TL:DR mode is the setting inverts a lot of fantasy tropes involving races. Several of the larger nations or continents have multiple races who all share the same culture, rather than each race having their own culture.
One Empire is Lawful Neutral and has Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Dragonborn, Kobolds, Tieflings and Humans who are a melting pot of several Mediterranean cultures. Another is a variety of Chaotic-Neutral Kingdoms who are all feuding and fighting with each other, but share nigh-identical faiths and social moores, and have Humans, Half-Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings and Aasimar. Other nations also exist but have a less expansive racial list. No mortal race is inherently good or evil. Aasimar, Tieflings and Genasai derive their heritage from exposure to sites of great magic, hence the site where a powerful celestial and devil clashed affected the survivors, and the bloodlines of those civilians caught in the area can randomly give rise to Aasimar or Tiefling children who breed true. Likewise Genasai just pop up in regions known for elemental properties because Mortals react weirdly to Planar energies, go figure. Some races are more prone to 'Fight' in the Flight or Fight response, others are naturally more community-minded or independant, but no race is intrinsically 'evil' or 'good', 'lawful' or 'chaotic'.
And centuries of living together under one banner helped smooth over the cracks. Certain cultural quirks are more prominent amongst certain provinces that have a higher ratio of X race over Y, but overall the culture and society that goes with it remains mostly the same within a nation or a continent.
I thought it was a very simple solution to the inherent racism in the game, that tension comes along via societal clashes and national agendas rather than racism, faith-based zealotry and the other 'problematic' issues that has been highlighted in D&D recently.
Yet I've got an older player (we're both in our early 40's) and a pair of younger players (mid 20's) screaming that I've gone 'Woke' and I've made the game unfun. We're still doing lots of combat, there's lots of intrigue, spying and sabotage and the like, there's plenty of the same plot hooks and scenarios I've been using for 20+ years of DMing. I'm not sure if this is a personal issue they're bringing to the table, if I have 'gone woke' in an effort to make the game more relevant and appealing to the younger players at my table, or I'm just getting crossed wires here.
I'd appreciate some feedback if I've gone too far or I'm letting these three players rattle me.
The players get to be the heroes, the DM gets the world.
If you follow the first school of thought, then there’s only two quotes you need to remember:
”The customer is always right, in matters of taste.” — Harry Selfridge
“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.” — John Ilhan
If you subscribe to the second school of thought, then the players get the right to tell you what to do with your world the minute they give you the right to tell them how to play their characters.
The players get to show up once a week, do their jobs for a few hours, and then go home and not have to think about it again for another week. In return for their minimal investment, what do they get? They get to be the stars of the show. They get all the glory, they get to be victorious, conquering heroes. It’s their story.
The DM spends hours in between sessions prepping and planning, writing and figuring things out, and when things go sideways the DM has to scramble to make it work anyway. The DM has to worry about every single thing that isn’t the PCs, right down to the weather itself. What does the DM get for that massive investment? We get to show the players our worlds. The world is yours, do whatever you want to with it. And if they don’t like it, then they can take a turn DMing.
In my experience, anyone who uses "woke" as a blanket complaint isn't going to be satisfied by any level of good writing or logic. I'd probably just abandon those players, but I don't know how close everyone is or how complicated your interpersonal relationships are.
If racism is role-playable than non-racism is roleplayable. Honestly, for most of human history racism was no where near as strong as it is now. Small tribal people hated everyone not of their tribe equally. In fact, competition with their closest neighbors was more important than skin color and other racial features. They would gladly hire foreigner mercenaries to attack the tribe next door.
I would tell him that not to worry, prejudice still exists, but is based on nationality not race. The Empire hates and despise the Kingdom people as puny little tribes. The Kingdom see the Empire as arrogant SOB's, etc. etc.
