What is considered to be "modern" RPG design?

[Username17]

I'm trying to think of a virtue that is explicity bad for a PC...?

Berserk makes you fucking die. It adds to your soak and subtracts from your defense so you take at least as much damage or more depending on what you are being attacked by. Also it means that you can't retreat and are going to fucking die. Enduring Magic makes your spells last a random and secret amount of time so that you are basically incapable of ever planning anything based on when your spells end because you can't fucking know. These are from the first two pages of Virtues in AM5.

-Username17

[Longes]

I'm trying to think of a virtue that is explicity bad for a PC...?

I think Frank's wrong about Enduring Magic - it's situationally useful.

That said,
Mercurian Magic is only ever good if you have access to an entire mercurian cabal, in which case you skullfuck the setting with big rituals. The rest of the time you just paid a third of your virtue points to not cast spontaneous spells.
Diedne Magic is the worst way to be a spontaneous caster that doesn't pay off until you are an archmage. Life-Linked Spontaneous Magic is better in every way and doesn't make you kill on sight target for the Order.
Magic Sensitivity leaves you defenseless before any wizard.
Elemental Magic and Secondary Insight are giant yawning traps.
Holy Magic from the splatbook is a character-destroying disaster unless you use a very specific combination of cheese and rules interpretations to be kinda okay.

On a more meta level, any wizard who takes Supernatural Abilities is setting xp and virtue points on fire, unless they are making cheese.

Ars Magica 5e has more traps than the Tomb of Horrors, and creates giant gulfs of power based on system mastery difference between the players.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I'm trying to think of a virtue that is explicity bad for a PC...?

Berserk makes you fucking die.

-Username17

Frank & Longes, yes, I agree with both of you. I never saw a player take Beserk and it always looked crappy to me.

I think a big part of "modernization" when making a new edition is being willing to throw out genuine crap from previous editions.

Beserk in AM4 was a similar kind of mess. Why keep it? Because of copypasta from the previous edition.

In Exalted 3e, Bureaucracy charms are not nearly as good as they should be, some of them at any rate, especially when compared to other charms. Like, there's still a charm that lets me evaluate a market place. Why? I mean, that is useful, but there's not resource sybsystem to interact with. Does it directly help me make more money? Maybe.

I think in terms of "Good" design, is to not write rules as if some subsystem exists, and then completely blank on actually writing up that subsystem. Exalted being a notorious offender.

[Username17]

The bottom line with modernization is that when you make a new game, especially if that game is a new edition of a pre-existing property, you should be able to make a coherent statement about what you're trying to achieve. When a new edition of Shadowrun or whatever came out in the nineties, one of the things you could expect was a heading followed by a few paragraphs for the "Why a New Edition?" section. That shit's really fucking important.

When 4th and 5th editions of games stopped having those little sections it wasn't to save space. Books that came out in the last fifteen years are almost universally way too long. And it wasn't because the design imperatives of these things were obvious and needed - I genuinely couldn't tell you what problems 5th edition D&D or V20 or whatever are supposed to be addressing other than a projected hole in 4th quarter incomes of the parent company.

A new game, especially a new game that is a new edition of an old game, needs to justify its existence. Lately, games haven't even bothered trying to do that. What is Pathfinder 2 even supposed to be for? Paradox wanted to make Vampire 5 because otherwise they wouldn't have an in-print edition of Vampire that they owned, but why would anyone give a fuck from the standpoint of someone who wanted to actually play the game?

Modernization can include innovation. But it can also simply be that you accept innovation that has already been done in other games. If someone makes a dicepool game and they use variable target numbers, I'm going to call bullshit because the innovation to improve that with fixed target numbers happened fifteen years ago and is nearly old enough to drive. If someone makes a dicepool game and they use the word "success" to mean both an individual die hitting the target number and to mean a sufficient number of dice hitting the target number to get the desired result from the roll, I'm going to call bullshit because the innovation to use separate hit/success nomenclature happened fourteen years ago and is allowed to have paid work with its parent's permission in many states.

A new game needs to justify its existence to the end user, not just to the parent company's accountant.

-Username17

[Koumei]

the innovation to use separate hit/success nomenclature happened fourteen years ago and is allowed to have paid work with its parent's permission in many states.

