Chris Perkins says this has been the most successful year for D&D in two decades. Why do you think that is?

>Meaning that even if them being more inclusive isn't helping, it can't be discerned as hurting, either. So why not do it?

Because if it's not helping sales, then it's literally just wasted energy.

Okay, but can you demonstrate that it's not helping sales? Sure, correlation does not necessarily equal causation, but nevertheless we know that D&D has been both growing gradually more inclusive AND had sales spikes - including one of its splatbooks hitting Amazon's top 10 bestsellers (number 10, specifically, but do you nevertheless understand how amazing that is for a D&D splatbook?). So you'll have to demonstrate that it's hurting in order to prompt a policy change.

I highly doubt you could, given that I cannot imagine it takes significantly more energy to draw a black man as a wizard than a white man as a wizard.

>free promotion in streamers
>only a handful of developers on payroll
>fuck all actual new books released

Yes, but how do you mean that?
>omen and niggers fuck
>women and niggers, fuck
>women, and niggers fuck

>Why do you think that is?
Stranger Things
The Big Bang Theory
Critical Role
Without those, it would be on nobody's radar.
The irony is that D&D is still a pretty mediocre game. It's not terrible, as some portray it, it's just 'Eh, okay'.

In a realistic sense, I'd have to say the success of DnD isn't from the actual mechanics of the game, but WoTC catching up with next generation marketing techniques in order to spread their game, and making the attempt to put more creation tools in the hands of the players, like DmsGuild.

Also, they've been courting actual play podcasts and shows like crazy, and it's paying off in the long-run. When a DnD show that isn't Acquisitions Inc. or Critical Role regularly gets somewhere around 4,000 viewers on Twitch, they're doing something right.

Their main issue is a lack of real content, something that's been hurting a lot of the biggest RPG companies. But beyond that, if you compare their social media presence to the nonexistent status of Games Workshop, or the regularly garbage policies of Catalyst Game Labs.

>>FUCK WOMEN AND NIGGERS
>t. Dyslexia
Also, playing the /pol/ card is getting old, get some new tricks to try to choke off the conversation.

By definition, anything not strictly tied to mechanics is wasted effort. You get the same in a book with no illustrations, but do you prefer that?

It's almost like the only people that are bothered by "forced diversity" are a small group of troublemakers that have nothing to do but shitpost about it constantly.

Hold on, GW made huge strides with the Warhammer Community page. And I suspect it will pay off for them too. But as for D&D, normies wouldn't care without nerds being hip these days, thanks to stuff like Big Bang Theory and lately Stranger Things.

Is still the most common entry level point.
This and WoD, most people I know started with one or the other.

>all who disagree with me are just a tiny group of shitposters
Okay

>people of color

>They actually include the make up of the woman in the chart
No more green genocide!

Big Bang Theory made like, one D&D episode, but I think Stranger Things was the more inherently inspired.

Glad you see the truth. The next step is to take a shower, go outside, and get a job. Here's a free type: chanting "KEK KEK KEK" over and over again every time someone disagrees with you will not go over well with most people.

Hey, it's the PC people who chose to call them colored people, I mean, people of color (because that's totally not the same).

And now they're fighting over the term?

>I cannot imagine it takes significantly more energy to draw a black man as a wizard than a white man as a wizard.

Paper is white, so you don't have to color their skin.

I'm sure pop-culture has helped D&D alot. Now it just remains to be seen if the high will remain, or will it just be a fad until some other pop-culture phenomena promotes another thing and everyone who totes loves D&D jumps on that bandwagon.

Honest question:
Are colored people so shallow that they really care about being represented by their skin color? What about their principles, their religion, their culture, their ethnicity, and so other elements that are part of their individual being that are so much more relevant and impactful than melanin?
Do they really think I'm more inclined to make business with someone because the ad shows someone that has the same skin tone than I do? Why would I reduce myself to an minor characteristic that I don't even have control over?

>Are colored people so shallow that they really care about being represented by their skin color?
It's usually not minorities themselves pushing this hard for diversity.
More often than not it's suburban white kids who've probably never seen a brown person in their life doing it so they can feel like they're fighting the "good fight" without actually having to do anything.

>Paper is white, so you don't have to color their skin.

Those are ghost, user

SJW activism and diversity saved dnd

>Paper is white, so you don't have to color their skin.

...yes you do? White people aren't generally albino. And again, note I said SIGNIFICANTLY more effort.

Because prior to about 1995 or so, do you know how rare it was to see a black character in any kind of role? It's about steps, user, or basically what one Family Guy episode summed up when the black character brought over the Game of Black Life:

>Peter: "Arrested again?! Jeeze, Cleveland, is it even possible to win this game?"
>Cleveland: "No...you just do a little better each time."

Although besides that, it's not like D&D portrays any particular aspect of white culture all that accurately either. But consider again that in the 2e Player's Handbook, not a single one of the classes was represented by anything other than a white man. So stepping things up and having people of different races and sexes is in fact an improvement, if only a marginal one.

