D&D 5E Toxicity in the Fandom

[d24454_modern]

I much prefer to see the good in people. Yes, there are some ugly ones over there. But should we judge a group by its minority of by its majority?

And frankly, I much prefer to talk with toxic people than to shut them down. If you do not talk to them, they do not get isolated, but reinforced in their thinking that "they" are right and fall into an echo chamber in which they only get to see what "they" believe is right. And guess what? These echoe chambers get larger as time goes on.

If you keep the lines of communication open, it is there that you get the chance to try and change their point of view. You confront them with their own biases and show them that they are not right or at least that what they think is the truth is not what it is. I had friends during the COVID that did not believe in the pandemic. It was all a hoax. Some of them still believe that even today. Others, I successfully opened their eyes. It is not always an auto success to turn people over to be more tolerant and open minded. It is even harder to open their eyes when they do not want to see the truth or when someone prevents you for opening their eyes. Sometimes, being blunt with people is the way to go and at other times, it ain't. But in the end, as long as you can communicate with them, you have a chance to open their mind that something might not be the truth.

And here, I do not claim to have the absolute truth. Far from it. But when one see that the other is truly wrong, communicating is the only way to turn the other over, or to get one's own eyes opened. Sometimes, it is oneself who is in the dark.

Depends on what you define as “good”.

You should see the Pokémon fandom. “If you keep buying the games, then they’ll never improve it.” If no one buys the games, then they’re just going to cancel it. No one is going to improve it.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

For the record, despite it predating the toxicity of internet culture by many years, I would like to designate the The Birth of a Nation fandom as the most toxic ever, seeing as it was responsible for the reforming of the KKK.

 

[Umbran]

I assume they're easily needled...

Quite the purl of wisdom, there.

 

[Umbran]

I do not doubt it but there are genuine bad actors who do honestly hate the film because it has female leads

So, the problem is that one doesn't have to be an outright sexist-bigot to hate it.

Human opinions are very often formed based on emotion and unconscious bias first, with a veneer of logical justification afterwards. And since that bias is unconscious, folks don't know that's what is happening.

The ultimate point is that the later film was judged on standards the original was not, and that isn't entirely fair.

 

[Helldritch]

Depends on what you define as “good”.

You should see the Pokémon fandom. “If you keep buying the games, then they’ll never improve it.” If no one buys the games, then they’re just going to cancel it. No one is going to improve it.

Do I really need to go down the definition of good again. We had a thread on alignment a few days ago.
Good is good. Tolerance, communication, respect all those positive things. It is not imposing any views or preventing any. It is live and let live. Yes we can argue over some point of views, but ultimately, if it is done with respect all is good. I have friends that despite my best efforts still denies COVID and claim it was/is a scam by the big pharma and whatnot. They are still my friends.
When you argue with someone, the goal is not to shut them down. It is to understand them. Yes, I sometimes take very strong positions, most of the time it is to see what the other is truly thinking. Sometimes it works, sometimes it backfires. I never hold any grudge. Because I want to see the good in people.

 

[Umbran]

Few years ago criticizing sequel trilogy was verboten but I think Rise of Skywalker put an end to that. Yes it was actually stupid.

Not a single Star Wars movie has been "smart".

If you want smart, go watch The Good Place. That's a show intended and built to make you think while you are entertained. Not a single Star Wars movie is so designed.

 

[Stormonu]

As I get older, I find a lot of the things I grew up and enjoyed are getting a reboot - into something I find myself recoiling from. Words like "improved" and "retcon" abound and there's folks both standing up to defend the original and "what it stood for" and the new who "want the property to get with the times". I don't find it usually works, and after a few years it settles back down a bit to become an acceptable compromise after the revolution has died down.

I find myself so often just going to my game room, turning on the 80's music and flipping through my old books and ignoring it all. The new crowd can have their fun, I'll go back to mine. Once in a while, I'll poke my head and look at something new and go "that's cool", then go back to what I was doing before.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

As someone that has a bone to pick with the gatekeepy nature of this hobby's community, I wholly agree. This community is really, really toxic. And a lot of that is to be expected for a game with 5+ different editions, a 50ish-year history, recent acceptance in the mainstream (with more people playing it than ever), and a player base made up of multiple generations. But a lot of it truly baffles me, as I discussed more in-depth in this thread.

