Quote from: GhostNinja on April 12, 2023, 11:49:54 AM

Quote from: Omega on April 12, 2023, 06:16:58 AM
WotC is obsessed with being "Edgy" and "SAFE!" at the same time.

They override half the established monster lore with "DEMON!" or some DEMON! influence and then turn around and try to witewash anything "problematic"

They are the most scizo company ever.

No doubt the new version/edition is going to mention X-Cards in the rules and recommend their use.

I ran a game at a convention and I was given X-Cards.  Placed them in the empty seat next to me along with the other books I was storing to the side and never mentioned them and no one brought them up.

I hate everything about "safety tools" at a game table. I think the thing I miss most about "the good ol' days" is the fact that regardless of where you landed politically or even socially there was always a sense of common decency that the entire culture agreed on. Even people who participated in culturally unsavory activities like BDSM and swinging had the self-awareness to know it wasn't something that was brought up in polite company. There was a social compact about what was and wasn't socially acceptable to bring up in public on a wide variety of subjects. And people kept their physical and mental conditions to themselves when possible. Nowadays it's some perverse badge of honor to list all of your problems - mental ones especially. So now we have to deal with people who freak the fuck out over the stupidest shit imaginable. Don't get me wrong, I've had issues with stupid shit, but I put effort into making sure that it didn't define the boundaries of whatever I was doing with other people. And if I felt it was going to be a big enough problem, I didn't participate in whatever the activity was.

The way I see it, if I had severe mental issues where talking about insanity "triggered" me, I wouldn't be playing games like Call of Cthulhu. But this is 2023, and we're supposed to have serious conversations about how mental illness is portrayed in such games because an honest portrayal might offend somebody. 

Quote from: Omega on April 12, 2023, 06:16:58 AMWotC is obsessed with being "Edgy" and "SAFE!" at the same time.

They override half the established monster lore with "DEMON!" or some DEMON! influence and then turn around and try to witewash anything "problematic"

They are the most scizo company ever.

It all makes sense when you realize wokists worship at the feet of some groups, but actively loathe and attack Christians. Christianity, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, it's a connected web of evil to them.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 12, 2023, 07:33:51 AM
Ooh! I really wanna play a "Child of Different Humanoid Kinds"! That sounds like a catchy name to have on your character sheet! I'm sure there's gonna be enough space in your sheet's race species "Humanoid Kind" section to write all that down.

Well between that and the gender-wheel and variable pronouns section, we will need to make some room...here, get rid of this stats section. Math is racist anyway.

Quote from: GhostNinja on April 12, 2023, 11:49:54 AM

No doubt the new version/edition is going to mention X-Cards in the rules and recommend their use.

I ran a game at a convention and I was given X-Cards.  Placed them in the empty seat next to me along with the other books I was storing to the side and never mentioned them and no one brought them up.

Oh my Goddess! Ignoring X-cards is one of my triggers! How could you...I can't even...

Anyway If I would wager why "half-species" are racist in wokist eyes, is because the idea that races have inherent traits, and those traits can be transferred or mixed or such is racist. Rather than every race being interchangeable.

The reason this doesn't apply to half-demons is that wokists have not applied this philosophy to demons yet. But give it 5 years and eventually the reason demons are evil will be revealed to be systematic and not innate.

Quote from: Wasteland Sniper on April 12, 2023, 12:19:44 PM
I hate everything about "safety tools" at a game table. I think the thing I miss most about "the good ol' days" is the fact that regardless of where you landed politically or even socially there was always a sense of common decency that the entire culture agreed on. Even people who participated in culturally unsavory activities like BDSM and swinging had the self-awareness to know it wasn't something that was brought up in polite company. There was a social compact about what was and wasn't socially acceptable to bring up in public on a wide variety of subjects. And people kept their physical and mental conditions to themselves when possible. Nowadays it's some perverse badge of honor to list all of your problems - mental ones especially. So now we have to deal with people who freak the fuck out over the stupidest shit imaginable. Don't get me wrong, I've had issues with stupid shit, but I put effort into making sure that it didn't define the boundaries of whatever I was doing with other people. And if I felt it was going to be a big enough problem, I didn't participate in whatever the activity was.

The way I see it, if I had severe mental issues where talking about insanity "triggered" me, I wouldn't be playing games like Call of Cthulhu. But this is 2023, and we're supposed to have serious conversations about how mental illness is portrayed in such games because an honest portrayal might offend somebody. 

Agreed. Safety tools are ridiculous. If they actually did anything useful, we would see them at pubs, restaurants, sporting events, or other places where people socialize. You're at the pub having a beer. What if the guy next to you says something harmful!!!??? Better demand the bartender set out an X card. Or pack your own.

Safety tools are for the socially maladapted who, rather than try to adapt to regular social situations, demand that the whole group cater to their fragility. Or worse, they have a disability fetish and want others to validate it.

Every generation has their flaws, and this generation's flaws include safety tools, ghosting, and similar things motivated by fear of regular human interaction.

