This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The OGL predates the Creative Common licenses by a few years. Most companies were content enough with the OGL, even though people had been saying for years that the OGL was mostly unnecessary, since game rules aren't subject to copyright in the United States, and a number of things are "licensed" under the SRD and OGL that WotC probably doesn't actually have any IP rights to. Basically, it did its job for 23 years, allowing companies to be reasonably sure they wouldn't be sued by WotC for violating their IP, which was a major concern coming out of the highly litigious TSR era.
Paizo is now spearheading a true libre license, called the ORC license, and a lot of major publishers are getting behind it, so it is likely this will fill the niche of an open license for the RPG community. However, many games are just going with a Creative Commons license, and in WotC's new regime they're actually licensing about 50 pages of the old SRD under a CC BY 4.0 license, which is a mostly meaningless gesture given copyright law (even if it does allow the use of D&D-specific terminology with zero risk of being sued), but might open up the avenue for people with lawyers to carefully fill in the actual content of classes, spells, feats and monsters to make a full Creative Commons fork of D&D. (Even if not, Kobold Press is working on an ORC license fork of 5e, and the Basic Fantasy Role-playing people are making a new Creative Commons version of TSR-era D&D - so large swaths of wider D&D hobby will be covered by non-OGL, libre games. Though we're still missing a non-OGL, libre version of 4e and 3e.)
More options
Context Copy link