There's a lot of toxicity, and most of it comes from the fact that "D&D" means different things to different people. To some people, D&D means a deadly hack-and-slash dungeon crawl game where you can play as any race from Lord of the Rings, but shouldn't get too attached to your character because the dungeons are designed to kill them as efficiently and unfairly as possible. To others, D&D is the roleplay-based fantasy adventure game with occasional combat where you can do anything you want so long as it fits the vague genre of fantasy, the loose definition of "adventure", and the crunchy mechanics mainly designed for combat (and the DM approves). To others, it's the next best thing to a video game adaptation for the fantasy books they read as a kid/teenager (Drizzt/Dragonlance novels and Lord of the Rings). And other people remember it as the game where they played as a garden gnome that punched a dragon in the face until it gave them its lunch money.

D&D means a lot of things to different people, just like Star Wars, or their favorite sport/tv show/video game/book series, or anything else that helped shape who they are. And they get protective about it. Oftentimes they're overprotective, to the detriment of the community and hobby as a whole. To some of them, it's the only thing that helped them through the hardest time of their life (probably teenage years), and the game changing to be nearly unrecognizable to them feels like an attack on the game they love and the experiences they had with it. They're loyal to the game, and loyalty to any other vision/version of the game besides the one they enjoy feels disrespectful and personal. And as much as they love it that the game they grew up being bullied/shunned for playing is finally in the mainstream, they take it personally that the version of the game that's popular isn't the one that they grew to love decades ago. And so they shun other versions of the game and variants of it as "not true D&D", they complain about modern D&D online because they want people to love their version of the game as much as they do, and they gatekeep the community online and judge people for playing a version of the game that they see as abhorrent. And that's not even getting started on how much a lot of them despise the recent changes to make the game more progressive.

And, they're wrong. They're objectively in the wrong. They're not wrong to like the versions of the game they grew up with, but they're definitely in the wrong to try and get people to hate the modern version of the game, and for the negativity, they add to the hobby and its community. Their viewpoint is understandable and I can somewhat empathize with it, but it's childish and they're wrong for trying to ruin something for someone else.

That, in my experience as a newer player, is one of the biggest reasons why the modern D&D community is so toxic. Sure, social media makes it worse, but it's not the root cause of the toxicity, it's only the amplifier. Sure, there's other sources of toxicity in this community, but a lot of it boils down to "I don't like playing the game that way, so you doing it isn't 'true to the hobby'". And the history of the hobby (the Satanic Panic, Gygax being booted from TSR, TSR being bought by WotC) makes it worse than a lot of other fandoms, too.

 

[Hussar]

Right, the trick is to paint anyone with criticism, with the same brush as those with 'incompatible views of the world' as you then get to dismiss said criticism as 'hateful'.

It happens, and companies are now doing it with their media projects.

Fandom's are toxic? Sure, some are, have been, and there always will be segments that are.

Painting 'fandom' as toxic? That's a more recent development, and media companies are doing it to deflect, or dismiss, criticism of their products.

This I will disagree with.

Fandoms are being painted as toxic because they are, in fact, toxic. Unrelentingly negative. It’s not enough to say, “I don’t like this.” No for the Toxic Fan, you must be told over and over and over why something you like is terrible, and you are an idiot for even considering it anything less than an affront to things good and right.

Look at the treatment of Wil Wheaton. Some teenage kid goes to conventions where people are proudly displaying Kill Wesley Crusher buttons. Or the treatment of that kid who played Anakin in the first prequel. On and on and on.

The reason that perfectly reasonable critisms get buried is because the completely unreasonable toxic mouth breathers aren’t interested in a conversation. They just want to tear everything down.

So if you have a reasonable concern about something, you wind up not being able to voice it because there are ten thousand unreasonable voices screaming at the top of their lungs.

In DnD you saw this with the 4e edition wars. DnD gets mentioned in a high profile place like Newsweek. Finally gets some mainstream attention and if you make the mistake of looking at the comments section it’s post after post about how 4e suxxors. It was mind blowing.

So if actually did have a reasonable concern with 4e and there are many perfectly reasonable concerns- it didn’t matter. If you said something negative there’d be an immediate dogpile of people shouting about how you hate 4e and and equal number patting you on the back for showing these newbies how much their game sucks.

It made conversation utterly impossible.

And that certainly wasn’t being fueled by media companies.

 

[Scribe]

Fandoms are being painted as toxic because they are, in fact, toxic. Unrelentingly negative. It’s not enough to say, “I don’t like this.” No for the Toxic Fan, you must be told over and over and over why something you like is terrible, and you are an idiot for even considering it anything less than an affront to things good and right.

You can believe this of course, but there are people here that I would still consider part of the D&D 'fandom' and they are unrelentingly positive.