D&D 5E 5e's new gender policy - is it attracting new players?

[TheCosmicKid]

I think that acceptance as the default makes sense, just as the default of gender equality makes sense.

I think if you want to coherently run the standard Medieval Europe Lite campaign setting, the culture probably needs to have just a touch of gender inequality. It's simply not going to look like the European Middle Ages without traditional gender roles assigning men and women different clothing and different jobs in day-to-day life. But they don't need to be particularly strong gender roles to produce this effect; there doesn't need to be anything really ugly like legal discrimination, overt oppression, or violence, just a general cultural tendency. And of course PCs are exceptional characters by definition -- a woman dressing in full plate and going off to swing swords at dragons is remarkable, but so is a man dressing in full plate and going off to swing swords at dragons. So for the PCs' personal experience any gender role issues tend to get lost in the noise.

And of course, for cultures other than the Medieval Europe Lite one, anything goes. In my own campaign, elves have absolutely no gender roles and are equally smug to everyone, dwarves think gender is not a topic for polite conversation, halflings have a sort of soft matriarchy in their clan structure, and a hypermasculine human culture is in the midst of an identity crisis because they recently got a Genghis Khan figure and she was a she.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No he said those who decline to participate he will ignore. He seems to think active dissent, rather than passive non-participation, is a problem.

Speaking as one of the people whom JesterCanuck is likely to ignore (on this issue), that seems fine to me. Where I have a problem with it is when people cross the line into persecution of those who disagree with them. As long as he's willing to live and let live, I don't foresee a problem.

I admit to having skipped part of the middle of this thread so maybe there's context that I'm not aware of, but from what I've read there is nothing objectionable about post #166. And I say that as someone who feels very strongly about the moral and social issues involved in a way which is (probably) diametrically opposed to JesterCanuck's stance. I'd give my life for my belief in the abiding value of paired femininity and masculinity--I don't think there's anything more destructive to human welfare in the long term than giving up on married mothers and fathers--but if JesterCanuck declines to take that life I'm not going to complain. Tolerance is better than persecution.

 

[SuperZero]

He never said anything of the kind. He said that inclusion for the sake of inclusion qua inclusion is harmful to fiction.

Well that's obviously wrong. Exclusion is harmful to fiction, and inclusion is merely the lack of that flaw. Besides than the fact that it threatens suspension of disbelief within any single work, consistent exclusion is harmful.
Forgetting to include women in fiction is a problem, and it tends to be quite an obvious one. Not having this problem in the first place is quite simple. If you do have this problem, you really should work to remedy it.
Now, failing to include even a single explicitly GLBT character is a bit different... first of all, I have to specify "explicitly" because, unlike with women, it is certainly possible not to mention whether a character is or not. And it's a much smaller segment of the population, so the absence is less conspicuous. That only really changes the scale, though.

Analogy: I could love pie and yet think that it's harmful to fiction for authors to listen to complaints that "there isn't enough pie in your book/adventure module", and to specifically include pie to assuage those complaints and be more pie-inclusive.

Unless the absence of pie doesn't make sense, that's very poor analogy.
However, pie is extremely easy to include. If you really want to include pie all the time, it is perfectly easy to do unobtrusively.

Basically what MostlyDm said is that using fiction as a platform for preaching is anvilicious and leads to bad fiction.

Nearly all fiction has a point. "Anvilicious" is the term for doing that poorly, not for doing it at all.
But regardless, since nobody has ever suggested that fictional works should be about the importance of inclusion, I'm not sure how that's relevant.

Also, MostlyDm actually complained about people wanting completely benign inclusion. So, uh, not that.

 

[Fishing_Minigame]

For what its worth, I have 8 players in my current player pool, 6 of whom are women and several of whom are on the LGBT spectrum. I don't think any of them started with 5e, but I think all of them are in favor of inclusiveness

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Well that's obviously wrong. Exclusion is harmful to fiction, and inclusion is merely the lack of that flaw. Besides than the fact that it threatens suspension of disbelief within any single work, consistent exclusion is harmful.

From a reader's perspective, there's a huge difference between incidental inclusion and inclusion qua inclusion. Maybe the issue is that you don't believe inclusion qua inclusion is happening--your paragraph above suggests so, as does your response to the pie analogy.

Maybe I would agree with you on that. I certainly haven't seen anyone at my table jumping through hoops to play gay PCs qua gay. They're more interested in playing carnivorous lightning-breathing reptiles with a death wish, soul-selling criminal warlocks, amnesiac barbarians who were literally raised by wolves, and 6'6" gangly insectile bug-men who can run 50 mph under ideal conditions.

Also, MostlyDm actually complained about people wanting completely benign inclusion. So, uh, not that.

He said above that I paraphrased him accurately, so if you think he was complaining about benign inclusion it appears you were mistaken. Take that as the answer to your question--benign/incidental inclusion is not what's being objected to by MostlyDm.

 

[Mistwell]

What question? This question?

No, the person who you asked this question, who is not me, did not say anything at all remotely resembling that.

I disagree. It's what he said, in a nutshell, from my perspective. He said active resistance (which I labelled "dissent") is itself a "problem".