On a tangent here, I've been thinking about that, and in a game where you're expected to attack people now and then (there are a couple of those), calling it a "hit" is just as bad as a "success". Is there a good term for "the die that comes up on the value needed to progress you towards succeeding at your action" that isn't also synonymous with succeeding at the typical tasks?

In BakuGaku I use "marks", but that's specifically because your stats are "grades" and the things you roll are "tests" so it works for that. But if you want to avoid "How many hits to I need in order to hit?" in Shadowrun, what would a better term be?

[Longes]

I've been reading L5R 5e lately, and I think it's an interesting case of a game that has been successfully modernized while also being really bad due to carried over baggage.

Modernization:

L5R 5e has five stats (rings): Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Void. In 4e- these rings were a compilation stat of two stats like Willpower and Stamina, and those were your actual stats. In 5e you just have the rings and roll the rings. Now, what's interesting is that every Ring can be rolled with every Skill, and which Ring you use mostly depends on your ability to describe your action in the way you want.

In my opinion that's pretty good and encourages roleplay. It's not totally free-form, and the book has a long list of "Approaches" to each skill group (i.e. what ring you use when), but it's a step in the right direction.

But there are issues.

The first issue is that despite having this streamlined skill mechanic, the game has over 20 schools (classes). While there are small mechanical differences between schools, and some are way better than others (Kakita Dueling School is one of the worst duelists, while Mirumoto Scout is one of the best), it boils down to the fact that two characters with the same rings will play almost identically. The difference between an Earth/Water Mirumoto Bushi and an Earth/Water Kakita Bushi is that the former has two swords and does some target number fiddling in combat while the latter has one sword and is slightly better at crits. You absolutely can streamline the entire system to "Bushi, Shugenja, Monk, Ninja" abstract schools that you customize to make them Clan Schools.

The second issue is that special moves (Kata, Kiho, Invocations, etc.) are all tied to rings, so if you actually know what's good for you, you'll always pick specific rings for a specific school. A Togashi Monk is always going to be high Earth/Fire, a Taoist Swordsman is always going to be high Earth/Water, and a Soshi Shugenja is always going to be high Air/Water. Which means any character from a school will always be roleplayed the same way.

The third issue is old school bean counting. This is a money-less society of nobles - I don't want to give a shit about how many koku I have and how many onigiri I packed under my ten foot poles. There are extensive weapons list which are all fucking useless because everyone uses either a katana or a nodachi. They may call "jian" a "duelist's weapon", but all duels in Rokugan are fought with a fucking katana, not with a jian. And also jian is objectively worse than a katana in every way and no bushi school starts with it, so why would you ever give a fuck.

The game streamlined merits and flaws into relatively free-form advantages/disadvantages. An advantage gives you a small mechanical effect like never being scared or never being tempted with money, and allows you to reroll two dice on any roll where you could argue your advantage applying. A disadvantage gives you a small mechanical effect like being known for being poor or never seeing spirits, and forces you to reroll two dice on any roll where GM thinks it applies. And you could basically end the chapter at that and let your players make their own advantages and disadvantages. But instead there are twenty pages of these fucks with more coming in expansions. And of course these are not created equal. Being able to know everything about rock gardens is nowhere near the same ballpark as always knowing how to best taunt someone.

There are many other issues with L5R 5e, but these are the ones relevant to the topic of modern game design. It's a game that takes one step forward, gets scared, and runs back. It's a lot like Monte Cook's Numenera actually.

[OgreBattle]

In BakuGaku I use "marks", but that's specifically because your stats are "grades" and the things you roll are "tests" so it works for that. But if you want to avoid "How many hits to I need in order to hit?" in Shadowrun, what would a better term be?

Points, boon, gain

[Username17]

On a tangent here, I've been thinking about that, and in a game where you're expected to attack people now and then (there are a couple of those), calling it a "hit" is just as bad as a "success".

I personally don't think hit is as bad as success. But eve if it were, having two different terms that are synonymous is still better for game purposes than using the same word twice for different game terms.

Like, in the real world "warrior" means the same thing as "fighter" and "sorcerer" means the same thing as "wizard." But it's not really a problem to have those two words side by side referencing meaningfully different game mechanics. The fact that there's different nomenclature is enough to distinguish the rules objects even though from a dictionary standpoint the words don't mean different things.

