What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Irlo]

No? Because comments about Lord Soth's dead wife and child suggest otherwise.

Okay. I don't see it, but I'm not going to argue the point. Nothing in those comments indicates to me that either poster had concern for Soth's victims, and there's no indication that WotC revised Soth's backstory because they wanted to protect a fictional woman and baby.

 

[mythago]

No one says it has to, but some people are saying shouldn't, and maybe it can't anymore. That's where I have a problem.

Again, the entire premise of this thread was that people shouldn't remove certain 'controversial' elements from their games, because doing so makes them less interesting.

And, again, there are plenty of games that deal with controversial subjects head-on, and are set in cultures other than Standard Fantasy Middle Ages. It's interesting to me how people concerned about edge and controversy don't seem to have much interest in finding out about those games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I, at least, am more saying that the majority of publishers only approach the matter casually, with minimum effort, little sensitivity, and little accuracy. You should expect folks to react as if that is dismissive and insulting, because it is! Folks pushing back on treating the topic casually, for a casual entertainment game, is not unreasonable behavior.

If someone makes themselves an expert on the matter, and does a really good, serious game supplement on it, that might be different. But slapping a slave-race history on the Hadozee and dressing them as minstrels wasn't an expert treatment. Just putting in slaver cultures for PCs to beat up isn't a serious treatment.

It is okay if WotC and Paizo don't choose to be the ones to do a serious treatment. It is not a bad, or slippery slope choice on their part.

To be fair, TTRPGs are, for the most part, intended as casual entertaining games, and have been for 50 years.

 

[Alzrius]

And, again, there are plenty of games that deal with controversial subjects head-on, and are set in cultures other than Standard Fantasy Middle Ages. It's interesting to me how people concerned about edge and controversy don't seem to have much interest in finding out about those games.

That's not the indictment you seem to think it is. Wanting to have the game that you like (and that your current group is playing) also have material with regard to topics, themes, and content that you want to explore is entirely reasonable. If you have to switch to another game in order to bring that content into play, that means not only expending money and time learning the new system (since mechanics are separate from themes et al), but also convincing your entire group to make the switch. All things which are barriers to trying those new games, in other words.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Again, the entire premise of this thread was that people shouldn't remove certain 'controversial' elements from their games, because doing so makes them less interesting.

And, again, there are plenty of games that deal with controversial subjects head-on, and are set in cultures other than Standard Fantasy Middle Ages. It's interesting to me how people concerned about edge and controversy don't seem to have much interest in finding out about those games.

A lot of people play D&D and its derivatives, and that's what they care about.

 

[Alzrius]

Okay. I don't see it, but I'm not going to argue the point. Nothing in those comments indicates to me that either poster had concern for Soth's victims, and there's no indication that WotC revised Soth's backstory because they wanted to protect a fictional woman and baby.

Well, when someone is disapproving about how tertiary characters in a particular narrative are "mere plot devices" when something bad happens to them as a way of advancing the main character's development, that they're upset over said fictional characters' welfare strikes me as the most obvious interpretation. But I suppose your mileage may vary.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And, again, there are plenty of games that deal with controversial subjects head-on, and are set in cultures other than Standard Fantasy Middle Ages. It's interesting to me how people concerned about edge and controversy don't seem to have much interest in finding out about those games.

I can't speak for others but I am always interested in finding things outside standard fantasy middle ages. And I am also all for people dealing with controversial subjects head on. Where I probably would disagree with some posters is more around what kinds of parameters we should have around treatment of controversial material in gaming culture

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's fine, as I don't think the folks you are arguing against are saying "never".

When someone wants to do the serious, thoughtful, sensitive Schindler's List of RPGs, we can talk about that. But so long as it is a cheap, "Well, the PCs need to fight someone, so let's put in an analog to the Holocaust just so we are clear it is EVIL, folks are going to respond as if it is cheap.

I am about to begin my two days of gaming for the weekend, so this might be my last contribution to this discussion for a bit.

