Quote from: Brad on January 12, 2025, 10:42:52 AM

Quote from: Jason Coplen on January 12, 2025, 09:48:30 AMI've considered adding a country of woke people to my fantasy world. My players would have a blast fighting them, rallying an army to conquer them, and so on. A country of 1 HP people might be too easy to conquer. But I'm afraid we'd all get laughing too hard to continue.

Just release a bunch of house cats and watch them kill everyone.

That would backfire horribly. They are likely to have far more of their heroes presige-classed into Childless Cat Lady than your players' (even if they have a Childless Cat Dude patron).

Remember, a black character (or non-white character) isn't of itself "woke". It's the combination of having mostly/all non-white/non-male characters because you feel that it's "problematic" to have white males that makes it woke; Even for example a supplement in a fantasy Africa wouldn't be woke just because "omg black people", in fact it would be stupid to not have the vast majority be black peoplein that case.

"Woke" comes from crap like making almost every class picture in the 2024 PHB a non-white or non-male. It comes from having left-wing activist artists who put things like, while it wasn't in the prompt, top surgery scars on a male character (the Draconic Sorcerer) because it pushes a message. It comes from having every demi-human race magically have all the same diversities and skintones as humans, and throwing in obvious token gay/interracial characters there for "representation". It comes from statements like "white guys like me can't leave the hobby fast enough", from calling anyone not wanting the above stuff as "racists", "fascists", or "bigots".

THAT'S when it becomes woke.

Here's a picture from Alarums & Excursions #19 from 1977. Female characters hanging the usual suspects in effigy over their treatment of women in D&D. One of the main takeaways from this is that the people angry are men who play female characters, not actual women.

Being offended on behalf of other people is one of the hallmarks of the type of leftism that spawned wokeness.

Might be remotely palatable if they actually has even an iota of the creators they are vilifying, but of course they do not.

Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 04:54:03 PMDiversity itself isn't woke, but forced diversity for marketing purposes is generally regarded as woke.

Hi Grima!

No, having a diverse cast of Iconics in 2000 wasn't woke. Having Regdar die constantly was sort-of Woke, it was certainly a passive aggressive dick move by the artists. Regdar, despite looking Hispanic, was the big guy with big sword that IME the non-nerdy male newbies were most likely to identify with & want to play. Jozan the Cleric was whiter and being 3e, far more powerful.

WotC were Liberal, not Woke. Paizo went Full Retard in 2012 but it took years and the ousting of Mearls for WotC to follow. Tales from the Radiant Citadel I'd say was marketed as a Woke product.

Quote from: Nobleshield on January 12, 2025, 07:32:06 PMRemember, a black character (or non-white character) isn't of itself "woke". It's the combination of having mostly/all non-white/non-male characters because you feel that it's "problematic" to have white males that makes it woke; Even for example a supplement in a fantasy Africa wouldn't be woke just because "omg black people", in fact it would be stupid to not have the vast majority be black peoplein that case.

"Woke" comes from crap like making almost every class picture in the 2024 PHB a non-white or non-male. It comes from having left-wing activist artists who put things like, while it wasn't in the prompt, top surgery scars on a male character (the Draconic Sorcerer) because it pushes a message. It comes from having every demi-human race magically have all the same diversities and skintones as humans, and throwing in obvious token gay/interracial characters there for "representation". It comes from statements like "white guys like me can't leave the hobby fast enough", from calling anyone not wanting the above stuff as "racists", "fascists", or "bigots".

THAT'S when it becomes woke.

Yes, Woke requires an element of hatred.

Quote from: jeff37923 on January 10, 2025, 07:32:43 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on January 10, 2025, 07:16:07 PM...
If that's the criteria then Armchair gamer got it in one:

The: "...tipping point at when 'official D&D' began to tilt in a more progressive/revolutionary direction away from its roots, it would be the acquisition of TSR by WotC and the resulting shift in the game's local and corporate culture."

And I can give receipts with quotes for this upon request.

