I'm seeing quite a few new people piling on to the anti-woke brigade upon learning that woke has over taken DnD even though that has been happening for over a decade and they just hadn't noticed until now. So I did my best to explain it and realized that I didn't have all the details. So, I'd like your help.
What were the key moments in the woke infiltration? When ere they? What people and forums were instrumental in pushing wokeness into gaming? What events were use to push the woke narrative?
I had told the guy I was talking to today that the whole "Orcs are racist" narrative wasn't new, that it has been around from since before 2012, but when did it actually begin?
That's a very good question. I bet you get some good information.
When WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
Quote from: Man at Arms on January 10, 2025, 04:48:45 AMThat's a very good question. I bet you get some good information.
When WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
They had a diverse cast of iconic characters. Then marketting said "where is the white male human fighter?" and they added Regdar last minute. Then out of spite to marketting guys, they included at least one picture of Regdar meeting an unfortunate fate in supplements.
That was Monte Cook and co that made Numenera later on. The infamous "ttrpg consent sheet" is their product, or at least had their approval when made.
I wasn't born yet to actually see the shift and might be wrong, but Vampire the Masquerade might be impactful enough to be considered first major infiltrarion. A different kind of demographic started to have an interest in the hobby ("theater kids") and as their priority shifted to woke issues, they added those to the games they play/design.
I would argue that full-woke arrived in 2015-2016. A few things happened around then (which coincide with me too movement, panic over the Trump election, etc.)
1. Gencon threatened to move in response to the governor of Indiana's religious freedom bill
2. This article was published in a blog--and I don't even know if it was real, or someone trolling. But it was taken seriously
https://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem
3. The people running the Ennies said they were going to control for content created by marginalized authors and designers, and started discriminating against any author or designer who expressed moderate or conservative views
4. Paizo started featuring POC characters in their books and advertisements. When I was at Origins in 2015, there was this big banner with a black, female Paladin. Soon after that, WOTC follow suit with race-swapped characters, etc.
Obviously, sites like enWorld and rpg.net were raging leftists going back much further than this, but woke didn't start hitting the mainstream until 2015-2016.
5. Chaosium ownership changed and a new edition of CoC came out which featured pronouns on the character sheets, chapters in books about LGBT people in Victorian society, etc.
6. Numerous conventions, such as Gamehole in Wisconsin, changed their official logo to include the expanded rainbow. Gamehole also features events restricted to POC
but the *earliest* example of something weird and photo-woke that I can find is the cover to the TSR module "Queen of Spiders" in 1986 which features a bunch of Drow women. All of them are clearly black women, and a couple look like Tina Turner. I was like WTF is this? Drow are not African--they don't look like that. I don't know if this was some political or ideological thing, or if the artist just liked Tina Turner lol
Quote from: MerrillWeathermay on January 10, 2025, 08:55:54 AMI would argue that full-woke arrived in 2015-2016. A few things happened around then (which coincide with me too movement, panic over the Trump election, etc.)
Agreed. IIRC, it was either GenCon or Origins that has Anita Sarkeesian as a guest speaker in 2016.
She's the biggest feminist grifter there is, starting with GamerGate and famous for saying "everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is political" or something to that effect.
Anita is an insufferable c*nt.
Quote from: Man at Arms on January 10, 2025, 04:48:45 AMWhen WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
To me that is woke in a nutshell. Instead of trying to create a campaign setting full of non-white guys they decide to alter what existed to make it have less white guys. I don't know if this is (1) Knowing that there aren't enough non-white guys playing to buy such a setting so it would be a big fail or (2) they like tearing things down and changing existing things more than building new things.
The world fractured in 2016 when a certain someone won something; prior to that, the mask would occasionally slip but the relatively normal people weren't afraid to keep the weirdos in check simply for sake of the sales. The most vocal and attention seeking people in the US suffered and instant mental breakdown that they have since never recovered from. Now the mask isn't slipping but thrown off and the crazies are screaming about how proud they are that they discarded it.
2016 MIGHT have been when some took notice because of the big things happening, but you don't go from zero to one million in the blink of an eye.
The infiltration was underway even under TSR, IMHO the first sign was an article in Dragon about Chainmail Bikinis. Sadly I can't remember the issue.
Do you think that fallout from Gamergate contributed to the woke problem? Where does Mike Mearl's "firing" of grognards on Twitter fall in all this, was it a symptom or a motivating instigation? Did the woke approach RPG gamers because they were considered easy targets for subversion based on the Five Geek Social Fallacies or is that just an explanation of the social environment?
That depends on how one defines 'woke' and the degree of infection. One of the first issues of Dragon I ever bought (#168, April 1991) included a Forum letter decrying the 'game racism' of painting goblinoids as purely evil and only enemies, and included thoughts on alternative ways to use them. (It didn't draw the parallels to real racism.)
There have been differences of opinion about the game from the beginning. If I were to identify a 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.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer on January 10, 2025, 12:07:05 PMIf I were to identify a 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.
That was the starting point.
Quote from: MerrillWeathermay on January 10, 2025, 08:55:54 AMbut the *earliest* example of something weird and photo-woke that I can find is the cover to the TSR module "Queen of Spiders" in 1986 which features a bunch of Drow women. All of them are clearly black women, and a couple look like Tina Turner. I was like WTF is this? Drow are not African--they don't look like that. I don't know if this was some political or ideological thing, or if the artist just liked Tina Turner lol
This is it, by Keith Parkinson.
