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TSR is Coming Back? Or it is Back?

Started by Shawn Driscoll, June 17, 2021, 07:17:39 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

HappyDaze

Quote from: Mistwell on June 28, 2021, 05:01:36 PM
Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 02:32:56 PM
Even after the requirement was lifted in the WotC era, he still reveled in seeing the white male character repeatedly thrashed/killed, etc.

Sick. Pathological.

This is the sort of cuck that would take a knee for BLM. Or worse.

This is all kind of coming together these days. Violence against Redgar. A couple decades later, violence against whites, Critical Race Theory, etc.

It's degenerate minds of people like him who allow this to happen.

Hey old man yelling at the clouds, have you considered that Redgar getting his ass kicked was just a funny running in-joke in the company at that point and not some giant conspiracy to trash white men in general? I feel very confident Redgar getting his butt kicked on the cover of some books did not lead to "violence against whites" in general nor "critical race theory" in general.
Did it contribute to the ideas that Fighters were the butt monkeys of 3e?

Mistwell

Quote from: HappyDaze on June 28, 2021, 05:03:27 PM
Quote from: Mistwell on June 28, 2021, 05:01:36 PM
Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 02:32:56 PM
Even after the requirement was lifted in the WotC era, he still reveled in seeing the white male character repeatedly thrashed/killed, etc.

Sick. Pathological.

This is the sort of cuck that would take a knee for BLM. Or worse.

This is all kind of coming together these days. Violence against Redgar. A couple decades later, violence against whites, Critical Race Theory, etc.

It's degenerate minds of people like him who allow this to happen.

Hey old man yelling at the clouds, have you considered that Redgar getting his ass kicked was just a funny running in-joke in the company at that point and not some giant conspiracy to trash white men in general? I feel very confident Redgar getting his butt kicked on the cover of some books did not lead to "violence against whites" in general nor "critical race theory" in general.
Did it contribute to the ideas that Fighters were the butt monkeys of 3e?

You mis-spelled bards?

Valatar

Quote from: Mistwell on June 28, 2021, 05:01:36 PM
Hey old man yelling at the clouds, have you considered that Redgar getting his ass kicked was just a funny running in-joke in the company at that point and not some giant conspiracy to trash white men in general? I feel very confident Redgar getting his butt kicked on the cover of some books did not lead to "violence against whites" in general nor "critical race theory" in general.

While I don't disagree with this, I am curious whether you'd be quite as sanguine if they'd been intentionally making a black character get murdered in as many pictures as possible because he was foisted on them by corporate.

jhkim

Quote from: Silas1066 on June 28, 2021, 04:37:39 PM
Quote from: Jaeger on June 28, 2021, 02:48:16 PM
These guys have hated the mainstream RPG demographic for years. Because they have been taught to hate themselves, and so they hate you too.

People need to wake up and understand; The left is incapable of understanding hyperbole, or figures of speech, and they take everything literally.

The Left/SJW's are not joking about what they want to do to us. They mean every word.

I would add that it is very true that to be "anti-woke" is not to be a member of any political ideology

to be anti-woke means to be rational, reasonable, and prudent in one's worldview

As far as I can see, Jaeger is saying that *all* of the Left are SJWs and all hate hetero white men. i.e. Being woke, SJW, or Left are the same thing.

I've been playing RPGs since grade school in the 1970s, with mostly other left-leaning players (since I've lived in primarily liberal areas). Overwhelmingly, we've just been interested in having fun play for ourselves, nothing about hating others. What our games have featured is plenty of variety in game systems, settings, and players.

There isn't a giant conspiracy of the left to destroy play. Since the beginning, liberals have been roughly half of all players, and they've tended to create and play games with more liberal themes. What there has been is increasing drive - particularly online - to make everything more politically partisan and hateful. And this forum has been just as full of that hate and acrimony as anywhere else.


Quote from: Silas1066 on June 28, 2021, 04:37:39 PM
You don't need to be a right-winger to reject the following woke propositions / agendas

This isn't the place to discuss political points. I'd encourage you to post about it on Pundit's Forum.


Quote from: Silas1066 on June 28, 2021, 04:37:39 PM
I am not required to respect this or to indulge these ideas. I see no reason to argue with someone over flat-earth or 73 genders.

and we have WOTC, Gencon, Origins, etc. all paying lip-service to this stuff and creating policy on it.

