D&D General Formative Experiences, Introductory Editions, and Current Trends and Controversies

[Yora]

I'm 37, started D&D with 3rd edition in 2000, began playing with B/X in 2013, and 5th edition in 2020.

And I don't even know what the current controversies about D&D are supposed to be. Something, something inclusion. Yes, some of my friends I've played D&D with are not white, and half of them are women. I don't put stereotypical carricatures of other cultures into my campaigns, and I don't see a point in having enemy creatures in my games that are "just like human, except inherently evil".
What exactly are the controversies? I see people talk a lot about the topic of controversies, while not actually saying what controversies they refer to.

 

[Bohandas]

What exactly are the controversies? I see people talk a lot about the topic of controversies, while not actually saying what controversies they refer to.

Some people are claiming that the orcs are some kind of abstruse racist allegory

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Age: 28 (Born January of 1994)
First DM: Forever GM since I got us started.
First Edition: 4e
Started Playing: 2010
Current Controversies: There is a legitimate need to make the hobby more welcoming, address inequalities in the industry, and rework things to be less racist and such. Not every controversy is created equal however, so I feel like some deserve scrutiny. Pervasive Fascism is endemic to our culture and I believe it manifests itself when any of us wield power, while power itself distributes differently along social lines, the cultural narratives that structure how we abuse power are part of everyone's experience. The end result of this is that we need to fight for change, but watch ourselves carefully for abuses of the power we're wielding, it shouldn't be a matter of identity as authority, because authority is ripe for abuse. Similarly, I suspect our current standards for cultural appropriation, they seem to be primarily rooted in problematic nationalist and colonialist, and racially essential notions of how culture work and what occurs at their boundaries.
Alignment: Meh, take it or leave it, at this point it feels like it mostly creates arguments and such-- my own Pathfinder setting uses a variant where only Outsiders (and God-powered classes) have it.

 

[Yora]

Some people are claiming that the orcs are some kind of abstruse racist allegory

Well, they are.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well, they are.

I wouldn't call it abstruse

 

[Blue Orange]

Age: 43
First DM: Me, actually. I was 11 years old, got the books, and ran a game for some other kids in summer camp.
First Edition: BECMI D&D (red box)
Started Playing: 1990. Played off and on Mage: the Ascension and Call of Cthulhu through the end of high school in 1997 (as well as the goldbox and eye of beholder series), then didn't play until 2020 and the pandemic, when I started playing 5e remotely with friends of a friend.
Current Controversies: PC death--whatever your group wants to do. It's a game. You want to have a funnel and kill most of your PCs, have a good time. You want to avoid PC death so you can run a 'theater of the mind' tiefling--aasimar romance, have a good time. Connection to personal experiences: I played Mage: the Ascension and enjoyed that, and I had the same character throughout the whole thing. I played Call of Cthulhu, enjoyed that, and we all know what happens to characters there.
Orcs and drow are evil: I don't have a strong opinion either way. Inventing both evil and non-evil cultures for humans, orcs, drow, and everything else seems like a nice way to keep everyone happy. It doesn't entirely make sense every orc is evil--I just figured humans are fighting the orcs all the time so they say that about them. Just learn Orcish and you can hear all the propaganda about 'small-teeth' who invade their underground cities, kill baby orcs in their cradles, and interbreed with (yuck) elves. They used to call condoms 'French letters'. You know what the French used to call them? 'Capot anglaise'--English hat. Connection to personal experiences: Dunno. I've read a lot of the books and it's interesting to watch them change the art, writing, etc. over the years. I'm not terribly surprised they would adjust that stuff.
Political stuff: Wizards is a for-profit entity and has an increasingly left-leaning customer base. You would expect any company that wants to survive to cater to their customer base. The fact that I don't like it doesn't mean much, because I'm not the target audience anymore. The game used to be aimed at me, now it's not, so I lose, but there are more people who felt excluded who now don't, and you want their money, so what do I expect? You run your game, I'll run mine. Moral relativism works here because in a D&D game, there's no 'real' world to fight over. Everyone decides what they want their universe to look like. Connection to my personal experiences: I've swung back and forth a few times and generally find everyone lies about something. that and, having been out for so long, I just can't see having flamewars, let alone threatening people (really? people do that? apparently they do) over a game any group of people can play how they want. We have enough misery fighting over the real world, we don't need to add to it with the fantasy one. (I've also had negative personal experiences with the left, though my general ideology is closer to theirs.)
Alignment: You can get rid of it if you want. I would probably keep it around if you're running older stuff, ditch it for the newer stuff that doesn't use it. Connection to personal experiences: There was at least one case back in my preadolescent gaming years when one guy did something nasty to a new player in-game and I docked him a level ('your alignment is now Chaotic, you lose one level'). Didn't seem to faze him much.

