Quote from: Motorskills;1055313Let's take that for a spin....

In the UK at least, the Fighting Fantasy novels were regularly bestsellers a quarter of a century before The Big Bang Theory

The Harry Potter books came out a decade before the The Big Bang Theory.

TBBT probably helped add some numbers, but the crowd was there long before.


Finally, you can't have it both ways. Either gaming was always for all, or the folks giving you sleepless nights were invited in. Pick one.

The FF books and the CYOA series were not RPGs though and did not overall impact the RPG comminity. There were overlaps of interests just as there is overlaps with board games and wargames and later arcade and PC games. And I doubt shows like Big Bang Theory actually had as big an impact as some think.

Theres allways been overlaps of interests and as I noted prior I think the current interest in these gameplay vids is the dearth of official viewing media related.

Quote from: Motorskills;1055313In the UK at least, the Fighting Fantasy novels were regularly bestsellers a quarter of a century before The Big Bang Theory

For children, though. I know I got into RPGs with FF but there was definitely some nerd stigma to D&D in the UK; probably not to the extent of the USA.

Quote from: S'mon;1055322For children, though. I know I got into RPGs with FF but there was definitely some nerd stigma to D&D in the UK; probably not to the extent of the USA.

Yeah, we didn't have the Satanic Panic and whatnot, but I do think Fighting Fantasy was much more for "young people" (say 10 - 30?) rather than simply for "kids". I don't think it was a coincidence that age range was pretty much the demographic I seem to remember playing RPGs at the various UK conventions of the time.

(My personal gamer circles were smaller then, and no internet, so don't want to extrapolate too much from that dataset)

Quote from: Motorskills;1055319Other than on webforums like these...where is this negativity being represented?

I've not seen it in real life, but it's widespread on the Facebook D&D groups, which are a lot bigger than the forums these days. I was a member of a bunch for a while. There was a lot of it in the main 5e Facebook group, which didn't surprise me so much, but I was shocked to see it in the Swords & Wizardry group. The only D&D FB group I've not seen it in - hence the only one I'm still subbed to - is the D&D UK one. Indeed I've seen a few comments there re the other D&D groups, about those crazy Americans and how we Brits don't let politics infest our gaming, we're just here to play.

I'm sure there are people with strong socjus views at my D&D Meetup. They are welcome to play, same as everyone else, as long as they, like everyone else, are polite and respectful to their fellow players. So far (8 months in) it has not been an issue. I deleted one "Punch A Nazi - What D&D Alignment Are You?" meme from the Meetup's ancillary FB group; that's it. I didn't scold the person who posted it and she's still welcome to play.

Quote from: Motorskills;1055323Yeah, we didn't have the Satanic Panic and whatnot

Oh yes we did!
I grew up in Northern Ireland, and the D&D Satanic Panic was very much a thing there. But I've heard reports from other more socially conservative parts of the UK too.

Quote from: Omega;1055320The FF books and the CYOA series were not RPGs though and did not overall impact the RPG comminity. There were overlaps of interests just as there is overlaps with board games and wargames and later arcade and PC games. And I doubt shows like Big Bang Theory actually had as big an impact as some think.

Theres allways been overlaps of interests and as I noted prior I think the current interest in these gameplay vids is the dearth of official viewing media related.

S'mon and I appear to be of a certain British age, so I don't want to generalise too much, but I honestly wouldn't put the CYOA and FF books in the same category when it came to the RPG hobby in the UK. I remember buying a couple of CYOA books and being astonished at how bad they were - or perhaps they were simply "American".
I never saw them on sale again, while FF went from strength to strength and spawned a bunch of things that were either peripheral RPGs or full-on RPGs.

And speaking for myself I would totally dispute that the FF books didn't impact the RPG hobby (in the UK). I'll let S'mon field that one if he likes.

Quote from: S'mon;1055325Oh yes we did!
I grew up in Northern Ireland, and the D&D Satanic Panic was very much a thing there.

That I can believe!

Quote from: S'mon;1055324I've not seen it in real life, but it's widespread on the Facebook D&D groups, which are a lot bigger than the forums these days. I was a member of a bunch for a while. There was a lot of it in the main 5e Facebook group, which didn't surprise me so much, but I was shocked to see it in the Swords & Wizardry group. The only D&D FB group I've not seen it in - hence the only one I'm still subbed to - is the D&D UK one. Indeed I've seen a few comments there re the other D&D groups, about those crazy Americans and how we Brits don't let politics infest our gaming, we're just here to play.

