WTW74: The Woke Are Coming for Your Dnd! - With Eli Bosnick
That's right, the woke are coming for YOUR Dungeons and Dragons! Look behind you, they're already here! These new woke rules are ruining the game and are actually the racists if you really think about it. Or maybe not and it's the same story of every fake woke controversy? We're not sure because we aren't NERDS*, so we invited an actual expert who is a huge nerd and host of an amazing DnD podcast, Eli Bosnick. Check out DnD Minus wherever podcasts are sold! Patrons get a very extended outtakes section! *we absolutely are nerds just not that kind. If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here, and it's coming for everything, everything, everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That over there is the brains of the show.
Lydia Smith.
Thank you.
Wow.
I thought you were gonna...
Send it over to the guest.
Oh, do we have a guest?
That's right, we do.
It's Eli Bosnick.
It's the thruple.
We're back together.
The good looks of the show.
The muscle.
The brawn.
Will A. Bos be mad if we're a thruple, is my question to you.
No, that's the whole point.
Yes.
I just want to make sure.
You never know.
Yeah, that's true.
As I said to my dear friend, Neil Gaiman, it's really important to check on these things.
Oh, man, I'm so glad that you're here, Eli, because you're going to explain some nerd shit to us.
Actually, yeah, he is the brains of this show, because I don't know anything about this.
We're the jocks of the show.
The two jocks!
The two musical theater jocks!
I don't know about Dungeons& Dragons.
I was too busy getting laid and playing Magic Together.
I have rehearsal for my musical theater program.
I can't.
I have rehearsal.
To be fair, though, everyone who's actually a nerd does know that...
Even within nerddom, there is a hierarchy of getting laid, and musicals is up there in the hierarchy.
Dungeons and Dragons.
Well, because the theater kids figured out fucking each other.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Well, because let's give credit where it's due.
The gays invented musical theater, and they were fucking each other, and they turned to us, Stratos, and they were like, hey, Stratos, you can fuck each other if you want within this coven of weirdness.
And we were like, we can?
And they were like, yeah, just...
Get in the booth at Denny's and fingerbang each other after the show.
You can do whatever you want.
It's that and marching band.
Those are the freakiest.
They're not fucking.
They're strong, though.
The marching band kids are fucking.
They were fucking?
They were too tired.
No, they absolutely...
Things were crazy with our marching band.
Well, we're going to sort this out, everyone.
Thomas, don't interrupt.
What was the marching band?
Everyone wanted to fuck the one guy with the tuba or something.
Whoever can carry the heaviest thing.
It was a drumline.
Nobody wants...
You want your ass eaten out properly.
A guy who walks up and down a football field with a tuba?
Yeah, no.
He's not coming up for air.
He's going, oh, babe, my jaw hurts.
He's in it to win it!
Whenever you accidentally let me onto one of your fine radio programs, I picture the person who comes to your shows for information and is just super soakered with the vileness that is my humanity once every 20-something episodes.
I love it.
I'm like the auto-ad.
Speaking of those, we're going to take a break and get to those and then when we come back, Eli's going to explain this nerd shit.
To us, Dungeons and Dragons.
Patreon.com.
Patreon.com.
Support the Lydia Edit!
Wow, thank you.
Give us a teaser.
This is the usual anti-woke hysterics, right?
I mean, this is a thing.
Are the wokes coming for your role-playing games?
No!
- Find out more after the break.
Where do we begin?
I saw an article that was about Dungeons& Dragons and skimmed it and was like, Eli, I don't understand this stuff.
But I do listen.
To D&D Minus.
I've listened to every episode.
It's a great show.
I want to make sure to plug your dungeon.
You're like an expert!
We've got a subject matter expert on.
Dungeon Master.
D&D Master.
Reliable expert of truth.
That's what they say about me.
So let's start at the beginning, which is important for the historical context.
So Thomas does a legal show.
Maybe you've heard of it.
It's called Opening Arguments.
And during the Paizo D&D legal drama, he...
And his then co-host, who we shall not name, blasphemed our beautiful shared hobby of Dungeons& Dragons.
Oh, ha ha!
They laughed.
What is this Paizo I hear so much about?
What is this third edition?
It must be for Pathfinders?
Is that using Google Maps, they said?
They laughed at us.
And you, the podcast listener, you rose up as one, and you told them...
Cut it out and get on a nerd like me to talk about Dungeons& Dragons.
And you can get a ton of shit for whatever that was.
That was the craziest the Reddit had ever been.
Without, you know, the lawsuit.
Rightly so.
Guys, I wish I could remember any of what this is.
Like, I literally...
That was, like, probably the fourth biggest controversy in show history, and I have no fucking idea what you're talking about.
The fun thing, just a little peek behind the curtain, podcast listener, come join me in the Bosnick Zone.
The fun thing about the very obvious PTSD my friend Thomas has is that sometimes when I talk about bad things that happen to us, they're gone.
And I don't mean...
I mean, he doesn't remember them.
I mean, he has to check that I'm not making them up.
I read the Bible.
Wasn't there something?
Yeah, no, that book was boring.
I didn't enjoy that.
Yeah, I forgot.
And we're going to get into some of that drama today, folks.
But yeah, so they brought on your resident D&D expert.
And now I have risen once again, like the Phoenix, part two, electric boogaloo, to tell you about the wokes who are coming.
For your role-playing games.
So let's get into that saying.
Lydia, tell us, what's this controversy?
What are we talking about?
So New York Times ran this story about some changes that were coming to Dungeons & Dragons.
And specifically, the one that they chose to highlight the most is this decision that Wizards of the Coast, which owns Dungeons & Dragons as of 1997, decided to do was to replace how they would refer to the various players in the game.
They would no longer be considered a race, but rather a species.
And that pissed off a lot of people, I guess.
To move from race to species.
That's kind of like the biggest thing there.
