It seems over the last couple years that I've been apart of forums, discord servers, the subreddits, . the overwhelming majority are woke or run by extremely woke people.

its annoying in my case cause I'm somewhat shit at hiding my power level so to speak, so it becomes very clear I'm not on the take, and I tend to get banned because I'm earnest and I don't bow down to struggle sessions.

Beyond merely that, these spaces become in a practical sense unusable, designers who couldn't design worth a damn, merely building a vehicle for their politics and nothing more.

Beyond this site, or building your own, it feels like everyone else in the hobby has rank the kool aid or won't speak out, sites like this are little islands in the hobby space that care about the theory and the craft of the hobby.

The only other types of places out there are owned by Bro-SR types or /tg/ on 4chan, which are not the brightest bulbs one can find, and typically just play arm chair theorist or play coattails with Gyax looking for "the true D&D"

It's this  turn of events that concerns me far more than whether or not WOTC or Piazo are woke, they might have the market share but they don't control the town sqaure.

It's when the town square, the public areas of speaking and where free speech is had that get infiltrated or co-opted, that's dangerous, that can kill a hobby more assuredly than if WOTC vanished overnight.

Addressing the original question...

I think they are definitely predominantly woke but... I'm not sure they are hopeless.

Traditionally, ttrpg players have more "lefty" politics.  Nerd culture has always been a thing of the left.  This used to mean that it attracted a lot of social outcasts and kids who did not really "fit in" with the cool crowds.  I like to think we were just more interesting...

Either way. I think there are a few main factors fueling the DnD/TTRPG craze.

1. Stranger things made it cool. No denying that one.

2. There is a demonstrable drop in socialization and social skills in the millennial and post millennial generations who grew up interacting via screens.  TTRPGs are social games and I think they offer these generations a chance to socialize in a fun way, something that they are desperately lacking.

3. People are generally sheep, and the common consensus that they are being exposed to in youth is that woke is in.  Because they are young and have no experience with life, they are simply internalizing what they are taught.  It's hard for people to break out of their bubbles.  But I think they eventually will as they get older.

Just as importantly, and to address your other points, the wokies make crap content. This is in no small part due to the fact that they infiltrate existing franchises and then hire for nepotism and ideological purity rather than merit.  Thus, you get teams full of incompetent people who were only hired to either check a box or because they were "one of us."

I think the best way to unwoke the community is to...

1. Make better content. (Easy enough)
2. Promote that content so more people are exposed to it.
3. Be welcoming to those who want to wander from woke.  (Ie Don't badger them and don't shove "based" down their throats)
4. Form our own communities that hold greater appeal due to the previously mentioned things.  I think this site is a good place to do that.

I really would like to add emphasis to the content promotion aspect.  People in the non-woke community need to put more effort into promoting the creative content of others in the community and maybe even form business alliances with other creators. (You make the world and I'll help make content for it).

Just my thoughts.

The vast majority of gamers just go along to get along and they aren't "woke" at their own tables.

The problem is that woketards don't join communities, they infiltrate them.  The goal is not to be apart of what's going on but to embed themselves into the decision making process somehow to control the public discourse.  Often, they seek positions of janitors and moderators so they can control the flow of information.

Yesterday I was looking for reviews of the Adventures In Time And Space game, with an eye to using it with the old FASA Doctor Who adventures (classic lore with a more modern game system.) Most of the hits I got were from the big purple, so I just skipped over them.

A big, popular gaming forum, plenty of posts to get an average feel for a game, so it should be a useful resource. Except I don't trust a word their members have to say, especially about anything related to the increasingly woke Nu-Who franchise.

A large resource one can't trust, is more useless than a small limited resource. I'd rather go to a GeoCities fansite full of dead links than trawl rpg.net

The problem is that it only takes a few people to infiltrate and take over one of these forums.  One or two worm their way into positions of power.  They bring in others like them.  They start changing the rules and moving and changing the Overton Window to match their own worldview.  It doesn't take long for people with similar views to realize that, as long as they have the right positions and use the right jargon, they can behave however they like without repercussions.  The forum becomes an intensely hostile place for anyone who disagrees or just doesn't agree hard enough.  This will just get worse and worse over time until they aren't even pretending that they aren't banning people for wrongthink.  People don't speak up because they know they will get dogpiled and banned for their trouble.  The people they are arguing with run the place and have no problem abusing their authority to get rid of people who backtalk them.  I don't think Stranger Things has much to do with it.  I was watching this happen years before that show came out.  They had thoroughly taken over TBP long before that.  Whether the average gamer believes this stuff or not is irrelevant since people like us have no say at all.  They don't give a single, solitary shit what we think.  Many would happily have us taken out and shot if they had the power to do so.  I don't mean figuratively either.  It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is.  Whether they allow a product to be promoted has nothing to do with quality.  If you have the right politics, they will allow you to promote your product and silence your critics no matter how worthless it is.  If they don't like you, they will ban any mention of you or your product no matter how good it is.  The actual product and its quality don't really matter.  A lot of these people don't play rpgs anyway so whether a product is actually useful at the table doesn't matter to them at all.  They buy and talk about games as a virtue signal.  They don't actually play them.  These are the people who will buy something like Candela Obscura and never realize that large chunks of the game just aren't there because they will never ever try to play it.