I certainly have less experience DMing than the OP, but in my 4 year DMing experience, there is no shortage of players desperately looking for a DM. Anyone who uses the term 'woke' unironically would get curbed, even if they were friends. Life is too short to wrestle with people who bring that energy to my table for a game that is meant to be fun. Especially considering that DMing a homebrew world requires a significant portion of my free time to prepare. D&D is for everyone. My table, however, is not for everyone.
Given the time commitment any D&D 5e DM has made beyond just the scheduled sessions, to try to make things fun for the players, it's INCREDIBLY RUDE for a player to show up at the table and start crapping all over the prep work the DM did.
Not being interested in the campaign setting is fine. Even disliking the campaign is fine if everybody's at least respectful about it. Either of those can actually improve the game by letting the players' ideas shape the campaign world, which is more interesting for the players and less work for the DM. But neither of those are what was described. Players trying to tell the DM, "you're playing D&D wrong" is bad enough, but this is going past that and actively insulting the DM. It sounds like they don't respect you or your ideas, and anybody willing to put in the time and effort to DM a campaign deserves better than that.
In my opinion, the classy thing to do would be to just tell them, "I don't think I'm the right DM for you," and if it were me that would be the end of it. But it's not me, and they're not my players. Maybe it depends on how close you are with these people, and how much you actually want to play D&D.
As an uninvolved person I don't know, it usually takes a lot for people in the normal world to use social media words like "woke" or the counterpart "based." I'm only seeing one perspective, so I'm probably not getting the full story either as it'd be nice to know the inciting incident of the 3 players dismay.
As far as world building, I would just go with what Sposta said. I'd add on that if the world is being made to be played on a ttrpg, the gameable elements for tension/conflict are more important than detailing "racial lists" for every nation (obviously focus can be given to the one or two they're currently experiencing). Deep lore can be nice, but players may not necessarily notice background minutia of a kingdom; creating such lore can dramatically eat up prep-time that probably won't be seen in play.
I'm not sure if this is a personal issue they're bringing to the table, if I have 'gone woke' in an effort to make the game more relevant and appealing to the younger players at my table, or I'm just getting crossed wires here.
I'd appreciate some feedback if I've gone too far or I'm letting these three players rattle me.
Did you "go woke" in an effort to attract younger players? You know the answer to that. No one here does. Your players might if they've known you for a long time, but what do the rest of them think? And just because someone who has known you for a while might be right about your motives doesn't mean they are.
You know what you did. If you did homebrew what you thought was a more "woke" D&D, not because you believed in it but just to draw young people, then I'd say there are easier ways to make friends. If this is not what you did, then I'd say, yes you're letting them rattle you. You built a world for your game. If they don't want to play in it, they can go elsewhere. There are many other players and many other worlds.
I'm curious about the rest of the context? Creating a setting explicitly to control what themes you want to address in the game, and which ones you don't want, is completely in your right as the Dungeon Master. I'm not sure what your players want out of the game, since your description of their complaints doesn't make sense. If your friends accused you of writing a "woke" D&D campaign, I'm inclined to think that there's more to the story than what you've presented so far.
Replacing the extra-planar lineages with elemental/planar influences infusing regions and altering the peoples there is interesting, and may be a good way to include said races without dealing with planar travelers or characters having infernal/divine ancestry. However, your setting will succeed or fail based on how interesting the cultures you create are, since you divorced your setting from the cultures of the official D&D settings. It'll work if you're good at making each culture distinct, but if it turns out like Hollywood's recent outings where every setting is starting to look the same because they're stripping away what made them unique for the sake of "diversity", that'll sink a campaign. (For example, look at Peter Jackson's adaption of The Lord of the Rings, and compare that to Amazon's Rings of Power. One is clearly Middle Earth, the other could be any generic fantasy setting, failing to understand the nature of the various cultures in Middle Earth, which is a disservice to the setting it's pretending to be)
Also, one of the other comments in the thread suggested you dump the friends for what they said... but I would caution that it's better to first put forth the effort to understand their positions, rather than cutting out everyone who has a different opinion/perspective than you. Maybe they're not a good fit for your table, but maybe the solution is just better communication from all of you.
