Ron: 0:25

Thank you. Hello digital personages, Welcome to the very first episode of the Uncannery, a brand new podcast where three friends whose names are my name, which is Ron- so that means my name's Ron too.

Doug: 0:43

His names are my name, I ron, and so that means my name's ron too his names are mine.

Ron: 0:46

I'm ron three, yeah three rons, one doug and two dons together to my left.

Ron: 0:54

Be clear we have doug I'm doug, and to his left we have I'm and this is the first time you've heard us, presumably, so we should introduce what exactly we are all doing here. We are three fellows who really wanted to spend quality time together and then also monetize the shit out of it. No, I'm joking. We have decided to create a podcast because we think ourselves curious. People right, we agree Frequently find ourselves diving down weird rabbit holes, interested in strange and arcane topics, and so we've decided that every week, we're going to show up here and one of us is going to be center stage. They're going to bring to the others some new topic that they have recently been invested or obsessed with, and we're just going to share it and see if there's any other, if there's any component of that sort of resonates with everyone else in the room, and if we can deconstruct. Why is that an interesting idea? How can we apply this? What is so gripping about it?

Doug: 2:00

And I think that we will hopefully touch hearts, minds and souls in the process of doing that as well.

Don: 2:08

Yeah, that's Amen, I think.

Ron: 2:14

And if you feel like your heart or soul has been touched, then Cool Tune in to the next episode.

Doug: 2:19

But definitely not minds. I noticed you left that one off. Oh yeah, sorry. No, turn off your brain, get ready to just feel.

Ron: 2:26

No thoughts, all vibes here on the. Uncannery Gentlemen, today I wanted to talk about a lifelong not a lifelong passion, a 10-year-long passion of mine and I know for some of you it is also and that is a game called Dungeons and Dragons.

Doug: 2:44

Yeah, baby Nerd. Yes, oh, all right, we just alienated a big part of our audience.

Ron: 2:51

No, they're nerds they are and they should reconcile that fact. If they have played, or have thought about playing Dungeons and Dragons Because I have, and, doug, I know you have played Dungeons and Dragons Can you tell us a little bit? What's your experience with it?

Doug: 3:09

I've even I've got my keys right here. There's this little pod that I have on the side. Listen to the sound effects at home, people. If I open this up and throw this out, you see what these are, ron. See those babies right there.

Ron: 3:18

Oh my gosh, he's showing us some very minuscule polyhedral dice. What are those? Made out of Stone?

Doug: 3:25

These are 8,000 years old. They are metal. It's like an industrial small pack that at any point in time I can throw down some dice for a role-playing game, if people are interested.

Ron: 3:37

How frequently has that occurred? Zero times ever.

Doug: 3:42

Why is it so funny to you, yeah?

Don: 3:44

zero times ever. You don't have to wait for a role-playing game to pop up. You can make real decisions with those. Those are with you all the time.

Doug: 3:51

I do like doing that. I often have rolled for the folks at home who don't know, the dice are identified by how many sides they have, and you just say D20, so that would be a 20-sided die. I've started mornings. I have a very big glow-in-the-dark D20 at my house that I've thrown. I'd be like how's this day going to go? And when it's five and under it's hard to not self-actualize some bad things. It's hard, you just go okay.

Ron: 4:21

I just love that. One of the things people who play Dungeons, dragons or tabletop role-playing games. I think a shared experience among them all is how incredibly difficult it is to gather enough people to play this game. And you're out here thinking I'm just going to fall into one at any minute. Oh yeah, don. Have you ever dabbled with the darkness of Dungeons and Dragons?

Don: 4:37

I have, actually, but I don't carry dice in my pocket. Actually, in my whole lifetime I have only ever played one episode of Dungeons Dragons that required dice. It was in the fourth grade by my buddy, alex, and he introduced me to the game and building characters and character sheets and hit points and it was like doing a math problem is what I thought Big math big math.

Don: 5:05

Yeah, there was a group of us that were friends and we would say that we were playing dungeons and dragons and really we were just telling stories to each other, like one of us would be the dungeon master and lead the other friends through a story if we were like on a, on a car trip or camping or something like that. So we, we said we were playing, but I don't think I've ever really actually I think you were.

Doug: 5:25

I think that's the best way to play. The more that you can get, in my opinion, the more that you can get the story infused and the dice don't get in the way, I think the better time that you're going to have, which is not the case for the hardcore. I think a lot of the time, but I love that stuff.

Don: 5:42

So basically, you think most people play the game wrong.

Doug: 5:44

It's a stylistic preference. Going back to what we said in the beginning, what touches my heart is without them.

Don: 5:51

Yeah.

Doug: 5:53

If the dice don't get in the way of the fun interactions in the world. I think that it's way more fun. I think it is collective storytelling. That's anybody that I've ever gotten into the hobby or suggested to play with that hasn't played.

Don: 6:04

I say it's collective storytelling, that's what you're doing and just to clarify you don't want the dice to get in the way that you literally carry on your key chain in your pocket all the time.