Please, do! I think that this is an important process to nail down in one location while it is still fresh in our minds.

I recently turned some previous post on the subject into an article on it:

7 Tabletop Gaming Professionals Who Pushed Dungeons & Dragons To The Woke Mind Virus
https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/7-tabletop-gaming-professionals-who

It was inevitable from the moment Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR way back in 1997 that players and their former creatives would be treated poorly.

One could point to signs of what we would now call "SJW entryism" early in the hobby. But by and large, the hobby was run and played by normal people in the beginning, and they did not gain any real traction.

Gygax himself was an insurance underwriter who loved wargaming. Virtually everyone who came into the hobby in the beginning had life experience outside of RPGs before they decided to try and turn their hobby into a business.

The real nail in the coffin for relatively normal people running the RPG hobby came when Peter Adkinson finally got his hands on the D&D IP.

Behold, WOTC corporate culture circa 1997: https://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/

GENCON Owner & Former WOTC CEO, Peter Adkins

Quote"The first thing I noticed about my new employer was how the halls of the offices ran rampant with representatives of alt culture. Up to that point managers' hiring practices seemingly consisted of recruiting anyone they gamed, partied or slept with, and preferably all three. If you were a Seattle gamer in 1994-95, you had to be willfully incompetent to not get a job at Wizards."

"Best of all, though, we would fuck like rabbits. On "Who Knew? Day" employees wore badges proclaiming their sexual orientation. Intimate relationships sprouted like mold on bread, cutting across departments and seniorities with the hierarchy-smashing fervor of our consensus-driven team meetings. Heedless of status, even peasants and princes coupled, and fell apart.

The example was set right at the top: Peter and his wife, also an employee, had an open marriage. Wizards was a big horny summer camp, and we were starring in the teen sex comedy of our fevered dreams. ..."

The quotes from the Salon piece show that from the beginning, the workplace culture at WOTC was set early on. This standard was set from the top down by the CEO himself. Yes, Hasbro bought out WOTC in 1999, and to a degree the employees were required to clean up their act. On the surface. But the damage was already done.

If there is one thing that we know to be true; It is that once these people get in positions of power, they will only hire fellow travelers that also think like them. Virtually without exception.

The result of fostering such an internal culture manifested itself in the 'crack team' of game designers that Adkinson had put in charge of D&D 3e being proto-woke leftists that utterly despised their core sales demographic and openly resented having to cater to them.


Johnathan Tweet: 3E Designer https://www.enworld.org/threads/3e-and-the-feel-of-d-d.667269/

Mr. Tweet openly talks about excising any references of or to real-world mythology when worldbuilding for official 3e D&D. Making the game entirely self-referential. Effectively doing a "Year Zero" of D&D lore...

Quote"...one part of the process I enjoyed was describing the world of D&D in its own terms, rather than referring to real-world history and mythology. When writing roleplaying games, I enjoy helping the player get immersed in the setting, and I always found these references to the real world to be distractions."
...
"...by the time we were working on 3rd Ed, D&D had had such a big impact on fantasy that we basically used D&D as its own source."
...
"We were fortunate that by 2000 D&D had such a strong legacy that it could stand on its own without reference to Earth history or mythology."

Mr. Tweet also openly discusses pushing a "diversity and inclusion" agenda for 3e. https://www.enworld.org/threads/diversity-in-d-d-third-edition.668462/

Quote"One way we diverged from the D&D heritage, however, was by making the game art more inclusive."
...
"Luckily for us, Wizards of the Coast had an established culture of egalitarianism, and we were able to update the characters depicted in the game to better reflect contemporary sensibilities."
...
"By the time I was working on 3E, I had been dealing with the pronoun issue for ten years."

Notice how furious he gets when the WOTC Marketing team of the time (TSR holdovers long since purged.) insisted that they throw their biggest sales demographic a bone:

Quote"...the marketing team added Regdar, a male fighter, to the mix of iconic characters. We designers weren't thrilled, and as the one who had drawn up the iconic characters I was a little chapped."

