Posted on 12/31/2024 1:28:18 PM PST by nickcarraway
“Races” are now “species” in the beloved game Dungeons & Dragons, which recently marked its 50th anniversary, irking some loyal fans.
“Some character traits have been divorced from biological identity; a mountain dwarf is no longer inherently brawny and durable, a high elf no longer intelligent and dexterous by definition,” a report in The New York Times explains. “And Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons & Dragons publisher owned by Hasbro, has endorsed a trend throughout role-playing games in which players are empowered to halt the proceedings if they ever feel uncomfortable.”
The company also now suggests that extended Dungeons & Dragons campaigns begin with sessions allowing players to lay out their expectations and which topics they wish to avoid, which could include sexual assault or drug use, the Times writes. “What they’re trying to do here is put up a signal flare, to not only current players but potential future players, that this game is a safe, inclusive, thoughtful and sensitive approach to fantasy storytelling,” said Ryan Lessard, a writer and frequent Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master, according to the report.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
It’s as Donald Trump once said, everything woke touches turns to sh-.
Adding more fantasy to fantasy?
I DGAF at all about D&D or what its fans do.... but I suspect, like everything else that has gone woke, it will go broke.
The woke cancer has infected most of the v game devs and it has cost them millions. The games coming out now stared development a few years ago at the height of the woke BS so the critics and the devs are attacking gamers for not buying this crap.
The Babylon Bee is already on it…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cEAsMMx_1jg&pp=ygUUQmFieWxvbiBCZWUgV29rZSBEJkQ%3D
Six minutes on youtube.
I’m so happy that I have enough computer games to last me a lifetime, without having to be involved in any of this.
It is as though Pathfinder. A D&D competitor, has employees that work within D&D development.
Watch what happens to the franchise.
Now: current pen and paper RPGs have a cluster of wokery centered in Seattle — WOTC (Renton, WA); Paizo/Pathfinder (Redmond, WA); Catalyst/Shadowrun (Seattle, WA). TSR was originally in Lake Geneva, WI, long before Kenosha became a site for riots.
Secondly, the genre always appealed to the outcast/nerd mentality — in the 1970s, whether adult or teen, which people were at home rolling dice and not glued to the Sunday TV sports regimen? Only now, the wokoid blob people dominate any intellectuals; they love their cancel culture and lowest common denominator.
However, and this is why they’re going to fail hard, the wokoids tend to be low performers financially. The (relative) normal guys with income are going to just not buy the latest tome of transgender dwarf character development or orc intersectionality or whatever. The books don’t auto-destruct and people can just as easily play as they did before, or a prior edition, and financially ignore woke Seattle.
Amusingly, *not* going superwoke will also bury them, because if there’s one thing low-performing woke people are good at, it’s screeching, and this lot have time beyond all belief on their hands. I’ll leave the searching to the reader but the SJW wars in RPGing are pretty wacky.
My cub and her friends played Dungeons and Dragons years ago, when we got our 1st home PC-I remember the kids giggling and screaming over the scary, thrilling and dangerous parts of the game-not that it was “safe, inclusive, thoughtful and sensitive approach to fantasy storytelling,”. Liberals ruin everything-even kids’ games...
I see your Atari still works LOL. Try 'World of Tanks' where you get kill progressive democrats by score. Everyone knows every enemy tanks is driven by unclean liberal demon groomers and their deaths are quite satisfying.
Nope. There are too many of us old timers still playing. I wouldn’t allow any of that crap at my table.
Well written!
And that is the problem.
Almost every game is "now owned by Hasbro".
Just an idea but maybe having a monopoly of any sort on anything is double plus ungood.
Video Game and Authenticity in the same sentence? I have a bridge to sell at half price.
Sounds like corporate speak. Flares are a distress signal. Is D&D in distress?
How many people play D&D these days?
The communists and their alphabet people enforcers are not going anywhere. The communist and modern social justice movement will continue.
Role-playing game.
I took it for granted that halflings were shorter than elves which were shorter than humans. I can’t remember what the other races were. I suppose now that they’re species they can’t interbreed - I don’t recall any D&D characters being interbred, but I didn’t play that much. I’d say the game is mostly for nerdy high school and college kids.
What were the traits? Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma, Strength (ability to deliver a hit), Constitution (ability to sustain a hit), and there was one other — stamina? speed? I forget.
I’m trying to remember what effect, if any, a character’s height had to do with resolving a conflict. Characters would have hit points. If a conflict arose, player and the dungeon master would roll against each other. The higher roll meant a successful hit, and hit points would be deducted from the losing character. A high constitution would mitigate the number of hit points lost; high strength would increase the number of hit points subtracted from the other character.
Go below zero on hit points and your character is dead. The dead character could be the dungeon master’s creation. Quite often, the dungeon master’s character would be carrying gold or jewels which the player could collect and later buy better armor, weapons, etc. Obviously if the dungeon is too difficult, the player loses and the game is not much fun.
Typically there are several players vs. the dungeon master.
The players should play different characters with different skills. For instance, one of the party should be a healer — after the conflict, the healer can restore hit points. Of course your party also needs fighters.
I read this, and get, um, irked.
(what i really want to do ...i believe there are others of us, from the early ‘80’s board game, that would love to beatuponthebodywithabigbrownstick!
this is wokeism, which the game had no calling for ...”no guts, no glory”.
Ende!
If your weapon is a magic wand you would need high wisdom (or was it high intelligence?) to use it effectively.
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