The players get to be the heroes, the DM gets the world.
If you follow the first school of thought, then there’s only two quotes you need to remember:
”The customer is always right, in matters of taste.” — Harry Selfridge
“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back.” — John Ilhan
If you subscribe to the second school of thought, then the players get the right to tell you what to do with your world the minute they give you the right to tell them how to play their characters.
The players get to show up once a week, do their jobs for a few hours, and then go home and not have to think about it again for another week. In return for their minimal investment, what do they get? They get to be the stars of the show. They get all the glory, they get to be victorious, conquering heroes. It’s their story.
The DM spends hours in between sessions prepping and planning, writing and figuring things out, and when things go sideways the DM has to scramble to make it work anyway. The DM has to worry about every single thing that isn’t the PCs, right down to the weather itself. What does the DM get for that massive investment? We get to show the players our worlds. The world is yours, do whatever you want to with it. And if they don’t like it, then they can take a turn DMing.
I'm very much in the first school of thought on this one, and I've given plenty of chances for players to give feedback on the setting for over a year before it started, and we're several months now into this campaign.
In my experience, anyone who uses "woke" as a blanket complaint isn't going to be satisfied by any level of good writing or logic. I'd probably just abandon those players, but I don't know how close everyone is or how complicated your interpersonal relationships are.
It has honestly come out of nowhere, at least as far as I know, because these aren't players at my table, but in our group of players. We're a not-for-profit group that provides tutoring and assistance to single parent/blended families/immigrant families who might struggle with the local 'official' groups, because most of those are both government and religious-based, and our D&D/table top war-games are a big way of helping some of the children/teens we have taken on become less afraid of maths and numbers, and a smoother social interaction to be who they want to be with less issues based on their appearance or heritage.
Given the time commitment any D&D 5e DM has made beyond just the scheduled sessions, to try to make things fun for the players, it's INCREDIBLY RUDE for a player to show up at the table and start crapping all over the prep work the DM did.
Not being interested in the campaign setting is fine. Even disliking the campaign is fine if everybody's at least respectful about it. Either of those can actually improve the game by letting the players' ideas shape the campaign world, which is more interesting for the players and less work for the DM. But neither of those are what was described. Players trying to tell the DM, "you're playing D&D wrong" is bad enough, but this is going past that and actively insulting the DM. It sounds like they don't respect you or your ideas, and anybody willing to put in the time and effort to DM a campaign deserves better than that.
In my opinion, the classy thing to do would be to just tell them, "I don't think I'm the right DM for you," and if it were me that would be the end of it. But it's not me, and they're not my players. Maybe it depends on how close you are with these people, and how much you actually want to play D&D.
I'm personally unphased by their presence but if they're saying stuff like 'woke' and complaining that they can't be racist to certain fantasy races, that's a bit of a red flag for me because we're a multi-racial group, and one of the big reasons I generally avoid running WotC campaigns 'as is', is because the cultures are predominantly white and often heavily westernised, which is going to be less likely to get the kids invested since their heritage isn't being used. What's great for me is not great for them, so making sure we change things up to give their cultures more time in the light, and positively at that, has done wonders to keep them engaged, and the parents/grandparents are more than happy to have their heritage on display and have been a massive help fleshing out the campaign with a lot of cultural quirks and little social mores I was completely oblivious to.
I'm not sure if this is a personal issue they're bringing to the table, if I have 'gone woke' in an effort to make the game more relevant and appealing to the younger players at my table, or I'm just getting crossed wires here.
I'd appreciate some feedback if I've gone too far or I'm letting these three players rattle me.
Did you "go woke" in an effort to attract younger players? You know the answer to that. No one here does. Your players might if they've known you for a long time, but what do the rest of them think? And just because someone who has known you for a while might be right about your motives doesn't mean they are.
