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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/dungeons-and-dragons-elon-musk/684828/
In This Thread, 2D3D Wonders Why Race Concern Shit In Pop Culture Still Matters
So, Elon Musk apparently had a spergout over WOTC because WOTC apparently did a faerun land acknowledgment and apologized for racially essentializing... well, anything (or everything, I can't tell).
Per the article,
And that made Musk tweet an implied consideration to buy out Hasbro, owner of WOTC. Perhaps he should keep away from napkins and lawyers for a few weeks, but WOTC staff and progressives have more to lose from a Musk takeover than Musks does if he accidentally commits to the sale.
My questiob is WHY do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds either lost permanently to the enemy or scorched to irrelevance.
I trust this forum understands the broad strokes enough to make a culture war summary unnecessary. Anything white nerds love must have more women and minorities and it must explicitly come at the expense of the white nerd favourites. Duke out details in the comments if necessary, the battle itself isn't the point.
The progressives won the previous round already. They got the victory lap of defeating racial essentialism by incorporating noble blacks, I mean orcs, in the rulebook a few years back. Vice, Kotaku, Polygon spammed articles about how this proves the rejection of white supremacy by the powers that be. Hooray for the Resistance, we are now the New Republic. Did I mix my factions? It doesn't matter, and apparently neither did the battle. Because WOTC still saw fit to dig up ancient corpses and put them on trial for heresy.
Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore. The volume of pop media culture wars has deflated in the face of victory, and perhaps Sydney Sweeney deadeyeing a millennial journo hoping for self abasement to atone for even being proximate to white advocacy is emblematic of how irrelevant this public opinion war is. You can, in fact, yeschad someone trying to make you feel guilty for not grovelling for zillenial approval.
But what exactly is the battlefield now? Racial/sexual/gender/whateverfuck representation? Moral ambiguity of 'bad' people unless the bad guy is generational trauma/white supremacy? Sinecures for adherents via "narrative consultancy"? Is the objective to win a battle or just to make noise.
Theres a destructive incentive structure here that I can't parse out fully. The unwoke are perfectly happy to sit back and be gradually edged out, as seen from the ready faggification of media starting with Will and Grace and reaching a high point (maybe) in Bridgerton where intraracial relationships are the enemy (maybe, I don't watch Shondaland slop). Or maybe the ongoing media projects where you can't have minorities be bad guys anymore - its always a white guy somewhere at the end pulling strings. Except if its Giancarlo Esposito.
Back to topic. The unwoke are silent dragged along consumers, the woke think they can accelerate the slide or celebrate the slide, suddenly reactionaries Notice and generate backlash, and the woke get smacked in. Retreating in confusion, they conclude that the issue is the message not being made clear enough, and the message is doubled down despite vocal opposition.
Rinse and repeat, but always back into defeat. Social justice went fucking nuts in 2016 because Trump descended from his golden staircase to snatch victory from Hilary Clintons anointed hands, and without the popular vote it seemed that this was merely a technical mistake, one that needed to be message disciplined to ensure the course of history is maintained. Biden won as a moderate but governed as a progressive because his brain turned to soup about a year in and the entire white house was Jill roleplaying Eleanor except without enough balls to lead a relatively competent cabinet, so the progressive staffers wrote every communique and channeled The Groups. Opposition was simply the last gasp of straight white men (and blacks and gays and women and asians and latinos and....)
Then Trump won, the illusion shattered for about a year. But now the same dead fights are being rehashed.
I don't really have a concrete point to interrogate in this culture war. My stance that any media featuring a minority front and center being likely to suck because it always means the writers room can't have room to criticize stupidity is enough for me to optimize my consumption because I'm an old moron and nostalgia for old shows from my youth gives me enough tinglies. Yet the strength of reactionary pushback to culture war attempts clearly shows that this is a conflict progressives seem intent on reigniting, and it should be clear that they not only lost the previous rounds but the upcoming battlefield is likely lost. The Dispatch sold a million copies and none of their characters were "body positive" in any way. Contrast that with Concord that literally was dead on arrival with their fat ugly minorities, making me wonder if the skirmishes being reignited are just masochists indulging in a public humiliation/victimization kink.
