By profession I am an educator. I get a very short amount of time with students (predominantly in their early to mid 20s) in which to pour bucketloads if technical information as well as emotional feedback. I cannot give too much away publicly, but part of my job is sensitivity training. Inevitably, through the course of an instruction at least once, a student will say some variation of “I don’t understand.”
Now, I could give them the short answer, but then they would have learned nothing. They would know what to put on the test, but they still wouldn’t really understand it. Instead, I have been trained to challenge them sufficiently so that they have the opportunity to understand it for themselves. My boss’s motto: “Challenge, don’t ‘teach.’” By providing a safe, structured environment in which they make mistakes and therefore figure it out for themselves, they learn to be better. Through adversity, comes enlightenment.
When I say “D&D needs Stormtroopers” what I mean is that 11 year olds need a D&D where it’s okay to kill “bad guys” and take their stuff because, for an 11 year old, that’s fun. And those 11 year olds need to have clear-cut, defined “bad guys” to point their swords at without feeling guilty. As those 11 year olds get older, and enter adolescence... with hormones, their story will naturally change. Que the busty bar wenches and such.
As those hormonal adolescents grow into more mature young adults, their stories will change again. They will start to question the world around them and make decisions for themselves as to what is right and what is wrong based on their experiences. And many of those young adults look at the concept of Orcs as “bad guys” and start to question it, eventually change it for themselves.
Eventually those young adults will grow into actual adults and become the fine people in this very forum. We all had the opportunity to become better because we were challenged to within a hobby we all love. Look at us now.
We became better because we were given a reason to. They could have said “Orcs are people too” and we would have known what to “put on the test,” but we wouldn’t have understood it, not really. Because we’re allowed to explore that concept to its natural conclusion for ourselves, we understand why Orcs are people too.
If we take that challenge away from tomorrow’s young adults, we have taken away their right to learn. We have done them a disservice. Remember that butterfly I mentioned? Don’t kill it with “kindness.”
By profession I am an educator. I get a very short amount of time with students (predominantly in their early to mid 20s) in which to pour bucketloads if technical information as well as emotional feedback. I cannot give too much away publicly, but part of my job is sensitivity training. Inevitably, through the course of an instruction at least once, a student will say some variation of “I don’t understand.”
Now, I could give them the short answer, but then they would have learned nothing. They would know what to put on the test, but they still wouldn’t really understand it. Instead, I have been trained to challenge them sufficiently so that they have the opportunity to understand it for themselves. My boss’s motto: “Challenge, don’t ‘teach.’” By providing a safe, structured environment in which they make mistakes and therefore figure it out for themselves, they learn to be better. Through adversity, comes enlightenment.
When I say “D&D needs Stormtroopers” what I mean is that 11 year olds need a D&D where it’s okay to kill “bad guys” and take their stuff because, for an 11 year old, that’s fun. And those 11 year olds need to have clear-cut, defined “bad guys” to point their swords at without feeling guilty. As those 11 year olds get older, and enter adolescence... with hormones, their story will naturally change. Que the busty bar wenches and such.
As those hormonal adolescents grow into more mature young adults, their stories will change again. They will start to question the world around them and make decisions for themselves as to what is right and what is wrong based on their experiences. And many of those young adults look at the concept of Orcs as “bad guys” and start to question it, eventually change it for themselves.
Eventually those young adults will grow into actual adults and become the fine people in this very forum. We all had the opportunity to become better because we were challenged to within a hobby we all love. Look at us now.
We became better because we were given a reason to. They could have said “Orcs are people too” and we would have known what to “put on the test,” but we wouldn’t have understood it, not really. Because we’re allowed to explore that concept to its natural conclusion for ourselves, we understand why Orcs are people too.
If we take that challenge away from tomorrow’s young adults, we have taken away their right to learn. We have done them a disservice. Remember that butterfly I mentioned? Don’t kill it with “kindness.”
The whole reason our society functions is because we're constantly building on the accumulated knowledge of previous generations instead of forcing each individual to rediscover everything. Are we taking away young people's "right to learn" when we simply give them a smartphone instead of forcing them to figure out how to harness electricity, create a microchip, transmit data wirelessly, etc.? If we can teach young people from the beginning these more nuanced understandings of difference and diversity, why wouldn't we? There's no virtue in allowing them to absorb ideas we know are wrong just so they can go through the same difficult and lengthy process of un-learning them that we did.
Don't re-invent the wheel.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
Again, there are no DM police going to show up at your door. What you are saying applies to your very own argument. Should WoTC be censored from making this kind of statement?
