WotC... just no

A preview of the 6e PHB dropped on the DnDBeyond YouTube channel. I don't recommend you watch it; it's nearly an hour long. But there are some highlights from 6e that are worth pointing out.

First off, the changes to the mechanics sound like they're going to be more substantial than was previously suggested. Although WotC is resistant to calling this 6e, that's clearly what it is. The changes from 5e to 6e sound much more substantial then the changes from, for example, 1e to 2e. I've seen a few people suggest 50e to highlight the anniversary nature of the game. Whatever you call it, it's a new edition, clearly. WotC being disingenuous about that is hardly surprising though.

As one YouTube commentator said, this hardly seems to resemble the game he remembers from his own youth in the 90s or whatever. Not that he's OSR, because he's not, but it's just that the game is nothing like what D&D used to be. You can see it in the art; very twee and precious, everyone smiling and powerful, while almost nobody is white or male or medieval in any sense. WotC fetishizes big, ugly black sheboons in particular, which is odd because it's not like attractive black women are impossible to imagine, as well as all kinds of other ridiculous things: PCs in wheelchairs, black, trans elves with boob removal scars, and most unexpectedly, orcs as Mexican cowboy/Mad Max hybrids.

What in the world are they doing?

Curiously, nobody had thought about orcs being blacks until WotC suggested it. For DFX, I actually thought that made them more interesting. Orcs as not necessarily evil was probably inevitable since Warhammer included then as armies. Orcs were always my favorite team in Blood Bowl, for instance, through the 90s. Warcraft and even Heroes of Might & Magic 3 ran with the idea that they didn't have to be evil. I thought that made them more interesting myself, but I never thought about orcs as negroes, or any other minority, until WotC suggested it: at which point orcs became a more nuanced problem. Sure, they are less intelligent. They are more violent and impulsive. They are incapable of maintaining high civilization, as a whole. But they're not evil, just incompatible with living among the Hillmen. Except, of course, for the talented tenth.

Thought about in this fashion, orcs become more interesting than just "always bad" goons, or as virtue-signaling cheap shots. You actually have to consider what to do about them when they're causing trouble because neither the woke submissive solution nor the hard genocide solution is acceptable to most players. 

All that said, I dunno. There's a big chunk of folks that haven't cared what WotC has done in years. To them, D&D is either some older version of the rules, or some other D&D-like game, maybe even a retroclone. Others have left more recently after WOTC's bad behavior. Maybe this bizarre turn in the game is actually what what remains of their market wants to see. If so, well, there are more alternatives than ever for those who've had enough of their wokeness. Almost too many alternatives, honestly. Nothing in the marketplace is exciting to me anymore because the market is too flooded.

Anyway, here's some DFX orcs. Most of them are even villains. 

Once again; leftism = mental illness

https://www.psypost.org/study-woke-attitudes-linked-to-anxiety-depression-and-a-lack-of-happiness/

This one was research performed in Finland on Finns, but there's no reason not to believe that it is a similar condition across the West. (To the degree that Finland is part of "the West." Like Ireland and southern "Mediterranean" Europe and western Slavic peoples, a case could be made that they're an outgroup, or other group within Western civilization, or a para-Western civilizational grouping that isn't part of Western Civilization per se, but is closely related to and still travels with Western civilization.)

The curious part is that women are so much more favorable towards wokeness compared to men. Sadly, and I was offended when this was first presented to me but the data is pretty incontrovertible now; the anti-suffragettes seem to be completely and totally vindicated by the data. 

As an aside, remember when Miss Helsinki 2017 went viral on the Right, where an African girl who looked like a somewhat prettier version of Flavor Flav won Miss Helsinki over about a dozen very pretty European women? Yeah. Finnish men weren't in favor of that, I'm sure, even if virtue-signaling Finnish women reluctantly refused to take a stand against it.

Here's the older link to a Danish study that reached similar conclusions; the most mentally ill group is white, woke women, the least mentally ill is based conservative Christian men.

https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts

Of course, this doesn't really need to be "proven", although it's nice that it is. But it's pretty obvious and self-evident. Even SNL made a joke about it on the weekend following Donald Trump's election; all of the liberal white folks in the apartment were chewing Xanax like they were Tic-Tacs.

And don't think that this is unique to Scandinavians, of course. All of the West fits this. And Denmark is about as firmly within Western civilization as you can get anyway.

College and IQ

At the risk of sounding behind the cool kids and their lingo, "oh, snap!"