Doug: 6:14

That's why I don't want to be rummaging through my artifacts like, oh here's this old thing here. Let me see if I can find the dice.

Ron: 6:22

And I've already forgotten what the story is.

Doug: 6:25

That would be terrible now don?

Ron: 6:26

I think you were. You probably thought you were just throwing a silly old line out into the wind by saying, oh, you play. You think people play the wrong way. However, you may not be shocked to learn that people who play tabletop role-playing games, and have been doing so for a very long time, feel very strongly about about these games, and one of the things I think I love most about the communities that have formed around tabletop role-playing games is just how esoteric and deeply involved with every tiny piece of gaming that they can find, and there are people who very much, very literally, believe there are right ways and wrong ways to play role-playing games and there are thousands of pages of forum threads dedicated to these kinds of arguments and this is actually what I want to talk about today, which very in the last three or so years in the scene there's been a little bit of a row occurring in Dungeons and Dragons land and I wanted to talk with us about that today.

Ron: 7:24

But before we do really quickly, doug, can you just give us like a quick primer what is a tabletop role-playing game?

Doug: 7:29

in case someone's never engaged with this idea, A tabletop role-playing game is the act of engaging with friends in a collective storytelling experience ranging from lots of math to not as much, but there's also going to be some elements of. There's probably going to be a book that is going to give you options for the types of characters that inhabit that world. There's probably going to be a book, or it'll be in the same book, that kind of tells you about what that world is, gives you some ideas of how to build that world and it gives you just enough rules to where you can construct scenarios that the people playing the game can understand. And there'll be one person usually that is running the game that kind of plays the world and the people in it that are interacting with those characters that people are playing I sure hope that dungeons and dragons is going to be paying us our royalty for the advertising we're giving here, because you get to do math and it involves a book.

Don: 8:28

It's what's not to love.

Ron: 8:29

Don't forget the friends, hardest part to acquire.

Doug: 8:35

And sometimes pizza, who knows?

Ron: 8:38

D&D has been having something of a renaissance in the last decade. It's become very popular. That's because Wizards of the Coast, who now own the Dungeons and Dragons property, they released the newest, or latest edition, which is called the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Ron: 8:52

And it's much to what Doug was saying. It's a very stripped down back to basics, not as math heavy as it has been In addition to the game and this has invited a lot of new people into the space it's become this is actually how I got into the game. I am technically one of the people who never really played a tabletop game until maybe 10 years ago or so, around the time that 5th edition was popping off right and there's a lot of reasons for that.

Ron: 9:14

One is people are watching YouTube videos and podcasts where people play these games and they're funny and they're engaging. And also there was a pandemic where people couldn't go out and do most of the things they would usually do for fun. You can jump on Zoom together and play a couple hours of Dungeons Dragons. So, all these have fueled this hobby recently. I want to go back to something of a beginning, real fast, the very first edition of Dungeons Dragons. Maybe the edition you were playing Don, were you playing Advanced?

Don: 9:45

Dungeons Dragons. This is a complex history.

Ron: 9:47

It was AD&D. Okay cool.

Don: 9:49

So Advanced Dungeons Dragons, it would have been 1982 or 83.

Doug: 9:54

Cool the way he said it made it sound like. Was that like 1746?

Don: 9:59

Don, you're really old. You probably played the original version right.

Doug: 10:05

Don was the rule manual, in tight face that's right, but the first edition of Dungeons Dragons.

Ron: 10:11

it comes out sometime around 1973. This is when the creators of. Dungeons Dragons two men, several men, but I think it's complicated folks. But essentially, what history has decided is the two guys got together and they made. Their names are Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax.

Doug: 10:25

Gary.

Ron: 10:26

By far the most remembered of these, and in 1973, they get together, they create a company called TSR that they use to publish their game systems, the most popular of which is going to be Dungeons Dragons. What do you think TSR stands for?

Doug: 10:40

Totally Super Remodeling age.

Ron: 10:49

That would be. That would make some more sense. It stands for tactical studies rules, which is the most boring company name I like that my brain sauce that's just spilling out sounded probably better.

Ron: 11:03

Totally super remodeling would at least has two exciting words it's very 80s right yeah, anyways, tsr is one of the biggest names in like tabletop gaming for a couple decades. Eventually gary gygax great guy, not a fantastic business runner eventually loses control of the company. The company goes down south. In 1997, tsr and the rights to all of its products and properties is purchased by Wizards of the Coast, a hot upcoming new board game they're most famous for.

Doug: 11:39

Magic the Gathering. Yeah, and this is in the 1990s.

Ron: 11:42

They're flush with Magic Cash, so they go out and they buy Dun and dragons I would like magic catch, where you get magic magic cash is what we're doing right now.

Ron: 11:53

Um, all right, tsr the name is eventually given to. Wow. Wizards of the coast decides they're not going to use the name tsr, so they allow a guy named Jason Elliott to to register it and he creates a new TSR. This is like the second version of TSR and he's basically just a very small like business and he, just out of an appreciation for history, wants to resurrect this name. Hey, this is where Dungeons and Dragons came from. There should be a TSR today, and he basically just uses it to publish a fanzine about dnd. So he cannot make dungeons and dragons. Obviously, that's owned by wizards of the coast and he can't make any of the other their other games. Was that a sigh of questioning?