Here's the thing. One doesn't have to argue about this stuff. If I play with someone who is a Mormon, and I don't agree that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God -- I don't have to argue with them about it. I can just play a game with them. I just have to treat them with respect as a fellow player. If someone is a Flat-Earther, I'll disagree with them too, but if they can treat the other players with respect, then I'm fine playing with them.

1989

#139
Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 05:36:08 PM
Quote from: Silas1066 on June 28, 2021, 04:37:39 PM
Quote from: Jaeger on June 28, 2021, 02:48:16 PM
These guys have hated the mainstream RPG demographic for years. Because they have been taught to hate themselves, and so they hate you too.

People need to wake up and understand; The left is incapable of understanding hyperbole, or figures of speech, and they take everything literally.

The Left/SJW's are not joking about what they want to do to us. They mean every word.

I would add that it is very true that to be "anti-woke" is not to be a member of any political ideology

to be anti-woke means to be rational, reasonable, and prudent in one's worldview

As far as I can see, Jaeger is saying that *all* of the Left are SJWs and all hate hetero white men. i.e. Being woke, SJW, or Left are the same thing.

I've been playing RPGs since grade school in the 1970s, with mostly other left-leaning players (since I've lived in primarily liberal areas). Overwhelmingly, we've just been interested in having fun play for ourselves, nothing about hating others. What our games have featured is plenty of variety in game systems, settings, and players.

There isn't a giant conspiracy of the left to destroy play. Since the beginning, liberals have been roughly half of all players, and they've tended to create and play games with more liberal themes. What there has been is increasing drive - particularly online - to make everything more politically partisan and hateful. And this forum has been just as full of that hate and acrimony as anywhere else.


Quote from: Silas1066 on June 28, 2021, 04:37:39 PM
You don't need to be a right-winger to reject the following woke propositions / agendas

This isn't the place to discuss political points. I'd encourage you to post about it on Pundit's Forum.


Quote from: Silas1066 on June 28, 2021, 04:37:39 PM
I am not required to respect this or to indulge these ideas. I see no reason to argue with someone over flat-earth or 73 genders.

and we have WOTC, Gencon, Origins, etc. all paying lip-service to this stuff and creating policy on it.

Here's the thing. One doesn't have to argue about this stuff. If I play with someone who is a Mormon, and I don't agree that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God -- I don't have to argue with them about it. I can just play a game with them. I just have to treat them with respect as a fellow player. If someone is a Flat-Earther, I'll disagree with them too, but if they can treat the other players with respect, then I'm fine playing with them.

That's all fine and dandy, but the problem arises when WotC writes it into the game with an agenda:

- every WotC adventure must now have a gay NPC (says Crawford)
- "gender" inserted into the Race & Sex section in the PHB
- Mearls calling everyone a bigot if they don't condone sodomy
- all old TSR products (PDFs) carrying a disclaimer (because of those bad old racist white men)
- etc.

- and the example in this thread:

- being forced to include a black female iconic character in the D&D rulebooks and then always killing her off in the artwork just because she is a black woman

(Oh, sorry, that was a white male fighter)

Chris24601

Quote from: Thornhammer on June 26, 2021, 03:35:45 PM
"Make Fantasy Great Again" would have brought forth much more hilarity.
Thank you... I now have the tagline for the back cover of my book;

"Make Adventuring Great Again!"

Shasarak

Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 05:36:08 PM
As far as I can see, Jaeger is saying that *all* of the Left are SJWs and all hate hetero white men. i.e. Being woke, SJW, or Left are the same thing.

I've been playing RPGs since grade school in the 1970s, with mostly other left-leaning players (since I've lived in primarily liberal areas). Overwhelmingly, we've just been interested in having fun play for ourselves, nothing about hating others. What our games have featured is plenty of variety in game systems, settings, and players.

There isn't a giant conspiracy of the left to destroy play. Since the beginning, liberals have been roughly half of all players, and they've tended to create and play games with more liberal themes. What there has been is increasing drive - particularly online - to make everything more politically partisan and hateful. And this forum has been just as full of that hate and acrimony as anywhere else.

I think that jhkim is right.  There is not an exact Venn diagram overlap between "the left" and "bigoted jerk," despite the best efforts of bigoted jerks to make it seem so.
Who da Drow?  U da drow! - hedgehobbit

There will be poor always,
pathetically struggling,
look at the good things you've got! -  Jesus

Shasarak

Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 05:54:17 PM
That's all fine and dandy, but the problem arises when WotC writes it into the game with an agenda:

- every WotC adventure must now have a gay NPC (says Crawford)
- "gender" inserted into the Race & Sex section in the PHB
- Mearls calling everyone a bigot if they don't condone sodomy
- all old TSR products (PDFs) carrying a disclaimer (because of those bad old racist white men)
- etc.

