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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.
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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