(https://www.vintagerpg.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Super3.jpg)
I don't think it's evidence of woke, though - just liking Tina Turner.
EDITED TO ADD: Parkinson later made the Guardians collectible card game that was designed with Bribery cards for "Babes", "Beer", and "Gold" - each of which was a core card type.
Quote from: Ruprecht on January 10, 2025, 09:37:03 AMQuote from: Man at Arms on January 10, 2025, 04:48:45 AMWhen WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
To me that is woke in a nutshell. Instead of trying to create a campaign setting full of non-white guys they decide to alter what existed to make it have less white guys. I don't know if this is (1) Knowing that there aren't enough non-white guys playing to buy such a setting so it would be a big fail or (2) they like tearing things down and changing existing things more than building new things.
OD&D and AD&D were almost entirely white characters - but there were a number of pushes to have non-white characters in D&D during the TSR years after OD&D and AD&D. The first I remember was Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan in 1980, which had non-white pregenerated characters part of the Toltec-inspired "Olman Empire". Deities & Demigods (also 1980) had a bunch of non-European mythos, and TSR later published Oriental Adventures, Al-Qadim, and Maztica as official settings.
The D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
That said, I'd agree that 2E released in 1989 intentionally also had all-white character illustrations - as well as cutting out demons and devils and other sanitizing. So 3E was really the earliest edition that featured less white guys.
Still, both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have always had a lot of non-white guys. They were designed as broad settings with lots of different ethnicities, not just European. But until 3rd edition, non-white characters weren't featured in the core rulebooks.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:15:48 PMI don't think it's evidence of woke, though - just liking Tina Turner.
Evidence of him liking a certain kind of female form...the Rifts cover comes to mind.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThe D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
Yeah but Diana is svelte, speaks clearly, and is obviously somewhat intelligent and nice. She's like the exact opposite of the black chicks in D&D now.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMStill, both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have always had a lot of non-white guys. They were designed as broad settings with lots of different ethnicities, not just European. But until 3rd edition, non-white characters weren't featured in the core rulebooks.
Not quite. There's a black magic-user in the 1991
Rules Cyclopedia, p. 20.
Quote from: Brad on January 10, 2025, 02:02:21 PMYeah but Diana is svelte, speaks clearly, and is obviously somewhat intelligent and nice. She's like the exact opposite of the black chicks in D&D now.
...which has a big ole booty, dread locks, and yells " OH NO! No you di'int! DIE muthafucka DIE!"
somebody make an AI art of this. please.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMQuote from: Ruprecht on January 10, 2025, 09:37:03 AMQuote from: Man at Arms on January 10, 2025, 04:48:45 AMWhen WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
To me that is woke in a nutshell. Instead of trying to create a campaign setting full of non-white guys they decide to alter what existed to make it have less white guys. I don't know if this is (1) Knowing that there aren't enough non-white guys playing to buy such a setting so it would be a big fail or (2) they like tearing things down and changing existing things more than building new things.
OD&D and AD&D were almost entirely white characters - but there were a number of pushes to have non-white characters in D&D during the TSR years after OD&D and AD&D. The first I remember was Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan in 1980, which had non-white pregenerated characters part of the Toltec-inspired "Olman Empire". Deities & Demigods (also 1980) had a bunch of non-European mythos, and TSR later published Oriental Adventures, Al-Qadim, and Maztica as official settings.
The D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
That said, I'd agree that 2E released in 1989 intentionally also had all-white character illustrations - as well as cutting out demons and devils and other sanitizing. So 3E was really the earliest edition that featured less white guys.
Still, both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have always had a lot of non-white guys. They were designed as broad settings with lots of different ethnicities, not just European. But until 3rd edition, non-white characters weren't featured in the core rulebooks.
Including women or non-whites isn't automatically woke.
Gender/race bending is.
Speaking about "too much white straight men" is woke.
Ranting against chainmail bikinis is woke. Ditto for "the male gaze" or "hypersexualization"
Quote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:31:23 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThe D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
Including women or non-whites isn't automatically woke.
Gender/race bending is.
Speaking about "too much white straight men" is woke.
Including a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
(https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/captain-planet-header.jpg)
This sort of planned ethnic diversity is clearly ideologically connected to the diversity of characters in 3E and later.
You could call it "pre-woke" or something by drawing the line differently, but I think it's obviously connected.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMQuote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:31:23 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThe D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
Including women or non-whites isn't automatically woke.
Gender/race bending is.
Speaking about "too much white straight men" is woke.
Including a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
(https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/captain-planet-header.jpg)
This sort of planned ethnic diversity is clearly ideologically connected to the diversity of characters in 3E and later.
Erasing the ginger would be ideological. IMNSHO it was done for marketing reasons, just like the ads with girls on them. After all the cartoon was an ad for the game.
Quote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:54:15 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMQuote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:31:23 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThe D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
Including women or non-whites isn't automatically woke.
Gender/race bending is.
Speaking about "too much white straight men" is woke.
Including a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
(https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/captain-planet-header.jpg)
This sort of planned ethnic diversity is clearly ideologically connected to the diversity of characters in 3E and later.
Erasing the ginger would be ideological. IMNSHO it was done for marketing reasons, just like the ads with girls on them. After all the cartoon was an ad for the game.
