Maybe? But I can see the point
@I'm A Banana is making. For people still fighting the downside of slavery's legacy, having it come up in RPGs, even if intended to allow for players to vicariously oppose slavery through their PCs, may be hitting a little too close to home. Their trauma really isn't everyone else's playground.
I get the argument you and others in this thread are making and I respect the intention, but I have to push back at it from it another angle. At which point is something useable as a plot element again? I speak as someone who survived the genocide in Bosnia and lost family to it, and I do not want to watch anything set in Bosnia due to the sense of loss. However, I would never want people to pressure writers or creators to stay away from the Bosnian war in particular or genocide in general as a story element.
First, I believe it’s the responsibility of the audience to pick what they are an audience to, not for a creator to limit what they will or will not touch based on possible backlash. If they don’t want to touch a subject, that’s fine. But feeling pressured to not express their creativity as they wish is extremely detrimental to creative and free expression. It’s not about other people’s trauma being a playground, it’s about the reality that everyone will have different reactions to different topics, and media should not be expected to appeal to everyone. Otherwise we are forcing creative industries down a path of endless homogenization purely because their business instincts are alert to public shaming.
Secondly, there will always be story elements that are not to other people’s tastes. War in general, crime, pandemics - should companies be pressured to avoid those subjects because they may not be comfortable for some people? Narrative of any kind relies on conflict - that’s how human beings have told stories for millennia. Conflict inevitably relies on topics that the audience is meant to be against or offended by. It’s our way of confronting scary or difficult issues within the safety of fiction. It can empower us, teach us, or just give us an escape to a world where real issues exist, but can be overcome through a protagonist’s action.
Lastly, D&D is built from the ground up around conflict. Its rules are mostly about combat, and every rule is about overcoming antagonistic forces. How can you convincingly create an antagonistic force if you are limited to what doesn’t disturb people? Again, everyone will have a subject matter they don’t want to touch, and that’s okay. But we should not normalize companies and artists being pressured into sterilizing their content to make people feel comfortable.
One additional perspective I’d put forward. Let’s say this is WotC not wanting to offend people due to climate change/class war implications in the setting. It erases the reality of those issues and curtails the expression of its authors who may legitimately want to express their concerns around those topics. But this may anger people who do not believe those issues exist (I would strongly disagree with those folks). Conversely, in time - even our lifetime - the consequences of climate change and class war will result in very real trauma for many people. Should those topics not be explored in fiction because they are very real and current issues for many people? Bringing it back to topics of slavery and genocide; at which point is it sensitivity, and at which point is it erasure of history and the important lessons it holds? The vast majority of lessons from the past have been taught through fiction. Why would we stop now?