The important thing is that in a dicepool system, the concept of rolling high enough on one die for it to be good news and the concept of rolling high enough on enough different dice for it to be good news are different concepts and it's important to have well defined and unambiguous ways to discuss the two. And the breakthrough of making nomenclature that was good enough for that was from 2005, and there's not really an excuse to make a dicepool game that doesn't hit that bar today.

Obviously, your game can use different nomenclature. You could call your DM a GM or an MC. Or fucking whatever. But "different mechanical concepts get different nomenclature" is fucking fundamental.

-Username17

[Zaranthan]

I think you missed the point a little. Yes, you need both "hit" and "success" to be distinguished, but Koumei is talking specifically about attack rolls, where you have to roll enough "hits" to "hit". Or worse, in the case of SR4, dodge rolls: where you have to roll enough "hits" to not be "hit", and if you don't roll enough "hits" then you get "hit".

You can weave around this in the rules text by phrasing the attack/dodge rolls cleverly. "When making an attack, your hits set the threshold for the opponent's dodge roll. If the opponent's roll fails to meet the threshold, they take damage." But, players at the table are still going to say shit like "I roll dodge, three hits" "he hits you".

The question is: is there yet another simple term we can use in place of "hit" for a die that rolls high enough, so we can use it for "to-hit rolls"? Emphasis on simple, because while we certainly CAN go full-on calling a rabbit a smeerp, it would be better to use a word that intuitively means "good roll" to people.

[OgreBattle]

How about rank

"A rank 5 hit is needed to bypass this ___'s defenses"

"I rolled a rank 5 hit"
"Oh that's not enough to hurt the dragon tank"

The higher the rank the better, and in-game means a higher quality hit

[Guts]

Detailed Skill lists are not as popular as they once were. The old-school resurgence, the narrative crowds and the latest D&D incarnation are sidelining them in favor of broader concepts like aspects, moves, proficiencies or simply GM adjudication (or rulings).

[tussock]

Guts, that's sort of how detailed characters aren't what they were, in the D&D line now. There is however much more detail in the Pathfinder line, which is more popular.

Anyway, modern gaming is essentially selling rose coloured glasses. Getting people to think they are buying a Mentzer D&D type game and actually selling them an even less compelling version of 4e D&D with the Mentzer cover on it. Literally.

5th edition D&D tried to be all previous versions of D&D to everyone. They explicitly did not try to fix anything at all, but rather just "take the best of everything" without ever specifying what that was or what was from where.

Pathfinder was "lets keep playing 3rd edition, please, because the GSL is poison and they took Dungeon and Dragon off us and we want to work in this industry still!" Pathfinder 2 seems to be "let's keep playing Pathfinder, please!".

It'd be like selling a car in the 1970's and putting giant fins on the back because of how cool all those late-50's cars all looked. And companies totally did that, because they also had nothing real to offer.

[Guts]

Interesting analogy, Tussock. Makes sense.

I actually like what the OSR produces in terms of tools and setting stuff, but rules-wise it's pretty dead.

[Mord]

From a broader standpoint of "modern RPGs" rather than design specifically, what distinguishes modern products to me is the level of pandering to the consumer involved. I guess you could generously call that "marketing."

Products made in the OD&D to VTM era did not give a single fuck what the audience thought about weird tables and incoherent, incomprehensible writing. The AD&D-era writer had a book they wanted to write, they offered it for sale, and did not compromise with "what anyone actually wanted." Some of these caught on, most did not. Now you have D&D 5, one of whose major selling points is "look at how much we like the gays!" and whose contribution to the state of the art appears to consist of an endless flood of shitty podcasts and video series.

VTM had an aesthetic vision rather than a mechanical one, but once again, there was no real attempt to appeal to anyone other than the writers and their circle of fuckbuddies. It just so happened that the gothic-punk aesthetic they sold caught the zeitgeist, but this was not the product of a deliberate attempt to gauge public interest - rather, what the writers wrote was in many cases actively hostile to what the broader market or even the fanbase wanted. Consider Justin Achilli's entire tenure as VTM line developer; no one at WW cared about making a product that appealed to their customers. Now you have the third incarnation of White Wolf presenting lavish photoshoot-quality artbooks of LARPers in the best vampire drag they can imagine specifically to sell glossy artbooks to Scandinavian LARPers. The use of high production values and full-color artwork in RPGs was a 3e thing, but it was never used so transparently to market directly to a target audience.

