I mean...right, but people who are going to go to that kind of bother, are already on the wrong side of it, and are almost CERTAINLY not the ones just rolling up to the FLGS to put together a pick up game, right?
Or maybe I just have misguided faith in the general tide of humanity despite all evidence to the contrary.
If we cannot have 'bad things' in settings, because people will be bad people because of those bad things being in settings....? Its not the settings fault people are naughty word. Its those people are just naughty word.
Just wrap it up and call down the nukes please.
Hey, c'mon. Let's not get all negative here.
I think, in part, we maybe need to reexamine what makes these settings and how we use certain aspects. I think slavery is one of those things used
ad nauseum in fantasy worlds that it has basically trivialized it. In concept, everything I've been told about
Dark Sun is very interesting, but the problem is that 1) We basically have the company that has to play safest owns the IP and 2) Every other fantasy RPG has devalued the idea of slavery so much that it's just... I dunno, a quest?
I mentioned
Delta Green before as something that deals with a lot of real-world issues and can get very... well, there can be some very needed content warnings. But it also goes over that stuff and tries to deal with it in a way where it's the focus, which makes every op sort of a setting unto itself. D&D doesn't really play like that, and it really can't go into deep depth on the institutions of its worlds typically because there's a decent chance that the players won't interact with all of them. It feels like a problem with the concept of the game, not just the broadness of the audience.
And then my PC kills the naughty word out of those slavers and then I’m the hero that freed the elven slaves.
I mean, I'm always down to kill slavers. But also if that's the only way we're seeing and interacting with slavery in the world, we're kind of turning it into a theme park ride. If all slaves are are people to be saved, we're trivializing what slavery is.
This is part of the problem with these things. And maybe Dark Sun could be different in execution, where they handle these things in a realistic and adult fashion, where these sorts of things are put up front... but I just don't see that happening with Wizards of the Coast. And hey, sometimes it's best to know what you
can't do and try to do what you can, hence adapting it in a way that is less fraught.