I'm sure there are people with strong socjus views at my D&D Meetup. They are welcome to play, same as everyone else, as long as they, like everyone else, are polite and respectful to their fellow players. So far (8 months in) it has not been an issue. I deleted one "Punch A Nazi - What D&D Alignment Are You?" meme from the Meetup's ancillary FB group; that's it. I didn't scold the person who posted it and she's still welcome to play.

Yeah, I can relate to that, the USA does seem spikier overall than the UK (related in large part to the geographical and cultural divides that Blighty doesn't have). Brits tend to be more....well....British, and that's part of it too.

Can we safely say that the USA and the UK are different countries with different cultures and thus different reactions to TTRPGs as an industry and a hobby?

Quote from: Motorskills;1055319I honestly don't see this in the significant numbers of places that I go. We have eight (ish) games shops within an hour of me, five are within twenty minutes of me. We have multiple conventions (both gaming-focus and gaming-peripheral). Adventurers' League is huge, but my local FB and MeetUp pages are bombarded with people starting new games and looking for games (of all kinds). The Gauntlet started round here and is now pretty much global.

I travel all the time (work), that enables me to go to conventions around the country, I stop by games stores I didn't know about the day before just to poke around and chat, I occasionally meet gamer-strangers for a beer.

All I see is a growing, thriving hobby, with all creeds and colours represented, an age demographic that I am happily astonished by (5e has been awesome for bringing people back after 20+ years away).

Other than on webforums like these...where is this negativity being represented? The FTF hobby has always had plenty of social misfits, it strikes me that that is not the issue out in the wild.  I game with plenty of conservatives, it really isn't politics that is the problem IMO. I suspect it is people that are unable to restrain their intolerance for others, and bring their issues to the table.

From someone getting punched at Gencon by someone else who attended. To another poster who post I can no longer find having a panic attack because when they went to Gencon this year everything and anything was offending that person. To rpg.net banning people at a whim for not swallowing the kool-aid. With Paizo telling me and others how to run our games. Their is a issue and I'm hoping your right it's not as prevalent yet to pretend it's not is being deliberately both obtuse and perhaps too naive imo. To be clear what Paizo wrote in their 2E core needed to be included. It could have been done with the overly obvious attempt to cater to SJWs and proclaim their new found wokeness. A simple Don't be a jerk, make sure everyone at the table is comfortable playing in your game. Allow everyone and anyone despite gender, race or religion. More importantly have fun. We don't need to be told to be inclusive, nannies and psychologists from Paizo. Many in the hobby were inclusive before that word existed.

 As much as some in the hobby want to pretend otherwise playing rpgs for many years was a stigmatized hobby. It became less worse with mmos because at least with rpgs it is a group activity and not some guy locked in his basement playing WOW hours or even weeks on end. For the longest time we were the social outcasts. So those treated like that with few exceptions tend to usually be more open minded. It's only with the Big Bang Theory that suddenly Geek became cool. To be fair though our hobby did have it's share of very socially inept and perhaps also having mental health issues too. I gamed with a few for too many years before I gave up and moved on.

The leftist "inclusion" big lie is the same as it has always been:  

1. A group is reasonably inclusive to a variety of viewpoints, because of a mix of classical liberal, free-thinking conservative, libertarian, and various others that wouldn't necessarily be inclusive on their own but see no reason to rock the boat.
2. Leftist member rocks the boat.  Not happy that X isn't "included".  Get their way.  Arguments are all about how everyone needs to be included.
3. As soon as they get enough of their like-thinking members, they start running people out.  It starts with whichever target they can isolate the easiest.  During this period, they deny vigorously that this is what they are doing.
4. As soon as they get control, they change the rules to ensure they never lose it, and the purge begins of anyone that even thinks about standing up to them.
5. Finally, the organization collapses as they turn on each other.

The method is standard Alinksy.  (Also standard Islamic Jihad tactics, including the lying, though I think the similarity of tactics is more because it works, than any particularly affinity.)

The bolded part of point #3 is where we are with some of the people on this board, and their rabid habit of sneering at any discussion about this happening.  They are bald-faced liars.

Quote from: Motorskills;1055313Finally, you can't have it both ways. Either gaming was always for all, or the folks giving you sleepless nights were invited in. Pick one.

This seems like a false choice. People were always invited in. Until recently most of them chose not to join because sitting around a table pretending to kill orcs was considered weird.

While it's not a big deal, it's at least mildly annoying to people who spent years minding their own business pursuing their (widely stigmatized) hobby to now find themselves recast as evil elitist gatekeepers who were shutting out the wretched masses who wanted to play. I started gaming in the early 80s. Those of us who kept playing after the initial fad faded away didn't spend our time chasing desperate would be players away from our tables, and it's a B.S. rewriting of history to claim otherwise.