Yet, in the UK (where I am) the Tele-Communications act section 127 is being used to fine, incarcerate and silence many and simply by someone calling the police (sometimes the police decide themselves to action with no one complaining) by merrily stating they were "hurt" by something someone or company has said. (see uk government stats for this here). there is several examples of this being abuse.
My argument is not "namely that any censorship at all equals absolute censorship"
it is any censorship can lead to absolute censorship and it should be done with the greatest care and attention.
There is always another ways instead of the enforcing or advocating strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.
My stance on Wizards is this: I think its good thing if they expand the section of alignments and say that people don't need to be strict to good and evil and simplified views as pointed out by other posters here - games can be more mature.
You know drow elfs are not all evil - I thought we already knew that or has wizards not read the last 10 years or so of Salvatore books same with orcs and other examples banded about.
That is good and it will make for better game play with more depth
What I dont want to see Wizards censoring themselves to appease twitter mobs which are already calling institutional racism or people that disagree, racists, white supremacy in dnd, etc.
Wizards should not have to censor themselves nor should any of us.
Now wizards are perfectly on their right to change the game its their prerogative
It is also mine to choose to play their game or not.
By profession I am an educator. I get a very short amount of time with students (predominantly in their early to mid 20s) in which to pour bucketloads if technical information as well as emotional feedback. I cannot give too much away publicly, but part of my job is sensitivity training. Inevitably, through the course of an instruction at least once, a student will say some variation of “I don’t understand.”
Now, I could give them the short answer, but then they would have learned nothing. They would know what to put on the test, but they still wouldn’t really understand it. Instead, I have been trained to challenge them sufficiently so that they have the opportunity to understand it for themselves. My boss’s motto: “Challenge, don’t ‘teach.’” By providing a safe, structured environment in which they make mistakes and therefore figure it out for themselves, they learn to be better. Through adversity, comes enlightenment.
When I say “D&D needs Stormtroopers” what I mean is that 11 year olds need a D&D where it’s okay to kill “bad guys” and take their stuff because, for an 11 year old, that’s fun. And those 11 year olds need to have clear-cut, defined “bad guys” to point their swords at without feeling guilty. As those 11 year olds get older, and enter adolescence... with hormones, their story will naturally change. Que the busty bar wenches and such.
As those hormonal adolescents grow into more mature young adults, their stories will change again. They will start to question the world around them and make decisions for themselves as to what is right and what is wrong based on their experiences. And many of those young adults look at the concept of Orcs as “bad guys” and start to question it, eventually change it for themselves.
Eventually those young adults will grow into actual adults and become the fine people in this very forum. We all had the opportunity to become better because we were challenged to within a hobby we all love. Look at us now.
We became better because we were given a reason to. They could have said “Orcs are people too” and we would have known what to “put on the test,” but we wouldn’t have understood it, not really. Because we’re allowed to explore that concept to its natural conclusion for ourselves, we understand why Orcs are people too.
If we take that challenge away from tomorrow’s young adults, we have taken away their right to learn. We have done them a disservice. Remember that butterfly I mentioned? Don’t kill it with “kindness.”
When I say “D&D needs Stormtroopers” what I mean is that 11 year olds need a D&D where it’s okay to kill “bad guys” and take their stuff because, for an 11 year old, that’s fun. And those 11 year olds need to have clear-cut, defined “bad guys” to point their swords at without feeling guilty.
I disagree on many levels. While at that I age my focus was on killing stuff, in retrospect I don't think that was great. (It was certainly heavily informed by other young white males who looked exactly like me.) My experiences with younger players these days runs more along the lines of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVaSzIIoA9Y .
It might have changed my life had we had an adult willing to show us something more than murderhobo play.
We didn't. We had what the books told us. And the books said be murderhobos. So I am all for better books.
Also, as I touched on earlier, I strongly feel that today's D&D is just not the right game for mowing down bad guys indiscriminately. Video games are just so much better at that. That's not a moral judgement, it's solely about the quality of the experience. Back in the day, we didn't have that option. For all the ground it broke, Wizardy had more in common with Excel than it does with, say, Doom.
As those 11 year olds get older, and enter adolescence... with hormones, their story will naturally change. Que the busty bar wenches and such.
Yup, I remember that style of game as well. They're sadly alive and well and frequently feature on /r/rpghorrorstories.
Again, might have changed my life if there had been girls at the table when I was a boy. But AD&D was just for boys. D&D 5e is for everybody. That is objectively better, but it does mean some players need to shut up about the busty bar wench so they don't creep others out.
If we take that challenge away from tomorrow’s young adults, we have taken away their right to learn.
No kid needed a place to kill bad guys. No kid needed to take other people's stuff. And I am not sure what country you live in where you feel such experiences, even as fictional experiences are necessary.