You know what you did. If you did homebrew what you thought was a more "woke" D&D, not because you believed in it but just to draw young people, then I'd say there are easier ways to make friends. If this is not what you did, then I'd say, yes you're letting them rattle you. You built a world for your game. If they don't want to play in it, they can go elsewhere. There are many other players and many other worlds.
My original group was me, a pair of maori guys who were like brothers to me (pair of extroverts who found and basically adopted my introvert ass), a caucasian girl, a korean girl and two more caucasian guys. It got hammered home pretty quick that generic western fantasy wasn't going to be engaging to more than 1/2 the table at about ... 15 years old? I'm 41 now. I've been pushing for more non-westernised content since I started DMing at 19, and I'm a forever DM. Everybody knew what they were getting into, I'm the dumb bunny that wrote two entirely homebrewed campaigns that have been in use for nearly 20 years now when our group first got complaints about some of WotC's stuff being a little 'iffy' towards non-western cultures.
The players in question joined eight years ago (older man) and two years and a year and a half (younger men), so its not like they've been unaware of the settings, and the situation of the group, so this being an issue now after so long has caught me off guard. I can only guess they want to run their own campaigns/tables and maybe want other players to join them, given the lack of other, established D&D groups in my town, because as of this post, the older man has been asked to leave the group for aggressive behaviour towards some of the single mothers, but the two younger men are staying and have been drafted into the Round Table to give their opinions to a broader circle, and younger people who have taken up DMing duties, because even my paleo-nerd ass can't DM for nine tables at once!
Going to keep this brief.
TL:DR mode is the setting inverts a lot of fantasy tropes involving races. Several of the larger nations or continents have multiple races who all share the same culture, rather than each race having their own culture.
One Empire is Lawful Neutral and has Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Dragonborn, Kobolds, Tieflings and Humans who are a melting pot of several Mediterranean cultures. Another is a variety of Chaotic-Neutral Kingdoms who are all feuding and fighting with each other, but share nigh-identical faiths and social moores, and have Humans, Half-Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings and Aasimar. Other nations also exist but have a less expansive racial list. No mortal race is inherently good or evil. Aasimar, Tieflings and Genasai derive their heritage from exposure to sites of great magic, hence the site where a powerful celestial and devil clashed affected the survivors, and the bloodlines of those civilians caught in the area can randomly give rise to Aasimar or Tiefling children who breed true. Likewise Genasai just pop up in regions known for elemental properties because Mortals react weirdly to Planar energies, go figure. Some races are more prone to 'Fight' in the Flight or Fight response, others are naturally more community-minded or independant, but no race is intrinsically 'evil' or 'good', 'lawful' or 'chaotic'.
And centuries of living together under one banner helped smooth over the cracks. Certain cultural quirks are more prominent amongst certain provinces that have a higher ratio of X race over Y, but overall the culture and society that goes with it remains mostly the same within a nation or a continent.
I thought it was a very simple solution to the inherent racism in the game, that tension comes along via societal clashes and national agendas rather than racism, faith-based zealotry and the other 'problematic' issues that has been highlighted in D&D recently.
Yet I've got an older player (we're both in our early 40's) and a pair of younger players (mid 20's) screaming that I've gone 'Woke' and I've made the game unfun. We're still doing lots of combat, there's lots of intrigue, spying and sabotage and the like, there's plenty of the same plot hooks and scenarios I've been using for 20+ years of DMing. I'm not sure if this is a personal issue they're bringing to the table, if I have 'gone woke' in an effort to make the game more relevant and appealing to the younger players at my table, or I'm just getting crossed wires here.
I'd appreciate some feedback if I've gone too far or I'm letting these three players rattle me.
There’s two schools of thought on the matter:
If you follow the first school of thought, then there’s only two quotes you need to remember:
If you subscribe to the second school of thought, then the players get the right to tell you what to do with your world the minute they give you the right to tell them how to play their characters.
