So having kind of liked the old Colonial Gothic game I checked out the new version Flames of Freedom on Drivethru and found the designers had gone woke between the old edition and the new one. It has some general woke nonsense like saying you should, not can, use X cards to prevent traumatizing people in the game and having a Native American man in 1776 that uses "they" as his pronoun, and announcing the development team included
But what I'm interested in here is where in the new game it is against the rules to play a character who is sexist towards women, wantonly kill innocent people, or purchase the labor contract of an indentured servant and you are expected to play characters with diverse religious beliefs. I wonder what peoples' feelings are about this being included in the rules. It strikes me as unethical for a game designer to tell players what personality traits their characters are not allowed to have, what religions their characters should believe in, or what actions the characters are not allowed to take. I've seen recent games that go to excessive lengths to indicate how inclusive they are, but this is the first time I've seen one that makes it AGAINST THE RULES to have a racist character. On the one hand, it's the designer's game and they can obviously make whatever rules they want, and I'm all for including rules that include game mechanics for personality where appropriate such as in Pendragon, but on the other hand it strikes me as unethical for a roleplaying game designer to tell his customers that they aren't allowed to play characters with certain personality traits and/or aren't allowed to have their characters engage in certain behaviors. Even though the rules are obviously easily ignored, it still seems to violate the spirit of a roleplaying game. I'm curious about other players and game designers' thoughts about this.