The other big thing that I saw that's part of this rule change, Eli, and I don't know if you got into this at all in your research.
Eli knows everything about this.
Literally everything about this.
There were recommendations in the new book about consent entering into the game space.
And if someone is uncomfortable, perhaps you raise your hand or make an X with your arms or something to indicate.
To indicate to the folks in the game that, you know, that kind of crossed the line or, you know, that you're uncomfortable pursuing that specific path.
All right.
I'm so sorry, Eli.
For the me's in the audience and the Lydia's, explain this game.
Okay.
Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons is a spreadsheet that lets you pretend.
To play pretend.
That's it.
It's just a spreadsheet.
You have a spreadsheet.
They've ordered it differently so you can pretend it's not a spreadsheet, but it's a spreadsheet.
And you do math with your friends and then you pretend to be gay or you are just a different version of your gayness that you are.
And then you trauma dump to your friends around a fantastical fire.
That's the point of the game.
That's why it exists.
You play these fantastical characters, you go on adventures, you tell stories.
It's also, hey, theater nerds, let's bring the theater nerds back in.
There's a bunch of bad acting in it.
It's bad acting, but it's also exactly what Brecht was describing as perfect theater.
Like, he didn't know he was describing it, but towards the end of Brecht's writing, he's like, yeah, I mean, I guess if there was a story where you could watch...
I think that's what perfect drama would be.
And then 20 years later, you get fucking Adventure Zone.
And there you go.
We fixed it, everybody.
We fixed Brecht.
But yeah, that's Dungeons& Dragons.
It's a role-playing game.
It's sort of the grandfather of role-playing games.
It is by far the most popular.
It is currently on its...
Sixth edition, which, and hey, let's talk about real controversies.
Rather than fucking calling it sixth edition, they're calling it Dungeons& Dragons Beyond, or Dungeons& Dragons 1, depending on the version that you're talking about.
So they're doing the fucking Xbox thing, where they just won't add the number to it.
So yeah, this is the newest edition, and as Lydia said, they have added something, which we'll talk about in a second, and they've also added safety tools, and spoiler alert for everywhere.
There's woke episode.
This is a thing that was already happening that no one cares about except a couple of racists.
Yeah, yeah.
For real, I'm so glad I have listened to every episode of D&D Minus because I actually kind of do understand it a little better than I might have otherwise.
But how does this game go?
When normies play it, there can be things that might be problematic or uncomfortable, right?
And like, what are some of the...
Do you have any, I don't know, either horror stories or at least some of the...
Issues around this game that some people are trying to, you know, make better.
Yeah.
So the core conversation to be had that's, like, worth having about this is that, like, we understand, if you've Googled it, that race as a scientific concept, especially racial essentialism, right?
The idea that, like, these people are better at this and these people are worse at that.
That is nonsense.
There's no biological base for racial essentialism, right?
And that's why people don't like Charles Murphy, right?
People are like, Charles Murphy tells the truth.
No, he doesn't.
Charles Murphy lies with math in a bad way, and he's lying for the case for racial essentialism.
And there's like a huge stripe of white supremacy in academia that has spent their entire careers trying to prove racial essentialism.
And it's just not true.
It's just not true, and no one thinks it's true.
I'm not here to argue or have that conversation.
A smarter person can have that conversation.
But the conversation that's worth having, as it applies to Dungeons& Dragons, is what does it mean when the dominant fantasy guidepost for our culture for the last 70 years has been a world in which racial essentialism is true?
Where dark-skinned drows are sneaky and dark-skinned orcs are strong but stupid and light-skinned elves are smart and, you know, good at the arts and the gnomes are, you know, sneaky and dwarves have Scottish accents for some reason.
Like, what does it mean?
Oh, you know why.
Right.
How has that affected the culture and the ability of people not to judge each other based on race?
Yeah.
Right?
And this is D&D catching up to that.
conversation.
I'll be honest, it does kind of feel like you were doing a bit where you just picked a race for each thing.
Is that kind of how it was?
It's 100% true.
Everything I just said was accurate.
Yeah.
Well, but it also feels like it's almost intentionally representative of someone's racial hierarchical view of real life.
Yes.
Yeah.
So from my understanding, E. Gary Gygax, who was one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, he has described himself as a biological determinist.
And I feel like racial essentialism is like one step, you know, just further from that.
So he believed that gaming was pretty much just a male pursuit, like only guys like to do it.
And as recent as 2004, and he died in 2008, so he didn't have much...
I don't think he would, based off of his involvement in some message boards I saw.
But he said that it isn't that females can't play games well, it's just that it isn't a compelling activity to them, as is the case for males.
And I think what's really interesting about that is that when he wasn't involved with Dungeons& Dragons, and we've started to see some of these changes and this focus on inclusivity, now...
From my reading, it's, you know, the split for men and women, for Dungeons and Dragons, folks that play the game, it's 60% identify as male, 39% identify as female, and 1% as other.
And that split used to be like 90-10.
Right.
Or worse.
Also, keep in mind how unbalanced those numbers are just by the amount of things, hobbies that men are allowed to have versus women.
When you look at just the very basic split of how many men are allowed to have hobbies versus what percentage of the female population cannot have hobbies because of their family and other obligations.
When you look at that split, it's a lot more equal.
The other important thing to understand for those who understand this hobby is that diversity saves.
Dungeons and Dragons, right?
The Dungeons and Dragons created by Gary Gygax, and look, here's my hot take on Gary Gygax, okay?
Everybody buckle in, because it's razor hot.
All old nerds...
Suck.
The definition of nerd that you and I have today...
You and I have today of, like, outsider who was downtrodden by the popular kid and then found a community of, like, a neurotypical, like, a, you know, heteronormative group of friends who, like, busted out your Stranger Things kids, right?
Your Freaks and Geeks kids, right?
That is a wildly modern construction, right?