 

[Yora]

I wouldn't call it abstruse

I actually don't know that word.

(Which is funny, now that I looked it up. )

 

[Burnside]

My XP
Age: 45
Year started: 1986
First RPG: Mentzer BECMI
How many in first decade: Probably about half a dozen. My group definitely dabbled with Runequest, Top Secret, and Shadowrun, but the only one I remember us spending any significant amount of time with other than D&D was the Marvel Superheroes TTRPG (which was dreadfully designed). My initial playing period was fall 1986 through summer 1994, so less than a decade actually. Then pretty much didn't play until 2017.

My 1986-94 and 2017-present gaming periods are obviously quite different. As a kid, I really didn't know anyone outside my immediate circle of friends who played (we taught ourselves) so had no frame of reference for what anybody else was doing. Now obviously you can audit thousands of tables online and easily play with many, many different people.

As a teenager, I realized that being open about the fact that I played D&D was not going to advantage me socially, so I didn't talk about it much. As an adult, I was re-introduced to it by younger actors at my theater, and no longer feel self-conscious about it. I started DMing professionally in 2020, eventually also working as an agent to help other DMs get players since I have more requests for games than I can take on myself. I am currently running 3 campaigns and playing in another, involving a total of 21 different people. A majority of my current players are women, which is a HUGE difference from the 86-94 period during which I don't think I ever had even one female player or DM.

First DM: My friend Adam (age 10). Although in truth I was hooked from just playing the solo adventure in the Mentzer book (somebody owned it and we all it passed around over the course of a week or so to play the solo adventure and learn the game).
First players: My 10-year-old friends

Views
PC Death:
Happens, but rare. I think that's pretty consistently been the case from 1E on. For me, some risk of death adds spice. But too much death would make it too hard to invest in characters. I don't begrudge or police how anybody handles this at their own table.

Alignment:
Really haven't used it since 1988.

Current Controversies
I find it almost impossible to discuss this without wading into real-world politics, because I feel that the issues in D&D directly reflect broader issues in society. And I know it is against the terms of this board to actually discuss those issues. D&D is art and all art is political. I will just say that I support the changes and updates to D&D in its current incarnation and think that what has been done thus far was quite necessary and warranted. My experience has been that if you are someone who is upset by things like the move away from intelligent races who have a biological imperative to be evil, you are pretty likely to be somebody with whom I have real-world political disagreements.

I'll chime in on the "chain mail bikini" issue, because I actually actually happened to observe a discussion about this between three of my female players. One of the women was discussing how she liked newer minis, because the older female minis her boyfriend owned were in chainmail bikinis which she hated. The other two women immediately said, "Wait, we can have chainmail bikinis?" and demanded to know where their characters could find some to wear. So it's not necessarily an issue of "chainmail bikinis = bad". It's just that chainmail bikinis can't be the ONLY way women are portrayed.

Similarly, I had an experience where a white player, in a table where slightly more than half the players are non-white, became concerned that it might be wrong for her to play a tiefling because she was essentially briefly putting on the hat of an oppressed minority race as part of a fun game, whereas other players at the table were actually living that reality away from the table. The non-white players thanked her for her concern and agreed it was a valid one, but assured her than in this particular case, at this particular table, it was not an issue because they trusted her as a player and me as a DM. But everyone agreed it was a pretty valid question to ask and not something that you'd necessarily want to just assume is okay.

 

[Bohandas]

I wouldn't call it abstruse

Esoteric then

 

[Li Shenron]

I want to talk a little bit about how our early experiences with D&D (and RPGs in general) including the edition or game we started with as well as major formative experiences in roleplaying games impact the way we view current trends in the game and gaming more broadly, including the various controversies.

My first ever experience playing D&D was with the "Black Box". I don't know if the DM was using some house rules at character creation, but there were minimum ability scores to play each class, either strictly required or imposing XP penalties if you didn't reach those minimums. We had to roll 3d6 in order, but the DM allowed some adjustments. I ended up with so poor numbers that even with the adjustments I only qualified to played the only class I wasn't interested at all in i.e. Dwarf, and with overall poor scores at everything. Apparently I was a decent enough player even as a beginner, because my wish for it to die quickly so that I could re-roll everything and maybe get to play an Elf never happened, and I was stuck with the crippled Dwarf until the end of the campaign.

That experience definitely planted the seeds of my eternal disdain at any player who whines that their character is not competent enough at something to be playable.