Do you find the tabletop community welcoming to everyone? Absolutely everyone?
By now most people will have heard at least something around the Wizards of the coast mishandling of their game license update.
I don't want to speak to that drama but a side issue that keeps cropping up and was relit due to part of the intention behind the WOTC parent company messing with the license in the first place.
AKA Hasbro wants to protect their brand and IP from Nazis.
To Woke is Human
"Oh no", they sob down their Infowars PJs, "WOTC is WOKE"
Please explain how being alert to and concerned about social injustice is a bad thing?
Ignorance is bliss?
For some reason, as well as the piling on of the obviously, objectively bad stuff in all of this, a segment of the community thinks a company protecting their brand from bad associations is wrong, or even more bizarrely, it is somehow targeting conservatives with censorship?
Nobody wants to take away your right to include capitalism or smaller forms of government in your games of make-believe, so what exactly is your objection?
Sometimes we forget games are meant to be FUN
Do we really want to exclude as a community?
Why not have wheelchairs in D&D? Why not have female space marines? If that is what fun looks like for your table then go for it. Who does it hurt?
When you benefit from the status quo any change feels like an attack.
I’m a straight white middle-class middle-aged dude. It would be so easy to privilege my way through the hobby and life. It’s awful that people still want to exclude, dismiss or in some cases pull the ladder up (“now I’m included but let’s exclude those people”)
RPGs Are for Everyone
Back when I was a kid, the people who played with plastic toy soldiers and dice were not the cool kids.
It was us nerds, punks, metalheads, disabled kids, and the "poofs". The kids who got bullied, we were not the ones doing the bullying. Our bond started by not being allowed near the good tables in the canteen.
Even back then we knew equating Orcs with racist stereotypes was wrong so don't come at me with "it was a different time". We even know antisemetic tropes when we see them, way before JKR decided her magic world bankers would be like that. It's just a lot of us can easily ignore "jokes" when it is someone else being punched down upon.
Warhammer 40k especially was a very obvious political satire, and certainly baked into its DNA was a rejection of prejudice, authoritarianism, religion as an excuse to hate, and toxic masculinity. Cry all you want, it is true. In all game systems there was a golden rule; if you don't find this fun as written then tweak it however you want to.
That means if you are a Nazi and want to play as a Nazi then nobody will stop you unless you then start to make money off your Nazi game and its association with intellectual property and branding.
You are not being canceled, just a company that performs capitalism protecting its interests under free market capitalism. If you experience consequences that is not wokists deleting your freedumbs. It is FAFO.
What Can We Do?
So by now you have either pounded insults into the comment section about me being a beta snowflake or you agree. What now?
All of this is just words unless we stop these things at source.
When you see someone being attacked or excluded because they are not a white, straight, able-bodied male then don't sit idly by. Allowing it to happen is a form of passive agreement.
BUT I don't mean risk harm to yourself. Go ahead and punch that Nazi, but what I think is as effective or perhaps more so is to show the person being attacked that you care about what is happening and that they are welcome at YOUR table, in YOUR community.
I think part of the problem is that people don't even work from the same definition of words. To me "woke" isn't simply being concerned about injustice, it's carrying that idea to the level of insanity. Or perhaps another way to put it is that wokeness is a shrill, incessant cry of injustice where none exists. I'm not saying injustice doesn't exist, just that claiming injustice doesn't automatically make it so.
For example, allowing biological males to compete in female sports. Identifying as female or being transgender does not take away the physical advantages of being biologically male which is one of the primary reasons for the separation of many sports by sex (not gender identity). I think the same can be said about public bathrooms. They are typically designed more with body parts in mind than what you choose to identify as (e.g. female bathrooms do not tend to have urinals). Either make bathrooms unisex or go to the one for which you have body parts that match. To argue you should be be able to use whichever one you want defeats the point of separate bathrooms in the first place but it is certainly a woke argument as is arguing biological males should be able to play in female sports.
Another example, assuming someone is privileged just because they are white. If you are the child of a rich black man you are going to be more privileged than if you are the son of a poor white man. It's a racist assumption to start with. Even if it is true (and I'm sure that it is) that racism (mostly past and some present) has caused there to be proportionally fewer rich black people that doesn't mean you should judge everybody's privilege in life by their race. No "justice" is achieved, social or otherwise, by doing so. Not every white person who achieves success did so because someone was racist somewhere. And not being the target of racism is no more a privilege than not being shot in the head. It's not that white people have historically had unfair advantages, it's that historically minorities have sometimes had unfair disadvantages. A subtle distinction perhaps but an important one.