I do think that the more specific and recent the thing you are talking about, the harder, the more challenging, the more likely it is to provoke (though not always). I worked in a kosher bakery when I was younger (which was my way of connecting more with the Jewish side of my family: my father's family is Jewish). We had a regular customer who was a very gentle old man who seemed lonely and liked to chat for a while, and I quickly learned he was a survivor. He even talked about it with us. That had a pretty profound effect on my worldview, in a number of ways. I don't think you can meet someone like that, hear their story and come away the same as before. And that impacted how I might be wiling to handle the material creatively. I would never personally want to publish anything that deals directly with the holocaust itself (I don't see a problem with doing so, I just wouldn't want to). But I am comfortable dealing with it through analogy, and have done so, and part of it for me was trying to understand why people even do that kind of thing in the first place.

I think my point here was that Falkovnia isn't Schindler's List. It is pretty far afield from that, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. I prefer a creative landscape where both those approaches would be possible and people can choose to engage or not engage them as an audience how they see fit. I know plenty of people who had the opposite reaction to us to Falkovnia and I think that is entirely fair.


I think there is also the topic here of the specific and the general. On the one hand you might have things like specifically alluding to or invoking the holocaust in a fantasy setting. And this might be handled in a number of ways and with a variety of tones. There are places where I would have a personal limit on that, but the limit would not be using it to make clear the villain is evil (that is probably a pretty thin and uninteresting use, but I don't take umbrage at it). Then there is genocide more broadly, which is something that I think is fair to include in a fantasy setting. Again, I will have lines (I wouldn't want to see someone use it to promote anti-semitism for example). But I also think it is important to not leap to conclusions when I see controversial content in a movie, game or book, and to try to understand the aim of it, what the creative vision was, and to have an honest emotional reaction to it (which might mean enjoying a schlocky fantasy film where the bad guy is a genocidal maniac----or finding the 90s version of Falkovnia compelling and evocative at the table).

Genocide is something that has happened. It is tragic, horrific and puzzling. So I think it is natural for people to want to explore it in creative venues.

 

[Umbran]

To be fair, TTRPGs are, for the most part, intended as casual entertaining games, and have been for 50 years.

Yep. No argument there.

 

[mythago]

A lot of people play D&D and its derivatives, and that's what they care about.

Okay, and? The discussion is about TTRPGs broadly (as was the original post, which was made in TTRPG General), not just about D&D and Pathfinder and what the companies publishing those specific games should do in their worldbuilding. Nor does one have to play other games to read those gamebooks and mine them for ideas/settings/themes.

Bluntly, it feels more like examples are being dismissed because they don't fit the narrative.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay, and?

And that's why a lot of people are viewing this through the lens of D&D, and are less interested in other games. You can't expect folks to put a lot of effort into researching something that doesn't matter much to them, as much as that would be nice.

 

[Imaro]

That's not the indictment you seem to think it is. Wanting to have the game that you like (and that your current group is playing) also have material with regard to topics, themes, and content that you want to explore is entirely reasonable. If you have to switch to another game in order to bring that content into play, that means not only expending money and time learning the new system (since mechanics are separate from themes et al), but also convincing your entire group to make the switch. All things which are barriers to trying those new games, in other words.

And that is exactly why 3PP exist. Now if you choose not to look into them well that's on you.

 

[Sabathius42]

And when a game publisher says, "You know, I was going to have a setting in which one culture went about systematically committing genocide, but I decided that that wasn't going to be acceptable in today's climate"...

...we'd probably say that was a reasonable choice and in good taste.

Isn't that the plotline of every demon and undead hoarde? Kill every living thing?

 

[Alzrius]

And that is exactly why 3PP exist. Now if you choose not to look into them well that's on you.

Looking into them means knowing that those third-party products exist in the first place, and being able to find them without undue difficulty. Given that "controversial" products are usually made by smaller publishers, who are less able to defend themselves against haters who say that their products offend their sensibilities and so either shouldn't exist or shouldn't be easily found by consumers – typically by way of leveraging harassment via unflattering coverage in game-specific coverage online and campaigns denouncing sales venues that carry them – their existence is thus not a given. Hence, it's on them, not us.