And to his utter horror:

Quote"... Regdar proved popular, and if the marketing team was looking for an attractive character to publicize, they got one."

Monte Cook, Former TSR Developer https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?t=16418

Monte Cook originally posted on his now-defunct livejournal blog revealing his social justice proclivities.

Mr. Cook was an early leftist cultural colonizer who had embedded himself within TSR. We can see how he gleefully reveals his true colors when he feels that the corporate culture has swung in his favor.

Quote"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. ..."

"It was a thumb to the nose of the old TSR requirement."

"At least that was our intention."

"...to the credit of a number of people--artists, art directors, designers and editors alike--our disdain for Regdar made its way into a lot of art. If you look closely, Regdar is getting thrashed on most of the early pieces he shows up in. (Look for his ignominious fate on the original DM's Screen, for example.) ..."

Vicariously killing off their core sales demographic was viewed as a necessary part of art commissions!


James Jacobs: ( D&D Writer and Current Creative Director for the Pathfinder Adventure Paths). https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2iha2?Monte-Cook-on-Gender-and-Race-in-DD-Art

Quote"Killing off Captain Whitebread is indeed a time-honored tradition in WotC books. I've written my fair share of art orders for those books, and have made sure to have Regdar get blasted or ruined or murdered a few times myself (such as at the end of Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk). It's a fun little semi-secret D&D tradition!"

The idea that this kind of behavior would not continue to manifest itself over time would have been wishful thinking at best.

One only needs to read what the recent 5th edition stewards over at WOTC have openly said about the game's core sales demographic in order to see the culmination of this anti-white male attitude some twenty-seven years later.

Kyle Brink, Former Executive Producer for D&D at WotC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPDc3DVHwKo&t=2946s  at 49:06 in:

Brink famously wanted white males out of the hobby, as he said on a YouTube channel before his departure.

Quote"And I think there's been mistakes made in years past where people assumed that D&D players were all, y'know, white dudes in a basement. Which has been a faulty assumption for a lot of years and gets more and more false every day and so in my viewpoint, honestly, guys like me can't leave soon enough for this hobby."

Christopher Perkins, Current Creative Director of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast:

https://x.com/ChrisPerkinsDnD/status/1012567486737158145

Quote"White men. I mean, really. Where to begin."

https://x.com/ChrisPerkinsDnD/status/997571380102090753

Quote"On this week's episode of "Dumb White Men":..."

This doesn't leave much doubt on where he stands, does he?

WotC has been so desperate to move on from its 'toxic' white male fanbase that even the creators of the game are no longer immune to progressive scrutiny.


Jason Tondro, current D&D Senior Designer/Project Lead:

After smearing Gary Gygax as a rampant sexist for daring to thumb his nose at the feminist busy-bodies of his era, he proceeded to declare the concerns of their traditional fanbase at his unwarranted smear as beneath all notice.

Quote
"... It never occurred to me I'd arise the ire of the grognards. It's obvious now that I look back on it, but I just don't those critiques seriously even now. I consider these people not worth listening to, ..."

Everything we are currently seeing with the direction of D&D in 2024, from the 'diversity' in the art to the writing, has been the natural result of the D&D brand being run by leftists that have only gotten bolder over time in turning the product that they have control over into a propaganda vehicle for their ideology.

And it will not get better anytime soon. The people currently in charge of D&D are a continuation of the anti-white male corporate culture that has been part of WotC since the beginning. Everything we have seen so far points to WotC following the same destructive path that we have already seen taken by their fellow travelers in the TV, Movie, comic, and now video game industries. It is no longer a matter of if, just when.

Quote from: Jaeger on January 18, 2025, 03:19:40 PM

Quote from: jeff37923 on January 10, 2025, 07:32:43 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on January 10, 2025, 07:16:07 PM...
If that's the criteria then Armchair gamer got it in one:

The: "...tipping point at when 'official D&D' began to tilt in a more progressive/revolutionary direction away from its roots, it would be the acquisition of TSR by WotC and the resulting shift in the game's local and corporate culture."