I posted this in Pundit's "Full Klan" thread, but that is currently occupied by a side-topic and it seems like some posters missed it...

----

I haven't even seen any complaints about half-elves even from a vocal minority. I have seen a vocal minority complaining about orcs and half-orcs as the "savage primitive" trope -- and about PC ability adjustments as linking race to what job one is good at. So I agree there is a vocal minority like this, but I haven't seen them complaining about half-elves or stout halflings.

So this seems like pro-active reframing at most, though now it seems like they are walking back on Crawford's statement. Last week, they had this brief statement:

QuoteOptions for creating characters descended from more than one species are not being removed from Dungeons & Dragons.

Proposed adjustments to character origins have been open to the community since August 2022 and will be revised further: http://spr.ly/6019OyEdH

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/DnDBeyond/status/1644119263286812672

That links to the D&DOne documents from last year, which has this sidebar:

QuoteCHILDREN OF DIFFERENT HUMANOID KINDS

Thanks to the magical workings of the multiverse, Humanoids of different kinds sometimes have children together. For example, folk who have a human parent and an orc or an elf parent are particularly common. Many other combinations are possible.

If you'd like to play the child of such a wondrous pairing, choose two Race options that are Humanoid to represent your parents. Then determine which of those Race options provides your game traits: Size, Speed, and special traits. You can then mix and match visual characteristics—color, ear shape, and the like—of the two options. For example, if your character has a halfling and a gnome parent, you might choose Halfling for your game traits and then decide that your character has the pointed ears that are characteristic of a gnome.

Finally, determine the average of the two options' Life Span traits to figure out how long your character might live. For example, a child of a halfling and a gnome has an average life span of 288 years.

Source: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/one-dnd/character-origins

----

To which GhostNinja asked:

Quote from: GhostNinja on April 12, 2023, 11:44:02 AM
So was Crawford talking out of turn if WOTC had to walk back his statement?

I have no idea. It seems possible, since it was a short quote in an interview rather than a written official announcement.

Quote from: Wasteland Sniper on April 12, 2023, 12:19:44 PM
I hate everything about "safety tools" at a game table. I think the thing I miss most about "the good ol' days" is the fact that regardless of where you landed politically or even socially there was always a sense of common decency that the entire culture agreed on. Even people who participated in culturally unsavory activities like BDSM and swinging had the self-awareness to know it wasn't something that was brought up in polite company. There was a social compact about what was and wasn't socially acceptable to bring up in public on a wide variety of subjects. And people kept their physical and mental conditions to themselves when possible. Nowadays it's some perverse badge of honor to list all of your problems - mental ones especially. So now we have to deal with people who freak the fuck out over the stupidest shit imaginable. Don't get me wrong, I've had issues with stupid shit, but I put effort into making sure that it didn't define the boundaries of whatever I was doing with other people. And if I felt it was going to be a big enough problem, I didn't participate in whatever the activity was.

The way I see it, if I had severe mental issues where talking about insanity "triggered" me, I wouldn't be playing games like Call of Cthulhu. But this is 2023, and we're supposed to have serious conversations about how mental illness is portrayed in such games because an honest portrayal might offend somebody. 

I agree.  If you have to use safety tools to play an RPG you probably shouldn't be playing, you are too weak of a person to actually game.   I have said before and I will say again, if anyone comes up to my game and wants to play but use safety tools they will be not so nicely told to F Off.

I don't know if I am lucky or not but I have seen games in game stores and run games in game stores and never see safety tools.   I don't they took off the way the creators wanted them to and good.

I have a player who is 14 almost 15 and a 16 year old player (both girls) and they don't bring them up.  I think safety tools are big online and not so much in person.

Of course I keep things PG in my game because thats just how I have always run games.

Quote from: Grognard GM on April 12, 2023, 12:39:55 PM
Oh my Goddess! Ignoring X-cards is one of my triggers! How could you...I can't even...

Please don't lock me up and hand me over to the SJW's 

Quote from: rytrasmi on April 12, 2023, 01:00:58 PM
Agreed. Safety tools are ridiculous. If they actually did anything useful, we would see them at pubs, restaurants, sporting events, or other places where people socialize. You're at the pub having a beer. What if the guy next to you says something harmful!!!??? Better demand the bartender set out an X card. Or pack your own.

Safety tools are for the socially maladapted who, rather than try to adapt to regular social situations, demand that the whole group cater to their fragility. Or worse, they have a disability fetish and want others to validate it.

Every generation has their flaws, and this generation's flaws include safety tools, ghosting, and similar things motivated by fear of regular human interaction.

I totally agree.   Good GM/DM's will always be good and the crappy GM/DMs we hear about (who are a minority) will always suck and would never user safety tools in the first place so they solve nothing.

Just wait until the sensitivity readers discover D&D promotes monarchism.

Quote from: DocJones on April 12, 2023, 03:13:01 PM
Just wait until the sensitivity readers discover D&D promotes monarchism.