Background. According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to 130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M = 100, SD =15). We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in 1940s and 1950s when university education was the privilege of a few. Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. The decline in students' IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s. Method. We conducted a meta-analysis of the mean IQ scores of college and university students samples tested with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale between 1939 and 2022. Results. The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year. The students' IQ also varies substantially across universities and is correlated with the selectivity of universities (measured by average SAT scores of admitted students). Discussion. These findings have wide-ranging implications. First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees. Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group. Fourth, the myth of brilliant undergraduate students in scientific and popular literature needs to be dispelled. Fifth, estimating premorbid IQ based on educational attainment is vastly inaccurate, obsolete, not evidence based, and mere speculations. Sixth, obsolete IQ data or tests ought not to be used to make high-stakes decisions about individuals, for example, by clinical psychologists to opine about intelligence and cognitive abilities of their clients.

It kind of seems like if they were as smart as they thought that they were, everyone would have suspected that to be the case based on logic and experience without having to have someone literally do a peer-reviewed study to prove it. At least the guys doing the study suspected what they were going to find, so kudos to them, I suppose. I've known too many college grads and seen the effects of college becoming the new high school first hand. This isn't surprising in the least, and I would have told you I believed this before someone decided to do a study on it.

Of course, the average IQ in America is going down too, so average according to the old average is also false. But that is mostly correlated to massive migration of Third Worlders where the average IQ is a standard deviation or more lower than it was amongst actual Americans.

A few more updates

After making a post with three "mini-topics" I now have... two more mini topics, later in the same day. Sigh.

First off, check out this article. https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/the-dungeons-dragons-movie-intentionally-emasculates-its-leading-men/ar-AA18704h

"We're not woke, we're just following every woke trope because contrary to the real world who's sick and tired of that garbage, we think it's fresh!" Liars. 

I didn't expect to like, or necessarily even watch that movie, but now I'll avoid it for sure. I won't even try and catch it on streaming. I mean, it looked like every garbage fantasy product of the last few years; the Willow show, the Rings of Power show, the dumb Witcher prequel, the Wheel of Time show, etc. So it's hardly surprising that it's going to be just as crappy for all of the same reasons as those, except without a coherent plot or characters from source material to screw up, at least. I've already addressed this in the past, but still relevant.

I'll pass. Entirely. 

Secondly, I found this image by a Russian paleo-artist who put a line-up of all of the bison of North America. I'm also a bit torn in my interpretation of what word to use for these animals. In America, since before the Revolutionary War, we've used the word buffalo (since 1616, apparently, where it was first noted that we know of). Normally, that would be that, and I'd prefer to say buffalo and ignore bison. However, there are competing claims on what word has more "teeth" in this game. The word bison is extremely old, Hellenistic Greeks from the 2nd century AD used the word βίσων which is Romanized as bison, spelled exactly the same as it still is today. If the Greeks and Romans called the animal (technically, the European version, of course—not the American ones. Although they are closely related) bison, that's a pretty compelling reason for using the same word. In Renaissance England (1611 and 1617 respectively, for two different references) the word bison was also being used in English. Curiously, although today bison is both singular and plural, it used to be that bison was singular and bisontes was plural, which is wild to me. An even earlier English reference, from 1398, uses this plural term, bysontes, with funky Medieval spelling. Bisontes also appears in a 1601 translation of a Latin original into English, and bison appears as a gloss in the marginalia of the King James Bible.

However, there are other competing claims. I wouldn't seriously suggest using these, because nobody would know what you're talking about, but Aristotle way back in the 4th century BC used the word βόνασος,which would be spelled in the Latin alphabet as bonasos, and transformed in Latin to bonasus. Curiously, the scientific name of the European bison today is Bison bonasus, for whatever that's worth. Claudius Aelianus, writing in the 2nd or 3rd century AD also used bonasus in Latin.

Finally, Old English had the word wesend, which referred to the European bison, but for whatever reason, it seems to have disappeared from English. Probably because there weren't any living on the islands, so the English stopped talking about them altogether. However, there are cognates in other Germanic languages to this word, including Old Norse visundr and Old High German wisunt, wisent (and other spelling variations.) While the word was lost in English, the modern German word Wisent has been borrowed back into English to describe this animal. Pronounced VEE-zent. The Old English word, depending on dialect, would have probably been WEE-send.

But there's no reason to use either of those words, unfortunately, even though I love them. It really comes down to bison vs buffalo. Bison, applied to the American animal, only dates back to the 1800s. And frankly, all of these species probably should have their own common name, but since they're no longer alive, they don't. If any of them were to somehow come back, maybe that's when we can talk about calling them bonases or wesends.

Anyway, here's the picture. And then I've got more to say about it too.