For the most part, for most of history, nerds were straight...
could not function within the society of 1960s and 1970s America.
They were so unbearably asocial that it was not their queerness.
It was not their being a person of color.
It was that they were so fucking antisocial that everybody hated them.
And it's really not until like the 90s and freaks and geeks that this idea of nerds as the downtrodden becomes dominant.
So often when you look at this old like original D&D stuff, which I have read most of it, if not all of it, it reads like a fucking 4chan message board.
It reads like a fucking Minecraft server of kids being like, what if there was a big pile of orc poop and you had to roll dexterity or an orc's butt would fall onto an orc poop and then a big spike goes through your...
Like, it's just...
It's juvenile, insane bullshit.
Like, when everyone...
That's fun.
I want to play.
I want to play that.
There you go.
Whenever anyone talks about, like, originalist D&D, and we're going to talk about one of the guys who sort of tries to make that argument, right?
They sound fucking insane because original D&D is like a child who needs intervention-y therapy describing a violent video game to an older sibling.
Like, it's nonsense.
It's nonsense, and it's nothing to do with the role-playing that people love today and has become popular.
And we'll talk about why it's become popular later.
One thing I like to do or try to do on the show is, like, I want to recognize that you're not crazy if you've had the observation that, like, well, it seems like D&D is a thing that nerdy dudes play.
Like, yeah, but there might be a bunch of reasons for that.
I don't, I'll never understand.
Like, when you say that quote of, like...
Women can't play her.
It's not that they can't.
I'll never understand why people have to be so all or nothing all the time.
It can't just be like, yeah, I think more dudes are into D&D, but yeah, plenty of women are into it.
And maybe I'll be wrong about that.
Like maybe eventually it would be more 50-50 depending.
But like, why do people, it just feels like a lot of this backlash is always, people are so rigidly dedicated to these lack and white worldviews where it's like, what does it matter to you?
If someone told me, like, actually, in a perfect Eden with no social pressure of any kind, women would be 50-50 D&D players.
I'd be like, okay, who cares?
What does it matter?
Or maybe not.
Like, maybe it's just the kind of thing that more boys would be into rather than girls, because that could also be true.
But why are people so insane about it?
Like, why is it...
I can never get past the part where, why does this matter so much to you, which is true, you know?
Yeah.
I also think that, like, when you're in a position like Gygax, right, where...
Where you are the creator of a genre and people are looking to you, that message of biological essentialism or centrist fucking bullshittery, whatever that thing he thinks he's doing is, it's a way to keep people out.
It's a way to keep things a boys club, right?
There's no scenario where you speak against inclusion for the greater good under any circumstances ever.
Even if you did think it was biologically essential, right?
It wouldn't matter because then, if you were speaking to an activity that is biologically essential, and I can't think of one, so forgive me, but if you were speaking to an activity that was biologically essential, wouldn't you still want the emphasis to be on inclusion?
Wouldn't that still be way more interesting than...
You know, tall people should play basketball?
Yeah.
Gygax has a fervent supporter, though, in the space right now because this has kind of blown up and some people are pretty upset, especially with the language that's in the foreword of the new edition.
They feel like it's kind of throwing Gygax under the bus a little bit and not respectful.
And wouldn't you know it, Elon Musk.
Chimes in.
Oh, moral beacon Elon Musk.
Yeah.
And he says, nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons and Dragons.
What the fuck is wrong with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast?
May they burn in hell.
That seems a little extreme.
This is from the guy who said that Polytopia is a better game than chess, everybody.
So take his ideas super seriously.
Yeah, Elon Musk, not one for a de-escalating situation.
Oh, no, and he's even taken it a step further, and he said, how much is Hasbro?
Oh, for fuck's sake.
He's going to buy it.
Hasbro.
He's going to make it not long.
Threatening to purchase Hasbro.
Yeah.
Do you guys, and I mean this from my heart, this is going to sound like I'm just doing a bit, do you guys feel like you've run out of stuff to say?
About Elon Musk?
Yeah.
Because every time someone's like, Elon Musk did this, I'm like, yeah, someone should shoot that guy in the fucking head.
Like, that's what I've got at this point.
Shoot him in his fucking head.
The end.
I'm rooting for Steve Bannon lately, guys, because he wants to just get rid of Elon Musk so bad.
I'm like, yeah, do it, Steve.
Elon Musk is the worst person.
He might be.
Top five?
Top five?
Well, are we talking ever?
Because currently alive, I think he might be the worst.
Certainly among the non-murderers?
Yeah.
Along the non-murderers?
Way up here.
God, it's insane.
And I've never heard him, and I mean this, you know me.
Guys, I am very fair.
I have never heard him say something smart.
I know the one smart thing he's ever said.
What is it?
Tell me, please.
So he has said one smart thing in the history of ever, which is he has a great metaphor for why your phone charges very fast when it's below 50% and then takes a really long time when it's above 50%, which is the parking lot metaphor.
Have you heard this?
No, but what are the odds that he stole it from someone?
I mean, it's possible.
It's possible.
I would love that, because then I could...
Okay, I'm going to look at...
Well, I've been meaning...
This is a longer-term project, but, like, you know when we actually listen to someone smart, like, I don't know, Daniel Dennett's really smart.
You might say what you want about Daniel Dennett.
Not now.
Not anymore.
But that guy, when he would do a lecture...
Daniel Dennett, trivia contest, go!
Right now!
I'll destroy him.
When that guy would do his lecture on compatibilism, I had to watch it like three times to fully understand what he was saying.
And I have a feeling a lot of people don't actually fully understand what he was saying.
There's nothing Elon Musk has ever said where I'm like, hmm, let me think about that.
Ever!
Ever!
This parking lot metaphor, okay, that's something that a high school physics student could come up with, but okay, that does sound smarter than anything else he said.
So anyway, what I wanted to ask is, what level of change are we talking about?