I agree that it's marketing, but it's marketing to a liberal ideology. WotC was also marketing to liberal ideology. They're a corporation looking to profit.
It seems like splitting hairs to say that when the D&D cartoon deliberately highlights a black girl acrobat, then it's OK and non-woke, but when WotC has a black woman monk, that's woke.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMIncluding a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
Ugh! Captain Planet and the Planeteers! SOOO GAY!
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 03:02:23 PMQuote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:54:15 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMQuote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:31:23 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThe D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
Including women or non-whites isn't automatically woke.
Gender/race bending is.
Speaking about "too much white straight men" is woke.
Including a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
(https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/captain-planet-header.jpg)
This sort of planned ethnic diversity is clearly ideologically connected to the diversity of characters in 3E and later.
Erasing the ginger would be ideological. IMNSHO it was done for marketing reasons, just like the ads with girls on them. After all the cartoon was an ad for the game.
I agree that it's marketing, but it's marketing to a liberal ideology. WotC was also marketing to liberal ideology. They're a corporation looking to profit.
It seems like splitting hairs to say that when the D&D cartoon deliberately highlights a black girl acrobat, then it's OK and non-woke, but when WotC has a black woman monk, that's woke.
So you don't know what woke is or want to pretend not to know what woke is.
By your position different strokes was woke, the fresh prince of belair was woke, Alien, Terminator were woke...
Either you're too ignorant to make engaging with you worth my time or you're too disingenuous, I'm betting for the latter.
I do not believe that ethnic diversity is 'woke', it is saying anyone can join without being condescending. My players since the 80s have been of different colours, females have been at my table, and with a variety of backgrounds, to this day, why do they not deserve examples? Welcoming and forcing are two entirely different approaches. I have a Chinese player, a Mexican and a black guy, along with a couple of white guys, is this a problem for anyone? They are all great players and good friends.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMIncluding a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
For the D&D cartoon, I don't ever remember any of us who watched it thinking she didn't make sense just because she was black. No one. It was ONE black girl out of six people (17%), which is literally about the percentage of my middle school. "Oh, a black gymnast, okay." Now contrast with fucking Captain Planet, though, and that was obviously done specifically for "representation".
So it's not even close. It may have been intentional in the case of D&D, but it made sense and you could race-swap her to be a white girl and make Bobby and Sheila black siblings and it wouldn't have mattered.
Quote from: bat on January 10, 2025, 04:24:55 PMI do not believe that ethnic diversity is 'woke', it is saying anyone can join without being condescending. My players since the 80s have been of different colours, females have been at my table, and with a variety of backgrounds, to this day, why do they not deserve examples? Welcoming and forcing are two entirely different approaches. I have a Chinese player, a Mexican and a black guy, along with a couple of white guys, is this a problem for anyone? They are all great players and good friends.
Diversity itself isn't woke, but forced diversity for marketing purposes is generally regarded as woke.
There's a difference between organically having a black player, versus intentionally creating a black girl in the lead for marketing purposes. As Man at Arms put it,
Quote from: Man at Arms on January 10, 2025, 04:48:45 AMWhen WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
I claim that putting non-white iconic characters in 3E is the same marketing logic as putting a black girl in the D&D cartoon.
Quote from: bat on January 10, 2025, 04:24:55 PMI do not believe that ethnic diversity is 'woke', it is saying anyone can join without being condescending. My players since the 80s have been of different colours, females have been at my table, and with a variety of backgrounds, to this day, why do they not deserve examples? Welcoming and forcing are two entirely different approaches. I have a Chinese player, a Mexican and a black guy, along with a couple of white guys, is this a problem for anyone? They are all great players and good friends.
Your players' races and their characters' races are entirely different things. Players should be accepted regardless of race; characters, not so much. If the setting is faux-medieval England, I'd expect every character to be white, with possibly the odd exception. Similarly in campaigns set in faux-Shogun Japan, or faux-Zululand or faux-Incan Empire. If a large medieval setting looks like downtown Seattle everywhere the players go, verisimilitude is lost for me.
Quote from: Brad on January 10, 2025, 04:45:14 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMIncluding a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
For the D&D cartoon, I don't ever remember any of us who watched it thinking she didn't make sense just because she was black. No one. It was ONE black girl out of six people (17%), which is literally about the percentage of my middle school. "Oh, a black gymnast, okay." Now contrast with fucking Captain Planet, though, and that was obviously done specifically for "representation".
So it's not even close. It may have been intentional in the case of D&D, but it made sense and you could race-swap her to be a white girl and make Bobby and Sheila black siblings and it wouldn't have mattered.
What are you claiming the percentages show? The D&D characters were random American kids on an amusement park ride, while the Planeteers came from all over the world. It would be ridiculous for the Planeteers to be 83% white.
If anything, the D&D group seems more forced. If I looked at groups of kids going on an amusement park ride in the U.S. in 1983 - it would be quite rare to see that mix of age, ethnicity, and gender as Diana and the others.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMYou could call it "pre-woke" or something by drawing the line differently, but I think it's obviously connected.
For the time, I think it was inocuous. The 80's had a pretty "progressive" bent, with shows like Diff'rent Strokes and "diverse" character rosters in cartoons.
In hindsight, they were laying the groundwork for the regressive, racist insanity of modern media. I think the tipping point was the emergence of current race grifters like Robin D'Anglelou. So about 2018 is when it went mainstream with White Fragility.