I think it's not even woke (although that is a predominant issue), but mods with power trips. This is really an outlier that while pundit is quick to ban Jew haters, there's very little else that's just a matter of expressing your opinion that gets you banned. Other self-professed non-woke forums will be run by mods who will get in an argument with you and then ban you for arguing with them. Mods with power trips of course find woke ideology very appealing, it gives them a convenient excuse to go on a trip. But even without woke ideology, they'll still do it.

These aren't TTRPG communities, they're online TTRPG communities.  The distinction is significant.  The internet largely skews left now because it skews younger.  I would bet solid money that the table of older guys sitting in the back of the game store with their AD&D books is not a bunch of wokies, but you aren't going to find them posting on r/rpg or harassing game developers on twitter for microaggressions.  That's why OMG THE OSR IS FULL OF FASCISTS, it tends to be older players who aren't bowing to current trends and conventions, where the latest stuff is getting the newer younger people hopping on the bandwagon.

Quote from: Valatar on December 20, 2023, 03:04:05 PM
These aren't TTRPG communities, they're online TTRPG communities.  The distinction is significant.  The internet largely skews left now because it skews younger.  I would bet solid money that the table of older guys sitting in the back of the game store with their AD&D books is not a bunch of wokies, but you aren't going to find them posting on r/rpg or harassing game developers on twitter for microaggressions.  That's why OMG THE OSR IS FULL OF FASCISTS, it tends to be older players who aren't bowing to current trends and conventions, where the latest stuff is getting the newer younger people hopping on the bandwagon.

All the high schoolers I know right now skew right, if anything, and they're not the kind that I ran into in typical right wing circles. I think with the past generations young = left may be true, but the youngest generation is more right than its predecessor. They're also not the kind in traditional online communities, like forums.

Quote from: Valatar on December 20, 2023, 03:04:05 PM
These aren't TTRPG communities, they're online TTRPG communities.  The distinction is significant.  The internet largely skews left now because it skews younger.  I would bet solid money that the table of older guys sitting in the back of the game store with their AD&D books is not a bunch of wokies, but you aren't going to find them posting on r/rpg or harassing game developers on twitter for microaggressions.  That's why OMG THE OSR IS FULL OF FASCISTS, it tends to be older players who aren't bowing to current trends and conventions, where the latest stuff is getting the newer younger people hopping on the bandwagon.

Wrong, it skews left BECAUSE leftards managed to become the moderators and have squashed all dissenting voices. Which is why GenZ is skewing more right like Migo points out:

The natural rebellious nature of the youth is working, since the censorious, anti-fun, fuddy-duddy, intollerant cunts in power ARE all leftards, it follows that the younger generations will rebell against the status quo.

Now, if only the right managed to avoid letting their own lunatics to get into power once the pendulum swings in their favour... we might have a chance as a civilization.

Quote from: Captain_Pazuzu on December 19, 2023, 07:30:42 PM
Traditionally, ttrpg players have more "lefty" politics.  Nerd culture has always been a thing of the left.

Eh, it's been countercultural.  Sometimes that's been left-ish but sometimes not.

The issue is definitely not that a lot of players of whatever game having this or that politics.  It's because there's a few loud activist types who believe they are making the world better by finding people who they disagree with and shitting down their throats.  This is because they've been taught that their enemies are just regular people who have different politics than them, so they set about hurting them using whatever tools they have at hand.

That's a new thing and it's definitely a left/liberal thing that is being injected into the culture top down.  The guy who would sometimes just say his  politics and defend it in some thread 10 years ago will now explain how his politics isn't politics IT'S CALLED BEING A DECENT HUMAN BEING and YOU CAN SEE YOURSELF TO THE DOOR and blah blah blah blah

That's the only reason it's an issue.  These people are doing an activism on twitter, in their games, and they advocate and bother for mod positions so they can ban any dissent.  They are just loud and annoying, and deserve unlimited pushback.

