Tabletop TSR is returning: The Birthplace of the RPG

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
I'm honestly not sure what the heck is going on. Clownfish had a couple of videos on the matter, but they don't get into what started this or the why:



The second one though, GenCon has preemptively banned the new TSR from being allowed to come.

So yeah, this entire thing is a confusing mess, but it looks like it's about TSR deciding to focus on retro style RPGs rather than more modern ones and mainly focusing their marketing on the older crowd of tabletop gamers whom are seen as... less politically correct?

Yeah, I'm confused.


People apparently are digging into the names of everyone related to this TSR and found a problematic tweet issued by one of their social media accounts responding negatively to a Trans Activist trying to provoke them, found Gygax Jr make a problematic joke in a podcast with about a thousand views a few months ago and has some sort of issue with his brother regarding TSR and found another member of TSR ran for Republican office among other random things. Plus all of the original problematic statements that Gary Gygax made, plus bringing up random trademark disputes and the like as well. Basically doing a deep dive and reposting and regurgitating things hoping to find more fuel to keep the brigading going.
 

S'task

Renegade Philosopher
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
People apparently are digging into the names of everyone related to this TSR and found a problematic tweet issued by one of their social media accounts responding negatively to a Trans Activist trying to provoke them, found Gygax Jr make a problematic joke in a podcast with about a thousand views a few months ago and has some sort of issue with his brother regarding TSR and found another member of TSR ran for Republican office among other random things. Plus all of the original problematic statements that Gary Gygax made, plus bringing up random trademark disputes and the like as well. Basically doing a deep dive and reposting and regurgitating things hoping to find more fuel to keep the brigading going.
Twitter was a mistake.
 

S'task

Renegade Philosopher
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
It, along with all of social media, basically incentives stalking and other sociopathic behavior.
I think there's a lot of good that can come from Social Media, it's just that the good has been overwhelmed by the insanity.

For instance, Social Media help eliminate industrial gatekeepers for things like music and other art. Small artists whom the Big Labels (be it music, art, or other such industries) ignore can get respectable followings and make a decent living due to Social Media. It also allows easier networking when it comes to professions that can allow people greater mobility that doesn't depend on an "old boys" network. And finally, it does enable people to keep in touch more easily.

So there are benefits. That said, it does also encourage some sociopathic behaviors like stalking, harassment, and, twitter especially, the spreading of "hot takes" not meant to encourage discussion, but rather virtue signal and enforce tribal loyalties.

That said, the issue with Twitter is not that it's Social Media, it's that it has utterly outsized influence for the number of people on it and provides an utterly skewed picture of the population. Basically, you have a very small, insular demographic that drives a lot of the national narrative and cancel culture. This is much, much worse than the supposed "bad old days" when such moral outrages were more driven by Christian morality than Progressive, as say what you will, but in the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s, a majority of people still claimed to be Christians in the US, and thus Christian morality could at least be considered representative of the general attitude of the US, and even then it was rare for individuals to be cancelled under that system (and if they were, it was generally due to something quite serious and actually criminal, like Roman Polaski). This is most emphatically not the case for Twitter, which cannot be said to represent anything but perhaps the attitudes of the Media Elites accurately.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
I'm honestly not sure what the heck is going on. Clownfish had a couple of videos on the matter, but they don't get into what started this or the why:



The second one though, GenCon has preemptively banned the new TSR from being allowed to come.

So yeah, this entire thing is a confusing mess, but it looks like it's about TSR deciding to focus on retro style RPGs rather than more modern ones and mainly focusing their marketing on the older crowd of tabletop gamers whom are seen as... less politically correct?

Yeah, I'm confused.

I did a little bit of digging and visited RPG.NET and ENWorld to see if I could find the issues.

It wasn't pretty and honestly, it's indeed hard to find the problem but what I've uncovered is this:

E Gary Gygax Junior did an interview on forming TSR. You can find it here:


I honestly haven't watched it because I don't have time for a 1:15 hour watch on this issue. things that seem to have triggered them are mentions of gender, that he said Native American tribes warred with each other and sometimes stole each other's women, and that he disagreed with WotC on something or other. People also said he was "Gamergate-Esque" but I couldn't find any mention of what that meant or why.
 

Circle of Willis

Well-known member
From what I can gather, apparently a few days ago TSR had the audacity to tweet out a message saying...RL politics and social justice causes shouldn't be mixed into fantasy settings. This has driven Twitter insane and gotten a Bioware writer involved, although sanity prevails in the replies. Basically everyone (even people with rainbow flags in their usernames) is slamming Weekes as a clear example for why gatekeeping nerd hobbies isn't always a bad thing or pointing out how Bioware's lost the right to criticize anyone else in the field for the past decade.
 

Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
They might have some views native to this paradigm (as is understandable for those alive now), but they don't appear to be SJWs. That may be good news.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
I did a little bit of digging and visited RPG.NET and ENWorld to see if I could find the issues.