I had a tweet, like, I don't know, years ago, that I think it's time we address the racial hierarchy of the Breath of the Wild, I rule universe.
So many games are like, here are the four races.
Yeah.
It's the water ones and the bird ones and the Gorons and the whatevers.
It's a simplistic kind of world-building thing that I think seems to be essential to a certain amount of sci-fi or gaming.
Is there a version of it that's fine?
Or is it, you know, like, where's that line?
Where are people trying to get that to?
It's funny because I actually think Nintendo has done this, has broken the generational curse in the Zeldaverse, right?
Because they have birds, rock people, fucking fish people, and Zelda.
And so they have sort of broken out of that.
What you see in pretty much all fantasy is Tolkienism, right?
Which is that Tolkien created the high elves and the middle elves and orcs and all that.
And that is what you see repeated over and over again.
And that was very...
Very much based on Tolkien's biases and ideas about race, and the popular ideas about race at the time.
Tolkien comes from a generation where biological essentialism was studied science, so we can sort of understand where that comes from, and a lot of that has been adapted since then, and that's where D&D comes from.
D&D, which is based on the fantasy novels of the time, specifically the mill junk fantasy of the time, is all ripped from Tolkien.
Everything is ripped from Tolkien with a little bit of eye of time.
Right.
You know, fantasy just sort of adds to itself.
There's also something that needs to be spoken to, which is that like a lot of times fantasy tropes are based on the observable world.
Right.
Like animals and nature and stuff like that.
And because racists have made sort of had dibs on comparing other people to animals, animal like people, people who are bestial, people who have bestial characteristics.
It carries a racial weight because in the past there have been people who have been so associated with animals.
Right.
And we see this controversy in video games recently, right?
There was like, I forget what the game was, but there was like a race of monkey people.
And people were like, hey!
Maybe don't make a race of monkey people.
There's just been a lot of talk about monkeys and their human counterpoints over the years.
It might not be the best idea.
So it's a little bit of that as well, right?
It's a little bit of racists having dibs on essentialism.
But so is there a good...
What's the good version of it?
I think Zelda is one of the good versions of it.
And weirdly enough, I think what D&D and fantasy have become in the hands of a new generation...
Are really good examples of it, right?
So, like, part of what I wanted to talk about today, and again, you guys talk about this all the time, is, like, the thing that happens on Where There's Woke most often is the writer freaking out about a thing that has been a norm since 2015. Right, right.
That everyone has known about, that nobody has cared about, and there is now, like, one professor being like, so what?
We're just not calling them kikes anymore.
Is that what you're saying?
Not even one?
What are we gonna do?
That's crazy.
How do you describe a Jewish person?
You kids have gone too far.
There is literally a section of a legal reporting website called Judges and Law Professors Can't Stop Saying the N-Word.
Yeah.
Nice!
Literally true.
Not even a parody.
I used to use that as like, oh, that's the joke.
It's like, there's a bunch of people who want to say the N-word in class or in their courtroom and then get in trouble and like, what?
What?
We can't say that?
I wasn't calling anyone in.
I was just like saying.
I was explaining the word, knowing how hurtful it was to the people of color in the room.
And I had no other way to say that word.
I was trapped.
I was trapped.
Did I mention there was a bomb stretched to my loved ones?
An N-bomb specifically.
If the boss went slower than 60 N-bombs per hour.
60 N-bombs an hour.
But like, so that is sort of the point to speak to, which is that like, it is truly two or three issues into Dragon Magazine before people are like, hey, what if orcs were smart?
Like, my character's a smart orc, or my high elf is super stupid, right?
And then you look at those tropes as they have evolved through fantasy and how they've...
Become popular, especially with the modernization of actual play podcasts, which is sort of one of the things that I want to speak to, which is like what saved D&D, right?
So 2015, 2016 is kind of the nadir of D&D. And it's interesting because the thing that was destroying D&D was making it like an even nerdier game, Warhammer 40k.
Now wait, Warhammer 40k perverts.
I know you're there and I know how much more expendable income you have than me.
So before you take your terrible, terrible revenge on me, I want to say your game is great.
It's a great game.
I love your board game and that you paint the little miniatures and you have them together.
Nothing but respect for the troops.
But...
What they were trying to do, D&D was trying to capitalize in that market with 4th edition, right?
All of a sudden, everything was on a grid-based.
Everybody had magic because they wanted people to buy D&D minis and place them and use them for the board game of D&D. And the people who played D&D, which in the time of 2015-2016 is this new version of nerds, the queer nerds, the aneurotypical nerds, the nerds who don't fit into those boxes, fucking hated the board game.
5th edition comes out It's very similar to 3rd Edition, which Thomas and Andrew blasphemed, right?
3rd Edition was Pathfinder.
3rd Edition was this incredibly creative...
Now, you can speak about whether or not it's because Gary finally didn't have his hands on it, but I'll leave that drama to the message boards, right?
3rd Edition was the first time that this game really embraced the storyteller version of itself, right?
And that's what 5th Edition, the so-called current edition, went back to.
But with fifth edition also came actual play podcasts, specifically the one that was most popular, the one that sort of breaks out actual play podcasts is Critical Role with Matt Mercer and a bunch of voice actors.
And they start telling these really interesting, a stereotypical, a heteronormative stories.
They are telling a story about people who are trapped within the fantasy system and want to break out of it.
So the podcast really had a hand in this?
That was like a part of the causal...
Huge!
Oh, I didn't know that.
Huge percentage of it.
Yeah, I put a link in the show notes, which is that like there's a bunch of...
And truly, you can just Google critical role saved D&D and there's like 10 different hot takes on that.
But yeah, actual play podcasts were a huge part of the resurgence of D&D as a hobby and D&D, more importantly, as a form of entertainment.
Yeah.
Right?