The kids in the D&D cartoon were 15 to 13 years old, except for the little kid, who was a younger brother of the red haired girl.
In the 80s it was not uncommon to have friends a year or so older or younger than you, especially before you were 16 and could drive. You would hang out with kids in your neighborhood.
It doesn't bother me in the least, to see images of a diverse nature. That's totally fine.
I don't like a rewriting of what actually existed, or else preachy text about modern societal stuff, in my Medieval-flavored RPGs.
Create something different, and put whatever you want in it. New Coke was a failure, because people didn't want that. It never should have completely replaced, Original Coke. Create something new and different, without walking all over existing products. Offer an alternative, not a replacement.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMQuote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 02:31:23 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThe D&D cartoon starting in 1983 featured a black girl as one of its core characters.
(https://tribality.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dungeons-and-dragons-1024x348.jpg)
Including women or non-whites isn't automatically woke.
Gender/race bending is.
Speaking about "too much white straight men" is woke.
Including a black girl as a core character in the D&D series was unquestionably an intentional choice of ethnic diversity in the cast, just like other 1980s series like Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
(https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/captain-planet-header.jpg)
This sort of planned ethnic diversity is clearly ideologically connected to the diversity of characters in 3E and later.
You could call it "pre-woke" or something by drawing the line differently, but I think it's obviously connected.
Fortunately, Captain Planet has nothing to do with the 80s. It's a 90s series.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 05:10:04 PMWhat are you claiming the percentages show? The D&D characters were random American kids on an amusement park ride, while the Planeteers came from all over the world. It would be ridiculous for the Planeteers to be 83% white.
If anything, the D&D group seems more forced. If I looked at groups of kids going on an amusement park ride in the U.S. in 1983 - it would be quite rare to see that mix of age, ethnicity, and gender as Diana and the others.
The show Captain Planet SPECIFICALLY was designed to promote "diversity", that is my point. And yes, I don't know where you grew up, but when I was younger there was always a token black kid in the friend group so it made perfect sense to me. D&D didn't seem forced whatsoever.
EDIT: And honestly, this is all stupid, anyway. Maybe the people who made the cartoon wanted to have an attractive minority (hell, two girls!) to promote the idea that ANYONE could play it, not just us nerds. I know I would not have minded if some buxom cheerleaders or gymnasts played D&D with us during lunch...so yeah, this isn't "woke", it's just good marketing. Just a group of normal friends and the kid brother, nothing more. To address the original question, I think when they removed all the devils and stuff to appease the retarded Pat Robertson nonsense (my mom was in that group...and STILL IS) was the beginning of the end. You start kowtowing to morons, you will do it more and more even when they are not a legitimate threat. The current state of the US just demonstrates that braying fucktards can get a lot done even when they legitimately do not give one fuck about a product.
You can call it "Proto-woke", "pre-woke", feminism, or political correctness; but whatever you call it, the ROT goes back much further in the hobby than people think...
The busybodies were ragging on Gygax even in the 0e days:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GR-_mqWXsAEz5G3?format=jpg&name=large)
His masterful troll response has been used as a bludgeon against him in recent times by people incapable of understanding sarcasm.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 02:50:58 PMYou could call it "pre-woke" or something by drawing the line differently, but I think it's obviously connected.
Jhkim is right.
That's right, I said it.
And we all know now with hindsight that as the hobby grew, the weirdo's within it also grew:
Quote from: GeekyBugle on January 10, 2025, 11:02:44 AMThe infiltration was underway even under TSR, IMHO the first sign was an article in Dragon about Chainmail Bikinis. Sadly I can't remember the issue.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer on January 10, 2025, 12:07:05 PMThat depends on how one defines 'woke' and the degree of infection. One of the first issues of Dragon I ever bought (#168, April 1991) included a Forum letter decrying the 'game racism' of painting goblinoids as purely evil and only enemies, and included thoughts on alternative ways to use them. (It didn't draw the parallels to real racism.) ...
And Armchair gamer hits the nail on the head::
Quote from: Armchair Gamer on January 10, 2025, 12:07:05 PMThere have been differences of opinion about the game from the beginning. If I were to identify a 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.
Jonathan Tweet straight-up bragged about this in a series of articles on ENWorld. It's no secret.
D&D will not become "un-woke" until the ownership changes hands.
Luckily we do not need "official D&D" for anything. Plenty of alternatives out there that do exactly the same thing, only better.
Like ACKSII
*...
* This fanboy shilling was completely unsolicited by anyone associated with ACKSII.
Quote from: Jaeger on January 10, 2025, 06:08:07 PMLike ACKSII*...
* This fanboy shilling was completely unsolicited by anyone associated with ACKSII.
I asked about this in another thread, can you please make a new one that goes over the content? I am debating on whether or not to drop $$$$ on a thousand page RPG...
Not to discredit the proto-woke additions to D&D, but I sincerely doubt that the woke infiltration could have been so pervasive or seen as so supported by fans without the Internet being a vital contributing factor. So, let's confine this timeline to 2000 and forward which corresponds to the publishing of DnD 3.0 (I also think that the OGL contributed as it allowed people to create DnD their way).
Quote from: jeff37923 on January 10, 2025, 07:07:11 PMNot to discredit the proto-woke additions to D&D, but I sincerely doubt that the woke infiltration could have been so pervasive or seen as so supported by fans without the Internet being a vital contributing factor. So, let's confine this timeline to 2000 and forward which corresponds to the publishing of DnD 3.0 (I also think that the OGL contributed as it allowed people to create DnD their way).