 

[Faolyn]

You and @Justice and Rule keep making this error and it is baffling.
The PCs are not the only murderers in a D&D game.

It is like you positing that others are suggesting PCs must be/want to be slavers.

That's really not what either of us are saying at all.

In a fantasy setting, there are reasons for the violence. Even if it's NPC against NPC, there's a reason. It might just be meta-reasons, but there are reasons. If you have a bad guy who just murders people for no reason but to show how evil they are, then I think most people would think that's a poorly-done villain with uninteresting motives and/or that the GM is being unnecessarily edgy. There are a few exceptions, like if you have Joker-style villains, but the majority of bad guys have a reason for their violence. But what's the justification for slavery? Just to show how evil someone is (as has been suggested elsewhere in this thread)? There's other ways to do that that don't involve slavery.

And may I remind you, this thread started because of Dark Sun, where slavery isn't considered so much a great evil to be overcome as it is a societal norm to be tolerated or even engaged with. And if slavery is a societal norm, then there actually is a chance that the PCs might want to be slavers--or might end up as slaves. Didn't one of the first Dark Sun adventures have the PCs start out as slaves?

And again, what do you get out of a game that includes slavery? If it's just realism, do you also have a Random STD table for when your players go a-wenching? If you have a PC with the Noble background, do you check to see what effects inbreeding had on them? "Sure, you can be a prince, but you're also going to take extra damage after each combat due to hemophilia." Since the party has encountered great horrors on their travels, do you insist that they have PTSD? All of these things are realistic, and removing them from the game would, therefore, remove another crayon from the box and make the world less colorful, by the logic that's been going around this thread.

And if you say "well, magic will cure these things," then magic can also create constructs and animate objects to work the fields--and coin can hire some friendly giants to do the work of a dozen farmers (with plant magic to ensure bountiful crops to pay for it).

How do you think bad guys get into power? The very first AP Hoard of the Dragon Queen has you rescue a tortured half-elf Harper in the 2nd chapter. The first chapter has mercenaries and kobolds hired by the cultists pillage a town, presumably killing innocents in cold blood in the process.

I haven't read that one (we played in it briefly, but didn't finish it), but I imagine that there actually were some reasons there.

There's also another difference between the violence and the slavery. Unless you have PCs or NPCs who are sadists (in which case, we're back to unnecessary edginess), the killing is fairly quick. And in a fantasy world, there's definitely an afterlife and a chance of resurrection. Slavery is a long, slow process that can involve a lifetime of abuse.

And just in case you don't get it, I literally don't care what you do with your home campaign. The (non D&D) setting I just co-wrote has some slavery and slavery-in-all-but-name in it, but I was careful to put legal limits on it in-game and to provide ways for the slaves to be freed because I know what's acceptable for my table. As it turned out, the player who probably would be considered the most "sensitive" by some people chose to play an ex-slave--and not only an ex-slave, but one from the culture where people were brainwashed from birth into thinking being enslaved was the norm.

And quite frankly, if someone else got a hand on my setting notes and said "I like the world and would want to run it, but this slavery has to go," my response would be "No problem; I have some ideas as to what else can be done, if you're interested."

But a company who is writing to a general audience doesn't know what's acceptable for my table, and that's what's important here. When it comes to a topic like slavery, which has not only harmed many people in the past but still harms many people today (it's estimated there's about 50 million people who are currently enslaved), no game company is going to be able to write about slavery carefully enough. Whereas it's a safe bet that no gamers have ever been harmed by a kobold who was hired by dragon cultists. Sure, there are likely some gamers who had been attacked or even almost killed in the past, but being attacked by a kobold provides enough of a fantasy buffer that I'd bet most of those gamers would be OK--and that's not even taking into account that they'd also be playing people who can fight back.

 

[Faolyn]

Isn't that the plotline of every demon and undead hoarde? Kill every living thing?

Bit of a difference between humans/humanoids and entities that are literally made out of pure evil.

 

[Sabathius42]

That's really not what either of us are saying at all.