Imagine like overnight, pretty much overnight, I'm talking within the space of a year, And fucking Baccarat becomes one of the most popular things for people to watch on the internet, right?
It's insane.
It is hard to convey, if you aren't part of this culture, just how popular actual play is, right?
It goes from Critical Role, for me, the next step is the Adventure Zone, the McElroy brothers, they do their own version, which is wildly queer, right?
It has gay characters, it has gay love stories, it has a trans, a predominantly trans character whose transness Is not part of their story, right?
They are just a trans person represented in media.
Sorry, that's impossible.
And can you believe?
They're not even punished for it.
There's no punishments for them being trans.
But surely it's their trauma.
No, they just get to be a human being who enjoys themselves.
And they're one of the best characters in the series.
People saw themselves represented in these ways.
And now, of course, the dominant force in actual play today is Dimension 20. And again, the reason why I think it's so fucking...
I don't know if people are going to like this whole race versus species thing, is that you have never seen anything gayer or more leftist than Dimension 20 has a company or any of their actual play podcasts.
I mean, the quote, laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation.
It's just a promise of violence that's enacted and police are basically in occupying harmony.
That's from Fantasy High Season 1 before the main characters kill a bunch of cops and break out of jail.
That sounds great.
What is this?
Yeah, it is great.
I'll be honest, I only understand about half the words you say with this topic.
Dimension 20, what is that, a show?
So Dimension 20 is a show on the Dropout Network.
What the fuck?
Is this a podcast?
My god, look at a fucking grandpa over here.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Do you know our wildest dreams?
They've been accomplished by people called Dropout.
And they built a Netflix for themselves, which has games.
Hey, you know when you're on YouTube and you see those little clips of Make Some Noise?
They're on the brightly colored set and they're doing funny things?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Come on!
Do we know what this is?
Make some noise!
I don't know what this is.
Game changer!
I'm so sorry.
But I do feel like this is something Arlo would be into.
Do you guys remember College Humor?
Yes.
Okay.
College Humor.
Remember, it closes down.
Right?
Yes.
The guy who was the head of it, Sam Reich, started a new company with all of the same people, most of the same people, most of the same people called Dropout, and they are now a subscription service that is wildly popular and wildly leftist.
So it's videos.
Yes, it's videos.
Oh, cool.
And they have podcasts as well, but they do a ton of actual play series, which are, again, among the most popular in the space.
I would say Critical Role is still the most popular, but among the most popular in the space.
And they have, like, two seasons now of actual plays, like people playing D&D show, that is just drag queens.
Nice.
Yeah.
Okay, we'll tell you this, Eli.
We did watch the Dungeons& Dragons movie, which was really...
And that movie ruled!
Yeah, okay, good.
So good.
I was worried that you'd be like, oh no, that's...
Oh, so good.
And they did exactly what you should have done with the Dungeons& Dragons movie.
They were like, hey, our world is fun.
Come on a fun romp in our world.
Yeah.
So, do we appropriately talk about the freakout, which is just...
Is it literally just about not saying race and saying species?
Is that really?
So, it's twofold.
One...
One of the complaints is valid, I guess, and one of them is absolutely not, right?
So the first, right, and this is the one that the article is sort of centered around, is that they have replaced the word race with species, which, again, these are nerds.
We're supposed to care about the truth.
Oh, I'm a little bit of a pennant.
It's actually three times four equals twelve or whatever the fuck it is, right?
They are different species.
They're not different races.
Different races would mean that orcs and elves and humans and dwarves are all part of the same species.
Yeah, they're just from the north of the country.
The north of the country.
They're not.
They're different species.
So it is a more accurate title that isn't loaded down with years and years of trauma and horror and slavery and death.
I mean, just again, try to imagine being a person of color sitting down at your D&D table for the first time and having someone be like, so what race are you going to play?
Yeah.
And having to go like, huh?
And then be like, oh, no, no, no.
That's just what we mean by elf or not elf.
So there's a tremendous amount of baggage associated with that kind of stuff.
So that's the first thing.
The second one is that a lot of the essentialism has been taken out of species, right?
So it used to be orcs, strong.
Elves, fast.
Humans, kind of all-arounders.
And what they have done with this new rule set is they've adjusted that so that everybody can kind of be anything.
And again, this has just been called homebrew forever, right?
People have just been saying, hey, I'm going to take the orc stat block and I'm going to apply it to my gnome because he's super strong.
I always forget this is just a spreadsheet you get to do.
Right.
It's just a spreadsheet and people just change the title at the top of the spreadsheet.
This is so uncontroversial.
It's impossible to imagine caring about it unless you are a...
Specific racist agitator, which are the people they quote within the thing, or so clueless as to the nature of the game that you don't understand this has been happening the entire time it's been played.
Should we hear from one of the specific racist agitators?
I think we should hear from someone of these guys.
I'm actually pretty excited for our first racist agitator.
Yay!
What's going on, everyone?
Jeremy, you're from the quartering, and...
It's the quartering!
Dungeons& Dragons continues to circle the drain, which is why I continue to recommend people...
Pause it!
Pause it!
Okay, so this is The Quartering.
So for those of you who follow the podcast drama, a.k.a.
the worst things that have ever happened to us.
The quartering was one of the YouTubers during the mythicist Milwaukee fiasco, who was really, and if I may use the scientific term, on our nuts.
My favorite thing about the quartering, aside from the fact that he tried to use a picture of me in my underwear on stage to embarrass me, is that first he tweeted, hey, let's open up New York City, fuck grandma, and then he lied about his grandma dying of COVID.
Oh my God.
And I included the link to that tweet and that retraction in the show notes, so you can enjoy that.
But yeah, he's just like a...
I am trying to think of a mainstream example, but it would be like...
And again, this is the first hyperlink.
They're saying, like, people are upset, and when you click that blue link, you're taken to a video of the corner.
In the New York Times.