There are lots of other examples but this is a pretty good idea of what I think of when someone uses the word "woke".
And yes, I absolutely believe racism exists and I absolutely believe it is evil. I also think it would be horrid to exclude someone because they are not white or in a wheelchair. But honestly that REALLY sounds like a straw man argument. Can you find one example among a group of D&D nerds where this has happened?
And that guy in the picture above just wants to play a Lawful Evil character. What's wrong with that? It is role-playing after all. Why is he being excluded? Is he supposed to be black guy in a wheelchair or something? But D&D is NOT for everyone. It's ONLY for D&D nerds. But if you want to play and like playing D&D then you are then by definition a D&D nerd. Not sure what skin color and wheelchairs have to do with it though. As a side note, if say 99% of D&D players are white, it doesn't mean it is because of racism. Nerdy white kids (many of whom have now turned into middle aged, sometimes still nerdy white guys) have a different cultural background so its not surprising that they like different things. Sometimes different groups of people like different things and that's ok. I'm not saying anyone should be excluded. Of course they shouldn't. But you can't force inclusion either...as in you must play D&D with us so that we can meet our quota of non-white and/or non-male and/or differently abled players.
Admittedly, I haven't kept up with changes WOTC has made lately but what I read seemed to be along the lines of they wanted to make people report income and some to pay royalties that were making content under their so-called Open Gaming License. Not sure what that has to do with wokeness or nazis. There was a new clause that they could de-license you at any time (presumably for being a nazi?) but since they can change the license at any time they could always do that. In any case, Nazis don't seem to have been a primary motive for the changes.
And how do you privilege your way through D&D? What does that mean exactly? And how does one benefit from the status quo in D&D from a woke perspective?
Sadly, I don't get to play any D&D for a combination of reasons (don't know anybody who plays, don't have the time, etc.) so I could be missing some dark D&D cultural undercurrent I suppose.
Nice strawman.
First of all, the actual definition of woke: a state of being achieved only by those dumb enough to find injustice in everything but their own behaviour. The majority of people take issue with wokery not because of what is advertised on the tin, but because of how insufferably in-your-face SJWs tend to be.
One issue that we (I and most of the gamers I know) take is with anyone trying to inject real-world politics into a game that has a non-historical setting. Allegory is perfectly fine, but it can't be too on-the-nose, pun fully intended, otherwise it makes for bad storytelling. Also, why are gentiles more offended by goblins and happy merchant memes than most Jews? The only reason to be offended by the latter is simply because it's a stale meme.
The bigger issue by far is intolerant people taking advantage of our openness and then trying to force us out of our own communities - and then getting mad when we establish a new community and won't let them in again. It doesn't matter what ideology the bigot holds if they demand total conformity and ruin the immersion. Have you noticed that stories steeped in ideology are bad stories, by which I mean they rarely even function from a strictly diegetic standpoint?
I don't know what circles you're in, but no-one I know of is criticising WOTC's OGL because they hold fringe world views. The criticisms I have heard from Arch, LegalEagle, and Discourse Minis have all been entirely on the fact that the policy is unethical, downright predatory, and potentially even illegal.
To conclude, I suggest you read this, lest you go down a road from whence there is no return.
This is definitely a worthwhile discussion to have !
I think the problem with what WOTC are doing here is that they're trying to drape themselves in a cloak of social justice as a way to gaslight those who don't agree with them. By indirectly implying that those who disagree with them must be some kind of bigot, they are attempting to mask the real reasons their new OGL is meeting opposition.
But I also feel very strongly that we need to draw a distinction between the OOC players, and the IC game.
In the group I play in, we've got people from across the political spectrum, and who identify as a variety of gender types. All are welcome, and we all get along as friends.
But the game itself sometimes deals with uncomfortable topics, as a way to challenge the players and give the characters moral choices to make in relation to their chosen alignments.
One of the worlds I run is very much a gritty medieval-based homebrew. There are two societies where slavery is acceptable and normal, a couple of others that are very patriarchal, and another that's terribly racist towards orcs (it's what a thousand years of fending off wave after wave of orcish invasion does to you...).
All of these can create moral dilemmas for the characters, but as players we understand that it's part of the game and can read each other's body language to recognise if we're pushing boundaries. Done right, it can really bring a game to life and create great RP opportunities.