The last one, the most to the right, is the current American buffalo as seen in places like Yellowstone or South Dakota, etc. As you can see, it's also the smallest of the bunch. The origin of the two extant bison species is cloudy, and genetic research has made it more confusing rather than less so. Genetics seemed to indicate that the y-DNA (male side) was most closely related to the modern yak, while the mitochondrial DNA (female side) was more related to the aurochs, or modern taurine cattle. This raised the specter that the European bison was actually a hybrid. Which also raises the specter that hybridization plays more of a role in speciation than our current models suggest—but that's a bigger problem for another post someday.

The next bison to the left of the modern American bison is Bison priscus, or the steppe bison, which seems to have had by far the biggest range of all bison; from western Europe all the way to North America across Siberia, Berengia and what is today Canada down to the modern Great Plains. It's not clear if the European bison is a chronospecies of priscus, or if they coexisted for some time, but priscus is presumed to be the ancestor of all subsequent North American bison. 

The image above is lined up by size rather than chronology, which is a little bit too bad. Chronologically the next bison to appear in North America after the arrival of priscus is the big boy all the way to the left, Bison latifrons, or the giant bison or long-horned bison. The chronohistory of the species is that as climate changed during the pulses of the Ice Age, which caused significant drying of the continent and conversion of forest and oak savanas into prairie, that latifrons had a speciation event, and that its descendent is the "antique bison" or Bison antiquus (usually called ancient bison; but I like being cute and translating antiquus more directly.) That's the smaller horned big humped creature to the right of latifrons, still quite a big boy. These are common in the La Brea tar pits, for example, but fossils of them across the plains also seem to be common. Supposedly, the next to the right, Bison occidentalis speciated within antiquus, but also lived alongside it for some time. This new species was smaller yet again. These two species also seem to have possibly hybridized and the new chronospecies emerged, shrinking yet again, into the modern buffalo that we all know. This shrinking in size apparently allowed the buffalo to grow greater in numbers, hence the almost awe-inspiring site of early pioneers of an estimated over 60 million of them in the 1800s across the continent. No doubt it didn't hurt that most of the major predators (until we started killing them) were gone; no more Panthera atrox, dire "wolves", sabertooth cats, scimitar-toothed cats, etc. Just wolves and Injuns (and occasionally mountain lions and coyotes and bears, especially for young buffalo), and they weren't in a position to keep herds culled. 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; I really miss the fact that the big, exciting megafauna of the past is one that we missed here in North America. I also suspect that the scientific view that most of it was gone 10,000 years ago is probably not correct; most of them probably lingered longer than that, although which ones and for how long I couldn't begin to guess. There's plenty of compelling evidence that mammoths and mastodons, at least, were still around until the very eve of white man showing up to be told that he literally just missed them; grandpa Injun Joe remembers hunting them, etc. 

Consent in Gaming

Although this was all the rage before people decided to flip out and act hysterical about the "election year flu season", I don't really pay attention to trends in RPGs very much, so I only saw a few off-hand mentions of it. I've now figured out what this whole consent in gaming thing is all about. I've seen YouTube videos arguing for and against it, and I've even read the document and the checklist itself. Sure, it was painfully cringy and entitled, but also free and only about a dozen pages.

In spite of the fact that it seems like a really retarded April Fool's prank or poor taste joke, it's actually not (although the people who defend it are.) There are people who think that this is an actual serious thing, and that it should be promoted. By "promoted" I mostly mean, that they will call you a terrible person if you disagree. Maybe alt right (the official position and statement by the cuck-in-chief at ENWorld on the issue, for instance. Surprise, surprise.) Maybe a racist. But before you actually respond to those kinds of allegations, I want to remind you of two things.

The first is the three rules of the SJW. 1) SJWs Always Lie. Don't listen to their defense of this indefensible ridiculousness. It's not meant to be taken seriously, because it's not honest. 2) SJWs Always Double Down. If they continue to beat the drum of inclusivity, don't allow that to wear down your opposition to their lunacy. They count on that. In fact, they get even more lunatic, with the expectation that you'll cave just to shut them up. Don't fall for it. 3) SJWs Always Project. Remember this one in particular, and the appropriate reactions to the first two rules of the SJW make more sense and are easier to implement. SJWs are terrible people, and they know it, somewhere deep down in their psyche. That's why they're filled with such nihilism and toxic narcissism that they want to ruin, destroy and burn down everything else around them that's normal; because it reminds them of how terrible they really are inside.

Is Consent In Gaming written by SJWs? Of course you already know that from the title. But just in case you're stubborn and willfully obtuse, look at what they thought cool interior art would be...