Doug: 12:34

I know that wasn't for me okay, sorry, uh.

Ron: 12:36

So anyways, everything's going fine for jason elliott in this new TSR until 2020. He had partnered with Ernie Gygax, which is one of the sons of Gary Gygax, and Ernie Gygax, it sounds, at some point realizes that Jason has forgotten to renew the his ownership of the name TSR, and he goes to a guy named Justin Lanasa, his buddy, and he says hey, look, this guy I work with. He forgot to renew the license to TSR. We could take it, we could be TSR right now. And that's exactly what happens Justin Lanasa and Ernie Gygax they swoop in and they create, they basically file a new business as TSR and they pay for the name and they steal it essentially from Jason Elliott. They pay for the name and they steal it essentially from Jason Elliott. And so this is now a third iteration of the good old fashioned TSR. And this is where the trouble comes from, because it turns out, ernie Gygax and Justin Lanasa are very quickly about to find themselves in a little bit of trouble. I don't like trouble. So what would they possibly want to do with TSR? They try to answer this question by going on to a YouTube podcast.

Ron: 13:45

Ernie Gygax is like a cult figure. He's the son of famous Gary Gygax, and people know him from conventions. He shows up on a podcast and he gives an interview announcing hey, tsr is back. We're going to bring back old school gaming. We're going to totally super remodel it. And in this interview, ernie Gygax says the following. He says TSR has been gone. There's a ton of artists and game designers and people that play and recently they were dissed for being old-fashioned, possibly anti-modern trends and enforcing or even having the concepts of gender identity.

Doug: 14:21

And then, in parentheses, he laughs he sounds a little bit for lack of a better term like almost high. What's going on there?

Ron: 14:31

Yeah, I don't think this was exactly like. This wasn't a question really put to him. I think the question was like why bring back TSR? And he continues by saying I would hope so. But they also. And then later they ask hey, are you going to cooperate with Wizards of the Coast, since they technically own all the properties TSR owns? Like how are you going to make this work? Tsr owns, like how are you going to make this work? And he says I would hope that we'd be able to cooperate with Wizards of the Coast. But they just put out a big disclaimer recently, trying to divorce themselves from the ethics and style of play that was involved in the origins of the game. They're basically trying to say we're a better company and a better type of person than those who started playing. At least that's somewhat of the impression they've given. And please switch over and be part of the new wave. Join the pack of lemmings, oh yeah.

Don: 15:17

So I don't understand the gender identity comment that you made a little while ago. So the big problem that Ernie had was that there's I don't understand that there's genders in D&D.

Ron: 15:30

Hopefully this will clear it up. There are, in fact, genders in D&D. Hopefully this will clear it up. There are, in fact, genders in D&D. He's talking about Wizards of the Coast putting a disclaimer sticker on some of their old products. Wizards of the Coast bought the ability to sell old D&D publishing books and handbooks and magazines and things like that Sometime in 2019, 2020, they decided to put a disclaimer on a lot of these. Almost all of these are sold digitally, so it's very easy to do. But this is what the disclaimer said.

Ron: 15:56

We recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website does not reflect the values of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons and Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.

Don: 16:30

So we are making our products as diverse and inclusive as possible by publishing these racist items.

Ron: 16:38

Yes, this is very much them saying hey look, don't judge us based on these. These were some other guys. We're going to still publish them because, one, we like money, money. Two, this is a. It's an interesting solution, I think, to a problem a lot of companies have had to address in recent years, as sort of discussions about systematized prejudices and biases have gone undetected in American society for so long and this has been a giant sort of national conversation that many people are now more fluent in conversing in and they've, I feel like Disney has gone back and been like hey look, in this animated film there's some weird stuff, right, and what's the?

Don: 17:18

they're redoing splash mountain because of racial overtones on the south.

Doug: 17:23

I do have a, an x-men comic from the 80s and, yeah, there's instances of the n-word being barred out because it's spoken by a white figure. That's in the comic and so even though it was originally printed that way, like that's now been barred out, which I thought was interesting.

Ron: 17:39

Right, and so companies are having to address OK, how do we still make money off of the things we want to make money off of? But meet these modern sensibilities, right? I think, wizards of the Coast. I think this is a pretty good way. I think this is a pretty good way. They're like hey look, we're not changing. Because as soon as you go and censor or remove things that were originally built and published, what is frequently a reaction among a certain enclave of that fan base?

Don: 18:06

Let's burn it down.

Ron: 18:11

Yeah, they get really upset, right. They're like, oh, you're changing my childhood man, you're playing with the time-space continuum, right, whatever it is Okay. So they're saying, look, we're not going to change it, it's still here, but we understand that it's not cool and maybe racist, and modern D&D is trying to do better, right, we are aware, and in our new products we're addressing these things.