The players get to show up once a week, do their jobs for a few hours, and then go home and not have to think about it again for another week. In return for their minimal investment, what do they get? They get to be the stars of the show. They get all the glory, they get to be victorious, conquering heroes. It’s their story.
The DM spends hours in between sessions prepping and planning, writing and figuring things out, and when things go sideways the DM has to scramble to make it work anyway. The DM has to worry about every single thing that isn’t the PCs, right down to the weather itself. What does the DM get for that massive investment? We get to show the players our worlds. The world is yours, do whatever you want to with it. And if they don’t like it, then they can take a turn DMing.
I hope that helps.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
In my experience, anyone who uses "woke" as a blanket complaint isn't going to be satisfied by any level of good writing or logic. I'd probably just abandon those players, but I don't know how close everyone is or how complicated your interpersonal relationships are.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
If racism is role-playable than non-racism is roleplayable. Honestly, for most of human history racism was no where near as strong as it is now. Small tribal people hated everyone not of their tribe equally. In fact, competition with their closest neighbors was more important than skin color and other racial features. They would gladly hire foreigner mercenaries to attack the tribe next door.
I would tell him that not to worry, prejudice still exists, but is based on nationality not race. The Empire hates and despise the Kingdom people as puny little tribes. The Kingdom see the Empire as arrogant SOB's, etc. etc.
I certainly have less experience DMing than the OP, but in my 4 year DMing experience, there is no shortage of players desperately looking for a DM. Anyone who uses the term 'woke' unironically would get curbed, even if they were friends. Life is too short to wrestle with people who bring that energy to my table for a game that is meant to be fun. Especially considering that DMing a homebrew world requires a significant portion of my free time to prepare. D&D is for everyone. My table, however, is not for everyone.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
Given the time commitment any D&D 5e DM has made beyond just the scheduled sessions, to try to make things fun for the players, it's INCREDIBLY RUDE for a player to show up at the table and start crapping all over the prep work the DM did.
Not being interested in the campaign setting is fine. Even disliking the campaign is fine if everybody's at least respectful about it. Either of those can actually improve the game by letting the players' ideas shape the campaign world, which is more interesting for the players and less work for the DM. But neither of those are what was described. Players trying to tell the DM, "you're playing D&D wrong" is bad enough, but this is going past that and actively insulting the DM. It sounds like they don't respect you or your ideas, and anybody willing to put in the time and effort to DM a campaign deserves better than that.
In my opinion, the classy thing to do would be to just tell them, "I don't think I'm the right DM for you," and if it were me that would be the end of it. But it's not me, and they're not my players. Maybe it depends on how close you are with these people, and how much you actually want to play D&D.
As an uninvolved person I don't know, it usually takes a lot for people in the normal world to use social media words like "woke" or the counterpart "based." I'm only seeing one perspective, so I'm probably not getting the full story either as it'd be nice to know the inciting incident of the 3 players dismay.
As far as world building, I would just go with what Sposta said. I'd add on that if the world is being made to be played on a ttrpg, the gameable elements for tension/conflict are more important than detailing "racial lists" for every nation (obviously focus can be given to the one or two they're currently experiencing). Deep lore can be nice, but players may not necessarily notice background minutia of a kingdom; creating such lore can dramatically eat up prep-time that probably won't be seen in play.
Honestly I like this idea because sure the classic fantasy prejudice is fun however I think this makes a lot more sense historical and logically.
Did you "go woke" in an effort to attract younger players? You know the answer to that. No one here does. Your players might if they've known you for a long time, but what do the rest of them think? And just because someone who has known you for a while might be right about your motives doesn't mean they are.
You know what you did. If you did homebrew what you thought was a more "woke" D&D, not because you believed in it but just to draw young people, then I'd say there are easier ways to make friends. If this is not what you did, then I'd say, yes you're letting them rattle you. You built a world for your game. If they don't want to play in it, they can go elsewhere. There are many other players and many other worlds.
