Celebrim
Legend
It's not the board rules on what is a defensible political position that would get me in trouble. Heck, I'm playing in a Paizo adventure path right now, so if blatant attempts to be inclusive were a turnoff for me, I'd be a total hypocrite. I will risk that in the last session we all had a good laugh at how despite these often ham-fisted attempts, one of the encounters was probably the most sexist thing we'd ever encountered in gaming go that we all gotten briefly taken out of character and out of the game just to boggle at it, but that's a whole different story.
No, what would get me in trouble is disparaging the talent of a game designer. One of the half-dozen or so times I got a temporary ban here was suggesting that the design a of supplement was so amateur, that the designer probably shouldn't plan a full time career in the industry - without realizing that the designer was in the thread.
That would be gentle compared to some things I could say. You handwaved certain things away from discussion as "obvious" at the beginning of the thread, and I certainly agree with the sort of examples you are thinking of. But for me, they aren't the only ones that fall in the "obvious" end.
While some of the presentation of violence or sex or violent sexuality and sexualized violence in those games do turn me off, none of those games rise to the example of things where I think the presentation is such that I'd condemn the entire game as immoral beyond redemption. In fact, the real morality problem I have with V:tM is the rules system in practice allows violence without real consequence (compare how humanity in theory is lost in the game to the acquisition of 'Dark Side' points in D6 Star Wars) combined with the fact that the games reward system works contrary to its stated purpose of play.
There are said games however where for me it does go beyond the pale into "obvious".
I think I half-agree with you. We have gotten better, but unlike you don't believe we've gotten so much better that we are actually consistently doing it. And in the case of something like D&D, I'd argue that we've got there by the same sort of evolutionary processes (trial and error) that so well informed the early design of the game. We are getting better incrementally, but in a system that already had strong core ideas.
I have heard good things about 'Zeitgeist' and 'War of the Burning Sky'. I keep meaning to pick up a pdf to read them.
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