Don: 18:25

Right, I think that's what, charitably, they're trying to say All right, I'm going to put a pin in that and come back to it, because I have my eyebrows raised for those of you who can't see. I'd love for you to keep that raised.

Ron: 18:35

So, anyways, this is what Ernie and company are upset at. They take offense at this because, like Ernie says, he thinks this is targeting his generation of gamers people that were playing originally in the 70s and the 80s Like you, don don like when you were being really racist, when you were playing with your buddy. That was key to your experience. And he feels attacked and is saying this new tsr, we're going back to the old ways. We don't care if there were sexist, racist tropes in those and the.

Don: 19:02

It's the disclaimer that irritates him or it's the new style of gameplay that irritates him?

Ron: 19:07

that's a great question. Yeah, um, because I don't know how the gameplay has changed because you've never played racist dnd I've never played sensitive snowflake d.

Don: 19:18

Well, what exactly is right?

Ron: 19:22

yes, I've only played woke dnd. What is racist dnd, though? I think for some people they're gonna be sitting there scratching their head being like what in god's name are they talking about? Dog, do you have any idea what is racist dnd?

Doug: 19:33

the one that I think of is the fact that I remember, and actually the only dnd books that I've ever read were about the dark elves and who are of dark the drow living underground drees de Droerden High elves yeah, I've at least seen that.

Ron: 20:09

And the dark elf thing is a great example, because D&D uses very simplistic morality system to literally code who is a good guy and who is a bad guy.

Ron: 20:18

It has a morality system that's called good, neutral evil and chaotic, lawful. So you fit somewhere on this axis. You're either lawful evil or you're chaotic good. You're one mix of these two variables, and the drow have always been characterized as just evil. Like all of the dark elves, they're evil. They worship the spider goddess Loth, and they make sacrifices and they warp their flesh. Except for one of them. One of them's good and he's drist. Right. There's one good and he's fighting his way out of this terrible but literally the dark elves. If you look at their art, they're literally just black people. They just have black skin and they all live underground under evil. So that's weird. There's also this history of orcs, right?

Ron: 21:09

And this goes back like where do orcs even come from? I'm guessing Tolkien, don let's go back even further.

Don: 21:13

I'm wondering if Don has the most right answer. Thank you. Most right, or Tolkien, would be my first guess too. Thank you.

Ron: 21:18

Tolkien is the right guess. But where does Tolkien grab it? He grabs it from Beowulf, from Old English.

Don: 21:23

Yeah yeah, orkneos, yeah, but anyways.

Ron: 21:25

Yeah, tolkien invents the orcs as a race of malicious creatures that do the bidding of the villains in that story and so of course every fantasy RPG it's got to have orcs and orcs got to be evil. And you might be like, yeah, of course there are evil people, let's fight some evil people. You got to have villains for your good guys to fight against. But as D&D sort of develops and grows and needs to publish more books, it starts talking about orc society and who are the orcs right? Even tolkien had this to say about orcs like. What are orcs right? What do they look like as people?

Ron: 21:56

And tolkien in one of his letters, writes that orcs are squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes, in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the to europeans least lovely mongol types. That's straight from the I love tolkien, but that's straight from the mouth of the to Europeans least lovely Mongol types. That's straight from the I love Tolkien, but that's straight from the mouth of the professor. Okay, and from the very beginning there's this racially coded language that is used to describe these inferior creatures, who are of course all evil and only do evil and only do bad, and a lot of this knowingly or unknowingly mostly, I would say unknowingly gets picked up by the writers of games and fantasy, new fantasy properties, and it gets carried over until you have dnd orcs who, when you make an orc character, your intelligence is capped at a lower level than other kinds of characters because orcs are not smart, but they sure are strong, and so you might have better strength because you're a savage, brute kind of creature did.

Doug: 22:54

Just going back, I want to make sure I heard it. You say least lovable mongol types is that correct least lovely least lovely.

Ron: 23:01

Oh, that's better wow okay okay so, anyways, a lot of this it's just been in there. There's a lot more. You can read whole essays about the sort of no-transcript tabletop communities. A lot of these, these kind of conversations, gain traction, and I think what ernie's really reacting to is one, the disclaimer that wizards of the coast put on there, but also this influx of new people who have come to the tabletop role-playing space, which is much more diverse than it's ever been. Don, what kinds, what kinds of kids were playing D&D when you were in fourth grade, fourth graders?

Don: 23:55

Can I make an assumption? Sure, you guys were all boys, right?

Ron: 23:57

Yes, Okay, d&d and table-to-table games traditionally a very masculine space, right? Not a lot of women joining in. That's changed recently, right? Tons of women and playing these games, visibly online and at my tables when I play, right? And so a lot of women show up and they look at these books and what do they see? A lot of oddly shaped, scantily clad women art drawn for men, right? So new people show up and they say, hey, this is weird. And so then a lot of the aesthetics of the game changes to accommodate a new audience right, so is that changing the game though?