And I can give receipts with quotes for this upon request.

Please, do! I think that this is an important process to nail down in one location while it is still fresh in our minds.

I recently turned some previous post on the subject into an article on it:

7 Tabletop Gaming Professionals Who Pushed Dungeons & Dragons To The Woke Mind Virus
https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/7-tabletop-gaming-professionals-who

It was inevitable from the moment Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR way back in 1997 that players and their former creatives would be treated poorly.

One could point to signs of what we would now call "SJW entryism" early in the hobby. But by and large, the hobby was run and played by normal people in the beginning, and they did not gain any real traction.

Gygax himself was an insurance underwriter who loved wargaming. Virtually everyone who came into the hobby in the beginning had life experience outside of RPGs before they decided to try and turn their hobby into a business.

The real nail in the coffin for relatively normal people running the RPG hobby came when Peter Adkinson finally got his hands on the D&D IP.

Behold, WOTC corporate culture circa 1997: https://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/

GENCON Owner & Former WOTC CEO, Peter Adkins

Quote"The first thing I noticed about my new employer was how the halls of the offices ran rampant with representatives of alt culture. Up to that point managers' hiring practices seemingly consisted of recruiting anyone they gamed, partied or slept with, and preferably all three. If you were a Seattle gamer in 1994-95, you had to be willfully incompetent to not get a job at Wizards."

"Best of all, though, we would fuck like rabbits. On "Who Knew? Day" employees wore badges proclaiming their sexual orientation. Intimate relationships sprouted like mold on bread, cutting across departments and seniorities with the hierarchy-smashing fervor of our consensus-driven team meetings. Heedless of status, even peasants and princes coupled, and fell apart.

The example was set right at the top: Peter and his wife, also an employee, had an open marriage. Wizards was a big horny summer camp, and we were starring in the teen sex comedy of our fevered dreams. ..."

The quotes from the Salon piece show that from the beginning, the workplace culture at WOTC was set early on. This standard was set from the top down by the CEO himself. Yes, Hasbro bought out WOTC in 1999, and to a degree the employees were required on the to clean up their act. On the surface. But the damage was already done.

If there is one thing that we know to be true; It is that once these people get in positions of power, they will only hire fellow travelers that also think like them. Virtually without exception.

The result of fostering such an internal culture manifested itself in the 'crack team' of game designers that Adkinson had put in charge of D&D 3e being proto-woke leftists that utterly despised their core sales demographic and openly resented having to cater to them.


Johnathan Tweet: 3E Designer https://www.enworld.org/threads/3e-and-the-feel-of-d-d.667269/

Mr. Tweet openly talks about excising any references of or to real-world mythology when worldbuilding for official 3e D&D. Making the game entirely self-referential. Effectively doing a "Year Zero" of D&D lore...

Quote"...one part of the process I enjoyed was describing the world of D&D in its own terms, rather than referring to real-world history and mythology. When writing roleplaying games, I enjoy helping the player get immersed in the setting, and I always found these references to the real world to be distractions."
...
"...by the time we were working on 3rd Ed, D&D had had such a big impact on fantasy that we basically used D&D as its own source."
...
"We were fortunate that by 2000 D&D had such a strong legacy that it could stand on its own without reference to Earth history or mythology."

Mr. Tweet also openly discusses pushing a "diversity and inclusion" agenda for 3e. https://www.enworld.org/threads/diversity-in-d-d-third-edition.668462/

Quote"One way we diverged from the D&D heritage, however, was by making the game art more inclusive."
...
"Luckily for us, Wizards of the Coast had an established culture of egalitarianism, and we were able to update the characters depicted in the game to better reflect contemporary sensibilities."
...
"By the time I was working on 3E, I had been dealing with the pronoun issue for ten years."