I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.
There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.
My exposure to D&D started with the Bioware game Neverwinter Nights (which was particularly notable for its easy to use level editor, which lead to thousands of authors creating adventures for it), so D&D 3 always seemed normal to me.
I later played the Baldur's Gate games which ran on 2nd edition, THAC0 and all.
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Recently I have played BG3, and while I found a lot to like, I mostly hated what I saw of the underlying game mechanics. I get getting rid of skills -- characters mostly maxxed out a few skills in any case, but the changes to spellcasting felt deeply offensive.
Like, traditionally wizards and sorcerers would both have spell slots for different spell levels. However wizards had to assign spells to slots during rest at night, while sorcerers could just decide which spell of their (smaller) repertoire to cast. This created meaningful mechanical differences -- a wizard who had prepared for a specific encounter was more dangerous than a sorcerer who was in turn more dangerous than a wizard who had prepared for a very different task.
With D&D 5, there is no need to assign spells to slots any more. Instead, you have to decide which spells you want to be able to cast after rest, and are limited to a frankly ridiculously low number, I think on the order of a dozen or so in the BG3 endgame, where in 3.5 you could go into combat with six different L1 spells, six different L2 spells et cetera. (Of course, the level capping at 12 instead of the more traditional level 20 does not help either. What good is a necromancer who can not cast finger of death? Not that a FoD whose best outcome is mere damage is much fun, either.)
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On the CW side, D&D races have always been more than halfway towards species, really. Sure, you have (fertile) half-elves and half-orcs, so a full speciation between these groups has technically not happened. (I do not consider thieflings to be evidence that devils and demons share the same species as humans any more than I consider Jesus or Greek heros to be evidence of God or Zeus sharing a species with humans, in either case it seems like magic is involved in the conception.)
Still, the D&D 'races' are clearly much further apart than most populations of homo sapiens sapiens are. And they used to get their mechanical differences, which ties the fluff around them to the game mechanics. Yes, that means that no halfling is ever going to be the realm's best melee fighter. That is life. They are 3 feet tall and weigh 20kg or so. Last time I checked, no elementary schoolers were beating up grown men at MMA either.
It seems pretty obvious to me that racial and sex-based bonuses exist in the real world. If a kid wants to become the worlds best long distance runner, but is a girl of European origin, then I am sorry to say that it seems very unlikely that she will ever beat the best male long distance runner from Kenya.
Of course, sex-based bonuses, while clearly present at least for physical (and social!) attributes in the real world, are totally absent in D&D. Women melee fighters are just as viable as men, and most non-evil societies are shockingly egalitarian compared to a medieval baseline. And as far as racial bonuses are concerned, the almost exponential scaling of power with the character level means that a STR-based halfling fighter will still be slaughtering creatures twice her size by the dozen eventually. So in a sense, the game mechanics of D&D were more woke and blank-slatist than reality for a long time.
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The lack of alignment also strikes me as silly, it was always a defining characteristic of D&D. Sure, I can see how the Always Chaotic Evil trope might be Problematic, but this can be fixed without getting rid of the E-word altogether. Just say that most goblins follow evil goblin gods, problem solved. And of course, the cosmology of D&D has not suddenly changed merely because alignment is not a stat any more, it is pretty clear that the followers of Baal or Shar are evil even if you do not spell it out.
I also do not think that the alignment system lead to an overall reductionist morality, you could still have plenty of shades of grey. Or even two lawful good characters going to war with each other if loyalties and circumstances conspire to pit them against each other.
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Personally, I think what killed D&D was WotC dumbing it down to increase mass appeal, not SJ. My understanding is that most fans of the earlier editions got off the bandwagon when 4e arrived. If among the myriad ways WotC are pimping out the rotting corpse of D&D is also apologizing for Gygax having done a racism somewhere, I can not say that I find that uniquely upsetting.
Geek, MOP, sociopath IS Culture War. It is describing how the Culture War battle is lost by the geeks by the entryist sociopaths.
