D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

Did that effect your ability to buy the books and play 4e with your friends? If not... who cares? Why would you concern yourself with other peoples opinions?
YES! You couldn't even go into your FLGS and buy a 4e book without being harrassed. If you attempted to find players for a game, you had to endure a gauntlet of stupid remarks, your stuff getting torn down off the BB, etc. Every potential new player was poisoned with stupid propaganda which had to be overcome before you could even get them to try it. EVEN SO the game sold well and attracted a lot of new players, but WotC itself had to put huge effort into running games at stores to even get there.
 

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Whether it comes to our hobby or elsewhere, there never seems to be a "right battle" when it comes to fighting against racism, but plenty of people who stand ready to accuse people of fighting the wrong battles. Is it any wonder that our society sees such slow progress against racism?

if your solution to the problem isn’t making it better but worse, which is what I think it is doing, and if your diagnosis of the problem is in error….
 

It is a bit tricky to parse this, and if you weren't there it maybe won't parse at all. It was not like that. A flood of people appeared instantly, even before the game was published, to deride the entire enterprise. Forums were filled with pure bunkum (substitute appropriate term here) written by people who had never played the game and clearly had not the faintest notion of what it was spewing nonsense.

Note that I don't, at all, aim that at @Bedrockgames for example. I think his opinion differs from mine and that's cool, we just have different tastes. If all I ever saw was comments from guys like him it would have been simply a bit frustrating, but that's not even close to how it was. Heck, you can go back to 2008 and dig up the threads. Enworld is pretty strongly modded, and there's still a good bit of it here. If you went to the WotC forums of the day (sadly extinct) you would get the full force of it. It was like 9 posts out of 10 were just ignorant drivel. You literally could not even start a thread, it would just be instantly filled with trash drive by D&D4=WOW trash posts. Again, written by people who, at most, skimmed the PHB for 5 minutes.
I was excited in the lead up to 4th ed, read it extensively, played and DM'd it for over a year, decided I didn't like it and went back to older editions, and was happy to see it replaced with something I liked better in it's time. That was my 4th ed experience, and I stand by all of it.
 

I was excited in the lead up to 4th ed, read it extensively, played and DM'd it for over a year, decided I didn't like it and went back to older editions, and was happy to see it replaced with something I liked better in it's time. That was my 4th ed experience, and I stand by all of it.
And you just managed to explain that without attacks or misinformation. That's fine.

Like how I manage to register my dislike for 5e without calling it Dark Souls and saying spending HD makes characters regenerate like Wolverine.
 

I was excited in the lead up to 4th ed, read it extensively, played and DM'd it for over a year, decided I didn't like it and went back to older editions, and was happy to see it replaced with something I liked better in it's time. That was my 4th ed experience, and I stand by all of it.
I think it's fine to say, "This isn't for me." The below comic about media would is also handy for discussing TTRPGs on the internet, particularly matters pertinent to the Edition Wars.

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The ability to say, "This isn't for me" and then move on, is something that sometimes must be learned the hard way, but I can assure those wondering that it is incredibly liberating.
 

If it drives people away, it limits access.

If you expand gatekeeping to to include using words that don't actually limit anyone, gatekeeping becomes too broad to really mean anything.
No, to the contrary you begin to see the true extent of it. The web of social and cultural elements and how people behave which forces other people 'into their place'. This is a case where what you are trying to argue has the effect of making the term meaningless because it excludes so much which is a part of the thing the term labels.
 

No, to the contrary you begin to see the true extent of it. The web of social and cultural elements and how people behave which forces other people 'into their place'. This is a case where what you are trying to argue has the effect of making the term meaningless because it excludes so much which is a part of the thing the term labels.
If a theory predicts everything, it predicts nothing.
 

This is gunna be a hot take, (but if you're familiar with me or my reputation that shouldn't be a surprised):

1.) Whether something offends you or not isn't relevent - only whether or not you can do something about it.
2.) Allowing other people to affect you and not cultivating a stoic sense of self is a weakness. There's nothing righteous about being offended by something.
3.) See Stephen Fry on the phrase "that offends me".
1) Whether you can do something about it depends on a whole lot of variables, largely out of your immediate control. As discussed elsewhere on these boards, there are many problems with bigotry in the hobby that have been complained about for decades, but are only now starting to be addressed. How far would we have progressed as a hobby if those early, ineffectual complaints had never been uttered?

2) Stoicism =/= being unaffected. Suffering silently =/= righteous or strength.

3) At its core, “I’m offended” is merely a communication that you have been hurt, just like “ow!” To say it’s meaningless is, thus, dising at worst. But Fry‘s intellect isn’t to be trifled with. But I guarantee you even he makes a distinction between being offended and the mere declarative utterance thereof.
 
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And the counter claim that 4e is the new hot ### and better than anything before it is not?

The traditions and sacred cows where not just done away it, their slaughter was celebrated and anyone not liking it was told at length how bad they were and how great 4e is for finally getting rid of them.

The "Gatekeeping" around 4e really goes both ways.
Well, this is an interesting point, when you try to introduce a new version of something are you forcing the people that liked the previous iteration out? I think that depends. Again, I would have been a lot more satisfied if people played 4e for a while, and truly got a good idea of what the game was, and then said "I'm going to go play another game, this one isn't so interesting to me." Now, that DID happen. It is, however, not really acceptable to say that all the trash talk from folks who never tried it was justified, so were they 'gatekept' out of D&D by 4e? No, they never even tried to come in! The people who did come in found a game that was genuinely an attempt to make a better D&D in some fairly objective sense. Its fine that they weren't up for that, I've never criticized anyone for that, but this is where I don't think the term gatekeeping can apply meaningfully.
 

a better D&D in some fairly objective sense.
See, that's an opinion presented as fact.

How can you objetively meassure the 4e Abyss and Orcus being a corrupted primordial as to being better than the legacy D&D Abyss and Orcus being an evil mortal soul that clawed his way up to demonprince?

It's like saying that this strawberry icecream is objectively better than the previous chocolate chunk ice cream.
 

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