About that legacy content

[tdenmark]

Alright, well, this was a risky thread to start, and held up surprisingly well for a while with some thoughtful well reasoned posts. But, seems to have gone downhill today.

I guess all I can say is I hope D&D doesn't succumb to censorship and banning like so much of entertainment seems to have these days. And fortunately we have the OGL which has given the gift of D&D's terminology and mechanics to the fans, so we can continue to make content until they come for all of us.

I'm going to go work on my fantasy heartbreaker retro-clone now. Ciao

[Vile Traveller]

I think this thread has served its purpose, and perhaps its gone a bit further than it should have. It seems we're all in agreement that book burning is bad and bigotry is bad. New and old RPGs can go on without one destroying the other.

I'd also like to personally apologise for repeatedly injecting my local real-world politics into the conversation, though I hope it was seen in the spirit I intended, that the "slippery slope" is not a mere bogeyman but it can and does happen with frightening speed. I can only assume it's a symptom of not having been able to say in person what I think to friends or colleagues since 1 July, as I have no desire to be locked up as a threat to China's national security two-and-a-half months before my departure because I said the wrong thing in the wrong place. This place may just be obscure enough to be safe, but it's not the venue for such conversations. This will be my last reference to such things here, as it already has been elsewhere online and in person.

Let's talk about games.

[Finarvyn]

[mod voice]
Let's be civil here. I thought that this thread started off really nice, then we sort of drove off of the cliff. I think that there was a thread like this on DF and the mod team there shut it down before it even turned ugly, and perhaps we should have done it here as well. I will lock this at the moment and chat with the rest of the Admin team as to whether it's worth continuing this thread.
[/mod voice]

[Deleted]

Adding to this, as I had to do most of my posting here via mobile over the last three days.

Handed tombowings a 90-day ban. Not because he, whatever, tried to contradict me, but because he ignored a direct moderator warning. He's welcome to come back after the ban, but for the moment, we don't want him to further distort a discussion that seemed to be promising before he made his mindless comments. - Now, because it might not be fully transparent to the more casual followers of this thread, let me explain:

• You think that the sender/speaker of a message defines the content, not the receiver/listener? - Cool. Go to your parents or life partners, tell them that they are "fatter than Buddha". That's an expression meant to say "that they bring you good luck", in some Indian dialect, apparently. Well, see if this brings you any good luck. 
• This isn't a debate about language, it's a debate about content: It's not about "how do we call it", but about whether depictions of submissive women in chainmail bikinis are generally alright for a game we want to invite other females to. Or, concerning "Oriental Adventures", whether books and movies like "Shogun" are necessarily the best source for learning about the realities of Japanese culture. - Again, there is nothing wrong with asking those questions, and nothing wrong with demanding that those things are changed. It does seem like common sense, really, and if folks in the 80s had been sensitized to those issues as we are today, they would very likely taken that into consideration. 
• There is an inherent difference between being sheepishly pro-active about issues of sexism and racism, like we often see in the media, and between speaking up when you are asked what you think about those things. And right now, rightfully or not, we are all asked to explain how we stand on those issues. There is nothing "nefarious" about that, or about being asked that question, in principle. Justified, positive criticism is something we all need to be able to handle, and if errors were made, then owning them is the only gentlemanly way to deal with them. 

In sum, we are not doing this for anyone else: We are doing this for ourselves! Not to please whatever might be the politics of the day, but to keep gaming open for everyone. Nobody here wants women to be afraid to play with an all-male adventuring party because she doesn't want to be forced to roleplay "Dragonlance's" Tikka. Or, for that matter, for the Asian kid to be reluctant to join a gaming group because in our RPG treatment of Japan, Japanese don't talk, they only yell. - Again, common sense, and sensibility. We openly ask it for ourselves, so when others demand it, we need to give it with equal openness.

Personally, I'm glad we get to do this, despite the side noises by people that seem to belong to a mindset of perpetual outrage. We should long have done it, frankly. I don't expect it to change our games, or anything else we do. But it will help people to better understand what we do, and that's worth the effort, in my mind.