I will grant you that it is a culture war, or even more accurately, a common trope encountered both in isolation and in the context of larger culture wars. Once the sociopaths are in charge, they will be willing to open the gates for whatever side of the larger CW going on at the moment is beneficial to their goals, with little concern about the ideological compatibility with the movement they just took over.
There have been multiple large culture wars in history, but the one which is roughly SJ vs MAGA is the one which I would identify as The Culture War in the context of this thread.
My point was that WotC is better seen as a sociopath org than as a SJ org. Sure, they will happily crave to the demands of the SJ crowd if they see it as advantageous to do so, but if for some reason Trump expended enough political capital to influence D&D, they would be equally willing to write how hobgoblins are strong, smart, handsome, modest, and peace-making, but unfortunately slandered by the jealous tree-hugging elves all the time.
But Trump wouldn't expend political capital to influence D&D. He doesn't give a shit. If you tried to make him notice, he'd probably call it a kid's game and insult the users or something. Same goes for D&Ds more traditional enemies, the religious who call it Satanic. They didn't want to take over D&D, they wanted to ban it. In a different world, perhaps Geek, MOP, sociopath could describe something other than part of the larger Culture War, but in the real world the entryist sociopaths ARE SJW/woke.
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Paizo has, among other things, removed slavery from the Pathfinder campaign setting because some SJWs found it offensive (see the edit at the bottom with Paizo's response). In case anyone was wondering why the rulers of Cheliax who worship Asmodeus (the ruler of Hell with Tyranny as one of his divine domains) have canonically abolished slavery. Whatever else is happening, culture war is as well, and not just as a cover for other motives.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. "Race" as a term for a group with a shared ancestry predates and has a broader definition than modern biological classifications. D&D used the term race and not "species" because Tolkien and other fantasy authors did, and the reason why they used it is due to writing settings that are descended from premodern myths/fairy-tales and that are meant to evoke a premodern sense of the world. Heck, in 3.x (the edition I'm most familiar with) the apes in the Monster Manual literally have claws, I'm guessing because someone made a deliberate decision to not base them on real-life apes but instead inaccurate medieval bestiaries. So there's no reason to assume D&D crossbreeding follows the rules of modern biology in the first place.
One annoying thing about discussions of D&D racial alignments is how rarely they engage with the actual text. "Always [alignment]" was of course invented by 3rd edition and used for outsiders like demons, some undead like ghouls, and a handful of other creatures like dragons and mind-flayers. Orcs by contrast are "Often chaotic evil". Those terms were defined thusly in the Monster Manual glossary:
If they actually engaged with it I wonder if a lot of SJWs would actually find this more objectionable. "Skewed distributions of traits, not absolute rules" are, after all, the sorts of differences based on race or sex that people tend to believe exist in real life.
Of course, Malediction is still on the book. Personally, I would much rather be worked to death in some Cheliax salt mine and face Pharasma's judgement than be summarily sent to spend even a single eon in the tender cares of Asmodeus.
I think the underlying thing is that for SJ, the topic of slavery is simply sacred, and can only be mentioned in sufficiently pious, orthodox works, and an RPG which lets you play evil characters simply does not qualify. (Of course, half of the sacredness is in the word slavery, if the game had simply called an enslaved person a serf (and perhaps gotten rid of the slave markets), most of the objections would have gone away.)
Personally, I have a strong preference that worldbuilding should include organizations whose attitude to diversity is different from a 2015 tech company. I think that fictional racism/speciecism is fine, and actually a good way to tackle these topics without stepping on the toes real world people (except for the professionally offended). Pratchett did this masterfully in Discworld with the ethnic tensions between trolls and dwarfs. Likewise, slavery and serfdom were unfortunately common in a lot of human societies long before Europeans settled in the Americas.
Nor is including a price range for slaves per se offensive. Most reasons why a DM would require this information are non-malevolent, like "can we afford to simply buy our source and set them free instead of breaking them out". Per default, the adventurer lifestyle does not lend itself to slave ownership.