Right.
So it would be like, I'm trying to think of something that isn't for constantly online people like myself.
It would be like if they were like, the news has reported, and you go to OAN, or fucking Fox News, right?
You're like, well, come on, you said the news.
They are doing that shit.
Into the Warhammer.
The universe is a little better.
The company is just as woke, but they haven't started so whole hog messing with the game.
There has long been this bizarre fake outrage that somehow orcs are black people.
I don't really know any other way to describe it, but that's what I bet you could.
White social justice warriors seem to think.
Now, to me...
He's still using that.
Which race of the...
What's the stats on the social justice...
It's actually a paladin, if you pay attention.
Oh, of course, yeah.
Fucking racism.
Wait, but paladins are Catholic.
To the rest of the world, I don't know.
Maybe French people think orcs are black people.
Dungeons and Dragons has officially removed...
Negative racial ability score modifiers from the rules, including...
His grandma just died of not COVID. Because orcs are black people.
Apparently.
That's why they did it.
I hated when they said that in the intro.
It really bumped me out.
We have the soy, screamy person saying, D&D is getting rid of the concept of, quote, evil races.
Orcs aren't inherently evil, just like you guys.
Black person says, wait.
You think I look like an orc?
I mean...
He's reading us a meme.
That's exactly...
I mean, 2.4 thousand likes compared to the original post with 142. 2.4 thousand likes!
I mean, absolutely destroyed.
Pretty true.
That meme gets to be president now.
As a dedicated Halfling player, let me just say cool.
I love choosing Halfling not to overcome my relative size and lack of brute strength with cunning swiftness and intelligence, but rather to be the exact same thing as a half-orc.
This is what...
What D&D needed.
So classic.
Ripping with sarcasm.
So funny.
Put a lemur in a group.
Probably couldn't tell.
JD Vance called and he wants his laugh back.
He wants his donut charms back.
So good.
Anyway, do I need to keep playing?
Are we done?
Can we be done with the court?
We can be done with the court.
Yeah!
Yeah, I just want to make sure.
Is there anything important that he says there?
But can we, guys, can we talk about cunts for a second?
I want to talk about cunts.
Robert J. Cunts!
The D&D creator who is also quoted in the article and says...
I'm just listening to Thomas recover from a panic.
Just like, what is happening?
Robert J. Hunt says, it's an unnecessary thing.
It attempts to play into something that I'm not even sure is worthy of addressing, as if the word race is bad.
I actually know a little about Kuntz.
First of all, his name is Kuntz, so whatever he does in life, it's not as cruel as what his parents did to him, you know, by having a child.
But if you're not aware, Robert J. Kuntz is like the guy who still wears his varsity jacket of RPG games, okay?
So he does his best to lay claim to the idea that he was like a co-worker of Gary Gygax.
And look, I once had a letter published in Dragon Magazine, so I feel like I could also say...
That I was a co-creator with Gary Gygax.
There's very little evidence that this guy had anything other than a relatively normal creative relationship with him.
But Gary Gygax worked with a lot of people, right?
And to give you an idea of how bad this fucking guy is at the Nostalgia-thon.
Is he is still publishing models for Dungeons& Dragons first edition.
The very first version of Dungeons& Dragons.
He is the putting something on the big floppy disk of Dungeons& Dragons.
And look, if that was the worst thing about him, I would forgive him with an open heart and a full mind like the Christian that I am.
His name be praised.
But I thought I would.
Head on over to his Twitter and see if he might expose himself as a virulent racist.
So, Lydia, do you mind doing a dramatic reading with me of this Twitter exchange he recently had?
He has this epically long tweet about Jordan Peterson's dick or whatever it is.
I'm going to read the beginning of it and then I'm going to go yada, yada, yada.
You can go on his Twitter or in the show notes to read his brilliant thoughts.
But here he goes.
The Marxist mind insists that there must be an oppressor and those oppressed.
It's anti-American, anti-human, and leads to division and resentment.
And that is the purpose of it.
Communists must always be stirring up.
And he tweeted this this year, people.
Communists must always be stirring up action for their cause since people would never willingly adopt division as a median way of life.
Humans have proven to be able to coexist for the most part.
So the Marxist way is to actively divide under the guise of inequality and injustice.
Yada, yada, yada.
I'm a piece of shit.
So why don't you read this response that he gets, Lydia?
Is this to say that inequity and injustice don't exist?
Or rather to say that such injustices don't occur institutionally?
Surely that isn't your position.
If so, there's no need to make such an argument.
I think it does, at the end of the day, come down to a matter of semantics.
Either there are horizontal power structures or...
To which he replies, within the American system, iniquities have been steadily worked out as a part of Reformed.
But not through investigative action such as recommended by Gramsci and others.
That's right, everybody!
We solved racism!
Steadily worked out.
Yeah, it kind of solved itself.
Yeah, it figured it out.
It worked itself out like a hose that was a little tangled.
It worked itself out with the hand of the free racism market.
Yep.
Wow.
This guy, this year.
This year.
This tweet was on...
January 12th.
Oh, man.
You love to see it, everybody.
You love to see it.
So, yeah.
I do want to read one other quote from the New York Times here because it's the only smart thing Grandpa says in the entire article.
But I think it's worth saying.
Pathfinder, that's the thing that Thomas and Andrew misspoke about.
What did we say?
You jock, son of a bitch.
You wrote us off.
You wrote us off as a people.
You wrote us off as human beings.
And we're still owed an apology.
I wish I understood this enough to go with your jokes.
Like, I don't remember what...
Curse your trauma amnesia!
Yeah, pretty much.
This is what the New York Times has to say.
Pathfinder, the role-playing game by the company Paizo, that has spoken of ancestry and heritage instead of race for several years.
As early as 2020, the independent Arcanus Press published Ancestry and Culture, an alternative to race in 5e, a proposal to use words instead of race in Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons.
