If you listen to Wizards of The Coast, selectively, you’d hear them say something like “D&D is for everyone!” same as Games Workshop when they released their manifesto.
Let me illustrate the hypocrisy here.
I think we can put the picture and the quote together and, if you didn’t know any better, it might come across as heartwarming, even wholesome. You may be going along with your 5th Edition games and never knowing a thing.
Then, maybe you get a little curious. What were the previous editions like?
You start doing Google searches. What Luck! You find every previous edition in PDF and Print-On-Demand via Drive-Thru RPG. You head to an edition and you begin to look. You go back to the original Dungeons & Dragons. You want to know where it all began. You scroll through the synopsis and you find this…
And then, today, there’s this…
Yep, click the photo and it will take you right to the article. Their new book is going to be spent trashing Gygax and Arneson, the very creators of the game you enjoy today. In my opinion, don’t spend the $99.99 this one book will cost.
It begs the question, for whom is this game? Well, if you follow the logic here; Everyone But Those Who Won’t Buy The Ideology That Accompanies It.
Don’t look to Pathfinder, it’s ideology is even more blatant and pronounced…
Oh there’s more than just that one. This is from this year’s highlighted employees, every single one of them identifying as one thing or another for Pride Month. Pathfinder, today, is not for everyone and Dana illustrates that.
I want to hold up a few games that probably won’t do this kind of messaging.
First, let’s talk about a trilogy of games you can get Right Now!
Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age, Night Shift: Veterans of The Supernatural Wars and the upcoming Thirteen Parsecs: Beyond The Solar Frontier.
There are only 4 days left and I’m listing Elf Lair Games at the top of this group of recommendations for a couple of reasons. First, these rule sets are entirely customizable to your table and your style from the ground up, leaving it truly your game.
Click here and get all three games for $175 if you don’t already have Wasted Lands and Night Shift. Unlike WoTC, you’ll get three games, not just three books for that price. With WoTC, you’ll spend more than that for the three core books to one game.
On to my second reason, the games just are what they are. Wasted Lands is a version of our world where The Old Gods were driven out and the world. You can become one of the Gods of Legend or you can just be a character inhabiting that world that lays in waste because of that war that drove the Old Gods out.
Night Shift leans into Urban Fantasy and, if you have the Night Companion, you can port your character from Wasted Lands over as an Immortal and now, your backstory is written and solid and you have to be killed in a special way in order for it to be permanent.
It’s even possible to carry that same character into Thirteen Parsecs, the Sci-Fi game.
So where is the representation that Elf Lair Games makes better?
I’ll come back to that, I promise.
Just take my word for it that it does it better for now.
The next company, you know I’m going to talk about Troll Lord Games again. Castles & Crusades, Amazing Adventures, Victorious, etc does it as well.
Castles & Crusades has been around for twenty years and has remained consistent.
Amazing Adventures and Victorious uses the same rule set as Castles & Crusades. The SIEGE Engine is much simpler than 5th Edition D&D and it can contain more complexity that the GM who doesn’t like running something on more adjudication and improvisation. In a few days, they’ll drop Castles & Crusades Reforged onto Kickstarter and if you sign up for notifications on it, you’ll get the new Player’s Handbook, free in PDF whether or not you pledge. What the difference is is that they’re getting rid of any and everything to do with the OGL and correcting typos with new artwork. It will still be compatible with the very books you see but, for the first time in twenty years, Castles & Crusades will be TLG’s own game. Truly independent of anything WoTC may have to offer.
Finally, there’s one more game that I’ll show you as an example. If your game wasn’t mentioned, it’s not that I chose to omit it. There are a great many games in my library. Feel free to drop yours into the comments. This one is solely-geared toward the solo player. Strap in.
The Fabled Lands books are absolutely great. It’s a simple game and, if you go to Spark Furnace’s Website, you’ll find free resources for it. It’s played with a d6 (six-sided dice) that you could easily borrow from a board game in your home. It’s like a more interactive version of the old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. The Adventure can go as long as you like. You can even have a lapse in playing and get right back into it as though you never left.
So how do all of these independent games do representation better than WoTC or Paizo?
It’s simple. You represent what you want to see in the game. Nothing is stopping you from making a character to see yourself in the game. What WoTC and Paizo and many other mainstream games are doing is using your identity to make a quick buck. Once it’s unprofitable, the version of you that you see in the game being marketed, that’s over. You won’t see it anymore.
The thing about tabletop role-playing games is, if you couldn’t “see yourself” in the game, it’s because you didn’t make a character sheet. You didn’t discuss it with the game master. You didn’t include it yourself in a way that worked if you were the game master.
For the rest of us, it was a mental vacation. It was, is now and shall always be a means of getting away from the things in our lives that suck. It was a way to feel a camaraderie with people around the table, no matter how different you were. The love of the game is what brought us together. If you didn’t like the game, you could find something else to play, you could run a game yourself or you could make up your own.
Corporations are now, have been and shall always be the enemy. They’re soulless, avaricious and they do not care about you or the product. All they care about is that bottom line on the profit and loss statement. If you are screaming at a company for not representing you, my question is, what are you doing to represent you? Why are you relying on a corporation to do it for you?
The entire point of tabletop role-playing games. The power was always in the hands of the GM and Players. If a table didn’t agree with you, then start your own. If you didn’t like how a race or class was presented, you could change that. To quote Dave Arneson in 1999:
"Too many...follow the official line of "You cant change anything or you'll destroy the rules" Aw, forget it. That's not the way things started, that's not the way things should be. If something doesn't work, get rid of it. If something works in another set of rules and you want to put it in your game, go for it. The Rules' job is to make the Referee's life easier so he can referee, not harder."
-Dave Arneson, Pegasus #14, Summer of 1999
another eye-opener…
"The rules cannot cover every possibility. And, frankly speaking, they shouldn't. The Referee needs the freedom to keep making the game fun."
-Dave Arneson, Kobold Quarterly, Issue 9, Spring 2009.
Tabletop Role-playing games and the legacy thereof are preserved in games that are just games for the sake of gaming. If you’re ever in question about this, know that the creators that get demonized today, actively supported you in your endeavors. It didn’t mean they agreed with it or condoned it but they did, by action, convey one single message and it’s this…
You carve out your own niche, create your own world, explore it as you must. Your Table, Your Rules, Always, In All Ways.
Thanks for reading, folks. Enjoy the games.
I concur, the forced "message" and the inclusivity screaming crowd drown out and push away the folks who just want to play a game for that one crazy reason - TO HAVE FUN.
On a personal note - what, no Dystopian Dawn love?
There is no message in my game other than HAVE FUN.
I think I covered all of this fairly simply in my Player's Guide and I welcome everyone to the Dawn.
Here's an excerpt from the Dystopian Dawn Player's Guide p.17:
"Survival is more important than focusing on insignificant differences. This is by design. As characters explore the world beyond their own Territory, they should evolve. No pun intended.
Skin color means nothing. All pigments are reflected in Dystopian Dawn. Sexuality, likewise, means nothing. Roleplay your character however you want. The prejudices of the old world died with it. All former biases and "norms" burned down centuries ago. "
I love reading posts like these, you always introduce me to new treasure to hunt and try for myself. More often than not it brings me to stuff I come to love.
Thank you for keeping the hunt alive! 😎