The OSR is not best understood as a return to the OD&D or AD&D era of "dear Gary here are a few hundred pages of weird shit I hammered out on a typewriter please publish it love Ed." In the time before dinosaurs, that's what creativity looked like. The aesthetic was entirely accidental and a product of the material circumstances of 1977. Today the throwback concept of the OSR is a marketing decision. There's no actual reason products made in 2019 should look like products made in 1981 except that it's a cynical way to suck money out of people who like to think that forty years ago they were the kids from Stranger Things.

In terms of actual modern design, what you have is the return and victory of rules-lite. Much as we hate it here, PbtA is modern design. FATE was a reaction to the mechanical sprawl and detail of D&D 3e, an attempt to revive the universalism of GURPS in a highly abstracted framework that ironically became just as complicated as the detail-oriented systems it set itself in opposition to. PbtA could be seen as a fork of that evolutionary branch, keeping the notion that most mechanics should be abstracted away but throwing aside any notion of universalism in favor of reifying certain concepts as mechanics within a given implementation. You could think of a Playbook as a set of FATE maneuvers and/or aspects that have been written down in advance to reduce cognitive load on the players. The designer's choice of what to put in the playbook reflects the priorities and themes of that particular PbtA implementation at the price of that specific implementation's ability to support stories outside the designer's intended framework. So the system itself is very loose and universal, but any given implementation is detailed enough to restrict the play space and make for an easy experience.

[Guts]

From a broader standpoint of "modern RPGs" rather than design specifically, what distinguishes modern products to me is the level of pandering to the consumer involved. I guess you could generously call that "marketing."

Products made in the OD&D to VTM era did not give a single fuck what the audience thought about weird tables and incoherent, incomprehensible writing. The AD&D-era writer had a book they wanted to write, they offered it for sale, and did not compromise with "what anyone actually wanted." Some of these caught on, most did not. Now you have D&D 5, one of whose major selling points is "look at how much we like the gays!" and whose contribution to the state of the art appears to consist of an endless flood of shitty podcasts and video series.

Makes sense. But isn't that the natural course of any maturing industry, becoming more "market aware"? It was like this with videogames too. Just look at the people at, say, the RPGCodex and see how they lament the end of their golden age when devs created to their hearts content and not what company comitees demanded (not judging if it's good or bad here, just saying it's expected, I guess).

In terms of actual modern design, what you have is the return and victory of rules-lite. Much as we hate it here, PbtA is modern design. FATE was a reaction to the mechanical sprawl and detail of D&D 3e, an attempt to revive the universalism of GURPS in a highly abstracted framework that ironically became just as complicated as the detail-oriented systems it set itself in opposition to. PbtA could be seen as a fork of that evolutionary branch, keeping the notion that most mechanics should be abstracted away but throwing aside any notion of universalism in favor of reifying certain concepts as mechanics within a given implementation. You could think of a Playbook as a set of FATE maneuvers and/or aspects that have been written down in advance to reduce cognitive load on the players. The designer's choice of what to put in the playbook reflects the priorities and themes of that particular PbtA implementation at the price of that specific implementation's ability to support stories outside the designer's intended framework. So the system itself is very loose and universal, but any given implementation is detailed enough to restrict the play space and make for an easy experience.

I would also include Cortex there (see Leverage, Smallville, Marvel Heroic, etc) and form a triad. Cortex actually looks more a sibling of Fate than PbtA does IMO, with it's similar use of traits and meta-currency. PbtA is more a child of the Forge and it's ideas of Story Now! / Narrativism, which predates Fate if I remember right.

[tussock]

Mord's post was a pretty weird grognardy thing, but I'm going to respond to bits of it anyway, just because.

From a broader standpoint of "modern RPGs" rather than design specifically, what distinguishes modern products to me is the level of pandering to the consumer involved. I guess you could generously call that "marketing."

So, marketing and pandering are different things. Their marketing is telling people they will be pandered to, but the actual games do not deliver in the slightest. 5e, for instance, can't be giving people what they want because it's not giving them much of anything.