- and the example in this thread:

- being forced to include a black female iconic character in the D&D rulebooks and then always killing her off in the artwork just because she is a black woman

(Oh, sorry, that was a white male fighter)

It is funny, in my current Paizo produced adventure path, how many evil white female slavers the party has had to kill.

Well thats equality for you.
Who da Drow?  U da drow! - hedgehobbit

There will be poor always,
pathetically struggling,
look at the good things you've got! -  Jesus

oggsmash

Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 02:18:54 PM
Quote from: Jaeger on June 22, 2021, 02:41:31 AM
Monte Cook: Originally Posted by Monte Cook on his now defunct livejournal blog.
https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?t=16418

Select quotes:
"When I worked at TSR, there was always basically a truism in cover art--the central figure had to be a white male. Most of us actually helping to create the cover art, either by conceiving it or actually creating it, hated that kind of outlook, ..."
...
"...when D&D was bought by WotC and we started working on 3E, we really felt that this was a time when we could break this mold. ..."
Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 11:38:20 AM
You know, it's funny, I used to think that most gamers were basically like me, and, for sure, the creators even more so. We were all just one big/small community of gamers who loved smiting evil. How naïve I was.

It turns out that the evil these designers want to smite is . . . heterosexual white men.

The move towards diversity has been going on for a while. The 1970s and 1980s had a lot of intentional branching out from white men in general -- like 1980s Saturday morning cartoons with deliberate diversity. The D&D cartoon had a black girl and white girl as two of the three leaders (with Bobby, Presto, and Eric as younger and/or comic relief). The 1980 Basic Set had a woman as the most prominent lead.



However, the later BECMI sets and 2nd edition went back to only white men on the cover. Cook's comment is that TSR created a corporate requirement that *only* white men appear on the cover. Maybe Cook does hate white men, but I think it is possible to be against a corporate requirement for only white men on the cover, and not hate white men.

  I have to LOL at you calling this a reach towards diversity.  This is marketing people knowing what is going to get a 12 year old boy's pulse to quicken. I have no doubt they wanted more women to play (being half the population and all), but that cover has jack shit to do with getting women to play.

Ghostmaker

Quote from: Mistwell on June 28, 2021, 05:07:01 PM
Quote from: HappyDaze on June 28, 2021, 05:03:27 PM
Quote from: Mistwell on June 28, 2021, 05:01:36 PM
Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 02:32:56 PM
Even after the requirement was lifted in the WotC era, he still reveled in seeing the white male character repeatedly thrashed/killed, etc.

Sick. Pathological.

This is the sort of cuck that would take a knee for BLM. Or worse.

This is all kind of coming together these days. Violence against Redgar. A couple decades later, violence against whites, Critical Race Theory, etc.

It's degenerate minds of people like him who allow this to happen.

Hey old man yelling at the clouds, have you considered that Redgar getting his ass kicked was just a funny running in-joke in the company at that point and not some giant conspiracy to trash white men in general? I feel very confident Redgar getting his butt kicked on the cover of some books did not lead to "violence against whites" in general nor "critical race theory" in general.
Did it contribute to the ideas that Fighters were the butt monkeys of 3e?

You mis-spelled bards?
Stop being retarded. I've gone into extensive detail explaining why fighters in 3E got the shit end of the stick. If you want I'll link you to my number crunching and lay out the issues.

Ratman_tf

Quote from: oggsmash on June 28, 2021, 07:29:32 PM
Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 02:18:54 PM
Quote from: Jaeger on June 22, 2021, 02:41:31 AM
Monte Cook: Originally Posted by Monte Cook on his now defunct livejournal blog.
https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?t=16418

Select quotes:
"When I worked at TSR, there was always basically a truism in cover art--the central figure had to be a white male. Most of us actually helping to create the cover art, either by conceiving it or actually creating it, hated that kind of outlook, ..."
...
"...when D&D was bought by WotC and we started working on 3E, we really felt that this was a time when we could break this mold. ..."
Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 11:38:20 AM
You know, it's funny, I used to think that most gamers were basically like me, and, for sure, the creators even more so. We were all just one big/small community of gamers who loved smiting evil. How naïve I was.

It turns out that the evil these designers want to smite is . . . heterosexual white men.