In a fantasy setting, there are reasons for the violence. Even if it's NPC against NPC, there's a reason. It might just be meta-reasons, but there are reasons. If you have a bad guy who just murders people for no reason but to show how evil they are, then I think most people would think that's a poorly-done villain with uninteresting motives and/or that the GM is being unnecessarily edgy. There are a few exceptions, like if you have Joker-style villains, but the majority of bad guys have a reason for their violence. But what's the justification for slavery? Just to show how evil someone is (as has been suggested elsewhere in this thread)? There's other ways to do that that don't involve slavery.

And may I remind you, this thread started because of Dark Sun, where slavery isn't considered so much a great evil to be overcome as it is a societal norm to be tolerated or even engaged with. And if slavery is a societal norm, then there actually is a chance that the PCs might want to be slavers--or might end up as slaves. Didn't one of the first Dark Sun adventures have the PCs start out as slaves?

And again, what do you get out of a game that includes slavery? If it's just realism, do you also have a Random STD table for when your players go a-wenching? If you have a PC with the Noble background, do you check to see what effects inbreeding had on them? "Sure, you can be a prince, but you're also going to take extra damage after each combat due to hemophilia." Since the party has encountered great horrors on their travels, do you insist that they have PTSD? All of these things are realistic, and removing them from the game would, therefore, remove another crayon from the box and make the world less colorful, by the logic that's been going around this thread.

And if you say "well, magic will cure these things," then magic can also create constructs and animate objects to work the fields--and coin can hire some friendly giants to do the work of a dozen farmers (with plant magic to ensure bountiful crops to pay for it).


I haven't read that one (we played in it briefly, but didn't finish it), but I imagine that there actually were some reasons there.

There's also another difference between the violence and the slavery. Unless you have PCs or NPCs who are sadists (in which case, we're back to unnecessary edginess), the killing is fairly quick. And in a fantasy world, there's definitely an afterlife and a chance of resurrection. Slavery is a long, slow process that can involve a lifetime of abuse.

And just in case you don't get it, I literally don't care what you do with your home campaign. The (non D&D) setting I just co-wrote has some slavery and slavery-in-all-but-name in it, but I was careful to put legal limits on it in-game and to provide ways for the slaves to be freed because I know what's acceptable for my table. As it turned out, the player who probably would be considered the most "sensitive" by some people chose to play an ex-slave--and not only an ex-slave, but one from the culture where people were brainwashed from birth into thinking being enslaved was the norm.

And quite frankly, if someone else got a hand on my setting notes and said "I like the world and would want to run it, but this slavery has to go," my response would be "No problem; I have some ideas as to what else can be done, if you're interested."

But a company who is writing to a general audience doesn't know what's acceptable for my table, and that's what's important here. When it comes to a topic like slavery, which has not only harmed many people in the past but still harms many people today (it's estimated there's about 50 million people who are currently enslaved), no game company is going to be able to write about slavery carefully enough. Whereas it's a safe bet that no gamers have ever been harmed by a kobold who was hired by dragon cultists. Sure, there are likely some gamers who had been attacked or even almost killed in the past, but being attacked by a kobold provides enough of a fantasy buffer that I'd bet most of those gamers would be OK--and that's not even taking into account that they'd also be playing people who can fight back.

Why do you feel like it's a good enough fantasy buffer from reality to excuse a kobold bandit trying to kill you in a mugging but not apply the same fantasy buffer to snake-guy wants to kidnap you and take you to a hidden desert lair to toil in mine?

 

[Sabathius42]

Bit of a difference between humans/humanoids and entities that are literally made out of pure evil.

So we are back in the camp of genocide is OK sometimes but slavery never is?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why do you feel like it's a good enough fantasy buffer from reality to excuse a kobold bandit trying to kill you in a mugging but not apply the same fantasy buffer to snake-guy wants to kidnap you and take you to a hidden desert lair to toil in mine?

Both have worked perfectly well in many fantasy stories, and I see no reason why they can't continue to do so.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So we are back in the camp of genocide is OK sometimes but slavery never is?

What if the demons were doing the enslaving?