Notice how furious he gets when the WOTC Marketing team of the time (TSR holdovers long since purged.) insisted that they throw their biggest sales demographic a bone:

Quote"...the marketing team added Regdar, a male fighter, to the mix of iconic characters. We designers weren't thrilled, and as the one who had drawn up the iconic characters I was a little chapped."

And to his utter horror:

Quote"... Regdar proved popular, and if the marketing team was looking for an attractive character to publicize, they got one."

Monte Cook, Former TSR Developer https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?t=16418

Monte Cook originally posted on his now-defunct livejournal blog revealing his social justice proclivities.

Mr. Cook was an early leftist cultural colonizer who had embedded himself within TSR. We can see how he gleefully reveals his true colors when he feels that the corporate culture has swung in his favor.

Quote"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. ..."

"It was a thumb to the nose of the old TSR requirement."

"At least that was our intention."

"...to the credit of a number of people--artists, art directors, designers and editors alike--our disdain for Regdar made its way into a lot of art. If you look closely, Regdar is getting thrashed on most of the early pieces he shows up in. (Look for his ignominious fate on the original DM's Screen, for example.) ..."

Vicariously killing off their core sales demographic was viewed as a necessary part of art commissions!


James Jacobs: ( D&D Writer and Current Creative Director for the Pathfinder Adventure Paths). https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2iha2?Monte-Cook-on-Gender-and-Race-in-DD-Art

Quote"Killing off Captain Whitebread is indeed a time-honored tradition in WotC books. I've written my fair share of art orders for those books, and have made sure to have Regdar get blasted or ruined or murdered a few times myself (such as at the end of Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk). It's a fun little semi-secret D&D tradition!"

The idea that this kind of behavior would not continue to manifest itself over time would have been wishful thinking at best.

One only needs to read what the recent 5th edition stewards over at WOTC have openly said about the game's core sales demographic in order to see the culmination of this anti-white male attitude some twenty-seven years later.

Kyle Brink, Former Executive Producer for D&D at WotC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPDc3DVHwKo&t=2946s  at 49:06 in:

Brink famously wanted white males out of the hobby, as he said on a YouTube channel before his departure.

Quote"And I think there's been mistakes made in years past where people assumed that D&D players were all, y'know, white dudes in a basement. Which has been a faulty assumption for a lot of years and gets more and more false every day and so in my viewpoint, honestly, guys like me can't leave soon enough for this hobby."

Christopher Perkins, Current Creative Director of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast:

https://x.com/ChrisPerkinsDnD/status/1012567486737158145

Quote"White men. I mean, really. Where to begin."

https://x.com/ChrisPerkinsDnD/status/997571380102090753

Quote"On this week's episode of "Dumb White Men":..."

This doesn't leave much doubt on where he stands, does he?

WotC has been so desperate to move on from its 'toxic' white male fanbase that even the creators of the game are no longer immune to progressive scrutiny.


Jason Tondro, current D&D Senior Designer/Project Lead:

After smearing Gary Gygax as a rampant sexist for daring to thumb his nose at the feminist busy-bodies of his era, he proceeded to declare the concerns of their traditional fanbase at his unwarranted smear as beneath all notice.

Quote
"... It never occurred to me I'd arise the ire of the grognards. It's obvious now that I look back on it, but I just don't those critiques seriously even now. I consider these people not worth listening to, ..."

Everything we are currently seeing with the direction of D&D in 2024, from the 'diversity' in the art to the writing, has been the natural result of the D&D brand being run by leftists that have only gotten bolder over time in turning the product that they have control over into a propaganda vehicle for their ideology.

And it will not get better anytime soon. The people currently in charge of D&D are a continuation of the anti-white male corporate culture that has been part of WotC since the beginning. Everything we have seen so far points to WotC following the same destructive path that we have already seen taken by their fellow travelers in the TV, Movie, comic, and now video game industries. It is no longer a matter of if, just when.

OUTSTANDING!

Thank you for posting this!