The move towards diversity has been going on for a while. The 1970s and 1980s had a lot of intentional branching out from white men in general -- like 1980s Saturday morning cartoons with deliberate diversity. The D&D cartoon had a black girl and white girl as two of the three leaders (with Bobby, Presto, and Eric as younger and/or comic relief). The 1980 Basic Set had a woman as the most prominent lead.



However, the later BECMI sets and 2nd edition went back to only white men on the cover. Cook's comment is that TSR created a corporate requirement that *only* white men appear on the cover. Maybe Cook does hate white men, but I think it is possible to be against a corporate requirement for only white men on the cover, and not hate white men.

  I have to LOL at you calling this a reach towards diversity.  This is marketing people knowing what is going to get a 12 year old boy's pulse to quicken. I have no doubt they wanted more women to play (being half the population and all), but that cover has jack shit to do with getting women to play.

Yeah, I don't think Erol Otis is a great example of "diversity" I think he just drew what he wanted and they bought it and slapped it in a game book.
Most of the women in early D&D art were supermodel-ish with perky boobs and sexy figures. Elmore and Parkinson spring to mind there. We've been treated to the reaction to those hussies being sexist and degrading!
The notion of an exclusionary and hostile RPG community is a fever dream of zealots who view all social dynamics through a narrow keyhole of structural oppression.
-Haffrung

SHARK

Quote from: Ratman_tf on June 28, 2021, 08:11:09 PM
Quote from: oggsmash on June 28, 2021, 07:29:32 PM
Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 02:18:54 PM
Quote from: Jaeger on June 22, 2021, 02:41:31 AM
Monte Cook: Originally Posted by Monte Cook on his now defunct livejournal blog.
https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?t=16418

Select quotes:
"When I worked at TSR, there was always basically a truism in cover art--the central figure had to be a white male. Most of us actually helping to create the cover art, either by conceiving it or actually creating it, hated that kind of outlook, ..."
...
"...when D&D was bought by WotC and we started working on 3E, we really felt that this was a time when we could break this mold. ..."
Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 11:38:20 AM
You know, it's funny, I used to think that most gamers were basically like me, and, for sure, the creators even more so. We were all just one big/small community of gamers who loved smiting evil. How naïve I was.

It turns out that the evil these designers want to smite is . . . heterosexual white men.

The move towards diversity has been going on for a while. The 1970s and 1980s had a lot of intentional branching out from white men in general -- like 1980s Saturday morning cartoons with deliberate diversity. The D&D cartoon had a black girl and white girl as two of the three leaders (with Bobby, Presto, and Eric as younger and/or comic relief). The 1980 Basic Set had a woman as the most prominent lead.



However, the later BECMI sets and 2nd edition went back to only white men on the cover. Cook's comment is that TSR created a corporate requirement that *only* white men appear on the cover. Maybe Cook does hate white men, but I think it is possible to be against a corporate requirement for only white men on the cover, and not hate white men.

  I have to LOL at you calling this a reach towards diversity.  This is marketing people knowing what is going to get a 12 year old boy's pulse to quicken. I have no doubt they wanted more women to play (being half the population and all), but that cover has jack shit to do with getting women to play.

Yeah, I don't think Erol Otis is a great example of "diversity" I think he just drew what he wanted and they bought it and slapped it in a game book.
Most of the women in early D&D art were supermodel-ish with perky boobs and sexy figures. Elmore and Parkinson spring to mind there. We've been treated to the reaction to those hussies being sexist and degrading!

Greetings!

Excellent points, Ratman!

Your commentary reminds me--and the shrieking about sexism, etc by the morons--about how in *decades* of playing and DMing campaigns, of the many women I have gamed with, not ONE OF THEM has said, "Yeah, my female character is a fugly, bloated hogg-beast. But she has a good personality! She's talented, strong and independent!"

NOT ONE WOMAN GAMER.

All of the women characters--the vast majority--have been gorgeous, yummy, sexy chewy things. A very few have been "Average Looking" at worst.

Women love playing sexy hot goddesses all the time. And they also make it explicitly clear that their characters are vamped up in style, too, dressed to kill, smelling good, and always looking fantastic. Again, the only exceptions to that being when the girls knew for certain they were going into some filthy, diseased dungeon. Only THEN did they leave the sexy vamp outfits and perfume packed away, and reluctantly put on something boring and practical.

