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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8487060" data-attributes="member: 18">Oh yeah I definitely do.But to be clear I agree it doesn't cross people's minds consciously.I'm talking about an unconscious feeling, like, when you play D&D, somehow thorny issues and awkward stuff doesn't happen, even though maybe it does when you play PF1 or CoC or whatever. So you gravitate to D&D because it promotes a good time, even without really thinking about why.I think the big differences here are:1) The changes here are designed to fit with younger people who already do or might actually play, rather than older people, who will absolutely never play.2) These changes are largely anticipatory, rather than reactionary. WotC is getting "ahead of the ball". I think this is confusing some people, especially older players like ourselves, because they're not seeing this "backlash" or whatever, so they're wondering, why is WotC doing all this?And the answer is because WotC wants to be on the front foot this time, not the back foot. Because the changes are aimed at younger people who do/might play, and are anticipatory, it's much more likely they'll offer a long-term benefit to WotC than reactionary changes like going "Oh crap, rename all the Devils and Demons!!!", which only made angry 50-something hardcore religious types happy, who hate D&D anyway.I dunno how much of TTRPG Twitter you read, but there are some people out there on the edges for whom the changes to D&D are "not enough". Thing is, most of those people would never play D&D, it's too big, it's too mainstream, it's too basically about acquisition and "winning", and I notice WotC isn't really moving to make changes to please that group. Their sort of suggestions have been pretty much ignored.Re: in real life, well, I've been offended by D&D before, a few times, and I'm 43 and have played for 32+ years. Some examples:A) Maztica. The idea of a South America expansion for the FR was pretty great. The way they did it? It was ghastly and yes actually offensive. This was in the early 1990s and I wasn't even particularly "woke", but I could see this was really gross. Just a creepy whitewash-y (in the non-racial sense) take on the conquistadors, who even by that age, I knew were Very Bad News.B) The Vistani as non-human. Let's not even go into details, but yeah, that obviously not great. It was from the same school of idiot anti-racism going full circle back into racism as World of Darkness: Gypsies, but thankfully less extreme.C) Elements of Red Steel, specifically the stuff where a bunch of Evil Humanoids were given the cultures of real-world tribal cultures that colonial-types had messed with. And the job of the players was to mess with them. Damn.D) The Barbarian's Handbook in 2E. Oh my god. Again, even a young-ish teenager I could see this was Messed Up. Like "Yikes". Again, I don't think it was intentional, I think it was just like the work of someone who lived in a very, um, circumscribed environment.E) I've always been creeped out by "pro-genocide of humanoid races" attitudes evident in some D&D materials. This was nigh-universal with people I played with. Note that maybe 50% of players I played with as a teen were Jewish, and I think that maybe made them pick up "Wooo genocide is cool" vibes in some D&D stuff and be really turned off by it a little more easily than some other people might be.I could go on, there were plenty of others. Of course some stuff didn't register as offensive at all. Oriental Adventures, I thought had a "dumb grandad name", because reading it, it should clearly be called "Japanese Adventures", but I didn't find it's stereotyping offensive as a kid, because it was so damn cool.</blockquote>

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