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.
Quote from: Jaeger on January 10, 2025, 07:16:07 PMQuote from: jeff37923 on January 10, 2025, 07:07:11 PMNot to discredit the proto-woke additions to D&D, but I sincerely doubt that the woke infiltration could have been so pervasive or seen as so supported by fans without the Internet being a vital contributing factor. So, let's confine this timeline to 2000 and forward which corresponds to the publishing of DnD 3.0 (I also think that the OGL contributed as it allowed people to create DnD their way).
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 wouldn't call this a "Woke Infiltration." Infiltration implies they were being covert or manipulative, when in fact the Wokification of RPGs was a quite intentional top-down policy decision at WotC, Hasbro, and GenCon. I also think that the majority of posters here completely miss why this was an intentional top-down decision; this was not politics. It was an anti-competitive form of soft regulatory capture, but it was phrased like it was a political posturing specifically because the Woke liberals at places RPG.Net are historically anti-capitalistic, but they are also anatomically capable of observing anti-competitive behavior in their own ranks. It falls into a blindside if you make it look political.
In this case, Wokeness creates barriers to entry with things like diverse creative teams, and creates opportunities to eliminate opposition with things like setting flavor being guilty of cultural appropriation and such. Once you see Wokeness as a cudgel to fabricate excuses to ostracize and eliminate competition, you can't unsee it.
When did someone realize this? I imagine it was around the time Sarkeesian started posting, which was actually 2009. However, it took time to realize the opportunity and to implement it.
Quote from: Krazz on January 10, 2025, 05:08:35 PMQuote from: bat on January 10, 2025, 04:24:55 PMI do not believe that ethnic diversity is 'woke', it is saying anyone can join without being condescending. My players since the 80s have been of different colours, females have been at my table, and with a variety of backgrounds, to this day, why do they not deserve examples? Welcoming and forcing are two entirely different approaches. I have a Chinese player, a Mexican and a black guy, along with a couple of white guys, is this a problem for anyone? They are all great players and good friends.
Your players' races and their characters' races are entirely different things. Players should be accepted regardless of race; characters, not so much. If the setting is faux-medieval England, I'd expect every character to be white, with possibly the odd exception. Similarly in campaigns set in faux-Shogun Japan, or faux-Zululand or faux-Incan Empire. If a large medieval setting looks like downtown Seattle everywhere the players go, verisimilitude is lost for me.
My players do not insert themselves into the game, my female Mexican player is usually a white male halfling for example. My point is that I don't see the problem in people seeing diversity in a game. We mostly play sword and sorcery or vanilla fantasy. Could people seeing various people accepting others in a game be a bad thing? Who the players decide to be in the game is up to them.
Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMThat said, I'd agree that 2E released in 1989 intentionally also had all-white character illustrations - as well as cutting out demons and devils and other sanitizing. So 3E was really the earliest edition that featured less white guys.
Still, both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have always had a lot of non-white guys. They were designed as broad settings with lots of different ethnicities, not just European. But until 3rd edition, non-white characters weren't featured in the core rulebooks.
Also in 2E Mystara had a ton of non-European areas. And there was an attempt with Oriental Adventures. I could be wrong but it seems that when Wizards of the Coast took over they stopped creating non-proto-European settings.
Also we should all remember that the D&D cartoon was Gygax's one success in his Hollywood days.
We shouldn't be letting racial diversity in the game distract us to the point of "orcs are racist". I'd venture that comparing orcs to blacks wasn't even considered until The Fellowship of the Ring movie came out and people saw the Uruk-Hai orcs of Saruman as dark skinned. Remember, before that orcs in media looked more like these below:
Greetings!
You know, all of these Woke morons are fucking idiots.
My Thandor world has many humanoid animal races. An amphibious, humanoid crawfish race, and an amphibious humanoid Shark race. There is an amphibious Orange-Coloured Coy race, and an amphibious humanoid Salmon race. There are several humanoid reptilian races. Then, there are humanoid races that have bright, lemon-yellow skin, bright, Orange skin, Lilac-coloured skin, and aquamarine-coloured skin. Being even remotely concerned about black or brown-skinned humans is fucking laughable. Humans need to think about being united to survive to avoid being fucking exterminated.
Thandor has some very real and mind-blowing racial diversity that makes all of this look so absolutely petty and stupid. Not being arrogant, as I am sure many DM's likewise have detailed campaign worlds that embrace fantastic racial diversity, that again, makes all of this crying pathetic, stupid, and honestly unhinged from what actually is possible and likely in many fantasy worlds.
This kind of ideological argument is so post-modern and ham-fisted shoved into the fantasy game world where when you actually think about the different potential racial conflicts, crazy diversity, the very different religions, all of the fantastic stuff--these modernistic ideas and arguments really do seem entirely inappropriate, ill-fitting, and out of touch. It does make me wonder though, how do any of these people around these fucking Marxist idiots take these people seriously? Their entire world view is laughable and pathetic.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Quote from: jeff37923 on January 10, 2025, 11:25:12 PMWe shouldn't be letting racial diversity in the game distract us to the point of "orcs are racist". I'd venture that comparing orcs to blacks wasn't even considered until The Fellowship of the Ring movie came out and people saw the Uruk-Hai orcs of Saruman as dark skinned. Remember, before that orcs in media looked more like these below:
Greetings!
