because that 'nonsense' seems to be exactly what you're describing: "Attacks on their character"? So if someone is making cracks about how greedy Jews are, and I tell them they're being anti-Semitic, in your view I, unlike that person, am not exercising my right to free speech: what I...

Yes, that’s what I was responding to. The OP described character creation in TTRPGs as if they all use a D&D model. I get the sense that perhaps you were exaggerating for comic effect?

Ah. So we’re back to the Preferred First Speaker Doctrine, which as is typical we arrive at by a series of “it’s kinda like that”. I’m old enough to remember when self-professed free speech advocates used the rallying cry “the antidote for bad speech is more speech”. Now it seems to be “feeling...

Sure, and in some games it IS part of the game. I’m just going with the hot take in the original proposal that character creation is tedious and wastes precious gaming time.