Products made in the OD&D to VTM era did not give a single fuck what the audience thought about weird tables and incoherent, incomprehensible writing. The AD&D-era writer had a book they wanted to write, they offered it for sale, and did not compromise with "what anyone actually wanted."

Gygax personally answered thousands of questions about his game, a huge amount of the DMG text for 1st edition is literally Q&A via snail-mail for the already-published MM and PHB. He was intimately familiar with what people wanted from D&D and the 1976 to 1979 development progress to a complete AD&D is really quite amazing given it was basically a 1-man job on primitive tech. Books for 1st edition were still written by popular demand up to 1985, where Gygax was sacked.

Lorraine Williams did not follow suit after that, explicitly rejecting customer feedback, playtesting, or anything else to do with changing or updating the basics of the game, instead literally ripping out much of the uniqueness of it to pander to religious nuts who didn't even buy it. Declining sales from there bankrupted them 10 years later.

Now you have D&D 5, one of whose major selling points is "look at how much we like the gays!"

I'll just remind everyone that denying people's existence is what Nazis do, and is bad. Companies that stop denying the existence of various people is good. The end.

VTM had an aesthetic vision rather than a mechanical one, but once again, there was no real attempt to appeal to anyone other than the writers and their circle of fuckbuddies. It just so happened that the gothic-punk aesthetic they sold caught the zeitgeist, but this was not the product of a deliberate attempt to gauge public interest - rather, what the writers wrote was in many cases actively hostile to what the broader market or even the fanbase wanted. Consider Justin Achilli's entire tenure as VTM line developer; no one at WW cared about making a product that appealed to their customers.

This is anachronistic. Compared to 1985-1996 run AD&D, VtM was completely delivering demanded content to fans. Playing as the monsters was something EGG didn't particularly want in AD&D, and Lorraine Williams tried to rip out completely to quell the religious right, despite continuous popular demand from actual players. Someone played a gods-damned Vampire in Blackmore in 1971 FFS, but it went against EGG's religious sensibilities to have redeemable (and thus playable as protagonists) monsters. They talked about it in early Dragon mags! Playable Drow only got in because R.A.Salvatore wrote a popular book about a bad guy being redeemed, and that made it cannon for the game, and still EGG talked about taking them back out.

So it was very well known there was a big market demand for exactly playing as vampires and werewolves and such, since forever, and also very well known after 1989 that D&D would not be providing it. VtM was literally targeted at unfilled market demand from day 1, and they worked hard on filling further demands thereafter, while 2nd edition AD&D continued to produce crap no one ever asked for as company policy (Williams didn't like D&D players at all, writers were forbidden from playtesting lest they become like the hated players).

Now you have the third incarnation of White Wolf presenting lavish photoshoot-quality artbooks of LARPers in the best vampire drag they can imagine specifically to sell glossy artbooks to Scandinavian LARPers. The use of high production values and full-color artwork in RPGs was a 3e thing, but it was never used so transparently to market directly to a target audience.

That's a matter of technology and local affordability. The photo-shopped real people are much cheaper than good raw artists if you get free modelling, which they seem to have done. It's not particularly high production, it's just like cheap cars now also have 11 air bags and a reversing camera, eventually things become standard.

D&D 5 has artists throughout, original art everywhere, that's the high production values these days. Very expensive, but also much cheaper that it used to be, 2e or 3e couldn't do that at a profit.

The OSR is not best understood as a return to the OD&D or AD&D era of "dear Gary here are a few hundred pages of weird shit I hammered out on a typewriter please publish it love Ed." In the time before dinosaurs, that's what creativity looked like.

It's more that that's what books look like with no layout expert, no editor, maybe a single friendly artist doing basic line-art, and a single author on a tight timeline. OSR games look like old games because they share some of the same production limitations, EGG's old wargaming friends who played in his games did most of the art for 1st edition AD&D, same dynamic at work in the OSR.

Which is to say they don't really sell enough copies to do better.

Where like forge games are all cargo-cult garbage based around a misunderstanding, and GURPS was literally a system of adding licensed game books to a common core mechanic from earlier games by SJG (it's like d20, without the open gaming license, all by contract to the company, it got big because Steve Jackson let it get big).