Ron: 24:36

Is that just changing the art that's associated with the game changes to accommodate a new audience, right? So is that changing the game? Though? Is that just changing the art that's associated with the game so frequently? It's changing just the art. Sometimes it'll be changing what the fans called the lore of the game, right?

Ron: 24:41

So once people were like hey, the drow, the dark elves, it's weird that they're all black, coded and evil. A lot of that has changed, so they go and change the storyline of those characters, right? But again to your question how much of this like enters into the actual space of playing the game? Are you playing the game differently? And I think the answer is both yes and no.

Ron: 25:00

A lot of people would say, hey, being a cool white barbarian guy and running into it, I just want to run an adventure where I run into a tribe of orcs and we kill them all and we take their treasure and I feel good, that's fine. And some modern DMs would be like, no, that's weird, we need to wrestle with that a little bit. Right, we need to do something different with that, because there's an implicitly icky thing going on there, and I think we see this sometimes with people when you ask them hey, this thing you loved. There was something weird under the surface about it, whether you knew it or not, and sometimes people get very defensive and they say, no way, that's not true. It was cool the whole time.

Don: 25:38

And part of what I think is is difficult is having lived through both episodes of of what we're discussing right? I guess I lived in the, the, the racist D dnd era before it was uh so lucky we invited you.

Don: 25:55

on the whole thing, I feel lucky. Is there a way? Could you play a game where a strong, buff, dark-skinned barbarian encounters a group of evil orcs who don't look like african-americans that that are dark elves but have a different skin color or a different complexion or a different body shape and still have that same adventure? So is the problem that you have a barbarian character killing orcs? Is that the problem? Or is the problem that all the barbarians are imagined as lighter skinned and built in a certain body frame and all of the orcs are imagined as dark skinned and built in a certain body frame, and all of the orcs are imagined as dark skinned and built in a certain body frame.

Doug: 26:39

And yeah, both.

Don: 26:39

So, again.

Ron: 26:40

This is why I think this is such a fascinating concept, because, like, where does D and D exist when you sit with?

Ron: 26:46

your friends and when you play D and D, where does it? What is happening? There are so many mediums in which it exists. So there's the book, there's the rule book and it tells you orcs are like this. But if I'm a DM, I can say screw that At my table, no orcs are like this. And then, as the dungeon master, I can present the game that way, however I want to bring it to you. The game also exists in the mind of the players, though Each bring it to you. The game also exists in the mind of the players, though Each of them is different. So some of them are going to see the orc one way and another going to imagine the orc a different way.

Ron: 27:15

I don't think the problem here is literally like the skin color of the player characters, right, because you know, people from all different kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities have played Dungeons and Dragons forever. I'm not trying to say until 10 years ago. No, black people played Dungeons and Dragons, right, and certainly they made characters who they thought were cool. It's just this idea that a lot of players just take what's in the rule books, what's in the adventure modules, and they just run them as presented and if they're not thinking very cognizantly or awarely about them. They're going to present narratives that maybe the authors didn't think about as carefully when they published that piece, and so, whether they wanted to or not, they might be promoting, propagating these kinds of old-fashioned ideas or sustaining them.

Don: 28:04

It's been true not only in role-playing games that we're talking about now, but if you go back to early movies or early radio shows or the characters in Gone with the Wind right, it sustains this idea of the servitude of African-Americans in America and it's not an equal power portrayal until much later.

Ron: 28:23

And certainly there are gamers who are like what Orcs were black people? I never thought that, and that's true, right. There's certain that link is not always that explicit right, and there are plenty of people who don't think that, but, whether they knew it or not, it is reinforcing an idea that, hey, there are some people, though, who you can just kill. It's fine, right. You can just kill the orcs, it's okay, right.

Don: 28:53

And that's a very kind of.

Doug: 28:53

That's a weird idea to just like innately have in us, right, does it?

Don: 28:55

carry to other characters or other creatures and everyone wants to kill the dragon. Like you can't say, oh no, the poor dragon.

Ron: 28:58

Let's talk to it and see what it feels right, and this is a great kind of conversation in like, uh, I don't know. I like listening to game developers and video game designers talk about how do you make an enemy for a player to kill and to feel good about killing, and so there's some rules right there like okay, demons, you can always kill demons who care? Demons are just embodiments of pure evil. There's no, that's all a demon is. You can kill nazis. Nazis are just bad. The wolfenstein games are a series of games where you just kill nazis and it feels fun to do.

Ron: 29:27

I think about that one specifically and basically non-sentient things, right, things that don't have a society or a culture. Robots, some sort of Samurai Jack, yeah, some weird cloned marmosets, I don't know, wild animals that are attacking you, right, instead of you attacking them. This is yes, obviously we need opponents to battle in our D&D game and, yeah, sometimes you will fight sapient, sentient creatures, because there's a real conflict there, but that conflict is not driven just by I'm the hero. You're an inferior being. I want your stuff that make a little more sense.

Don: 30:01

Yeah, I can too, okay.

