Oh yeah I know how this goes and it sucks big time. Lie in bed, can barely sit still and relax. Get up for a minute to go to the toilet, immediately start feeling lethargic and have difficulty keeping eyes open. Go back to bed, sleepiness goes away. In my case, anxiety medication helped.
Jobasha
joined 2 years ago
Literally started this yesterday.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney (312 pages)
Uncritical support, I don't know if you've heard of The Last Ringbearer, but it's basically "what if LotR was all elf propaganda?".
There is something very fundamentally wrong with D&D and it comes down to its roots and original influences. First off you have Tolkien, who, as other comrades have mentioned already, had some deeply problematic elements in his worldbuilding that went on to greatly influence the genre conventions of fantasy ttrpgs. Then there's Gary Gygax, creator of OG D&D, and also famous racist and biological essentialist. One thing that should be highlighted is that once you get past the medieval aesthetics, D&D really has more in common with the American West than Medieval Europe, and here again other people have already mentioned how he compared a paladin killing "prisoners of Evil alignment" to actual atrocities by US settlers. The core gameplay loop itself boils down to: go to a dungeon (inhabited by always evil monsters), kill all the inhabitants (who are evil by nature so it's ok), and take their stuff by right of conquest and the moral implications of killing sentient creatures to loot them are handwaved away with the very same type of arguments that real life colonial powers have used to justify their own real life crimes. Just a glance at how orcs/goblins/bugbears/gnolls etc are commonly portrayed as rag wearing tribal savages in contrast to the generically anglo-saxon knights-and-castles humans and other "civilized races" is enough to spot more red flags than the October Revolution had. It's disgusting and we can and should do much better.
I once read a thread on 
where a guy was complaining that another player in his party was derailing the session and trying to be the main character because... they were trying to treat bandits as humans whose material conditions led them to banditry and who could be reasoned with instead of banditry elementals that bandit around because that's what they do so you just need to shut up and kill/imprison them.
Thanks for actually sourcing that crap, the nits make lice line was exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote the post. As I said, Gygax was a piece of shit. He also had horrible views regarding women, who he considered as biologically hardwired to not take much interest in ttrpgs. rip in piss asshat
post-scarcity atomic juche sounds 200% banging not gonna lie
I can relate to this, I too enjoyed the game overall but was deeply put off by the way goblins were portrayed.
To be completely honest, I have ran Forgotten Realms for my first games because I was aware that I have no idea what I am doing and stuck to official content until I got comfortable with my abilities. I avoided the Sw*rd Coast and its general surroundings like the plague, picked the bits of lore I felt like I could work with and ignored everything else, especially the obnoxious major NPCs like the meme wizard. Overall the setting is dreadfully brainwormed, especially with the giga-reactionary secret organization that wants to recreate their favorite fallen empire and are in-universe supposed to be good guys with good alignments on the cosmic good boy scale.
what sucks more is how many people stubbornly ignore the parallels to real-world fascism
That's what gets to me the most. People will literally make Generalplan Ost into a fun dice throw game and see nothing wrong with it. And they continue to do this when there is a real world genocide going on that closely parallels their creative output down to the very words used to describe the others.
I am also interested in this, please ping me when it happens.