At least we know where the New Warriors proposal for Marvel got their ideas for Safespace and Snowflake...

The second thing to remember is Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. This is the toxic behavior that SJWs—even long before they had that pejorative label—use to subvert, infest and destroy small groups. It may seem odd that it would be applied to your D&D gaming group, when it was initially meant for stuff like city councils, home owner associations, corporate HR departments, etc. But SJWs apply it to everything, because they have absolutely no boundaries between their evil ideology and anything else in their life. The only thing that brings a temporary salve to the SJW's sucking vacuum that is the place where a soul would be in a normal person is the destruction of anything normal, healthy or beautiful and the replacement of it with a profane effigy of their false idols like inclusivity, diversity, tolerance, and everything else that they're lying about (1) SJWs Always Lie.) If you can see what they're doing, you are much less likely to fall for it. SJWs couch this kind of crap in prettied up terms, yet what their only real purpose is is to bully everyone around them and mold them into plague-zombies of their cult, or hollow them out and devour them trying. Just like Codes of Conduct in corporations or other organizations inevitably and in fact almost immediately get coopted into forcing out normal, healthy, effective, or useful behavior and replacing it with a continual struggle session about intersectional identity politics, this consent in gaming has no real aim other than to destroy normal people's gaming groups and replace them with continual struggle sessions for the mangled psyches of the mentally unwell.

There's two other observations that seem obvious to me but which don't really seem to get mentioned, lurking just between the lines of this document. First, why is it that what is acceptable or not has to be explicitly spelled out in some kind of pseudo-contract form? Are the people who wrote this really that socially inept that they are constantly intruding into genuinely inappropriate behavior? (3) SJWs Always Project.) Normal, healthy people who aren't blazingly psychologically dysfunctional can hold conversations without blundering into topics and positions that insult and offend the people that they're talking to. Except for very small children and the mentally unfit, people don't need to be told to avoid topics that are inappropriate most of the time. Conversation really isn't that really hard of a skill to be proficient in. And let's face it; although more focused in a particular direction, game sessions really are little more than group conversations. 

Secondly, if we were take this fraudulent document full of dishonest, bad faith intentions and motivations at face value—clearly a foolish thing to do, but let's for the sake of argument, assume that it's doable—then it implies that this document is for gamers who are so emotionally incontinent, so psychologically defective, so mentally crippled, that their very presence would be intolerable to anyone over time, even their own mothers. They are "triggered" into idiotic panic attacks because their naked malice and unfit psychologies are laid bare by the very existence of normal reality. If you can hold other conversations without this imbecilic pseudo-contract approach, then you can hold a game session without it too. If you can't, then the problem isn't everyone else around you, it's you.

Dramatic illustration of an SJW on the back of a cuck.

Between these two observations, I can at least find one pragmatic use for the Consent in Gaming document and its associated checklist. Anyone who refers to it in any tone other than withering contempt is automatically disqualified from gaming with me. They're probably automatically disqualified from having any social relationship with me at all, if I can help it, but sometimes family, friends of friends, coworkers, etc. can't entirely be helped. But the document is a useful filter. Anytime anyone invokes it, you pull a soup nazi on them, tell them "no game for you!" and make them know in no uncertain terms that they're no longer welcome. Hopefully you didn't invite them to your actual house and give them your address.

Seriously; normal people are used to giving people the benefit of the doubt. Of discussing things with them in good faith. Of being reasonable and accommodating. None of that works on the kind of locust people who make up the SJW hordes and who think crap like this is a good idea. They aren't reasonable. They don't want to game with you; they want to reform you in their twisted and perverse image, or destroy you by trying. The only acceptable response to them is to immediately cut them out of your life, or at least participation in the hobby with you. Don't get suckered into thinking that you can "just this one time" or "surely they're not that unreasonable" finesse your way into some kind of accommodation with them. SJWs, like the Huns, are always either at your feet or at your throat. They're the scorpion in the animal fable. It's their nature. They aren't normal people. They can't be dealt with like normal people. Don't be the frog and give them a ride across this river. 

UPDATE: I've actually converted this post into a page. Let's filter the SJWs away from the blog while we're at it. Can't hurt to take a few extra precautions to keep them out of your life.

UPDATE 2: I don't consider my game to be inclusive. It's exclusive. I'm a pretty decent GM; not the best out there, but pretty good, and I play with good players that I enjoy being around. My free time to spend on my hobby is much too valuable to spend it on enabling and coddling self-important, toxic narcissists and their multitude of issues. Inclusivity is a cult by-word. It's not a good thing, just because we've had it bleated in our faces for a long time that it is. Exclusivity is a good thing.