I saw this on Twitter the other day:
| How do you explain to young players that DungeonsAndDragons stands against racism (which it does, there are wonderfully inclusive illustrations across the 5e books) while codifying "racial traits" and foregrounding race as a determinant of ability? Will 6e change language used? |
Um what?
Will D&D eventually get taken down by snowflake propaganda?
Now While the reply was no, It did prompt the thought, what if it could?
Being sexist is no longer acceptable (was it ever?), and yet many plot points, interaction in stories, conflict and resolution is based around sexist issues.
Racism is a big no-no, yet again, classifying a group of "friends" and "enemies" based on your own race, friendly races, not friendly races and downright annoying races, is again, conflict & resolution.
If you took the conflict and resolution out of stories, do you even have a story?
"Johnny went to the Dungeon of Doom, which was decommissioned due to snowflake laws no. 17 & 19, He walked casually through the interesting caves, the safe catacombs, viewed traps that were triggered and locked behind large perspex walls, and eventually arrived at the final chamber where a lovely necromancer awarded him a trophy of participation, and suggested he purchase a "I survived the Dungeon of Doom and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" t-shirt."
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| Never ceases to amaze me that any idea, someone has thought of too |
Its unlikely to happen, but I can see whole armies of snowflakes petitioning and boycotting products because they allow violence, sexism, racism, exploitation, slavery, all the standard fantasy RPG tropes. Sure, I think certain rules in FATAL went overboard, and as the industry shifts towards crunch lite games, and the backlash of crunch-heavy niche markets, games like that are cludgy, outdated, yet have a niche/cult audience, more too them.. but banning it? Ha!
What next?
If you've seen Black Mirror (in particular Season 4, episode 2) we might be looking at a dystopian future where kids are over protected by the state, and suffer horrendous psychological damage, or alternatively, our grandchilden grow up in a world bland yet peaceful, where everyone has a healthy productive life, without any struggle.. and crave it through secret underground clubs that roleplay a distopian past, where people struggle to go to work, play archaic games on weekends and write blogs of angst in the evening..
Who Knows....