Ron: 30:03

Anyways, back to Ernie and new TSR. When this interview is published, people immediately are like whoa, what? What do you mean? The old style of gaming, okay. And they basically asked them to like clarify their comments. And hey, when you said gender identity, you didn't mean that, right.

Ron: 30:19

And on Twitter, they basically launch into this kind of flame war where they just start saying like more inflammatory and gross stuff. Uh, that doesn't in any way, uh, make the situation better or make people feel like they are not intentionally building a company where they can make like racist adventures and stuff like that. Uh, this happens very quickly. They the company's quickly banned from all other like conventions occurring that year. They're like we just don't want to deal with these guys Like this is like the reaction. This is how serious people take their statements. I don't really want to repeat any of them here, but they do some pretty gross stuff to transgender people online, just like saying rotten kind of stuff and again using this script of we're under attack, they're attacking us, they're attacking our way of life, we're going to bring back this kind of game, all right, later. So what are they doing? What are they selling? What are they trying to do? And this. They don't have the rights to anything.

Ron: 31:16

But they announced that they're gonna make a game called star frontiers, which is another old tsr game. There's a there's a smirk upon your face, don keep going. I'll explain. Star frontiers is another old tsr game. It's basically basically D&D in space. They announce, hey, we're going to make the new edition of Star Frontiers, which technically they can't because, again, wizards of the Coast owns this. And so everyone's like what are you talking about? You're going to get sued into oblivion. You can't do this. And they're like, let's say, wizards of the Coast is a dumb, woke company. They can come and out of us, we're gonna do it anyway. And eventually a uh, they. They announced that, hey, we released that new copy of star frontiers. It sold out in a week and we have none left. And everyone's like okay, where is it? And no one can find. Anyone has no one's. I've got it.

Don: 32:04

So like they just start lying about their success they just printed one copy and they gave it to somebody.

Doug: 32:11

Completely sold out. One of one edition.

Ron: 32:15

Yeah, and they have, they throw like their own convention and they say, oh my God, we had 800 people at our convention and it's like in a hall, it's in a small hobby museum. They eventually buy like Gary Gygax's house and they turn it into a hobby shop, memorial museum type thing, and they house or and they turn it into a hobby shop, memorial museum type thing and they're like 800 people were in here. It's like, oh, it's like a tiny, it's a thousand square foot house. How could that just like trying to create this narrative of their own tremendous success and stuff like that. And you might be saying like, okay, these guys are clearly like rude online, but are they really like racist? Are they really like bad people? And anyone can have a bad weekend on Twitter, right?

Ron: 32:51

A copy of their Star Frontiers books does actually surface at some point. Through a sort of comical series of misadventures, someone in a role-playing game forum actually gets access to the company's Google Drive. I don't remember exactly how this worked. I think one of them was on a video and he had the link in the background to his drive and someone just went to it and it wasn't password protected so they could just root around in their drive, and it turns out two things they find in there. One they find a list of their enemies.

Ron: 33:23

The company keeps a list of other content creators they don't like who have been reviewing them poorly, and all of them are woke, have been reviewing them poorly, and all of them are. They're woke, right. This is, you know, following a sort of script of like culture, war, stuff that we're used to seeing, I think. And then, secondly, they find the missing star frontiers, right, and it's in a half-formed PDF format, and it turns out it's been, at least partially, written by a guy named Dave Johnson. And soon after this, it comes out that Dave Johnson is has two Twitter accounts and one of them is like full board Nazi stuff. Like did you know Nazis have memes.

Ron: 34:01

It's not in my folder, he's just got like an anonymous account where he's like posting very terrible Nazi memes, like the kind of stuff that I used to hang out on 4chan. I'm not like bragging, but it was fun to go to like weird forums when I was younger and just see like trash, like humans acting weird, and this is like worse stuff than I ever saw. I'm not just saying this about dave johnson. Like this is credibly proven. All of his previous like writing works are like removed from like digital storefronts and stuff like that. But this copy of Star Frontiers New Genesis has these races that you can play as, and this is another kind of D&D thing. You play as a race, right? You pick elves, you pick dwarves, you pick humans. You guys want to know what races you could play, as in Star Frontiers New Genesis.

Doug: 34:53

Oh, I'm already ready for it to be bad.

Ron: 34:56

Human. Yeah, you can be a human, or what they call a multar, which is the human equivalent. Don, I'm going to peg you for a cyborg. You make a great cyborg. Thanks, doug, you could be a good reptilian. Thank hey, who wants to play the negro?

Don: 35:12

oh god, is that what they're called?

Doug: 35:15

yep, that's what they're called, and they're not a moldar, as you said. They're separate.

Ron: 35:19

They're, yep, they're separate and they are a humanoid classes. Their description they're tall, they're thick-bodied, they're dark-skinned, even purple, dark brown eyed race with large strength average intelligence all attributes are in the 10 plus range, except intelligence, which is maximum of plus nine. This is contrasted with the nordic playable race. I'm going to be a nordic, this is why they're tall, blonde, blue-eyed race with exceptional attributes and powers. All attributes are in the 13 plus range okay and it's really interesting.