It wasn't pretty and honestly, it's indeed hard to find the problem but what I've uncovered is this:

E Gary Gygax Junior did an interview on forming TSR. You can find it here:


I honestly haven't watched it because I don't have time for a 1:15 hour watch on this issue. things that seem to have triggered them are mentions of gender, that he said Native American tribes warred with each other and sometimes stole each other's women, and that he disagreed with WotC on something or other. People also said he was "Gamergate-Esque" but I couldn't find any mention of what that meant or why.


That's a small part of it but the biggest whine being pushed by the LGTQAIP++++ activists is because Ernie Gygax said THIS:

"But I just want to say that TSR has been gone, there's a ton of artists and game designers and people that played there, and recently they were dissed for being old fashioned, possibly, anti modern trends, you know, and, enforcing or even having the concepts of gender identity [laughs], so I don't know."

"All I'm trying to do is fill in the strip mine, allow this old fertile soil to produce more games, and products again. We're not going to be able to get back the diamond that was Dungeons and Dragons, we'll be able to make things that might have chips of diamond material or whatever but we're never going to see that great D&D diamond again, I don't think. But someday, something will be around, hopefully it will be made by TSR, but if not, I still hope to be alive and see the next great incarnation of gaming."



You literally have to be extremely sensitive and easily victimized in trying to find a reason to be insulted by that statement... of course you have to search through a barely seen, hour plus long podcast to find it in the first place to be offended... but that goes without saying.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
That's a small part of it but the biggest whine being pushed by the LGTQAIP++++ activists is because Ernie Gygax said THIS:

"But I just want to say that TSR has been gone, there's a ton of artists and game designers and people that played there, and recently they were dissed for being old fashioned, possibly, anti modern trends, you know, and, enforcing or even having the concepts of gender identity [laughs], so I don't know."

"All I'm trying to do is fill in the strip mine, allow this old fertile soil to produce more games, and products again. We're not going to be able to get back the diamond that was Dungeons and Dragons, we'll be able to make things that might have chips of diamond material or whatever but we're never going to see that great D&D diamond again, I don't think. But someday, something will be around, hopefully it will be made by TSR, but if not, I still hope to be alive and see the next great incarnation of gaming."



You literally have to be extremely sensitive and easily victimized in trying to find a reason to be insulted by that statement... of course you have to search through a barely seen, hour plus long podcast to find it in the first place to be offended... but that goes without saying.

Some people literally cannot function unless they can find something to be offended over; it's part of their conditioning.
 

DocSolarisReich

Esoteric Spaceman
I literally me ne frego about the woke stuff, but neither Ernie nor the guy behind the Dungeon Hobby Shop have good reputations when it comes to delivering a project.

Set phasers to skeptical until they survive the inevitable cease and desist from Hasbro and deliver a product.
 

Stargazer

Well-known member
From what I can gather, apparently a few days ago TSR had the audacity to tweet out a message saying...RL politics and social justice causes shouldn't be mixed into fantasy settings. This has driven Twitter insane and gotten a Bioware writer involved, although sanity prevails in the replies. Basically everyone (even people with rainbow flags in their usernames) is slamming Weekes as a clear example for why gatekeeping nerd hobbies isn't always a bad thing or pointing out how Bioware's lost the right to criticize anyone else in the field for the past decade.

Man... Patrick Weekes contributed some good stuff to the Mass Effect trilogy. But he went down the non-binary rabbit hole and it's clear what side of the culture war he's on. It's interesting that TSR made no claim to "owning fantasy", but Weekes says it doesn't belong to them. So who does it belong to, Patrick? You? I'd rather it not.

More on topic, I'm not a big tabletop guy, but hey, irritating the progressive crowd by refusing to be activists like they demand is a decent advertisement to get me interested. We'll see what happens.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Looks like TSR Games deleted their social media accounts, rebranded themselves as TSR Hobbies and the GiantLands splintered off from TSR Games as well.


So TSR is dead again; that certainly didn't last long. How many times are we going to have to see fools failing to save themselves by trying to capitulate to an angry regressive left mob, before it stops being a standard business practice? If they don't have the courage to stand up for themselves in the face of scorn and derision, they had no business trying to get this thing off the ground in the first place.
 

Terthna

Professional Lurker
Yeah it looks like they disavowed all of their previous social media posts...



What are they even planning on selling at this point? Because it seems like they haven't thought about that part yet, and are just panicking right now. If nothing else, this debacle has at least illustrated that the mainstream PnP RPG community is so thoroughly infected by regressive leftists ideology, as to be virtually unsalvageable.
 

Hlaalu Agent

Nerevar going to let you down
Founder
What are they even planning on selling at this point? Because it seems like they haven't thought about that part yet, and are just panicking right now. If nothing else, this debacle has at least illustrated that the mainstream PnP RPG community is so thoroughly infected by regressive leftists ideology, as to be virtually unsalvageable.

I guess this just makes it clear that we need to build our own parallel one, it would actually allow us to have a community that can support creators and might make corpos rethink their stance and allow us to marshal strength to retake the hobby if the chance arises...
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Well, I can see their reasoning. With them being pre-emptively banned from all the cons they basically lost just about any chance of moving forward. They could stand up to the Twitter mob but being pre-emptively blocked from public events would just plain sink the company, no questions asked. RPGs, especially everything that isn't DnD, are really, really dependent on conventions to get their brand recognized.
 

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