Then WotC bought D&D, and (before Hasbro gobbled them up and starting sacking all the good ones) managed to do massive customer surveys and a huge REAL playtest between 1997 and 2000 and produced a set of fixes to AD&D that people actually wanted, including things like playing the monsters (VtM), having a common core mechanic (GURPS), allowing anyone to make support for the game ( ) and retaining the kitchen sink fantasy including Demons and Devils and Assassins (AD&D).

4th edition is ... fuck 4th edition. So much head-up-ass.

5th edition is ... yeah, it went basically nowhere and produced almost nothing because Mearls has personally never finished anything and never will. It's just how certain people in charge of things massively trump any technical limitations, Lorraine Williams killed development for 15 years and then 3 years under Monte/Skip/Jonathon actually listened and produced the titan that was 3e. Artistically 5e is really nice, quibbles aside, but the content ... it does remind one of the problems with Iron Heroes, only Mearls has gotten worse with age.

I mean, he's a genius at internal self-promotion in the company, the press he delivers about a barely existent game is brilliantly competent. I can see why he's still there, it's just a shame for the game, which mostly isn't.

--

Just look at the people at, say, the RPGCodex and see how they lament the end of their golden age when devs created to their hearts content and not what company comitees demanded (not judging if it's good or bad here, just saying it's expected, I guess).

CRPGs have changed to avoid licensing fees, as have most games. The basic engines take huge crews to get functional these days and whoever owns your studio is where you get your engine to avoid the cost of using someone else's. In turn, the engines are built for sports games (or whatever the parent company's basic profit line is) and just don't work well, if at all for classic RPG concepts.

I mean, if you're basically trying to write Baldur's Gate in an emulator that runs inside a soccer game, you can see why that might not come out the same. It's hard enough for them to write a cricket game in it. The soccer game's not that great in the first place, it's just a licence to print money because they have the ip sewn up.

[Mord]

tussock, hey, real quick, can you tell the difference between "making something because it appeals to you while accepting suggestions from others" and "making something because you hope it will appeal to someone else?" Asking for a friend.

Also can you tell the difference between "concrete actions to improve the material circumstances of oppressed minorities in the face of material consequences" and "platitudes paid lip service for the sake of profit?" Asking for the same friend.

[Guts]

So, marketing and pandering are different things. Their marketing is telling people they will be pandered to, but the actual games do not deliver in the slightest. 5e, for instance, can't be giving people what they want because it's not giving them much of anything.

And you say this based on what? Because D&D 5e is the most popular and best selling RPG in the world right now. So they must be delivering at some level.

Also, Mord seems spot-on based on my personal experience, because I see people from wildly different circles - from OSR to crunchy to light-games - all playing and praising D&D 5e.

[tussock]

Mord: representation is important. Stop before you say something bad, m'kay.

Like, it's 2019, man, gay people existing has long been the default in popular media, Will and Grace was twenty one fucking years ago, excluding gay people from your work now is just fascism.

3e D&D was a bit shit for representation, or at least very shy about it, and even then management actually forced the design team to add a strait white guy as the lead in the art not long before publication. But it was also 19 years ago and they got nervous about things like that then. Management no longer does that shit because it was received somewhat poorly even then, and things being better now is expected and normal.

D&D books also cannot directly solve hate crimes, except through representation. Like, c'mon, don't be an ass.

--

Guts: D&D 5e is in print, and has the name D&D on it. That doesn't automatically make them the top seller, 4e often wasn't for instance, but Pathfinder and everything else is currently unsupported and being "the best selling RPG in the world" is thus a super low bar for something in print with the name D&D on it.

People not talking about much else is, you know, there's not much else to talk about either. Like, ... what would you expect to happen?

I say it's not giving people much of anything, because it isn't. Physically, almost no rules. People do things with it, but those things are unique hand waving. The game itself insists that it has no flaws because the GM can fix everything. Which is just garbage, that's terrible, awful to see in a game, bad enough in 1989 let alone now. It means everyone's 5e experience is massively different to everyone else's, they're not even talking about the same thing when they talk about it, other than to insist people having problems just need a new GM.

[Thaluikhain]

Also can you tell the difference between "concrete actions to improve the material circumstances of oppressed minorities in the face of material consequences" and "platitudes paid lip service for the sake of profit?" Asking for the same friend.