I'm curious about the rest of the context? Creating a setting explicitly to control what themes you want to address in the game, and which ones you don't want, is completely in your right as the Dungeon Master. I'm not sure what your players want out of the game, since your description of their complaints doesn't make sense. If your friends accused you of writing a "woke" D&D campaign, I'm inclined to think that there's more to the story than what you've presented so far.
Replacing the extra-planar lineages with elemental/planar influences infusing regions and altering the peoples there is interesting, and may be a good way to include said races without dealing with planar travelers or characters having infernal/divine ancestry. However, your setting will succeed or fail based on how interesting the cultures you create are, since you divorced your setting from the cultures of the official D&D settings. It'll work if you're good at making each culture distinct, but if it turns out like Hollywood's recent outings where every setting is starting to look the same because they're stripping away what made them unique for the sake of "diversity", that'll sink a campaign. (For example, look at Peter Jackson's adaption of The Lord of the Rings, and compare that to Amazon's Rings of Power. One is clearly Middle Earth, the other could be any generic fantasy setting, failing to understand the nature of the various cultures in Middle Earth, which is a disservice to the setting it's pretending to be)
Also, one of the other comments in the thread suggested you dump the friends for what they said... but I would caution that it's better to first put forth the effort to understand their positions, rather than cutting out everyone who has a different opinion/perspective than you. Maybe they're not a good fit for your table, but maybe the solution is just better communication from all of you.
I'm very much in the first school of thought on this one, and I've given plenty of chances for players to give feedback on the setting for over a year before it started, and we're several months now into this campaign.
It has honestly come out of nowhere, at least as far as I know, because these aren't players at my table, but in our group of players. We're a not-for-profit group that provides tutoring and assistance to single parent/blended families/immigrant families who might struggle with the local 'official' groups, because most of those are both government and religious-based, and our D&D/table top war-games are a big way of helping some of the children/teens we have taken on become less afraid of maths and numbers, and a smoother social interaction to be who they want to be with less issues based on their appearance or heritage.
I'm personally unphased by their presence but if they're saying stuff like 'woke' and complaining that they can't be racist to certain fantasy races, that's a bit of a red flag for me because we're a multi-racial group, and one of the big reasons I generally avoid running WotC campaigns 'as is', is because the cultures are predominantly white and often heavily westernised, which is going to be less likely to get the kids invested since their heritage isn't being used. What's great for me is not great for them, so making sure we change things up to give their cultures more time in the light, and positively at that, has done wonders to keep them engaged, and the parents/grandparents are more than happy to have their heritage on display and have been a massive help fleshing out the campaign with a lot of cultural quirks and little social mores I was completely oblivious to.
My original group was me, a pair of maori guys who were like brothers to me (pair of extroverts who found and basically adopted my introvert ass), a caucasian girl, a korean girl and two more caucasian guys. It got hammered home pretty quick that generic western fantasy wasn't going to be engaging to more than 1/2 the table at about ... 15 years old? I'm 41 now. I've been pushing for more non-westernised content since I started DMing at 19, and I'm a forever DM. Everybody knew what they were getting into, I'm the dumb bunny that wrote two entirely homebrewed campaigns that have been in use for nearly 20 years now when our group first got complaints about some of WotC's stuff being a little 'iffy' towards non-western cultures.
The players in question joined eight years ago (older man) and two years and a year and a half (younger men), so its not like they've been unaware of the settings, and the situation of the group, so this being an issue now after so long has caught me off guard. I can only guess they want to run their own campaigns/tables and maybe want other players to join them, given the lack of other, established D&D groups in my town, because as of this post, the older man has been asked to leave the group for aggressive behaviour towards some of the single mothers, but the two younger men are staying and have been drafted into the Round Table to give their opinions to a broader circle, and younger people who have taken up DMing duties, because even my paleo-nerd ass can't DM for nine tables at once!
Yeah. You're doing great. Carry on. Damn the torpedoes.
As long as there are still "bad guys" to fight, I don't see the problem with your setting.
True can't not have bad guys