*Laughing*! That's right, Jeff! "WHERE THERE'S A WHIP, THERE'S A WAY!"
I love it!
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Gamers have never been hard right individuals going back to my first exposure to gaming. I would even go so far as to say that they leaned slightly left in the aggregate by the standards of the day. (I don't even think the median position of gamers has changed on most political and social issues but the way they are viewed in relation to left /right has.) Gaming certainly had a majority white male participation, but every table I was ever at was always welcome to anyone that wanted to play.
I have been in and around gaming spaces since 1979 and I remember oddballs that pushed ideologies that would be considered woke now back in the early 80s. They weren't in control of anything back then. There were letters in magazines, fanzines, and occasionally some supplement that had been photocopied to death that would try to nudge players to consider more "enlightened" views both in game and IRL.
I've actually had a chance to go through some mid-to-late 80s gaming material recently and I have noticed that there has been things of progressive ideology put in many of them. Dark Sun is clearly an environmentalism allegory for example. The biggest change I see is that we were allowed to ignore all this and play the way we wanted vs now where they want to control our gaming.
I think what separates the "Woke" crowd from earlier progressives is the effort to force people to comply with there views rather than trying to convert. There were always those that were like this but they generally were seen as an annoyance, even by those that shared some of their beliefs.
White Wolf's World of Darkness books in the early 90s was the first place where I noticed a major product that had material that we'd consider woke today. The Werewolves books were some of the clearest examples of this that I remember. By the mid 90s, the WOD crowd had become toxic in and around the Puget Sound with them bullying other gamers and even hobby shops if they didn't fall in line with their views.
This current wave started in 2010. The mess of the 90s wave had mostly died down, but you could see the tentative beginnings as early as 09.
In RPGs it was RPG.Net and storygamers pushing here and there, in board gaming it was BGG mostly and even still now.
By about 2015 it was in full swing and gaining momentum. You could see the beginnings of it in D&D with the little entries in 5e. And that has increased gradually to its current state.
Outside RPGs its been about the same, this increasing level of control the woke have over every form of media.
And so far it is showing little likelyhood of a moments respite before the 2030 wave begins.
5 fucking years and we will be in some likely even worse lunatic spree.
Quote from: Armchair Gamer on January 10, 2025, 02:06:22 PMQuote from: jhkim on January 10, 2025, 01:52:17 PMStill, both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms have always had a lot of non-white guys. They were designed as broad settings with lots of different ethnicities, not just European. But until 3rd edition, non-white characters weren't featured in the core rulebooks.
Not quite. There's a black magic-user in the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia, p. 20.
More than just that. Black guy right there in the contents pages,asian pg6, and 28, the one you noted pg20, another asian pg30, Theres some obviously Mediterranean ones scattered about too.
Quote from: SHARK on January 10, 2025, 11:34:08 PMGreetings!
You know, all of these Woke morons are fucking idiots.
Being even remotely concerned about black or brown-skinned humans is fucking laughable. Humans need to think about being united to survive to avoid being fucking exterminated.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
This is where genius is. Nobody would give a damn about differences in humans with everything else trying to kill you. The people trying to cause strife in our hobby have (probably) never been in an actually traumatic situation in their lives and really, saying orcs are like black people or worrying over diversity instead of letting things organically happen is really dredging for the lowest hanging fruit.
Excellent comment, SHARK!
White Wolf games, like Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse and Mage the Ascension were very progressive and have many critics to Western civilization values and could be, uncharitably sum up to white people bad ... But most the players, including me, did not give a damn about this weird secular guilt, which could only be expressed in liberal countries, like the US, Canada and Western Europe.
Like an other poster wrote, Gamergate was a central event of the rise of the MESSAGE (e.g terminal wokeness) yet I remember that Marvel comics had started to change etablised characters like Captain Marvel and Thor, but I might be wrong.
WotC/Hasbro began to hire in the late 2010's, early 2020, people who "critized" (playing their victim card and my culure is not a trove for your imagination colonizer drivel) for freelancing jobs, which they use for their resume for Patreon/Kickstarter clout ...
There is a black character on the cover of the 1981 AD&D module White Plume Mountain. Nobody cared, because he looked cool.
The White Wolf games being painfully political is one of the reasons why I am so frustrated with their market dominance. If you want to play magical creatures on Earth that aren't rainbow fascists, then you're out of luck. I'm sick of that woke bullshit. Hopefully Paradox fumbling the video games will kill the damn things for good and open the market to new publishers.
Quote from: yabaziou on January 11, 2025, 01:28:47 PMWhite Wolf games, like Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse and Mage the Ascension were very progressive and have many critics to Western civilization values and could be, uncharitably sum up to white people bad ... But most the players, including me, did not give a damn about this weird secular guilt, which could only be expressed in liberal countries, like the US, Canada and Western Europe.
I'd generally agree about White Wolf. To me, _Shadowrun_ (1989) was also notably progressive - especially over Native American rights, since its future had much of North America being reconquered by Native Americans using magic.
In the post-2000 era, I didn't notice much politics in gaming discussion until around 2006. Pundit frequently knocks on The Forge for being elitist storygamers, whose peak was the early 2000s. While they were into story as an aesthetic, though, they weren't noticeably progressive politically. I noticed more politics in discussion in the later 2000s - starting with Blue Rose / True20, as well as some references in the post-Forge story games talk. That was around when I started here. It ramped up hugely in 2016 with the election.
