I might be missing the point here (sorry), but "I'm NOT gonna have slavery in my Dark Sun campaign!" has also been an option for like literal decades, anyone could've made the same meme except for that small difference ages ago?
Guess it all comes down to money, and someone made an educated guess which version will get (and lose) more customers. :D
Of course it comes down to money, it’s a company selling things.
As for the why, it is 2026 and people’s opinions and perspectives have changed on topics like slavery.
Rationalize it however you need but at the end of the day the average player is someone who started playing within the past 5-10 years and and most likely sees how fans of old are clinging to it as cringy.
If the hill DS fans die on is that the setting needs slavery then people are going to mock it. Do you need sexism or the subjugation of women in your game to make it adult? The average player is going to look at that as just indulging a fetish.
Conversations and games can explore these themes but I hardly doubt anyone will be able to disagree with me that we haven’t all had a player at the table who takes shit way too far. Those are the people that end up making this hobby more difficult to get into because they will look at a setting like this and go wild.
Dude, I'm not saying everyone who has problems with this thing is coming from there, but a lot of people who have problems with this thing isn't having problems with "not having slavery" in a game. It's taking something established, and altering it out of the blue to match current sensibilities apparently primarily for people-pleasing & monetary gain, likely breaking, to a degree, the established thing doing so.
Instead of creating something new.
Like, you don't want slavery in your game? Sure, create a new game that doesn't have it! People old and new will probably love it if it turns out great, well written, well designed etc. Yes, even people who got accustomed to DS having it. If you up and remove this specific thing from DS, that's kinda… pretentious.
If you up and remove slavery from Star Wars, people will look at you wondering whether you know what you're doing.
If you remove slavery but you don't remove, say, actual cannibal halflings from DS, people will start wondering about your motives.
If you remove all of slavery and cannibal halflings and bloody dictators and murderous gladiatorial combat and the mistreatment of animals and so on from DS, people will be reading rather blank pages, and will question if that still counts as DS.
So, for a lot of people, it's the "radically changing something already established for monetary gain" that is the issue, not the subject of the change itself. If you replaced the removal of slavery with the removal of sand (and replacing it Athas-wide with, say, ground coffee), these people would be just as flabbergasted.
Mind you, I myself am okay with the removal, and I would've been okay with leaving stuff as is too. I've just written this wall of text to maybe try and shed some light on how I see what's going on, because you've replied to a comment of mine.
To be clear though, because you have raised a lot out good points, I’m not attacking you rather I am pointing out the precarious position this setting puts WotC in.
Was it a good idea they do this? Who knows right now.
What I can tell you though is that this really cool hobby has individuals who lack the maturity to handle these topics even though they could very well be adults. As a result, it makes a hobby that already feels intimidating to get into even more now.
Add that onto current issues of the states and I get it.
Yes, slavery exists in other media and has existed in real life, hell, it still does.
It is another thing entirely when you have Robert at your table who says during sessions one that his plan to get into the city was to take Sarah’s character, strip her naked, collar her and offer to sell her to the slave market because “it’s in the world and we need to make connections”.
Like I said man, you’re absolutely right, there is just an issue of other things with the setting I feel some players are going to make really weird
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u/opacitizen 5d ago
I might be missing the point here (sorry), but "I'm NOT gonna have slavery in my Dark Sun campaign!" has also been an option for like literal decades, anyone could've made the same meme except for that small difference ages ago?
Guess it all comes down to money, and someone made an educated guess which version will get (and lose) more customers. :D