NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7868996" data-attributes="member: 6873517">My comment about "no politics" wasn't about the issue of representation per se, although of course that's what started the thread. It was about table norms. You're right, of course, that presentation of the game material can certainly matter to someone from a marginalized group who might be interested in the game. A publisher has to make decisions about possibly expanding their market by bringing in new folks versus the risk of alienating old ones, as well as the kind of social statements they want to make. It's often not helped by how nostalgically clueless a number of fans can be, for instance not noticing that the X-Men always had a social justice agenda.This is a separate issue of a particular table's norms, which is what I was thinking of. Folks I play with are usually free to play what they want, but I haven't played with a crowd notably seeking much beyond fairly straightforward characters recently so it wasn't at the top of my head. (I have in the past, but not recently.) In my case it's more a group that has people with different political viewpoints, sometimes markedly so. For instance, I know one player is pretty reflexively traditional/conservative and another is definitely not. However, our own social contract is to view the game as a place where those kinds of debates are in a state of truce and we're pretty clear about telling folks to save it for outside the game. As DM I would avoid writing adventures that make strong reference to current political topics. Issues like these also factor into what's OK at a table or not in other areas that can lead to contention. For example, we have a pretty strict "no ringtones or sound effects" rule. That rule has no political implications but does have a big propensity to create dissension and throw the game off track.</blockquote>

Verification