Quote from: Crusader X on January 11, 2025, 05:29:40 PMThere is a black character on the cover of the 1981 AD&D module White Plume Mountain. Nobody cared, because he looked cool.
Agreed. As I noted, TSR included a bunch of non-white characters in the 1980s era and it didn't seem controversial at the time - though they went with all white men for AD&D 2E. However, it seems that WotC's inclusion of non-white characters in 3E was more controversial, as Man at Arms puts it -
Quote from: Man at Arms on January 10, 2025, 04:48:45 AMWhen WOTC started work on D&D 3.0 the content of their first ever Player's Handbook, reflected some of their own personal preferences regarding gender, and having less white guys. The big name creators involved, were in on that stuff. They thought it was important to start changing the way D&D had been previously. It's been growing and growing, ever since the year 2000, and the 3.0 edition.
Quote from: bat on January 11, 2025, 12:08:49 PMQuote from: SHARK on January 10, 2025, 11:34:08 PMGreetings!
You know, all of these Woke morons are fucking idiots.
Being even remotely concerned about black or brown-skinned humans is fucking laughable. Humans need to think about being united to survive to avoid being fucking exterminated.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
This is where genius is. Nobody would give a damn about differences in humans with everything else trying to kill you. The people trying to cause strife in our hobby have (probably) never been in an actually traumatic situation in their lives and really, saying orcs are like black people or worrying over diversity instead of letting things organically happen is really dredging for the lowest hanging fruit.
Excellent comment, SHARK!
Greetings!
Thanks, Bat!
Yeah, I can see larger human kingdoms fighting against each other over land, politics, religion. For most humans though, whatever their social class or station, whatever their skin colour--with vampires, hordes of Orcs, Minotaurs, Trolls, and all the rest--as well as witches, cultists, demons, and dragons--and Tyrannosaurus Rex's running around eating and slaughtering everything they come across--
somehow, these idiots are obsessing over fat black lesbians, cripples in wheelchairs, and black and brown-skinned minorities being "properly represented"? And, well, some Asian people, too! All of that is somehow seen as top-fucking priority. And, strong, independent Feminist women!
None of these morons have the slightest real intelligence and self-reflection to actually look at themselves and what they are saying--and place that in context of the fantasy game world that is harsh, brutal, and looking to exterminate humans at every opportunity. None of these idiots see what they are saying and promoting as being just jackass stupid and mindless?
In such a fantasy meatgrinder and hellscape, where war, terror, and death are ever-present, all of these fat, weak, soft idiots--the crippled fucktards in wheelchairs, the fat, black lesbians, the weak, goateed Male Feminist metrosexual--all of these pathetic losers would be mulch, chewed up in the mud and just slaughtered.
How the fuck would any hardened soldiers, rough knights, or daring, cigar-chomping Adventurers, ever want these pathetic weaklings joining their ranks, heading into the maw of danger?
The reality is, most sane Adventurer groups would ruthlessly laugh at all of these fucktards and send them back home to stay with the women, the old people, and the kiddies.
You know when Adventurer groups are out digging and fighting through some mud-soaked, terrifying dungeon somewhere, like in so many dungeons, and they come across the slaughtered and looted bodies of failed adventurers? Or dungeons where pathetic adventurers have been captured, and brutally tortured and sacrificed to the Dark Gods?
Those failed adventurers are these Woke morons.
The Woke morons that bought into the delusion that they could be real adventurers, marching into a savage and brutal world. The sad truth is, NO. They would find absolute failure, terror, and death. That is why even within the fantasy world, real adventurers would drop-kick these weak losers to the curb before they ever left the tavern, after having a smoke.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
jhkim may be on to something regarding The Forge in the mid 2000s. While they may not have pushed politics, their methodology of proselytizing GNS theory and Professor Bat Penis' in all possible venues was definitely something adopted by the woke/SJW mobs. I seem to recall quite a bit of overlap between the two circles.
Quote from: jeff37923 on January 11, 2025, 07:55:35 PMjhkim may be on to something regarding The Forge in the mid 2000s. While they may not have pushed politics, their methodology of proselytizing GNS theory and Professor Bat Penis' in all possible venues was definitely something adopted by the woke/SJW mobs. I seem to recall quite a bit of overlap between the two circles.
I pointed this out way back and no one listened. Storygamers/Forge cultists were spearheading woke ideals and use the exact same tactics. And both stretch and twist and pervert terms to suit their agendas.
And both love to infiltrate and co-opt other groups/venues.
Quote from: SHARK on January 11, 2025, 07:24:16 PMIn such a fantasy meatgrinder and hellscape, where war, terror, and death are ever-present, all of these fat, weak, soft idiots--the crippled fucktards in wheelchairs, the fat, black lesbians, the weak, goateed Male Feminist metrosexual--all of these pathetic losers would be mulch, chewed up in the mud and just slaughtered.
Quote from: SHARK on January 11, 2025, 07:24:16 PMThe Woke morons that bought into the delusion that they could be real adventurers, marching into a savage and brutal world. The sad truth is, NO. They would find absolute failure, terror, and death. That is why even within the fantasy world, real adventurers would drop-kick these weak losers to the curb before they ever left the tavern, after having a smoke.
