What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Kaodi]

...as evidenced by the fact that up until about five years or so ago, there were virtually no women in the hobby...

That would seem to me to be a fairly bold statement about the demographics of our hobby even ten years ago.

 

[Thourne]

No.

It is concern about the fact that for much of the history of the hobby, people who don’t conform to a very narrow interpretation of history have been made to feel unwelcome in the hobby as evidenced by the fact that up until about five years or so ago, there were virtually no women in the hobby as well as very nearly no inclusion of anything that wasn’t 100% geared for white males.

Your personal experiences are of course yours, but there have been a significant number of women in the hobby since I started playing in the late 70s here. The explosion of the World of Darkness in the mid 90s sent the number in this area through the roof.

 

[Maxperson]

Use of terrain, long-range attacks, cover, moving around, etc.

That qualifies as increased difficulty per the game, though. @Ruin Explorer is increasing actual encounter difficulty and you are increasing effective monster difficulty.

DMG page 85 under Modifying Encounter Difficulty. If terrain is favorable to the monsters, that increases the difficulty one step. If there are other advantages the monsters have, it increases more steps. So if there are 2 drawbacks(monster benefits), a moderate encounter becomes deadly.

 

[Lanefan]

This is ironically incredibly naive and I would suggest a very sheltered and silly view that doesn't reflect how D&D is actually played. I've been playing D&D since 1989, and many other RPGs, with an awful lot of different people, and the vast majority of D&D settings included slavery (even if not as a common element, it was out there). Has anyone ever suggested taking prisoners, and selling them as slaves in those 34 years? No, they haven't. Not even in Dark Sun. And buying a slave? Are you kidding me? We, the players and DMs from a society that hates slavery and slavers. That sees them as the scum of scum. No normal person goes "Oh I will just buy a slave!". It just doesn't happen. Not even in a game.

I've DMed a game where PCs took prisoners to sell as slaves, then instead took the PCs who objected to this and gave them into slavery.

I play a character who, as someone aspiring to rise into the Patrician class in faux-Rome, almost has to own at least a few slaves or else risk being looked down upon by the very society she is trying to enter; a very bad outcome for someone with sky-high political ambitions. She doesn't have any slaves yet, but sooner or later it's almost inevitable that she will.

That said; if her sky-high political ambition beats some long odds and somehow realizes, she'll in theory be in a position to by various means abolish or at least greatly curtail slavery (but in game time any of that will most likely happen long after the played campaign is done).

 

[Lanefan]

The Magnus Archives is a completed podcast put out by Rusty Quill. Uzumaki is a manga by Itou Junji. They're coming out with an animated version "soon" that looks really beautiful.

Hard pass on the manga (not a fan of the style) but I'll check out the other. Thanks!

 

[Lanefan]

No.

It is concern about the fact that for much of the history of the hobby, people who don’t conform to a very narrow interpretation of history have been made to feel unwelcome in the hobby as evidenced by the fact that up until about five years or so ago, there were virtually no women in the hobby as well as very nearly no inclusion of anything that wasn’t 100% geared for white males.

You must have seen different parts of the hobby than I, then.

Within our own crew the M-F ratio started around 70-30 even back in the early 80s and over the years has wandered its way to about 50-50 now.

The first GenCon I went to was 2003 - i.e. 20 years ago - and at a rough guess I'd say the M-F ratio there was somewhere in the 60-40 range; yes there were more men than women but "virtually no women" is a hyperbolic exaggeration.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There's an awful lot of overlap between gamers and people who eat Thai food. That doesn't mean they're connected. (Man, I want some drunken noodles right now.)

And I'm sure that most people can tell the difference between an RPG and a movie. For instance, one passively watches a movie and actively plays in an RPG. Movies are scripted while RPGs are not and sometimes go completely off the rails because of player weirdness or a die roll.

I don't think that difference matters in regards to including content, just in how you engage.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Yeah to be fair there are already games where you play as slave owners and generally they are reasonable well accepted, because it is part of the game, and it's only a game it doesn't make you a bad person.

... Which games are these?

Same as how playing the Nazi's in a WWII war game doesn't make you a Nazi or even imply you are sympathetic to Nazi ideas.

A viewpoint which is apparently no longer acceptable.

So this is a bad point for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that Nazis in wargames are almost always incredibly sanitized. Yes, we don't think of them as Nazis largely because their forces don't really resemble them beyond uniforms and equipment: we aren't showing off their ideology, we can't play their war crimes, etc... You don't engage with that aspect of it at all and it ends up making Nazis in a wargame just another army to collect.

And that does come with cost: as a wargamer of 30 years, I know several Jewish players who still get quietly unnerved by people collecting Waffen SS armies. We can say all day that they are the bad guys, but when we put them into those sorts of games we really remove them from the context that they hold in history and turn them into something of a toy, an army with advantages and disadvantages that people can collect and paint and compete with. In turning them into a toy, you do do a bit of whitewashing so that people can enjoy them as a toy and you can sell models. It carries cost, and yeah it can encourage people to take that sort of whitewashing further.

On the other side, you really can't portray them as they should be in a wargame because the only way people would want to play them would be if they really were Nazis. Most of what makes them so bad falls outside of what you can do in a wargame: most people get understandably uncomfortable if someone were to attempt to commit war crimes in a game. With slavery in an RPG, you can't really avoid that: the crime itself isn't hidden due to the scope of the game, but is basically on full display unless you want to sanitize it to the point that it no longer resembles what it actually is.

 

[Hussar]

Would you give a concrete example of how you have a moderate challenge be dangerous?

Well let’s see. Current adventure is a dungeon crawl. One encounter for four 15th level characters was 4 Living Walls. Exciting, challenging and one pc was actually within a round of permanent death (walls imprison grappled opponents- if you drop to zero ho whil imprisoned, only a wish or true resurrection can bring you back).

Seemed like an exciting fight to me.

 

[Thourne]

Well let’s see. Current adventure is a dungeon crawl. One encounter for four 15th level characters was 4 Living Walls. Exciting, challenging and one pc was actually within a round of permanent death (walls imprison grappled opponents- if you drop to zero ho whil imprisoned, only a wish or true resurrection can bring you back).

Seemed like an exciting fight to me.

Ok, I am admittedly say 2.5 editions out of practice with D&D (haven't played it since 3.0) but isn't that a Deadly and not a Moderate encounter?