Maybe it’s a product of the times in which we grew up. But being products of the Action Movie Genre in America, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Harrison Ford made it cool to kill bad guys, get better guns of of their corpses, and use those to go kill more bad guys.
Kids, particularly 11+, are actually mature enough to understand deeper concepts of 'bad guy' than race based, or clothing based, or any other stereotype you consider convenient. It is rather a lot easier to teach that such stereotyping is bad in the real world when not encouraging it in play. At least it has been so in my experience.
Then why did G.I.Joes always shoot one color laser while Cobras always shot another color? Why is Halo online still Red Vs. Blue?
If it is something said publicly, e.g. on Twitter, then there may well be reason for police to act. Certainly police are not randomly showing up on doorsteps accusing people out of the blue and there is still due process.
There been many cases of misuse of the act - like this one
Moreover, though, the police are not going to show up at your door to enforce WoTC campaign guidelines and if they show up at your door in Scotland to enforce the law you cited, it will have nothing to do with anything WoTC said about how D&D campaigns should be run.
I agree 120% with you on this, it would not be because of WoTC. Don't disagree with you here.
And you, sir, are insisting that WoTC SHOULD censor themselves. You are insisting this by insisting that they should not change the nature or descriptions of officially published settings or creatures. Your insistence is just as much censorship as anything you are complaining about, particularly when you equate it with actual government legislation with actual penalties.
No don't think I have said they should not do this, in fact in my previous post I made abundantly clear that I agreed with WoTC position
Here is an example which not related to anything i have said up to now.
One of the changes WoTC has done to Curse of Stradh is this:
Ezmerelda, an NPC with a lower leg prosthesis (having replaced it after a werewolf bite), no longer “takes care to hide it from view,” and is not implied to be ashamed of it.
Changing the character for what reason? why? is it that the sensitivity readers WoTC employed to review said someone with a prosthetic might be offended by this and you should remove it or that might be read by someone with this very same problem?
The author put that there for a reason, its part of the character of Ezmerelda wasn't it not? It kinda robbed player characters from interactions with this NPC that could have been positive and brought the eventual good thing of Ezmerelda not being ashamed anymore.
I think this change made the product worse and for what?
I am curious of what people opinions are about this, mine is above obviously.
By profession I am an educator. I get a very short amount of time with students (predominantly in their early to mid 20s) in which to pour bucketloads if technical information as well as emotional feedback. I cannot give too much away publicly, but part of my job is sensitivity training. Inevitably, through the course of an instruction at least once, a student will say some variation of “I don’t understand.”
Now, I could give them the short answer, but then they would have learned nothing. They would know what to put on the test, but they still wouldn’t really understand it. Instead, I have been trained to challenge them sufficiently so that they have the opportunity to understand it for themselves. My boss’s motto: “Challenge, don’t ‘teach.’” By providing a safe, structured environment in which they make mistakes and therefore figure it out for themselves, they learn to be better. Through adversity, comes enlightenment.
When I say “D&D needs Stormtroopers” what I mean is that 11 year olds need a D&D where it’s okay to kill “bad guys” and take their stuff because, for an 11 year old, that’s fun. And those 11 year olds need to have clear-cut, defined “bad guys” to point their swords at without feeling guilty. As those 11 year olds get older, and enter adolescence... with hormones, their story will naturally change. Que the busty bar wenches and such.
As those hormonal adolescents grow into more mature young adults, their stories will change again. They will start to question the world around them and make decisions for themselves as to what is right and what is wrong based on their experiences. And many of those young adults look at the concept of Orcs as “bad guys” and start to question it, eventually change it for themselves.
Eventually those young adults will grow into actual adults and become the fine people in this very forum. We all had the opportunity to become better because we were challenged to within a hobby we all love. Look at us now.
We became better because we were given a reason to. They could have said “Orcs are people too” and we would have known what to “put on the test,” but we wouldn’t have understood it, not really. Because we’re allowed to explore that concept to its natural conclusion for ourselves, we understand why Orcs are people too.
If we take that challenge away from tomorrow’s young adults, we have taken away their right to learn. We have done them a disservice. Remember that butterfly I mentioned? Don’t kill it with “kindness.”
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
The whole reason our society functions is because we're constantly building on the accumulated knowledge of previous generations instead of forcing each individual to rediscover everything. Are we taking away young people's "right to learn" when we simply give them a smartphone instead of forcing them to figure out how to harness electricity, create a microchip, transmit data wirelessly, etc.? If we can teach young people from the beginning these more nuanced understandings of difference and diversity, why wouldn't we? There's no virtue in allowing them to absorb ideas we know are wrong just so they can go through the same difficult and lengthy process of un-learning them that we did.