While there are massive differences, there's an argument to be made for "better than nothing" and something something normalisation. Preferably it's a little step that precedes a few much bigger ones, though.

Like, it's 2019, man, gay people existing has long been the default in popular media, Will and Grace was twenty one fucking years ago, excluding gay people from your work now is just fascism.

As an aside, John Barrowman (who is gay for reals) was in the running to play Will, only he was too straight, so they gave it to a straight guy that'd act more stereotypically gay. Not perhaps the best example.

[Mord]

While there are massive differences, there's an argument to be made for "better than nothing" and something something normalisation. Preferably it's a little step that precedes a few much bigger ones, though.

I agree with you that "better than nothing" is about the best that you can say for them.

Corporations are naturally the very last type of entity to sign on with a social change because of their legal responsibility to shareholders. They do what will make money for shareholders and what the law compels them to do (when they can't get away with flouting it). A company jumping on a social change is an explicit business strategy, not an expression of ethical conviction. The fact that corporations, including Hasbro subsidiary WotC, are doing the rainbow thing represents the fact that pro-LGB forces have already won in every meaningful way. ("T" isn't there yet.) If the bean counters at Hasbro thought there was any risk that the tiny rainbow on D&D Beyond or the "we love the gays" disclaimer in the PHB would lose them more money than it brought in, those things would not be there.

Let's ask this: is the content of D&D 5 actually meaningfully pro-LGBT in any way? No it is not; they slapped a rainbow sticker on the same product they were going to make anyway and expect you to reward them with money for it. It's the same fucking thing as this:

The meme that businesses deserve your money because they support "representation" is misguided and pernicious. They are coopting LGBT identity for free marketing. It took Executive Order 13672 (July 2014) and the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (June 2015) to make sexual orientation a protected class and force all states to allow gay marriage. D&D 5e Player's Handbook came out in August 2014. D&D didn't say fucking shit about being gay until after Barry O. signed Executive Order 13672. At best you can give WotC a neutral score for not self-destructively digging in its heels against the legal and social evolution that had already taken place; the idea that they deserve positive credit for merely going with the flow is nonsense.

So, to attempt to bring this back around to my original statement about pandering defining the "modern" RPG industry:

Employees of WotC did not create any real original content for D&D 5e and no one involved had any creative vision. The various things they did and are doing to try to draw in audiences were and are empty pandering because they have always just said anything they think people wanted to hear, without any intention of doing any work to follow through on any of it. Does anyone still remember their hype statements about modular rule sets for 5e that would support play in the style of literally any previous D&D edition? Because all references to that shit vanished during the playtest, after no effort at all was invested in pursuing it.

The nominal pro-LGBTness of 5e follows that exact pattern: say some things that you think people will like, do nothing to meaningfully substantiate those statements. You can point to a few instances in a few adventure modules where somebody ctrl+H'd a few instances of "wife" to "husband" in reference to spouses of male NPCs, or "she" to "they" in reference to gender-neutral NPCs, to which I say: Whoop. De. God. Damn. Do. When WotC prints a campaign that revolves around Elminster awakening to his homosexuality, then I'll entertain the idea that WotC actually supports the gays to an extent that's more than skin deep.

EDIT: Spoiler tags and exclusive bonus content.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

... excluding gay people from your work now is just fascism.

I can't tell if this is serious or not, and this troubles me.

[Kaelik]

... excluding gay people from your work now is just fascism.

I can't tell if this is serious or not, and this troubles me.

While I am all for calling Disney a fascist company, I just want to point out that Marvel has a variety of gay and bi characters every single one of whom has been portrayed as straight when presented in the Marvel movies.

[Thaluikhain]

The fact that corporations, including Hasbro subsidiary WotC, are doing the rainbow thing represents the fact that pro-LGB forces have already won in every meaningful way.

While I agree (to an extent) with the rest of what you've said, I'd really not go that far. LGB people still face a hell of a lot of discrimination, just not enough to stop sticking rainbows on things profitable. Hell, if there wasn't an issue, you'd not be able to make money out of controversy.

I remember a twitter post I saw, don't remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of "Yeah, they are cashing in on LGBT issues, but I'd loved to have seen rainbows all over the supermarket when I was a kid".

[tussock]

Disney bought all of Fox except Fox News off Murdock, and nothing changed.

It's the same fucking thing as

No, it is not. Lt. Uhura was not pandering to Blacks. When they made a Lt. Uhura action figure at some point, it was not pandering to Blacks. The black girl Barbies is not pandering to Blacks. That's all representation.

Rainbow stickers on companies who sack employees for being gay is bullshit, but the companies who provide rainbow sticker certification are almost universally shit (and still, it's a thing that is appreciated). That would be like if 5e literally had a rainbow sticker with no internal representation, while what it actually has is internal representation, no obvious company hang ups about gay people, and not even a rainbow sticker. They don't advertise it, it's just there.

And you're being continuously offended about gay people subtly existing in the background of art that you don't seem to be a fan of, out of nowhere, so I'm probably just gunna block you, Mord.

It took Executive Order 13672 (July 2014) and the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (June 2015) to make sexual orientation a protected class and force all states to allow gay marriage.

It took the 14th amendment to make that possible at all in law. But the 14th amendment wasn't enough, it needed prolonged social acceptance, which actual politicians in the US have said came because Will & Grace was a popular show that ran for years on prime time from 1999 and presented a gay man as a primary protagonist while being otherwise normal.

So while it used to be possible to talk shit about gay people, about how they were all child molesters or rapists or devil worshippers or secret communists (which is literally the shit that stopped these sort of laws in the 80's), after years of Will and Jack being normal people, dressed normally, with normal jobs, and gay at the same time (and not all are effeminate!) it was accepted that gay men are just men with regular type man problems and also they have to date men, who are mostly terrible (as exemplified by Grace also dating mostly terrible men). And when they find a good one, them getting married ... like, it just makes sense and offends people that they can't.

Offends them enough to call their senator. And then laws actually get passed.

You might think, that would've happened anyway, but lots of countries that didn't get Will & Grace have actually gone the other way in recent years. There's countries just now passing laws to make homosexuality illegal for the first time, because their media didn't have anything like that in recent years and people forgot.

Representation matters, a lot. It probably matters more than anything. Yeah it's not the law, but even the fucking law won't save you if there's an asshole in the whitehouse and the only thing Mexican immigrants are on TV is migrant farm workers who can't speak English and get arrested for not having papers, maids who steal from their employers, and MS13 gang members who kidnap white women in some ludicrously convoluted drug deal.

In the 1968 episode "Plato's Stepchildren", Uhura and Captain Kirk kiss. The episode is often cited as the first example of a scripted inter-racial kiss on United States television. Originally, the scene was meant to be filmed with and without the kiss, so that the network could later decide whether to air the kiss. However, Shatner and Nichols deliberately flubbed every take of the shot without the kiss so that the shot could not be used.

To some extent, Mord, you're just missing how fucking stupid people are. Seeing things on TV as normal and accepted makes them normal and accepted, just like that. Staying in media that way makes them stay accepted. Republicans are now happy with concentration camps where children sleep on bare concrete floors with insufficient food and water and no blankets, because it was on TV and the R guy said it was acceptable and normal and lawful, and they didn't film the protesters or ask a lawyer.

That's life. Everyone needs positive, ordinary representation or bad things start happening, examples abound. D&D isn't leading the way in anything, but they're following in this case, and that's all good, the more the better.

The fact that corporations, including Hasbro subsidiary WotC, are doing the rainbow thing represents the fact that pro-LGB forces have already won in every meaningful way.

Today, in quite a lot of the world, gay people can be executed for existing. In NZ we had a gay minister of foreign affairs, and he lost that job because there was too much of the world that he couldn't travel to with his partner. The media here attacked him for flying too far, which he had to do, because he was gay, and landing in some countries was quite simply, life threatening. We recently sent a gay man back to Saudi Arabia as an unrecognised application for refugee status, and of course the Saudi govt murdered him for having stated he was gay in the refugee status claim.

Yeah, there's isolated pockets where gay people can live openly now, some places they can even buy a cake (and some they can't, because some cake shops aren't for gay people, and lots of shops won't hire gay people, and some will sack you if you come out) and they're much bigger than they were in the 70's, but it's a long ass way to go.