Quote from: Dimitrios;1055350This seems like a false choice. People were always invited in. Until recently most of them chose not to join because sitting around a table pretending to kill orcs was considered weird.

While it's not a big deal, it's at least mildly annoying to people who spent years minding their own business pursuing their (widely stigmatized) hobby to now find themselves recast as evil elitist gatekeepers who were shutting out the wretched masses who wanted to play. I started gaming in the early 80s. Those of us who kept playing after the initial fad faded away didn't spend our time chasing desperate would be players away from our tables, and it's a B.S. rewriting of history to claim otherwise.

Eh, I'll concede the point, or meet you halfway at least. From the late 70s (in the UK) I never saw the hobby as stigmatized as such (albeit except in certain religious corners), even if it was geeky/nerdy/whatever. Plenty of hobbies and interests fell into a similar category.

I think what is different now is the hobby is expanding (along with all sorts of peripheral interests) and is actively welcoming people of all stripes, whereas in previous decades the acceptance might previously have been passive, or grudging, or not at all, (whether consciously or not). And where the acceptance is not adequately embraced, there is significant noise, whereas before either people just sucked it up or drifted away.

Quote from: Dimitrios;1055350This seems like a false choice. People were always invited in. Until recently most of them chose not to join because sitting around a table pretending to kill orcs was considered weird.

While it's not a big deal, it's at least mildly annoying to people who spent years minding their own business pursuing their (widely stigmatized) hobby to now find themselves recast as evil elitist gatekeepers who were shutting out the wretched masses who wanted to play. I started gaming in the early 80s. Those of us who kept playing after the initial fad faded away didn't spend our time chasing desperate would be players away from our tables, and it's a B.S. rewriting of history to claim otherwise.

Exactly this. I don't think Millennials really understand how stigmatized geek culture was in the 80s. If you were interested in wizards and orcs, Conan or Star Wars, past the age of about 12, you were regarded as socially and emotionally stunted. Parents were worried that you were stuck in early childhood and would never grow up. Teachers discouraged you from reading 'trash' fantasy novels. And of course, to any girls who found out, you might as well have been pushing dumptrunks around a sandbox at age 14 making vroom-vroom noises. D&D was probably the most socially toxic activity a teenaged boy could engage in. There weren't girls and visible minorities clamouring to be allowed into the gates - if you were a nerd in 1985, you were living in the trash ditch outside the gates, and passerby would sneer and hold their noses as they passed. Girls, being more socially attuned than boys at that age, wouldn't be caught dead playing D&D.

That's the cohort that make up the bulk of long-time RPG players, and who became designers and authors in the 90s and 2000s. They didn't drive away people who weren't white male nerds - they were shunned or ignored by them. Nobody would have spurned or mistreated a woman who tried to join my group in 1991 - we would have been astonished they wanted to play in the first place.

One of many cognitive defects in the SJW mindset is the inability to understand that different people like different things. To them, everything is explained by structural oppression. Any activity that has more male and female participants is exclusionary and misogynistic (though curiously, they don't feel the same about the many hobbies that skew almost exclusively female). And like True Believers of all stripes, they furiously denounce anyone who challenges their simplistic orthodoxies.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1055349The leftist "inclusion" big lie is the same as it has always been:  

1. A group is reasonably inclusive to a variety of viewpoints, because of a mix of classical liberal, free-thinking conservative, libertarian, and various others that wouldn't necessarily be inclusive on their own but see no reason to rock the boat.
2. Leftist member rocks the boat.  Not happy that X isn't "included".  Get their way.  Arguments are all about how everyone needs to be included.
3. As soon as they get enough of their like-thinking members, they start running people out.  It starts with whichever target they can isolate the easiest.  During this period, they deny vigorously that this is what they are doing.
4. As soon as they get control, they change the rules to ensure they never lose it, and the purge begins of anyone that even thinks about standing up to them.
5. Finally, the organization collapses as they turn on each other.

The method is standard Alinksy.  (Also standard Islamic Jihad tactics, including the lying, though I think the similarity of tactics is more because it works, than any particularly affinity.)

The bolded part of point #3 is where we are with some of the people on this board, and their rabid habit of sneering at any discussion about this happening.  They are bald-faced liars.

People like Motorskills will never see the error in their thinking, unless something drastic happens. They're like the Terminator: they can't be reasoned with and will never stop until they're destroyed*. Luckily, they do this to themselves with very little provocation.

*No, I'm not advocating for you to be smooshed in an industrial press or harmed in any other way. I figured I'd just head off your outrage at being “threatened”.