Don't re-invent the wheel.
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
It is a sad truth that people learn best by making mistakes.
That’s why my students tell me they learn more in an hour and a half with me, than in a semester with their professors.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Yet, in the UK (where I am) the Tele-Communications act section 127 is being used to fine, incarcerate and silence many and simply by someone calling the police (sometimes the police decide themselves to action with no one complaining) by merrily stating they were "hurt" by something someone or company has said. (see uk government stats for this here). there is several examples of this being abuse.
My argument is not "namely that any censorship at all equals absolute censorship"
it is any censorship can lead to absolute censorship and it should be done with the greatest care and attention.
There is always another ways instead of the enforcing or advocating strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.
My stance on Wizards is this: I think its good thing if they expand the section of alignments and say that people don't need to be strict to good and evil and simplified views as pointed out by other posters here - games can be more mature.
You know drow elfs are not all evil - I thought we already knew that or has wizards not read the last 10 years or so of Salvatore books same with orcs and other examples banded about.
That is good and it will make for better game play with more depth
What I dont want to see Wizards censoring themselves to appease twitter mobs which are already calling institutional racism or people that disagree, racists, white supremacy in dnd, etc.
Wizards should not have to censor themselves nor should any of us.
Now wizards are perfectly on their right to change the game its their prerogative
It is also mine to choose to play their game or not.
This change wont stop me playing the game.
This basically what I am thinking
I disagree on many levels. While at that I age my focus was on killing stuff, in retrospect I don't think that was great. (It was certainly heavily informed by other young white males who looked exactly like me.) My experiences with younger players these days runs more along the lines of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVaSzIIoA9Y .
It might have changed my life had we had an adult willing to show us something more than murderhobo play.
We didn't. We had what the books told us. And the books said be murderhobos. So I am all for better books.
Also, as I touched on earlier, I strongly feel that today's D&D is just not the right game for mowing down bad guys indiscriminately. Video games are just so much better at that. That's not a moral judgement, it's solely about the quality of the experience. Back in the day, we didn't have that option. For all the ground it broke, Wizardy had more in common with Excel than it does with, say, Doom.
Yup, I remember that style of game as well. They're sadly alive and well and frequently feature on /r/rpghorrorstories.
Again, might have changed my life if there had been girls at the table when I was a boy. But AD&D was just for boys. D&D 5e is for everybody. That is objectively better, but it does mean some players need to shut up about the busty bar wench so they don't creep others out.
Who is doing this? And how?
Sure, and people will still be making mistakes and learning after this. Maybe even while playing DnD.
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
Orcs, Elfs are fictitious entities in made up worlds.
We simply play as the over gods, the multiverse changing and shaping the these worlds to anything we like.
We can't not treat these the same way we treat the real world.
that is true
Tell me about it; I keep having to refresh this page every 5 minutes just to keep up...
I don’t keep up. I simply voice my opinion based on my experience. I catch up after I’m done.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Maybe it’s a product of the times in which we grew up. But being products of the Action Movie Genre in America, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and Harrison Ford made it cool to kill bad guys, get better guns of of their corpses, and use those to go kill more bad guys.
Then why did G.I.Joes always shoot one color laser while Cobras always shot another color? Why is Halo online still Red Vs. Blue?
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
There been many cases of misuse of the act - like this one
I agree 120% with you on this, it would not be because of WoTC. Don't disagree with you here.
No don't think I have said they should not do this, in fact in my previous post I made abundantly clear that I agreed with WoTC position
You have no idea how much I envy your ability to do that right now...
Sad thing is, I wasnt expecting this to get 6 pages worth of responses. It's actually scary
6 pages? Oh Patrick, you have no idea how big this snowball is going to get...
Here is an example which not related to anything i have said up to now.
One of the changes WoTC has done to Curse of Stradh is this:
Changing the character for what reason? why? is it that the sensitivity readers WoTC employed to review said someone with a prosthetic might be offended by this and you should remove it or that might be read by someone with this very same problem?
The author put that there for a reason, its part of the character of Ezmerelda wasn't it not? It kinda robbed player characters from interactions with this NPC that could have been positive and brought the eventual good thing of Ezmerelda not being ashamed anymore.
I think this change made the product worse and for what?
I am curious of what people opinions are about this, mine is above obviously.
Did I accident a flame war?? DID I PUSH THE NUKE BUTTON??!!
wow you can find all the changes here in dndbeyond forums : https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/rules-game-mechanics/8760-official-wizards-of-the-coast-errata#c16
lol i think it could be the longest living post in dndbeyond