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.