SHHHH not so loud.  Maybe they won't find out. 

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on April 12, 2023, 10:01:06 AM
I think what makes D&D work is it has a fairly simple and straight forward character creation process but other areas of the game are quite deep (large number of spells, magic items, fair amount of combat rules, etc). Where I think the designers are going wrong, at least in my humble opinion, is they have been complicating the character creation process and trying to make it more customizable but it works because you just pick class and race and those come packaged with abilities and flavor. There are lots of games out there that don't do that, that are more customizable (I make games that have more involved character creation). When D&D starts chasing that experience I have found it loses something. That said, simple character creation shouldn't be confused for the whole thing needing to be simple. D&D isn't the most complicated game in the world, but it also isn't the simplest or easiest to learn (when I think back to AD&D, that took time to figure out reading through the book).

I'm not sure what you mean here - it seems to me that D&D character creation was simple in B/X, but hasn't been simple since WOTC came to town?! I have players with PhDs in Mathematics who take pregens rather than faff about trying to figure out 5e character "builds", even in their second or third campaign. (Agreed that other games can be much tougher; I'm trying to figure out how to get my players interested in something skills-based like Mythras, but even WWN might be too fiddly for some.)

Quote from: GhostNinja on April 12, 2023, 01:57:12 PM
I totally agree.   Good GM/DM's will always be good and the crappy GM/DMs we hear about (who are a minority) will always suck and would never user safety tools in the first place so they solve nothing.

Some of my coworkers - heck, some of my family members - think I'm a good DM, some think I'm a bad DM. It's hella subjective, because different players are looking for different things in their games. There might be a rough consensus here, and _some_ people in the hobby might be wrong, but I don't think we have a monopoly on THE FUN(TM).

I hope that's hyperbole, because anyone with a PhD in Math who can't grasp how to make a 5e character should surrender their degree stat. Ten year olds do it all the time.

Quote from: Festus on April 13, 2023, 08:14:22 PM
I hope that's hyperbole, because anyone with a PhD in Math who can't grasp how to make a 5e character should surrender their degree stat. Ten year olds do it all the time.

Hollywood has spun the myth that being wired for hard math makes people a genius, whereas a lot of such people are hyper-specialized to the point of being useless at everything else. Much like being a chess grand master means you're fantastic at memorization, rather than a tactical genius who can bring down governments.

Quote from: Naburimannu on April 13, 2023, 04:12:28 AM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on April 12, 2023, 10:01:06 AM
I think what makes D&D work is it has a fairly simple and straight forward character creation process but other areas of the game are quite deep (large number of spells, magic items, fair amount of combat rules, etc). Where I think the designers are going wrong, at least in my humble opinion, is they have been complicating the character creation process and trying to make it more customizable but it works because you just pick class and race and those come packaged with abilities and flavor. There are lots of games out there that don't do that, that are more customizable (I make games that have more involved character creation). When D&D starts chasing that experience I have found it loses something. That said, simple character creation shouldn't be confused for the whole thing needing to be simple. D&D isn't the most complicated game in the world, but it also isn't the simplest or easiest to learn (when I think back to AD&D, that took time to figure out reading through the book).

I'm not sure what you mean here - it seems to me that D&D character creation was simple in B/X, but hasn't been simple since WOTC came to town?! I have players with PhDs in Mathematics who take pregens rather than faff about trying to figure out 5e character "builds", even in their second or third campaign. (Agreed that other games can be much tougher; I'm trying to figure out how to get my players interested in something skills-based like Mythras, but even WWN might be too fiddly for some.)

I just mean the way you choose race plus class and how those are packages of abilities (rather than more customizable systems where there is more fiddling). I agree it has been slowly moving towards more involved character creation. And obviously there is a huge difference from something like B/X versus 3E. But the conversation I am seeing now around half races seems to indicate a further increase towards fiddly customization (take with a grain of salt as I only played a little 4e and have played very little 5E as well).

Quote from: Grognard GM on April 13, 2023, 08:42:45 PM

Quote from: Festus on April 13, 2023, 08:14:22 PM
I hope that's hyperbole, because anyone with a PhD in Math who can't grasp how to make a 5e character should surrender their degree stat. Ten year olds do it all the time.

Hollywood has spun the myth that being wired for hard math makes people a genius, whereas a lot of such people are hyper-specialized to the point of being useless at everything else. Much like being a chess grand master means you're fantastic at memorization, rather than a tactical genius who can bring down governments.

Nevertheless, anyone who has successfully navigated ~20+ years of education kindergarten through grad school should be able to choose standard array, a race, a class, and add single digit numbers together. You don't even have to roll HP since every 1st level character starts with the max. And if that's just too damn hard, D&D Beyond will do it all for you point and click. There's plenty to dislike about 5e and I can see deciding that the time spent creating a custom character isn't worth the effort. But complaining that character creation is overly complex is absurd. Sounds more like a player who can't be bothered than one who is overwhelmed.