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

[Lanliss]

Ah! Oops. Missed context.

I can dig it.

Not a problem, I can attest to how easy it is to get lost on these boards. I always wind up having to scroll back, because I miss posts all the time.

 

[Shasarak]

I wasn't. I was comparing a tee-shirt to a tee-shirt, and real threats to real threats.

I'm Jewish. If I see a swastika on a shirt, I am going to worry that this person is a physical threat to me. It may not be likely, but I must and will consider that it's possible.

It's the same with homophobic shirts and gay people, only violence against them is a lot more prevalent and even acceptable in many places.

When was the last time someone - anyone- was beaten to death at their local Magic tournament?

Is there some kind of clear and present danger that I am not seeing?

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

When was the last time someone - anyone- was beaten to death at their local Magic tournament?

Is there some kind of clear and present danger that I am not seeing?

A more relevant question... "When was the last time someone was beaten to death at a time - or while leaving a time - when being beaten to death would seem very non-sequitor?"

Because that happens with some frequency.

 

[IlluminatedSeraph]

So you see it as a good thing to get rid of the "wrong people" from what is already a niche hobby? "We're driving 'those people' out, so buy our products" is a selling point?

And I am the type of GM who would ban bisexual characters unless there is a VERY good explanation why I shouldn't. This is because I have never seen an example of bisexuality or homosexuality in PCs that was not either A) trying to be stereotypically homosexual for the shock value, or B) trying to make a real-world political/moral statement.

I also generally ban transsexuality because in a world full of magic, it doesn't make sense; think your body is the wrong gender? Get magic to fix it. Problem solved.

Well, heavens. A rare and expensive magical procedure (permanent polymorph is a 9th level spell, after all) to correct a painful mismatch between body and spirit, sought by a poor peasant with nothing to support her but her skill with her sword? Where could one possibly find interesting drama in a character like that? /sarcasm.

But the point I actually wanted to take up (since a discourse on the many and profound ways you do not understand Gnosticism would probably take pages I don't want to spend) is your lovely little hand-wave erasure of homosexual and bisexual people from your fantasy world and how neatly that aligns with exactly the ugly, marginalizing behavior that you're ardently claiming you aren't advocating. Because when the heterosexual characters in your game walk around and engage with the game world, you don't notice. You don't care. You treat it as perfectly normal and natural. When a bisexual or homosexual character does the exact same thing, though, it's suddenly a 'real world' political statement. Our bodies, our lives, our loves are political to you because you would prefer they not exist and the very act of behaving as full, visible people (or having people play characters who resemble us) strikes you as intrusive.

To put it another way, when the hero kisses his (female) love interest in the movie nobody shouts "Oh, God, how political!" When he does the same to his (male) love interest, politics is all most people seem to want to read into it. Treating people in a fair and just fashion involves acknowledging that they exist, that their experience is just as human and worthy of drama and attention as anyone else, and that those experiences do not have to be entirely about their sexuality/the color of their skin/etc.

And if people have a problem with that, nobody is stopping them from playing D&D. But I will damn well stop them from playing D&D at my table if they intend to disrupt the right of my players to express the range of human experience - an experience in no way incompatible with heroism, kindness and justice - that they choose to.

 

[Lanliss]

When was the last time someone - anyone- was beaten to death at their local Magic tournament?

Is there some kind of clear and present danger that I am not seeing?

Assuming a worst case scenario, it would probably be possible, if one were quick enough, to kill someone before the hundreds of people nearby could stop you. Considering the light some of the anti-LGBT parties paint themselves in, I would not see it being too big a stretch for one sheep to take it upon himself to carry out "God's word" himself. Most definitely not a common occurrence, but not completely out of the realm of possibility, assuming a high enough level of religious fanaticism, or a low enough level of mental stability.

EDIT: I just read back over this, and realized the beginning sounded like I had actually contemplated doing this. I want to let you know that I am not a psychopath, and only arrived at that conclusion by assuming the ABSOLUTE worst case scenario of an actual psychopath managing to get a knife inside, and being within three feet of his target, while also not caring about the repercussions.

 

[Shasarak]

*There is no way of saying how great white people are without being awful. Sorry, white people, but the racists and a history of slavery, colonialism, and other such awful things have ruined literally every slogan.

If the history of the world has taught us anything, it is that only White people do bad stuff.

 

[IlluminatedSeraph]

If the history of the world has taught us anything, it is that only White people do bad stuff.

Sarcasm aside, history has taught us that white people have spent an awfully long time doing an awfully large collection of bad stuff awfully effectively, and that maybe with chattel slavery, multiple cases of genocide and the oppression of most of the globe in our comparatively recent rear view mirror, a good dose of humility might be in order.

Just a thought.

 

[Lanliss]

I think the best thing to take away from history is that the vast majority of humans throughout history have been pretty horrible to some degree. As far as I know, though I am not a history buff, it was not until the last couple of millennia or so until we actually realized other humans might deserve some level of equality, or at least deserve to sleep in something other than a cage.

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

If the history of the world has taught us anything, it is that only White people do bad stuff.

The point is somewhere a few miles to your left. You have missed it. Allow me to play the role of navigator.

Mass colonialism, destruction of local cultures and populations across all continents, intercontinental intergenerational chattel slavery, continent-scale acts of genocide, and stealing the idea of tea from Asia then claiming Asians don't know how to drink tea? Not to mention the specific cardinal sins of the United States (slavery, the native genocide, the internment camps)?

Yeah. Pretty much just white people.

 

[Lanliss]

The point is somewhere a few miles to your left. You have missed it. Allow me to play the role of navigator.

Mass colonialism, destruction of local cultures and populations across all continents, intercontinental intergenerational chattel slavery, continent-scale acts of genocide, and stealing the idea of tea from Asia then claiming Asians don't know how to drink tea? Not to mention the specific cardinal sins of the United States (slavery, the native genocide, the internment camps)?

Yeah. Pretty much just white people.

Africans frequently enslaved each other, Egyptians had slavery, as well as Romans. Slavery was pretty much everywhere back then. It is just that white people cover a decent portion of the world, and control a number of important resources. This makes them historically important, so their actions are much better documented than most places back then.