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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9390422" data-attributes="member: 907">This goes back to my old comparison of Luke Cage vs Black Panther. Luke Cage lives in a reasonably realistic (for comics, that is) version of Harlem: rampant crime, racist cops, poverty. The difference from the real world is that Luke Cage has the means to do something about that. I believe the TV series at one point referred to him as "a racist cop's worst nightmare: a bulletproof (bleep)." And there's definitely a kind of catharsis in playing in a world where things suck, but you can set things right.But at the other end, we have Black Panther, who lives in Wakanda. Wakanda is a futuristic utopia, that was never colonized because they had the means to resist, and never had to bow down to European or other outside influence. Life is great if you're Wakandan, and the Black Panther is mostly about maintaining that power and possibly redirecting it in other directions than isolationism. And there's a different kind of joy in playing in a world where things don't suck, and your job is to keep things from sucking.I'm a white cis dude who lives in one of the world's most affluent and happy countries. It's not a perfect life, but I'm pretty much playing life on easy mode. So having some hardships in the games I play is... exciting, might be the right word. In a Luke Cage campaign, I might experience vicarious hardship, but I will probably be able to fight back, or at least climb on top of the heap. But for someone in less fortunate circumstances, having the same or worse hardships in-game might not be their idea of a good time. And for a company like Wizards of the Coast who's always aiming at a broad audience, it probably makes more sense to be welcoming than to turn people off. And it's not like I have a problem with Black Panther-style worlds either where the threat is external.Fate of Cthulhu does some interesting stuff in this realm. There, exposure to the Mythos doesn't necessarily make you "mad", but it does make you strange, perhaps physically and perhaps mentally.I think Amonkhet is worse than Dark Sun, because it is artificially manipulated. As I recall, the Egyptian-style civilization there had a huge focus on being competitive, with the best of the best earning the right to "eternal life" as mummies. Only it turned out that it was all a lie perpetuated by one of Magic's big bads, Nicol Bolas, in order to get an army of exceptionally powerful zombies to use to invade other planes.</blockquote>

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