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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8912458" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm not sure who you think that would be. Any ideas for a model group?The SPLC are methodical, and thoughtful, and not particularly aggressive. They have specific, measurable, consistent criteria for classifying a group as a hate group, and whilst not everyone might agree with those criteria, they do follow them predictably, and aren't zealots or ideologs. Indeed the main thing that has got them called "biased" is that publishing race science stuff is a red flag for them, and an awful lot of groups occasionally decide to publish some race science (even if that's not a main focus of that group). I can sorta see why groups are upset given that it's sometimes a tiny amount of their output, but like, maybe don't publish any race science if you don't wanna get called racist lol?(Which of course is unfortunately relevant to RPGs, given a certain 3E designer decided to become a "race science guy" a few years ago, before repenting, I think.)Also they have better things to do than check out game books for a corporation, so don't worry too much about them specifically lol.And the reality is that any group that is chosen will be less methodical, less thoughtful, and more aggressive than the SPLC, so brace, I guess? WotC would be a bull in a china shop by comparison.That's not really accurate.There's a huge swathe of stuff that's really never going to be meaningfully offensive to anyone.I think what you mean is that everyone has blind-spots on what others might find offensive, which isn't quite the same thing.They shouldn't, sure, if that was the genuine and sole reasoning, but it isn't. Their goals here are:1) Control over what gets created, with this as an easy threat if there's anything they don't like.2) Control over corporate image. Which is very different from actual issues, both being more sensitive to some stuff, and far less sensitive to others. This is what is likely to make WotC reject any calls for a third-party to handle this stuff, because even if stuff isn't racist, or "sexualized" or whatever, WotC may want to be rid of it anyway.This is where the particular risk to certain minorities comes in - LGBTQ+ stuff has a history of getting called "excessively sexualized" or the like even when it's no worse than other material which isn't labelled that way.3) Very distantly behind that, they probably do want to avoid any actual hateful stuff, but that's not the primary motivation. You can tell because they're proposing a post-facto approach - i.e. if someone says "[3PP] did a racism!", WotC will look into it, rather than WotC insisting books be pre-screened or whatever.What this really tells us is that WotC should be using a closed licence, not an open one.</blockquote>

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