I guarantee that most of the sexism whining comes from self-loathing "Male Feminists" or card-carrying feminist women. Most normal women love having sexy hot characters.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK
"It is the Marine Corps that will strip away the façade so easily confused with self. It is the Corps that will offer the pain needed to buy the truth. And at last, each will own the privilege of looking inside himself  to discover what truly resides there. Comfort is an illusion. A false security b

Jaeger

Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 05:36:08 PM

As far as I can see, Jaeger is saying that *all* of the Left are SJWs and all hate hetero white men. i.e. Being woke, SJW, or Left are the same thing.
...

All headed in the same direction, just at different points on the same path...

The Left as a movement has continually been moving further into SJW marxist territory this past century, it has just kicked into a really visible high gear in the past 20 years.

Yes you can find "reasonable" people on 'the left' to game with. I have done so myself

They are reasonable because they have not drifted as far left as the current year SJW's, and are in complete denial of the totalitarian direction that left wing politics has taken.

So yeah if you find some actual adults who are there to game and choose not to lose their shit over politics: i.e. 'agree to disagree' nothing wrong with that.

Congrats. You found some people with some modicum of self-respect left.

I know of some myself.

And they all still voted for Biden.
"The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge."

jhkim

Quote from: 1989 on June 28, 2021, 05:54:17 PM
That's all fine and dandy, but the problem arises when WotC writes it into the game with an agenda:

- every WotC adventure must now have a gay NPC (says Crawford)
- "gender" inserted into the Race & Sex section in the PHB
- Mearls calling everyone a bigot if they don't condone sodomy
- all old TSR products (PDFs) carrying a disclaimer (because of those bad old racist white men)
- etc.

- and the example in this thread:

- being forced to include a black female iconic character in the D&D rulebooks and then always killing her off in the artwork just because she is a black woman

(Oh, sorry, that was a white male fighter)

Saying that a white male must appear *somewhere* in each module doesn't seem like a big deal to me - certainly much less so than a requirement of the cover image. If one would prefer a module with no white males, it's trivial enough to change. (Oh, sorry, that was a gay character.)

Seriously - liberals and gay people played for years when modules weren't allowed to have gay characters, which was enforced by conservative politics. We generally didn't like this requirement, but we dealt with it and kept playing.



Quote from: oggsmash on June 28, 2021, 07:29:32 PM
Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2021, 02:18:54 PM
The move towards diversity has been going on for a while. The 1970s and 1980s had a lot of intentional branching out from white men in general -- like 1980s Saturday morning cartoons with deliberate diversity. The D&D cartoon had a black girl and white girl as two of the three leaders (with Bobby, Presto, and Eric as younger and/or comic relief). The 1980 Basic Set had a woman as the most prominent lead.
...
However, the later BECMI sets and 2nd edition went back to only white men on the cover. Cook's comment is that TSR created a corporate requirement that *only* white men appear on the cover. Maybe Cook does hate white men, but I think it is possible to be against a corporate requirement for only white men on the cover, and not hate white men.

  I have to LOL at you calling this a reach towards diversity.  This is marketing people knowing what is going to get a 12 year old boy's pulse to quicken. I have no doubt they wanted more women to play (being half the population and all), but that cover has jack shit to do with getting women to play.

These aren't mutually exclusive. I think the damsel-in-distress in the metal bikini on the first DMG was about sex appeal and not diversity. However, the Basic Set magic user is in a more prominent position than the fighter and appears as a real adventurer in a position of power. So I would say this is a cross-over of both. Likewise, in the D&D cartoon, Diana was in a fur bikini which appealed to boys in the audience, but she was also a leader in the group who spoke for herself.

More broadly, diversity isn't exclusively for appealing to alternate audiences. The theory of some is that gender and racial identity is always foremost. i.e. So if there is a black character on the cover, that will only appeal to black players and not white players - and vice-versa if there is a white character on the cover. There might be some statistical tendency to that effect, but I think there is plenty of exceptions.

It was more notable to me that later sets and AD&D2 abandoned this and had lone white men - which I found strange particularly as it doesn't illustrate the typical adventuring party.

Jaeger

Quote from: SHARK on June 28, 2021, 08:25:12 PM
...

All of the women characters--the vast majority--have been gorgeous, yummy, sexy chewy things. A very few have been "Average Looking" at worst.

Women love playing sexy hot goddesses all the time. And they also make it explicitly clear that their characters are vamped up in style, too, dressed to kill, smelling good, and always looking fantastic. ...

ROTFL!! So true my brother.

I GM a group in which 3 of 5 players are women.

Some of which profess 'feminist' values.

I have yet to see a single one of them make an ugly PC.

Funny how that works...
"The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge."