Big ideas. Gaming outside the box. Walnut and Steel. Past and Present. Distinguished Ruffian. Plus Ultra.
Joined August 2012
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𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐃𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐨 𝐔𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐛𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐃𝐢𝐞𝐬
A local D&D Fighter has died after ignoring repeated warnings from fellow players that his choice of weapons and armor was mathematically inferior.
“He wanted to use a flail because he thought it was cool,” explained one party member. “We showed him the damage calculations. We sent him three build guides. He just kept talking about his PC's backstory, which was mostly about his dad’s forge or something.”
The group had repeatedly urged him to reconsider, pointing out that his refusal to optimize was making the game less enjoyable for everyone else.
“He said he was just trying to have fun,” recalled another player. “I don't think he understood how selfish that was.”
The group has since agreed to let him play whatever PC he wants, provided they approve the build first.
Trek is already diverse by default. Countless worlds, cultures, and species. Diversity isn’t a theme, it’s part of the setting’s physics, like warp drive.
But WotC can’t just let that speak for itself. They need to turn it into another activism opportunity instead of leaving it alone.
This was the terrain on the trail up to Big Round Top in Gettysburg. Nothing but rocks, most of them apple sized or bigger.
It reminded me of one of my favorite RPG mechanics: Difficult Terrain. Halving movement is such a simple way to represent having to watch your footing and pick your way through this stuff.
Ideological conformity becoming a substitute for professional qualifications. It's hard not to see it, especially when you look at companies like WotC and what they've done with D&D.
Please stand by. A WotC apologist will be with you shortly to establish credentials, declare dissent illegitimate, and move the goalposts.
Hasbro's Q3 earnings report gives Magic its own revenue figures: $616 million, up 34%.
D&D is bundled with other games. No separate revenue or growth figures.
Hasbro has been happy to tout D&D's successes in the past. So why not give us the numbers?
share.google/6EOeKKJmlsike9M…
Inspired by a Glasgow museum’s brave decision to remove Egyptian mummies from display, WotC has announced that mummies will be removed from the next Monster Manual.
“These individuals never consented to being portrayed as monsters, much less having their tombs looted by adventurers.”
Beginning next year, all tombs will be designated protected cultural heritage sites. The disclaimer on legacy D&D products will also be updated to acknowledge these historical harms.
This is where tabletop gets infuriating. WotC hasn’t hidden the politics, they’ve sold them for years and they’re still doing it. Changes to D&D get wrapped in the language of progress, inclusion and fixing “harmful” material, then marketed as a virtue.
So spare me the “D&D has always changed” excuse. WotC has been telling us exactly what they’re doing the whole time.
People who say "get politics out of entertainment" are misguided.
They'll be the first to quote George Orwell, who wrote unabashedly about his political agenda, without a hint of irony.
But people pretending complaints about politics in entertainment are about just making a statement or exploring political issues are being disingenuous.
The complaints exist and are valid because for 10 years every cherished IP has been hijacked and destroyed by people whose social politics form the basis of creative choices that run counter to established lore and to good design.
Some examples include
- The softening of male characters (see Sony's "Wolverine")
- The hardening of female characters (see the most recent "Halo").
- The arbitrary "Queering" of the narrative (see "The Last of Us Part II")
- The desexualizing of sexy female characters ("Mortal Kombat" is my favorite: the women's breast sizes were deemed offensive, but not the graphic dismemberments and disembowlments the series is known for)
These are creative choices made for the sake of social engineering, not compelling storytelling or innovative game design. They are choices made to please the developers and writers, NOT the majority actually buying and playing the games.
The brilliance—and cowardice—of these choices is that ANY criticism of them can quickly be dismissed as "hate" from "toxic fans" who are "intimidated" by "diversity" in videogames.
This is a ridiculous charge to anyone familiar with the hobby:
For nearly 50 years, games have featured protagonists ranging from men and women to animals and aliens to robots and monsters and beyond and not a single person cared, nor bothered to check the demographics of who was developing the games.
A deeper complaint is that the people sloppily hamfisting their sociopolitics into popular IPs is that they very openly discriminate against people who don't share their political vision.
This not only means that great talent is shut out of these companies for ridiculous reasons, it also means the aforementioned bad choices are guaranteed to never be challenged, else it's unemployment and blacklisting for the suspected "Chud."
This pattern has played out across multiple entertainment media, and it's contributed to tanking game studios, tanking comic book sales (compared to Manga), and tanking box office revenues.
The complaints aren't about "politics in games."
They're about how those politics translate into the work, and how the people developing these games use their politics as a weapon against the normal people they're employed to serve.
AHEM
"The restructuring and realignment of the games industry has got to fix the fact that the people who make games no longer have anything in common with the people who play them, and aren't making products the audience will buy."
If everyone who works on a $300 million game is a Mamdani progressive, then the game is going to lose money because it is going to be alienating to a large segment of the audience.
BioWare grossly underestimated how negatively the mainstream audience would respond to the nonbinary storyline and the pronoun discourse would be to a mainstream audience because everyone in their writers' room and all their creative leads were in the wokest 5% of the population.
If they'd had one "loud and proud MAGA" in the room who was familiar with Asmongold, Critical Drinker or Fleekazoid, he might have warned them how YouTube and X were going to treat the game they were making.
I think they were in such a bubble that they really thought all that shit was normal and were absolutely blindsided by how much gamers hate it, and that's a function of who they let into the room and who they excluded.
Due to the push for gender and racial equity and LGBT representation over the past 10-15 years, game studios are extremely out of line with the tastes, values and norms of core gamers, who are mostly men and largely white. This demographic voted heavily for Trump.
That audience is no longer buying the products these studios are making, and an audience that looks like the curated slice of the population that they have assembled in their offices has not materialized to replace the gamer chuds who won't buy this stuff.
The restructuring and realignment of the games industry has got to fix the fact that the people who make games no longer have anything in common with the people who play them, and aren't making products the audience will buy.
This absolutely sounds like the kind of brainless modern moralizing some activist would try to inject into D&D.
A Scottish museum has removed its Egyptian mummy exhibition because it does not have “consent from the deceased individual”.
Visitors to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in Glasgow, were left disappointed by signs explaining bosses had “removed human remains from this display as a mark of respect”🔗
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
🚨 BREAKING 🚨
WotC Announces AD&D Live Play
"We recognize that some of the legacy content featured in this program, including the players themselves, does not reflect the values of Dungeons & Dragons today.
Their inclusion should not be mistaken for an endorsement.
These players were wrong then and are wrong today.
We believe it's important for today's audience to see what D&D has had to overcome.
This part of our work will never end."
Chase mass appeal long enough and you end up making elevator music. Nobody hates it, but nobody loves it either.
People seem to forget that a core of activists spent years going after D&D and pressuring WotC to change it. Many of them are on Bluesky now. WotC listened, and here we are.
If you don't know that history, that's your problem. But spare me the lectures about criticizing WotC. Where were all these complaints about negativity when those people were doing it?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
You can still run an entire D&D campaign around a megadungeon. The notion that this style of play is outdated is ridiculous. Fill it with factions that have their own goals, rivalries, and mysteries for players to uncover.
And think horizontally, not vertically. Stretch the megadungeon across the surface, with different areas to explore and multiple ways in and out. This also makes it easier to deal with players coming and going between sessions.