Quote from: hedgehobbit on January 13, 2025, 10:54:03 AMHere's a picture from Alarums & Excursions #19 from 1977. Female characters hanging the usual suspects in effigy over their treatment of women in D&D. One of the main takeaways from this is that the people angry are men who play female characters, not actual women.

I would guess that's it's driven, directly or indirectly, by liberal white women.  That group seems to drive all of this woke insanity.

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 19, 2025, 08:46:47 AM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on January 13, 2025, 10:54:03 AMHere's a picture from Alarums & Excursions #19 from 1977. Female characters hanging the usual suspects in effigy over their treatment of women in D&D. One of the main takeaways from this is that the people angry are men who play female characters, not actual women.

I would guess that's it's driven, directly or indirectly, by liberal white women.  That group seems to drive all of this woke insanity.

I'd tend to agree with yosemitemike that liberal white women are key drivers.

hedgehobbit, why is your takeaway that this isn't actual women? I don't know the context of that particular picture, but Alarums & Excursions was run by Lee Gold, who is a white woman that I know mostly from her other game design work.

So out of curiosity, based on the complaint's I've heard about 2024's art direction, and the supposedly lack of white males compared to say, black females... I decided to find out for myself.

I took up my physical copy, and in my totally scientific method over about 20 minutes...Looked at every single individual piece of art from the covers to the pages inside...

I Decided to count the number of white males in the art and the number of black females.

I didn't rely on "Species"... A white male could be an elf, a dwarf, a Gnome and even a Tiefling. The same thing went for the Black females as well..

In the case of some of the Tieflings, their skin color and hair designs are ambiguous enough I couldn't assign them a "race/ethnicity" one way or another...and so they were not counted... but in the case of the female Tiefling with dreadlocks and the male tiefling with bright golden blonde hair I erred on black and white respectively.

The results, and of course this is my own guess, looking at the pictures came down to this.

White male: 70 instances in the art.
Black female: 25 instances in the art.

Now overall, yes the Player's Handbook is more DIVERSE in the sense that there are Asian looking purple elves, Indian (sub-continent not native) Halfings, South American Indian Dwarven Clerics and so on, ect, ect. The point is, the art itself isn't really showing a huge bias towards anyone... You really are getting White Male Orcs, African Human Male Wizards, Asian Halfing Sorcerors, hell, the picture for the "Human" species section even features a Little person (I really like that piece, as it's pretty much the gamut of Human ethnicities, all are together dressed in European high medieval clothing, clearly watching a Jousting tourney)

And the rules for Human now allow you to play a little person, as in you can decide your size is medium or small. Which is a very simple, non-invasive way of doing rep. It just says in the section on size, "Humans can be medium or small" you look above, see the little person in the group picture and go "Ahh, I get it."

But the point I'm trying to make is.... the "No white males, and full of black females" is a huge exaggeration.

The main effort in the art (which is all very high quality even if you may not like the subject matter) really seems to be in showcasing the non-human races have their own ethnic ranges as well. They're almost all really good, and a lot of fun. You have a bunch of Gnomes working together to make a robot, and it's black, white, Asian gnomes, being gnomes. The Halflings are all sharing a fine family meal together. The Dwarves are forging, The elves are hanging out in trees and now also are shown to be green and purple if you want too. Overall the species art splats are great.

Oh except for the Orcs.

The Orcs is fucking terrible, because apparently while every other fantasy race can have variety... Orcs are only allowed to be Mexican. NO EXCEPTIONS (except for all the other Orc art in the book).

Anyways, I just want to point out, it's important to actually verify this stuff for yourself sometimes. The supposed level of "Woke" in the PHB is really overblown. There's no obvious transgender characters, and while there were a few character art pieces that were androgenous, I chalk it more up to their Gen Z Fantasy fashion than trying to put actual "Non-binary" characters in.

Overall it seems wizard's decided to be far more business minded in terms of making the PHB open to the original audiences than trying to alienate them in the name of "Activism". That's apparently more Paizo's thing.