Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9387916" data-attributes="member: 2067">What's so deeply frustrating to me is that this culture shift is so piecemeal and incomplete.Like, I don't want to get into specific politics, but if you tune into practically ANY country's election coverage these days, you're likely to see proud bigots and predators who try to and often succeed in laying claim to large swaths of the cultural sphere, even as more milquetoast centrists decry anything that smacks of asking them to change (be it issues of race or gender or even just "kids these days and their protests" or being "cancelled" or not having "free speech").D&D is doing OK, but it is still grappling with honoring its legacy without carrying over the rough stuff. It's hard to be anticolonial when an iconic D&D experience is killing creatures with green skin who have an "evil culture" in their homes and taking their stuff. It's hard to be sympathetic to the mentally ill when you've got Pandemonium and eldritch horrors from beyond the stars that cause madness. It's hard to have a Barbarian class and not live dangerously close to racist beliefs about nomadic peoples. It's hard have Intelligence as a numerical stat, or to have an exclusively human kingdom in a world where ethnostates are actively being pursued. Not impossible, but something to treat with care and concern. So, this......I wish it were true. The Faulkner quote seems more relevant to me. "The past is never dead. It's not even past."One interesting interaction I had in my current game was when I introduced a helpful NPC who essentially believed in the divine right of kings and the very medieval idea that nobles were just "born different." Everyone had their role to play in society, and you are born into your role, and you have certain rights and responsibilities because of your role.The setting is very fairy tale in nature, and is currently ruled by an evil queen figure that is kind of the main antagonist at the moment, so this NPC was helpful in that he also believed that the wrong person was on the throne, and that this usurper needed to be dethroned.The ick factor from my players was immediate and strong. This character was immediately slotted into the same space that more overtly hostile NPC's occupied: not someone to trust. They made friends with the overtly self-interested thief and the amoral dark magician figure. But the guy who wanted to restore the king to their "rightful place" on the throne? Don't trust that guy's ideas.I enjoyed their reaction quite a bit, though I didn't expect it.I think that the first barrier to this comes when you define what is a "bad thing."Because if you say a "bad thing" is, say, fantasy racism, you might wind up at a table with someone who unironically believes that, say, certain "types of people" should "go back to where they came from" and suddenly you're not playing a fun fantasy romp, you're having a difficult conversation.People don't always agree on what the "bad things" are.The second barrier to this comes when the "bad thing" is a bit too real. Killing children is a classic evil monster kind of thing, but probably not OK in a game where someone's child was killed. Sure, we can all agree that killing children is a bad thing, but we can also probably see that this isn't a good idea for fantasy fun times with someone whose child actually died. There's a lot of bad things that might not be in a game, because a game of D&D isn't necessarily a fun place to explore those bad ideas.Certain "bad things" can ruin someone's fun.</blockquote>

Verification