https://deathtrap-games.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-critters-are-future-of-d.html
I just discovered this blog post while going back and watching a backlog of Dungeon Craft videos. Fortuitously, I discovered it right at a time when we can evaluate some of its predictions.
First off, especially after reading his replies in the comments but also the text of his post, I can read between the lines and guess that he's seeing a bit more of what he wants to see in his analysis. I do think that the OSR tends towards more conservative, especially the "classic" OSR, but yeah; that's relative. The post he links to is a Venger post that makes reference to George Will, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and the revisionist and deconstructionist idea that the Founding Fathers were Deists. That's not what I call any kind of conservatism, but relative to SJW Twitter idiots or even the "nice guy" progressivism of Critical Role, who think that literal socialists are right wing extremists, there's probably some lost in translation interpretation there. I suspect, even though most OSR gamers are younger than this, that they espouse a kind of virtue-signaling center-right Boomer conservatism that would like a Pied Piper like George Will, Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson. If, as the Z-man often says, the old left/right divide is becoming more meaningless by the day, which seems apparent to me, then I don't think many of the old conservative faction are on my side of whatever the new line is yet. But still... using old, outdated, and irrelevant terminology though it may be, I think Venger is more right than this other guy, whatever online name he uses. The OSR (minus the NSR) is more conservative in the old-fashioned use of the word than the rest of the hobby, speaking in broad generalities. I think the reason this guy can't see it is revealed in his post and his comments; he's into community theater, and he has some bitterness and resentment about slights that he believes Christians did to him at some point, so he's anti-Christian. Since the former is a haven for leftists, as is the community who reject Christianity, I think he identifies more as a centrist or even a left-leaning centrist than he does with the OSR, so he doesn't want to define it in a way that excludes him, even by broad generality.
Or maybe by "conservative" he merely means non-woke. I think plenty of people can reject wokeness without being conservative.
He also makes a case that the critter aesthetic is more important than an SJW aesthetic in the future. Now, two and a half years later, I think both have become equally important, and frankly, they are traveling comrades anyway. The Critical Role cast may be relatively nice and friendly rather than preachy and smug, but they are still far leftists, through and through, and that's hardly something that they even attempt to hide. In part because of their bubble in SoCal and the entertainment industry, where they all work, they probably don't even realize how out of touch with so much of mainstream America they truly are. And when they see glimpses of it, it just reinforces their cult beliefs that America is a deeply racist/sexist/bad-word-spell-du-jour. So I wonder how much the difference really is between the two positions.
And not only has WotC and Hasbro revealed themselves to be as woke as any other corporation (although as he points out, maybe they don't really believe it), as Diversity & Dragons has been pointing out on his YouTube channel for some time now, most of the people working there who are in any way important to the creative or even management side of the industry are deep into anti-white, anti-male hatred and bigotry, and even self-identify to a very large degree with how much they hate whiteness and maleness. And we've seen a lot of that already in the development of the game since he wrote that. Tales of the Radiant Citadel reads like an ESG pamphlet turned into a D&D campaign, where everyone is to be celebrated except for white males, who are strangely absent. The brand manager flagellates himself because he wants to see less white males playing the game. The movie which recently came out infamously had the two directors laughing about how they loved to emasculate leading men. (To be fair, they wrote him as a bard, so that kind of writes itself.) While the blog post talks about races converging to a singularity, it was expected that this would be done in an attempt to facilitate more flexibility and options, not to virtue-signal about some kind of weird, imaginary racism that the presence of half-orcs or whatever implies.
And some of his predictions have yet to come to pass and may not. Is the game going to be become more simple? Not if a boatload of options can be sold as microtransactions. Will the game move towards more family friendliness? Only if you think gay pride parades with naked perverts flirting with little kids is a family friendly activity. There's hardly a corporation that hasn't raced to embrace that kind of malevolent anti-family ideology this past month. Even before he wrote that, we were already starting to see the push for transgenderism in the RPG market, although to be fair, Hero Forge and especially Paizo were ahead of WotC in that regard. But also to be fair, all of those people run in the literally the same social and cultural crowd.
Can WotC fork the brand at this point? I don't think so. For three reasons, although some are related: 1) there are no creatives left that want to touch old-fashioned "Classic D&D" type material because they'll get the stank of normalcy on them amongst their radical, whack-a-doo peers which is a social and cultural death sentence in that insane environment, 2) WotC has probably permanently ruined the trust of the biggest chunk of that market in the last year, who now want nothing to do with them, and 3) the biggest chunk of that market already have games that they like in the OSR and are the least likely to be moved by an appeal, even a subtle, implicit one, that they should be playing "official" D&D of any stripe at all. And even then, people who buy stuff just to buy stuff, are now sniffing around other games, like the new Critical Role games, the more "normal" fork Schwalb is writing out of Shadow of the Demon Lord, or Knave 2e which raised half a million dollars on Kickstarter, or Shadowdark which raised almost a million and a half.
No comments:
Post a Comment