Doug: 36:03

We're out in space. Don't forget that we're on space, so probably going to different planets, sure, yeah, let's make sure we include nordic.

Ron: 36:11

Let's make sure we go call back to a group of people now, some of this actually has basis in old alien stuff, which should probably be the topic of another show, but there are alien weirdos who have categorized the types of aliens, and one of them are the nordics. And it is super racist. They're just like they're aliens who look like white people and they're. They live in a peaceful utopia and when they visit it's good, but when the grays come, it's bad, absolutely point taken about the descriptions you have just read.

Don: 36:39

But to play devil's advocate for a second, is the problem the description or is the problem the names that are being used there? So if it wasn't, the race wasn't called negro, the race was called korzak or whatever made up word would. Does the racism carry over still, or is the racism just literally in the the?

Ron: 37:02

name. No, I think the racism carries forward in the idea. Right, and this is another thing that the RPG community has been talking about and is also what they consider one of the racist holdovers of old D&D. Because in old D&D you're a player, you want to make a character. I want to be a dwarf, right, and you want to be different from other people because you're a dwarf. Dwarves are small, dwarves have beards, dwarves like caves, so what can your dwarf do better than a human? Your dwarf might be really good at swinging an axe right, you might get plus two to axes, or something like that. I want to be an orc right, cool, orcs are really strong. You get plus two to strength, but orcs are really dumb, so you get minus two to intelligence, right. It's this idea of a bio-essentialism.

Doug: 37:41

You heard?

Ron: 37:42

this before you heard this hot term the idea that, like your biology, that you're born with, right determines your kind of capabilities, your abilities, right, and to some extent, yes, humans can't breathe underwater, right, but it doesn't affect things like our intelligence, right, like the intelligence of one race of humans is in no way determined by the color of their skin, right and this is what this is in a stupidly blatant and ignorant way, is trying to say, right, that, yes, some people are just really bad at that kind of thing.

Ron: 38:12

So, in more modern game design and this is where game design has been influenced by this more progressive or modern ideas If you want to play an orc, you won't have a limit to your intelligence, right, you won't have a limit to your strength, because presumably there is a variety and a range and a diversity of those kinds of fictional people, right? But let's say, your orcs in your game have tusks. So then maybe you'll have cool tusks, right? Or maybe you're playing a mermaid they can breathe underwater, obviously, but what we might call soft abilities or something like that, right, does that make sense? Those won't be like your personality, your, your, your bonuses, your intelligence, these sorts of things are not going to be determined by biological limitations.

Don: 39:00

Right.

Ron: 39:04

All right.

Don: 39:05

So glad we're all on the same page.

Ron: 39:09

Anyways, like this is all this blows up. Everyone like obviously just dunks on this company. Eventually, Wizards of the Coast joins the fray and they actually sue them to relinquish use of the TSR logo and all these things, because these are still technically owned by Wizards of the Coast. They have been in court for the last two years. It sounds like it's wrapping up relatively soon. Just June of 2023, the new TSR actually filed for bankruptcy Turns out. Based on their bankruptcy file, their gross revenue for the year of 2023 was a whopping $621. Profits, Clearly, things were going really well for them.

Ron: 39:50

Justin Lanassa basically ran this weird thing into the ground trying to fight this culture war idea that he was bringing back old school gaming, and we've seen this before. I think this is part of why this is interesting to me. Like I love tabletop role playing games, I don't really want to see this sort of blueprint of trying to enrage an audience to give you money and attention. Show up, but it did. It arrived here. We see this in video games a lot. We see this in I don't know what other fields. This is Twitter, right? This is why Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, right? The same kind of guy saying hey, we're being victimized.

Ron: 40:29

I can't say racist stuff on Twitter, I'll just buy it, and now I won't moderate it at all. And what do you know? There are way more Nazis on Twitter today.

Don: 40:33

Even something as niche and tucked away as Dungeons and Dragons is still getting has the tendrils of this gross ideology sneaking around it, and I think the thing that makes it really interesting to me is the way it pops up, not only in the topic we're talking about with the role playing, but it's the same question we're talking about with book bands or with films and things like that. So the question is obviously we brought up before. There are what today would be considered racist portrayals of of people of color in early films or in early books, or right to kill a mockingbird it's not not even that old, and it's being questioned as whether or not it's appropriate for children to read because it portrays a type of society that includes overt racism. And so the question is do we remove that or so that way the children don't ever get to see those portrayals, or do we present it to them as this historical relic of this? Is how things were, and so we've made progress. So you can't tell the progress you've made if you only get the end result. You've got to show the beginning result in order to measure the difference between the two.

Don: 41:51

The case here of D&D. I guess the question that I'm struggling with is it so we joked before about woke D&D, but that's like what you described a little while ago, where people are imagining a greater diversity amongst all of these types of characters. If we only present that version of the game, then everyone only experiences these worlds that have this inclusion and diversity, versus the old style games that don't admittedly has problematic elements to it. In order to make clear the progress that we've made in diversity and inclusion, or does that increase the danger of sustaining those old tropes? Does it?