You know the thing that you play all the time when you're an expert in?
This is a thing that is five years old.
So again, just like, it's five years old.
It is so old.
Wait, so why did it come up right now?
Oh, because the new rulebook came out.
So, sorry.
The spurring action of this is that what they are doing as part of D&D, not 6th edition D&D 1, D&D Beyond, whatever the fuck they're calling it, is they put out a new Dungeon Master's Guide, a new Monster Manual, a new Player's Guide, and those things have the species race dipped thing changed in them.
It's also been changed on the website.
And they've also included safety tools as well, recommendations for safety tools.
Should we talk about safety tools?
Yeah, let's do it.
So safety tools are really, really simple.
There's been a lot made about the X gesture, but the X gesture is literally just so you don't have to interrupt someone.
So lines and veils is the system that we use on D&D Minus.
It's the one that a lot of people have talked about, which is basically like, hey, I would like our adventure to not contain this kind of content, and I have a hard line about this.
So maybe I'm okay with, like, graphic violence, but I'm not okay with graphic violence against children, right?
So in that case, violence would be a veil and a line would be graphic violence against children.
The X card or red carding is because very often when someone is engaging in content that you are uncomfortable with, they are speaking.
They are narrating.
And it can be really uncomfortable for everybody for you to have to go, hey, stop, stop, stop describing.
And that puts all the burden on that person who's probably trying to speak up for themselves.
Right, to have to literally speak up and break character.
And instead, what you do is just put your hands up, hold your arms in a cross, and your dungeon master can then pivot without drama or discomfort.
It's like improv and you need to know, but...
But also you don't want to ruin the scene.
Ruin the scene, yeah.
Yes, exactly.
So you kind of tell and signaling like, hey, maybe zigzag, do something a little different.
Because I think what's unspoken is, and this is just me guessing because I've dealt with awful gamer nerds.
Is there a lot of D&D playing that's really like edgy?
I recommend the RPG Horror Stories Reddit for those of you who want to see how awful it gets.
But one of the things that comes up quite a bit is that people who want to tell extreme stories or make their villains villainous is they use sexual assault as a plotline.
One, because fantasy uses it as a trope.
But also because like...
Female players at tables often make people uncomfortable, and so a way to make them uncomfortable is something sexual assault-y back, right?
And I want to be clear here, I think it is very rare that a dungeon master would be like, and then your character gets raped?
But I do think that a villain doing something to violate someone's bodily autonomy...
Right?
Is something that a well-meaning dungeon master might put into an adventure without understanding how a non-male-bodied person experiences being part of that narrative.
Yeah.
I've played a lot of Magic the Gathering tournaments, so I'm familiar with this kind of environment.
There's often like one girl there.
Things like this that would put someone in a very uncomfortable position as a way, like you said, Eli, either as a way to make them uncomfortable on purpose or just because of sheer cluelessness one way or the other, singling them out and making someone feel really shitty.
And then, wouldn't you know it, it's harder to get anyone who's not a...
Straight white male nerd to come play these games, and it perpetuates itself.
Maybe that could be a reason why the game was looking a little monochrome or whatever.
And so it strikes me that this is an incredibly basic thing that I can't imagine having a problem with.
By the way, these edgy nerds or whatever, do they...
Is there a law about D&D, Eli, where you have to now have one SJW, beta cuck, woke person in every game?
Yeah, no, they changed that.
You actually get assigned it in every game.
Like a hall monitor?
I applied for a permit to be the SJW of D&D. You can still do your fucking edgy shit if you want.
It's not like they make you.
With your friends that like the edgy shit.
I can't imagine having a problem with this.
It's also just, like, another form of communication, right?
I mean, like, you communicate during the game if you need clarification on something that's happening, right?
Like, and you'd raise your hand or something like that or indicate in some way.
So this is just another way to communicate, to make the best experience for everybody as part of the game.
And, yeah, I just don't understand.
It's honestly what it is, is just people...
Creating this vision of what it is in their heads and running with it and saying, like, that you must stand up and make an X with your hands above your head and stand there while...
First you have to do a land acknowledgement.
Yeah, until you're acknowledged, yeah.
And again, I don't want to be like the defeatist nihilist, just shoot Elon Musk in the head guy, but, like, the people pretending that they're upset about this...
Yeah.
Right?
They quote the head of the Babylon Bee, which is the right onion, and Elon Musk, and Robert Kuntz.
They're not real.
They don't actually think any of these things.
They just pretend to think these things because racists like their tweet when they do it.
And it's exhausting.
I'm just...
Look, we're outvoted.
Bad people are the vast majority.
It's an evil country.
We're in 1939 Germany.
We cannot change it.
But can we at least stop pretending?
Right?
Like, I just want to stop pretending.
Stop pretending that the Third Reich, they just have some legitimate concerns.
Right, like, I just need to say, well, maybe if you spoke to your Reichman or congressman, whatever the fuck, he would change his mind.
In the Reich Diner in the Midwest.
I just want to stop, because we have spent so much of our lives interacting with people who are just lying.
So much of our energy and sanity and health and well-being has been sent on people who don't care, who are just doing it for a giggle, for a fuck it.
They don't think about it ever again.
The things that bother them are equality and justice and peace and beauty and fairness and grace, right?
Those are the things that keep them up at night.
Yeah, or genuinely bothers them, in which case, wow, there's something wrong with you.
It's one or the other.
I think there's a mix of it.
I think there are people who are just cynical.
I think there are people who – it's a tale as old as time.
It's reactionary.
Everything we cover in all our entire extended network can be boiled down to, hey, some people want to make things better, which might involve changing things.
And a bunch of other group of people that's more people that are like, changing things, that's communist or something.
Or they're opportunists and they see that that's going to get them clicks, that's going to get them money, that's going to get them popularity.
It's the same reason that people were mad that...
