Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8936403" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yeah, I suspected there was some implicit tongue-in-cheek there.Which is fair, though "minority" becomes rather a more complex subject in the context of game analysis. Are ultra-old-school "High Gygaxian" heist-lovers the (a?) minority party because their style has mostly been abandoned by official D&D and tends to only get support in comparatively niche 3PP stuff? Are 4e fans the (a?) minority party because our favorite edition is so often straight-up falsely accused or totally forgotten? Are 3e fans the (a?) minority party because everyone moved on to 5e, leaving behind the few distinctive bits of 3e design? If more than one is a minority party, what happens when one uses a term another finds pejorative, do we listen to the minority struggling to get its voice heard even if that means allowing speech another minority finds mocking, or do we expect them to meet some kind of norm and thus in principle silence their voice?(I don't think these questions have clear answers. Just noting the heuristic can quickly run into trouble when one minority group's concerns conflict with another's.)Sure, it's best that we strive for an improvement. And, as you say, addressing what is lost and why, and whether that loss actually matters, is relevant. Sometimes the loss is simply evocativeness, which is a pretty weak standard. Sometimes it is like my example of "meatgrinder" above, where to take away the (relatively soft) implication of arbitrary mass slaughter would literally strip out the key thing being described about early-edition D&D (that it has high body counts, especially with the many inexperienced DMs of the day, and that most of those deaths were unavoidable, random, and empty/unsatisfactory/etc.)By that same token, though, we can easily run into trouble in other ways. Consider, for example, if we discuss with person A, who finds label Q unacceptable because of its connotations, but supports label P. Then, later, we discuss with person B....who finds label P unacceptable because of its connotations, but supports label Q. We are definitionally stuck: we cannot use Q without angering A, who wants P; but we cannot use P without angering B, who wants Q. What are we to do? We cannot dispute either person, because they are each aggrieved parties and aggrieved parties are always right. Yet it is logically impossible to appease both without inventing new terms--and that just passes the buck. For the sake of being able to communicate without needing constant circumlocution, it would seem that we probably at some point have to consider the practical angle in addition to the need to show respect.</blockquote>

Verification