Doug: 42:40

come down to for lack of a better way of saying it how much somebody enjoys it or what they get out of it. Because I think of even in therapy sessions, when people say let's role play this scenario so you can become more empathetic. I think that's why role play is used in therapy, is let's make you more empathetic to this cause. In a sense, it might be in the hands of the person who's running the game. Right, because, like they're also, I think that's why there's so much responsibility in that person for what they're creating. And it's interesting because I've ran games so many times. I generally am the person who does run the games and I try as much as possible to involve my players in, like them, kind of constructing the world as well. But you're right in that. Yeah, if you again going back to that description least lovely if I'm describing the world and as you walk into the town, they're the least lovely looking mongoloid people.

Doug: 43:36

It's like you're very much painting a world in which you know, versus talking about bringing people into a world that is incredibly racist, and maybe there is a scenario in which somebody is being auctioned off for slavery, sold into slavery, and you need to rescue them in a sense. If this is what you're saying, I don't know hopefully I'm on topic you get, you give an opportunity and for people to sympathize and see that there is a better side of that. Yeah, it's very. I guess it is important to consider in how you're constructing the world.

Ron: 44:10

That would be peoples right, but that they may have accidentally been doing so without really knowing it, and that products of their own time.

Ron: 44:59

Yeah, exactly. And not that we're judging them or saying, oh my gosh, every fourth grade kid who played D&D is a jerk, who play TNT is a jerk, but just that you should be aware, so that, yes, if you want to play that game, that anti-racist game, or that game in which you do play the subjugated peoples in a racist society, at least the person running the game is intelligent enough to do that. Well, and to not accidentally or continue propagating ideas that are counter to progress or counter to justice, right. And there are games that are made expressly for this. Doug, I know you're aware of some of these, right? So there's the game Spire, right, can you?

Doug: 45:36

give me the rundown. What?

Ron: 45:37

is Spire about.

Doug: 45:39

Spire is in the heart. The two companion games. I enjoy them a lot because, spire, the idea is that you're role-playing inside of a city in which there's incredibly corrupt authoritative figures, that you are playing the resistance movement, so you are part of the down-with-the-man forces essentially trying to take them over, and the book explains that it most likely will end in your party's demise because the oppression is too great. And I think that allows for kind of glorious conversations about like, why struggle against things that feel so overwhelming? And so that's a perfect example of a system that I really like for that reason. Why, even if you come to demise, why fight against things that you think are wrong or corrupt in some way?

Ron: 46:28

I, yeah, I love that one or there's games like a vampire, the masquerade, which is, instead of you going around and fighting monsters, it's more about you're the monster, and how does the character navigate a situations where they might have to manipulate or be cruel to other people, as they try to suck their blood right, losing their humanity along.

Ron: 46:45

So there are games that are aware of these themes and designed around them, and dnd can be that kind of a game if you have someone who knows how to do it, but frequently it's just not, and so I think people are just trying to be aware and trying to and there's an educational philosophy, that social reconstructionism, that imagines the world as a place that has social problems in it and that the solution is to educate those problems away in the next generation of humans.

Don: 47:13

And you see it in things like the civil rights movement, where schools were desegregated and teachers were the first ones that treated children of different color equally, and that was the first experience that they had, but then those kids grew up and it wasn't unusual for them to see people of different colors in the same room or being treated equally, things like that.

Don: 47:32

So it seems to me like there's an opportunity here as well for that very same thing, where the role-playing community is developing a way to experience a world that is much more inclusive and diverse than maybe our own world is, and by experiencing that, it opens up the opportunity that maybe that's something that could carry over into our real world, which I think is the danger that I was talking about earlier of if you don't do that, if you just hang on to, or even if you allow some of the older versions of the games to carry over, then it's sustaining those same problematic viewpoints. So it's, there's a pushull there. I don't know what the right answer is.

Ron: 48:11

And I'm sure we and all of our brothers and sisters in role-playing games will continue to find the answer to that question at our gaming tables, rolling dice, swinging imaginary swords.

Don: 48:24

And just want to remind everybody. I don't have dice in my pocket. We're going to get you dice tonight. We're getting you dice baby and I don't have dice in my pocket we're going to get you dice tonight. We're getting you dice, baby, and I wasn't participating in the conversation about what other games there are.

Ron: 48:33

If you want Don to get some dice, then please send us a Venmo $5, so we can get him a crisp ChessX set of really cool dragon scale dice or something like that. Gentlemen, I think this has been a very lovely conversation. Thank you for indulging me as we take this bizarre turn down D&D's past, present and who knows future?

Don: 48:56

Does Doug need to cast a die to find out whether we're done or not?

Doug: 48:59

No, because, referring back to what I originally said, we have my heart, my soul and my mind has been touched all three and there's no role that can eliminate how powerful this has been. I'm just going to call it as the dungeon master and say we succeeded.

Ron: 49:16

This is fantastic. This is incredible. No die is more powerful than the die of friendship. Thank you all for being here. And thank you for joining us. Take care everyone. Thank you.