Pluto is not a planet anymore.
That's just a scientist, an expert.
Why did you know that Pluto was a planet to begin with?
Was it part of your family heritage?
Or did a scientist tell you it's a planet and later the same people who were in charge of that were like, whoops.
Wrong.
Now it's not.
We know more things now.
Yeah, and like the idea that like that's what our stupid fucking species is.
Talk about our races.
Our idiot species, I'll use the correct terminology, just can't handle that a thing is different than before.
Everything boils down to that.
And so I actually genuinely, I believe that there are plenty of cynical actors here, but I actually believe there are people who just...
Have this reaction to anything changing.
And it is – I think it is racist.
It is sexist at heart.
But it's this feeling that like the way – it's tied up in their identity.
The way this was done is something I liked, I did, I enjoyed.
That means it's part of me and my enjoyment of it needs to be this pure okay thing.
Otherwise, I am a bad – they're saying I'm a bad person for having done it.
Eli, can I ask your take on like...
Probably with a gun is what I would do.
Seems quick.
Like what this does for storytelling from your perspective?
Because I saw somebody's piece on Medium where he said that humans are only...
The complaint also shows a massive lack of imagination.
Humans are only one species, and there's huge physical and social variation between populations and lots of conflict for all sorts of reasons.
Eliminating the casual default racism makes things more interesting, not less.
You aren't getting rid of bands of orc raiders.
They just have a motivation besides their orcs.
Right.
I completely agree with that, right?
And that's something that we've worked to fight against with D&D Minus, right?
So, like, the example that I use all the time of, like, inclusivity is that Noah in our first season chose a Southern accent for his gnome character.
And so a stereotype that we could have played into that is still socially acceptable is, like, Southern people are stupid.
So I made his hometown, because basically the first arc of our series was just going and visiting the characters' hometowns, right?
I made his hometown the most elite university in the Plains, right?
And so they go back to this school and they have to deal with the school and everybody talks in a southern accent at this super-duper smart school.
So yeah, playing against those tropes, playing against those norms is...
Always more interesting.
Always.
I am a huge fan.
I love Tolkien.
I love Lord of the Rings.
But I do get genuinely kind of bummed that it just sort of comes down to the bad people are bad and the good people are good.
And it's like, yeah, it's kind of a bummer.
It's cool to have more creativity than that and to be able to...
And this is, again, it's just the fucking spreadsheet that tells you what to do.
Yeah, isn't that the whole point of Dungeons& Dragons, too?
You have to develop more interesting stories.
You have to tell your own stories, yeah.
Right.
Fantasy!
To pretend!
Why would you want to pretend the things you think are true that are bad about the world?
I don't get it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's real life.
You don't have to experience that in a game, too.
You can just start a podcasting empire like Thomas and Lydia did if you want to talk about bad things that happened in real life.
So I did want to cover a little Patreon goal, which is that if we hit...
Two more Patreons over on Where There's Woke.
Thomas and Lydia are going to do an adventure out of the Book of Erotic Fantasy.
It's the D&D 5th edition supplement that includes fuck skills.
If you're going to Dungeon Master for us.
That one goes on OnlyFans rather than Patreon.
Yeah, two patrons.
That's all we need to do that.
Another two Patreons, which in fairness we may hit.
Yeah, exactly.
Double the Patreon.
Oh, I see, I see, I see.
I thought you were saying we just needed two more patrons so we wouldn't do this.
I think that is what he was trying to say.
I was trying to mispronounce Dungeons and Dragons.
No, I said Dungeons and Dragons.
Only one dragon.
So how serious do you think Elon is about...
Buying this.
Not at all serious.
He says this every time a company does something he doesn't like.
And he's only done it one really important time.
He's only bought it once, and it was because people were making fun of him on his favorite mental illness platform.
If he buys Hasbro, then at least Magic the Gathering can't get any worse than it currently is.
And that's not because of woke stuff.
That's just because of pure capitalism.
Capitalism, yeah.
Well, so what's the ultimate thing here?
Is this just yet another bullshit anti-woke controversy that then everyone forgets about and Dungeons& Dragons lives happily ever after and we're all fine?
Is that...
Yes.
Okay.
This is a nothing controversy that nobody cares about that will make more players feel welcome, that will cause less halting weirdness, and will be a less shameful history for us to introduce our kids to.
Right?
Like, because look, here's the truth of the matter.
And this is what I say to my fellow gamers all the time, right?
We're going to have to explain history.
And we're going to have so much to explain.
I've only got a couple of years until Max starts asking about who the president is.
And I don't know what the fuck I'm going to say.
I know.
Phoebe's there.
Lord knows, when we try to tell our kids about our hobbies, can we at least point to a Dungeon Master's Guide that doesn't have racial essentialism in it, right?
That doesn't have a forward by Jerry fucking coin.
What I'll say about this controversy is what we say about all controversies here on Where There's Woke, where I am an equal partner.
This has been happening.
Nobody but Biggits cares.
And the old people reporting on it are 10 years late to the story.
Well, that's a good way to sum it up.
Eli Bosnick, thank you so much.
D&D Mind is genuinely one of my favorite.
Book of erotic fantasy!
One of my favorite shows.
I listen to every episode and, of course, all your other shows.
And, yeah, thanks so much for taking us through this because we genuinely would not have the ability to do it on our own.
No, not at all.
I am your Sherpa, much as I will be your guide through the book of ironic fantasy.
Yeah, I'm looking at it now, actually.
It's nice, right?
if you DM for us.
Nice.
Fucking guy.
What's going on?
We never actually met this guy, did we?
Yeah, he was there.
He was at MythCon?
He's behind you with the camera, yeah.
Behind me with the camera?
Right now.
In the video where Tom almost punches Sargon.
Oh, right.
That fucking...
Yeah, okay.
I don't think I ever talked to him, but yeah, what a douchebag.