Now, if the source books had made special accommodations for PCs owning slaves -- like saying and you can get a discreet obedience tattoo for your slave which will force them to obey you, I would consider that in poor taste, just as I would consider an info box on how to use the grappling rules to rape someone. But on priors, I doubt this was what happened here.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to seeing how long it will take for SJ to get universal franchise for all residents of Cheliax.
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It's based on level + int modifier, so yeah a dozen or so is about right. That said, the 5e magic changes are on the whole a breath of fresh air. Vancian magic in prior editions (my experience is with 3e, which itself was a softening of the system by including 0-level spells) is a terrible, actively un-fun system. It sucks ass to find yourself in a situation where it sure would be nice to cast (insert spell here), but you only prepared one copy and you already cast it so you're SOL.
The magic system envisioned by Jack Vance, where wizards cast world shattering spells that are so complex that you have to lay them down in your mind in advance, is very cool for a novel. It is not at all pleasant as a game mechanic, however. There are a lot of changes 5e made which are questionable but I disagree that this was one.
5e's equivalent problem is only having space on your preparation list for a very short list of spells. It also sucks to take Fireball and find out that you actually needed Lightning Bolt or something situational like Feather Fall.
I preferred the 3.5e system because in this situation it means I still got to use that ideal spell once, and the larger quantity of memorized spells gave more space to take something experimental or niche without leaving a massive gap in my spell list.
I suppose that's true to some extent. But I can't say I ever felt limited by it, 15 spells (assuming max int at level 10) is enough that you can have a pretty decent distribution of utility spells along with a couple of workhorses. YMMV of course, it depends greatly on the individual player and the game you're in.
I decided to try Sorcerer in 5e so it's possible some of the problem came from having to make changing my spell list a multi-session affair. I think they've since made the UA which let you change spells without levelling up official which is a positive change.
However, I did feel like 5e gave a much greater pressure to have something optimal if you want to to properly contribute to a fight. Preparing multiple options to diversify across different saves, different damage types, and single-target vs multi-target ate up that list quickly.
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From what I remember of 5e, I think the "ritual" tag was supposed to handle a lot of the situational utility stuff.
Edit: I also prefer the 3.5e system, because I like my wizards strong and versatile. Pathfinder tried to balance them a bit by making the spells weaker (I think), but overall Pathfinder wizards are still acceptable to me (even if I don't care for the default Pathfinder setting all that much).
Spontaneous spell casting is more convenient and fun than prepared spell casting for most players, I believe. It's also more powerful, so it's not surprising that the game designers try to balance it in various ways. Originally with the Sorcerer, that was with fewer spells known. Pathfinder has an Arcanist class that instead tries to balance it with fewer spell casts. 5e's Wizard class tries to keep both the large number of known spells and the number of spells cast, instead reducing the number of spells prepared (and giving metamagic to Sorcerers).
Honestly, I think the concentration mechanic and spell nerfs that 5e did are the bigger sticking point for me.
They probably had more impact on my enjoyment when actually playing, but I have some sympathy for these two changes because they did at least partially solve issues that were widely complained about in 3.5e.
Spellcasters ignoring the recommended adventuring day to dump everything immediately made fighters feel irrelevant, which is less of a problem now that the spells are weaker. I also don't think anyone liked the pre-fight buff dance that happened whenever a party got to surprise their foes, which has been killed off entirely by concentration.
I disagree but I can see someone liking those changes enough to outweigh having less interesting and impactful spells.
On the other hand, the loss of proper prepared spellcasting feels like almost entirely downside since we went from having a choice between wizard and sorcerer to two flavors of sorcerer.
I think they might have initially intended this, but most of the best utility spells got left off the ritual list. That was a good decision. Characters being able to cast Detect Magic and Leomund's Tiny Hut effectively at-will was enough of a problem. The idea of dealing with characters who get to cast Fly, Fabricate, or Clairvoyance any time you let them sit still for half an hour should fill any DM with dread.
Rituals were a mistake and if WotC ever gets tired of making slight iterations on 5e I hope the next edition removes or reworks them. At least make them limited by something other than just time!