For sure the forums and biased moderation have been a part of the woke-ification of gaming. Also just broader trends of corporate censorship, woke corporate stances and messaging, and ESG, I feel. It all interconnects and helps screw over the hobby. Something to be said for the expanded politicization of TTRPGs, too. As well as rules being made for "appropriate conduct" of players, gms, and the like at the table. Such as with Rokugan and the like.

I think online communities are woke, but probably not the hobby as a whole. I would say the hobby is very liberal but overall not very extreme in any direction. I think the hyper-woke are the terminally online types who spend more time talking about the game than playing it, because they have no social life or politics and the joy of power are their real hobbies. The same sort of dynamic played out towards the end of 3e's lifecycle in a smaller, less political way. The terminally online people constantly talked about meme characters, exploits, character optimization, and how 3e was a failed design because reasons A-Z (most of which were not real problems in actual play, just theorycrafted hallucinations). This online culture's echo chamber created the received wisdom that was internalized by the 4e designers and nearly killed the game. The same dynamic is playing out today I think. Woke is ascendant because all of the loudest people, sitting in the most visible social positions, are insisting that it's the end of history. Just like the last time it was supposedly the end of history, it will eventually collapse. The only question is what else might collapse with it.

One other thing that's not often spoken of but really influences nerdy online communities is insecurity. There is a type of person who I think is over-represented online who was traumatized by High School or whatever growing up. The people who never move on from this trauma end up insecure and desperate for social approval because they haven't realized that they don't need a stranger's approval to enjoy something. Stacy wouldn't go out with them in High School (because they played D&D, definitely not because they were a disgusting fat goblin with a dull personality) but now that Stacy watches Stranger Things or whatever, that means that Stacy approves of the hobby and so now they can enjoy without shame. These are the kind of people who push the idea that D&D is making the world safe for democracy by pushing the woke stuff. As long as it's joyless and awful, that means its deep and meaningful art, and that means that pretending to enjoy it might make them a serious adult instead of a child still hopelessly frightened by the idea of talking to Stacy.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on December 21, 2023, 02:27:20 AM
I think online communities are woke, but probably not the hobby as a whole. I would say the hobby is very liberal but overall not very extreme in any direction. I think the hyper-woke are the terminally online types who spend more time talking about the game than playing it, because they have no social life or politics and the joy of power are their real hobbies. The same sort of dynamic played out towards the end of 3e's lifecycle in a smaller, less political way. The terminally online people constantly talked about meme characters, exploits, character optimization, and how 3e was a failed design because reasons A-Z (most of which were not real problems in actual play, just theorycrafted hallucinations). This online culture's echo chamber created the received wisdom that was internalized by the 4e designers and nearly killed the game. The same dynamic is playing out today I think. Woke is ascendant because all of the loudest people, sitting in the most visible social positions, are insisting that it's the end of history. Just like the last time it was supposedly the end of history, it will eventually collapse. The only question is what else might collapse with it.

One other thing that's not often spoken of but really influences nerdy online communities is insecurity. There is a type of person who I think is over-represented online who was traumatized by High School or whatever growing up. The people who never move on from this trauma end up insecure and desperate for social approval because they haven't realized that they don't need a stranger's approval to enjoy something. Stacy wouldn't go out with them in High Sschool (because they played D&D, definitely not because they were a disgusting fat goblin with a dull personality) but now that Stacy watches Stranger Things or whatever, that means that Stacy approves of the hobby and so now they can enjoy without shame. These are the kind of people who push the idea that D&D is making the world safe for democracy by pushing the woke stuff. As long as it's joyless and awful, that means its deep and meaningful art, and that means that pretending to enjoy it might make them a serious adult instead of a child still still hopelessly frightened by the idea of talking to Stacy.

Oh yeah, it was totally MY fault my bullies bullied me...

Guess you were the one doing the bullying in your youth.

Nope, the woke are the cool kids and the mean girls, using the exact same tactics they used back then.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on December 21, 2023, 02:51:51 AM
Guess you were the one doing the bullying in your youth.

Far from it, I just have no sympathy anymore for people who can't get their shit together and develop confidence in themselves instead of seeking the approval of others. Seeking approval of awful people (bullies) is how a big portion of the rot spreads.

I actually feel like nerds and grognards are the ones mounting the most resistance to the woke.

1) Because they are aware of things within the industry more generally.

2) Because they know more about gaming outside recent Woke norms.

3) Because those who are or were socially unpopular to begin with have less to fear from peer pressure and more strength of ties within their limited groups and communities.

4) Because they care about TTRPGs, including things most others would potentially dismiss as inconsequential or trivia.

5) Because they cared and were exposed to it before it was cool/wokified, and have nostalgia for the before-times.