What he actually said was that saying you don't think a solution is necessary then impeding said solution without a reason is a problem.

No, he didn't say impede without a reason. You've changed what he said in a pretty meaningful way. What he said was, "It's a problem when they stubbornly insist that there IS NO problem, and actively resist efforts towards equality and inclusivity."

So, stubborn insistence that something is not a problem is itself a problem, and active resistance is a problem. That's dissent. If people stubbornly voice their disagreement, that's dissent. If they actively resist it by (for instance) marching with signs against it, that's dissent. These are the very elements of dissent. It doesn't become "not dissent" just because you think their opinion is hogwash.

And even if he did say that, "dissent is labelled as a problem" would be an extremely disingenuous way to describe it.

How so? Again, you seem to think if you believe someone else's opinion is hogwash that somehow makes it not dissent. That's not how dissent works. I never said or implied "He's calling all dissent in society a problem," I am asking him in the context of this debate, concerning this specific issue. So, I don't think it was a hasty generalization I was making and if you took it that way then now you know I didn't mean it that way and we can move on to you (hopefully) answer my question.

"Disagreements" come in rather a large variety of scales. And frankly, I've seen plenty of people use words like "disagreement" to describe their bad behavior in a really weird (but, as stated, strangely common) attempt to get out of criticism.

I assume you're not suggesting anything about me. Specifics of who and what you're talking about would be helpful.

For my part, I have seen a great deal of ends justifying the means, and justifications for authoritarian rules, to squelch speech people disagree with lately. The term "liberalism," which I am not using politically in this context to refer to a "side" of the political scale or political party, used to mean something different on speech topics. It used to mean that the best answer to speech we don't like is speech we do like. That the marketplace of ideas is the only solution ever needed for speech we don't like, because the best opinions naturally rise to the top. The goal therefore is to simply respond, to inform and persuade as best we can, without ever trying to pressure others to not speak, or to deny forums for them to voice their opinion, or to defame or belittle or dehumanize the speaker instead of responding to the content of their speech, or to ever say or imply that dissent itself is unwelcome or a problem.

Which is why I keep asking what people propose we do about "stubborn insistence" that we disagree with? What do we do about "active resistance" that we disagree with? If the answer is simply, "We try to persuade people that our view is the better view" I am totally cool with that. But if the answer is "We metaphorically steam roll over them because the rightness of our views justifies putting all pressure we can on them to not continue to resist our objectively correct views or to reduce the means available to them to voice that resistance," then I disagree with that approach and think it is in the long term worse for society than the wrongheaded views being squelched to begin with.

 

[Mistwell]

Pretty much my standard operating procedure for any dissent: argue.
I'm going to argue until I have to forcibly remove myself from the keyboard. I'm going to write my little heart out in the hopes that something I say will make a difference, because that's all I can do in this world. Maybe I'll change an opinion, maybe I won't.
And, eventually, this thread will die and I'll move onto arguing with them about something else that is infinitely less important and almost trivial. Likely warlords with my track record.

And I'm going to praise people who are making a positive example, and call out attempts to improve representation. Like the instigating PHB sub-subsection of the PHB. It done good, I wanna defend.

That, and I'm going to do my best to raise my son to be tolerant and accepting and loving. Because, really, that's how we make the world a better place: we raise our kids to do better than us.

OK, that is an answer to my question, and it's a mighty fine one. Thank you. That's really all I was trying to get to here.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

OK, that is an answer to my question, and it's a mighty fine one. Thank you. That's really all I was trying to get to here.

Always nice to see civil disagreements kept civil and resolved amicably on the Internet. Props to you both.

 

[SuperZero]

I think if you want to coherently run the standard Medieval Europe Lite campaign setting, the culture probably needs to have just a touch of gender inequality. It's simply not going to look like the European Middle Ages without traditional gender roles assigning men and women different clothing and different jobs in day-to-day life.

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but it's not going to look like the European Middle Ages anyway.

First of all, essentially nobody knows anything about the European Middle Ages. Secondly, DnD settings are nigh universally polytheistic--and it's not actually a polytheistic religion, it's polytheistic fact and I'm having Athena over for tea on Tuesday.
Also, it has elves and goblins and wizards.

If my vaguely-at-best Medieval-themed world can handle that, it can handle "The guards approach, one of them holding a sword menacingly. The captain puts his hand on her shoulder and says to knock it off."

 

[Wik]

So, turns out I was a bit mistaken. The trans player I mentioned in the first post? Turns out he's a long-time player that just rarely gets the chance to play, and is mostly new to 5e (but not D&D). I like him - funny guy who likes 2e and thinks cats are evil little bastards. That's enough for me.

And I didn't even ask. The reason he joined WAS because of my PDF posting. We didn't really talk about the PHB blurb, but I don't think it matters. So, that's a plus.

Ultimately, though, I think this is a question that's worth asking. I believe wotc SHOULD be pushing to be more inclusive in how they portray their product. I think this can increase the player base, and I see absolutely no reason it shouldn't include LGBTQ characters in game products. We don't need bedroom details, but there are ways to reference it without being lame. As mentioned earlier, it includes married characters all the time, after all!