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Okay, I should add that I have mostly encountered D&D in single-player computer RPGs. There, the impact is much lessened. First, most of the focus is on combat even more than with pen and paper D&D. Either you win an encounter, in which case the fact that you were unable to cast the ideal spell for the situation is moot, or you get a TPK, so you reload and prepare differently. Outside combat, you are not on a timer and can rest whenever you like. Where a barbarian player would certainly have their character complain about having another rest despite the party being in good shape simply so that a spellcaster can prepare a utility spell, and a DM would be quick to point out the side effects of wasting another day, NPC party members typically are much more accommodating.
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But 3e/3.5e also had more robust magic item buying/crafting rules, so it was easy to spend a little extra money to have your highly situational spells as scrolls or wands for when you need them, so you could reserve your spell slots for your more generally useful spells.
True. Though in fairness, you can craft scrolls in 5e just fine so the same would really apply to that (albeit the DMG gives almost zero guidance to the DM on how to implement magical item crafting, just hand waves a few broad guidelines). And in BG3 specifically you have scrolls coming out of your ears.
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I'm not sure I would describe 4e's sin as being "streamlining" or "being too beginner friendly." They made the decision to use grids instead of feet, but the earliest editions used table inches. They replaced 3e's point-based skill system with a simple yes/no, but most TSR editions didn't have a general skill system by default. They threw the lore in a blender, but by the end of 4e's life the World Axis lore had basically everything from the Great Wheel, and it almost ends up being a change of emphasis and presentation more than an actual, substantial change to things.
Heck, it's a bit silly to say that 4e was the start of D&D trying to make itself newcomer friendly, when there is an entire line of Basic D&D under TSR (BX, BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia) that all manage to be pretty easy to play and run, and are still playable to this day.
I agree with you to an extent, but 1e did allow for superhuman stats for humans: 18/100 for males and 18/50 for females. A cap reminiscent of Hercules vs. Xena levels of strength.
However, my feeling is if you're going to allow for larger than life heroes with more strength than is actually humanly possible, who cares about maintaining strength differences between sexes? I'm genuinely fine with either option - either different superhuman caps for men and women, or superheroic men and women being potential equals - but I have a slight preference for the latter, since we're not even talking about real biology anymore anyways.
Heck, even Greco-Roman mythology had Camilla and the Amazons as examples of warrior women with immense strength, so it is hardly "woke" to allow for them in fantasy.
The weird thing is, they haven't even gotten rid of alignment. Flip through the 5.5e Monster Manual, and you'll see that every monster statted there has an alignment. 5e and 5.5e just de-emphasized alignment (most spells and effects like "Detect Good and Evil" interact with creature types like Celestial or Fiend instead of Alignment itself), and presented things slightly differently. (Like, the 5.5e Monster Manual says up front that all of its alignments are suggestions, and you as DM can change them if you want, but has that ever not been the case? Even if, say, 1e doesn't give you explicit permission, what DM is so devoid of creativity that they couldn't conceive of the idea of a fallen Astral Deva/Angel?)
The big change is in how they emphasize and present humanoid creatures. The 5.5e Monster Manual basically defaults to making the DM do homework and apply racial traits to the NPC stat blocks for all of the humanoid races (including orcs and drow), and shunts a lot of creatures that were historically humanoids into other categories (like goblins becoming fey, and lizardfolk becoming elementals.) I don't like most of 5.5e's changes, and have continued to run 5e with my local group (with a healthy dose of OSR philosophy and sensibilities because I love that playstyle) but it is simply false to say D&D got rid of alignment.
I misspoke. What I meant was to say they got rid of alignment for player characters, at least if BG3 is any indication. In 3e, every character, including mortals, had an alignment which was tracked and could be detected. A decent fraction of classes (paladins, clerics, druids, probably more) had alignment restrictions, so there was a mechanical effect even in computer rpgs. (Naturally, with tabletop gaming, a DM is much likelier to intervene if a divine spellcaster strays to far from the purpose of their god, and they can do that in any edition.)
If doesn't surprise me they got rid of alignment in BG3.
5e still has alignment for player characters, but it doesn't really do anything mechanically. The one effect I can think of off the top of my head that cares about PC alignment is rakshasas still being vulnerable to piercing damage wielded by good creatures.
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