D&D Wokeness issues gets more and more media coverage

 

The whole wokeness invading D&D thing has been discussed on blogs and such for a good while, but it was when Elon Musk recently tweeted the possibility that he might buy it from Hasbro is when I realized this issue was going mainstream. 

The popularity of the game thanks to things like Critical Role has also led to the discovery of famous people having been players at least in the past, which Musk clearly was. Sure, figures such as Vin Diesel and even leftist late night shill Steven Colbert have been known about for a good while. But along with Musk we are finding more. 

Since I started watching a lot of Youtube because I mostly work from home, I have bits of clips I like to watch. One of these is The Hill, a news show that is one of the few balanced options for such. It is usually hosted by one leftist, and one on the right (more or less). 

Host Robby Soave often brings up being a boardgame and DnD geek. So he certainly chimes in on these issues of woke takeover of his beloved pastimes. 

I almost get chills with this stuff. When I was a kid I had to hide my geeky loves. I would leave football practice and sneak off to the history hall (where I knew no teammates would be lurking) to hang out with my dork friends and get my DnD on. Who would have thought it would ever get so mainstream that actual news journalists would be talking about it in a way that was not about satanic panic and dudes getting lost in college maintenance halls?

The Question of Race in D&D and other Woke issues

 

So I read yesterday that they will be removing the term "race" from D&D.

I'm not here to rant on that. You can go to The RPG Pundit's Blog, or Venger Satanis', or any number of more conservative (does it sound logical for a satanist to be conservative? I mean, is "do what thou whilst" conservative?) spots for more passion about it. Me? I get over these things fairly easily. 

I mean, race was never the proper term. And "species" seems more appropriate, though sounds more science-fictiony. I recently had to go through the "no more racial modifiers" thing with my Roll20 material. And you know what? I love those race-based modifiers, but in the grand scheme of things? I just want to run games and make fun for others. So now you get plus 2 to something and plus 1 to something. Big whoop. Let the players decide if a mod is based on what they are. 

The main thing that irks me is how the left wants very badly to instill real world race issues into gaming. They are the ones who decided orcs and drow represent black people. It's kind of tragi-comic how the left seems to actually be the ones with racist thoughts. But whatevs.  

I'm fairly on the left for many social issues. Things I can't believe we still have to talk about in this day and age. Gay marriage. Legalization of marijuana. But I lean more to the center on most other things. Though I believe there is a lot of racism in the country (no worse than most other nations), I think the current wokist ideals at their heart include a lot of racial grift and liberal profiteering. Indoctrination of children into believing they are racists at heart and their reading of way too many Twitter posts on the issues are making them do things they will one day regret. I mean, those dicks don't grow back after you cut them off. 

The regular Roll20 campaign I've been doing for months does not seem to have especially woke players, though I don't try to test them on it. But I have tried a couple of campaigns that were nonstarters that were made up of folk heavy on the pronouns. It's bad enough that in a lot of cases off the Roll20 forums you will get people who want to go by nicknames that are awkward for me to call them, like Morpheus, Goat Cheese, or Sucknuts, but toss in an endless variety of pronouns and it starts to get kind of surreal. I'm open to learning more about people, but for games I just want to call people Mary or Joe as our campaigns roll along. DMing can be stressful enough without worrying that using the terms "He" or "She" might be taken as ignorance. 

Again, whatevs. I'm accepting of le differance. When I left SoCal I had a transgender neighbor, and she was the first person who called me when I moved to a new state to see how I was doing. My friendship there sort of opened my eyes to more acceptance of differences. 

But the long and short of it is I just want to run a game that is fun for all. I don't want all these worries of the real-world intruding. I want orcs to be nasty and evil, and I want everybody to hate them. Even other orcs. 

YMMV. Cheers.