This is conflating
players and
characters here.
Overwhelmingly, both woke and non-woke players have no delusions that they could be real adventurers. It's a fucking game and they're sitting at the table rolling dice.
The people with the delusions are the ones who think that there is any measure of real-world toughness in a fantasy game.
Quote from: jhkim on January 12, 2025, 02:33:00 AMQuote from: SHARK on January 11, 2025, 07:24:16 PMIn such a fantasy meatgrinder and hellscape, where war, terror, and death are ever-present, all of these fat, weak, soft idiots--the crippled fucktards in wheelchairs, the fat, black lesbians, the weak, goateed Male Feminist metrosexual--all of these pathetic losers would be mulch, chewed up in the mud and just slaughtered.
Quote from: SHARK on January 11, 2025, 07:24:16 PMThe Woke morons that bought into the delusion that they could be real adventurers, marching into a savage and brutal world. The sad truth is, NO. They would find absolute failure, terror, and death. That is why even within the fantasy world, real adventurers would drop-kick these weak losers to the curb before they ever left the tavern, after having a smoke.
This is conflating players and characters here.
Overwhelmingly, both woke and non-woke players have no delusions that they could be real adventurers. It's a fucking game and they're sitting at the table rolling dice.
The people with the delusions are the ones who think that there is any measure of real-world toughness in a fantasy game.
Greetings!
*Laughing* It is these Woke morons sobbing about how *THEY* need to be represented in the fantasy game world. Thus, the weak, Male Feminist Metrosexual, the fat, black lesbian, the pathetic, intellectual cripple in a wheelchair--they have all insisted that they be represented in the game world. You see this all over the modules, the art, and so on.
So, having them represented in the game world, is a laughable joke, and utterly silly.
Beyond that, my overarching point is that such crying about black and brown people and cripples in wheelchairs need to be in the game--as in actual characters, not just *PLAYERS*--is absolutely moronic when stacked up against the assumed dynamics of a typical fantasy world filled with monsters and many different crazy races.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Quote from: SHARK on January 12, 2025, 03:57:51 AMGreetings!
*Laughing* It is these Woke morons sobbing about how *THEY* need to be represented in the fantasy game world. Thus, the weak, Male Feminist Metrosexual, the fat, black lesbian, the pathetic, intellectual cripple in a wheelchair--they have all insisted that they be represented in the game world. You see this all over the modules, the art, and so on.
So, having them represented in the game world, is a laughable joke, and utterly silly.
Beyond that, my overarching point is that such crying about black and brown people and cripples in wheelchairs need to be in the game--as in actual characters, not just *PLAYERS*--is absolutely moronic when stacked up against the assumed dynamics of a typical fantasy world filled with monsters and many different crazy races.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
It's a mental disorder. I am a big guy ( 6'1" about 320 or so) and I have never been offended by fantasy art that didn't include adventurers of my size. Deranged people simply cannot accept the fact that whatever "representative" group they are a part of, that nobody really cares. This is fantasy role playing. Just roll up the character , make them look like whatever you want them to look like, and play.
Quote from: SHARK on January 12, 2025, 03:57:51 AMQuote from: jhkim on January 12, 2025, 02:33:00 AMQuote from: SHARK on January 11, 2025, 07:24:16 PMIn such a fantasy meatgrinder and hellscape, where war, terror, and death are ever-present, all of these fat, weak, soft idiots--the crippled fucktards in wheelchairs, the fat, black lesbians, the weak, goateed Male Feminist metrosexual--all of these pathetic losers would be mulch, chewed up in the mud and just slaughtered.
Quote from: SHARK on January 11, 2025, 07:24:16 PMThe Woke morons that bought into the delusion that they could be real adventurers, marching into a savage and brutal world. The sad truth is, NO. They would find absolute failure, terror, and death. That is why even within the fantasy world, real adventurers would drop-kick these weak losers to the curb before they ever left the tavern, after having a smoke.
This is conflating players and characters here.
Overwhelmingly, both woke and non-woke players have no delusions that they could be real adventurers. It's a fucking game and they're sitting at the table rolling dice.
The people with the delusions are the ones who think that there is any measure of real-world toughness in a fantasy game.
Greetings!
*Laughing* It is these Woke morons sobbing about how *THEY* need to be represented in the fantasy game world. Thus, the weak, Male Feminist Metrosexual, the fat, black lesbian, the pathetic, intellectual cripple in a wheelchair--they have all insisted that they be represented in the game world. You see this all over the modules, the art, and so on.
So, having them represented in the game world, is a laughable joke, and utterly silly.
Beyond that, my overarching point is that such crying about black and brown people and cripples in wheelchairs need to be in the game--as in actual characters, not just *PLAYERS*--is absolutely moronic when stacked up against the assumed dynamics of a typical fantasy world filled with monsters and many different crazy races.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
I'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.
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.
Quote from: Brad on January 12, 2025, 10:42:52 AMQuote 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.
(https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/format:webp/1*D5PAWCot12JG5MMmY80q4g.jpeg)
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! :D
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 PMQuote 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 Virushttps://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, ..."
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sI2Le9VB5zw/sddefault.jpg)
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 PMQuote from: jeff37923 on January 10, 2025, 07:32:43 PMQuote 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, ..."
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sI2Le9VB5zw/sddefault.jpg)
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 AMQuote 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.