I know plenty of people who love to self insert as the character because they enjoy a more immersive experience, is them but as elves, dwarves, etc, I guess the idea that your melanin group isn't in the setting is kind of concerning in that regard.
>You cannot be an elf, elves aren't black. You can be a purple drow though,

>Are colored people so shallow that they really care about being represented by their skin color?

It's kind of cool that I can play a character who looks like me without some faggot going "EVERYONE IN DND IS WHITE!"

Rise of 'geek' and 'nerd' culture as the new cool thing in more mainstream circles combined with the lower barrier to entry and simplified rules of more recent editions of the game.

Additional causes, at least from my own anecdotal perspective, include the rise of popular fantasy vidya (Skyrim, DA:I etc.), and the growing number of young people attending post-secondary institutions, where a gaming subculture has always thrived, albeit in smaller numbers in the past.

3.5 phb had multicultural charcters as well

Some guy run the statistics, 5ed is the most varied so far, followed by 4 and then 3.5

Am brown grognard. I'm honestly just pleased to see diverse aesthetics. I feel like I got a taste of that in Dark Sun and just thought it was cool. I like visuals so seeing African fighter, Arabian cleric, aztec-inspired anything's, it's just nice to see!

We have 3 decades of cool European fantasy art, but it's nice to add diversity to the visuals that can inspire new adventures and characters.

I've never felt like man, I'm glad I saw a conquistador/aztec art because that accurately represents my heritage, it was just cool to SEE that because it was different and nice!

>Are colored people so shallow that they really care about being represented by their skin color?

Yes, and I think to some extent all races are, because this shit has been fueling conflict for thousands of years. It's instinct to not trust somebody who looks different than you. Sadly, we are not evolving at the same rate the world is changing, so the brain still operates like it is a relevant factor. Especially in coloured people who have been living in savagery until much more recently.
The major reason as to why it's become so much more of a factor recently though is retarded SJWs that are inclined towards this primitive sociological outlook encouraging people to focus on colour. They are destroying race relations that took years to build up and civilisations that took millenia, they are the problem.

On a less serious note, do coloured people cast with their wands held sideways?

>"What are black and white drawings?" for $300.

>improvement
Why is it a problem to have all classes represented by characters with white skin color? D&D was european fantasy.
Is it a problem that Oriental Adventures only had asian-like characters? What about al-qadim?
Why is that representations of white culture can't follow the same rules as representations of other classical cultures/societies?
I've been away from D&D for a long time but I suppose setting like Oriental Adventures would be considered racist today, jesus.

Nah, it matters to the black people I talk to. Principles, religion, and culture are important, naturally. They matter, but so does having some different races in the illustrations.

Come on: if you saw a trailer for a movie, and everyone in it was black, you'd be less likely to see it. You'd think it wasn't for you. If most movies were all-black, and only a few were all-white, you'd feel weird about it. I mean, for god's sake, you're up here actually objecting to a small minority of characters being black; imagine if they all were, most of the time.

It's not hard to include people. You don't have to be so weird about it.

Literally Matt Mercer. That, and 5e being hipster bait.

>They are destroying race relations that took years to build up

Yeah, if only those stupid SJWs could be okay with police targeting and killing minorities. It took years for the police to get to that level!

>looks like me
So you identify yourself as a skin color?

Unfortunately, yes that’s the case. Identity politics are all about skin color.

As soon as /pol/ stops trying to derail threads by talking about minorities, we'll stop telling /pol/ to stop derailing threads by talking about minorities.

>looks like me
I identify my skin color as being my skin color.

White people stole their religion, culture, ethnic identity etc. by displacing and enslaving them. Black people in America don't identify as Ugandan or some shit. Skin color's all they have left to identify themselves.

Most manuals are in color this days anyway. But still your post was just too retarded.

fuck critical role and the pathetic retards in and around it especially that god awful community full of ass kissing cunts

>this shit has been fueling conflict for thousands of years

How? I mean, vast majority of conflicts have been between neighboring tribes and nations. How different are Swedes and Danes or Chinese and other Chinese from one another to warrant hate based on looks?

>D&D 5e has been crushing sales every year for a few years
>I’m sure it’s just faux-nerd hype
Every year with this shit. 5e is just being managed properly by the person a significant portion of Veeky Forums things can’t manage their way out of a paper bag, and it isn’t surprising because most of Veeky Forums has the business sense of a wet blanket.

>But still your post was just too retarded.

I'm sorry facts hurt your feels.

>if you saw a trailer for a movie, and everyone in it was black
Are you insane? Have you heard about bruce lee, and tons of asian movies that are literally cult movies in the west? What planet are you living in? SJW planet?

This. WotC figured out how to market to the younger generations and do it well. They also give youtubers and streamers free stuff to further promote their works for almost nothing.

Pair that with things like Community and Stranger Things to get lots of people interested in it.

Then, on top of all that, tabletop in general has seen a resurgence in recent years. I'm not sure if it's as a reaction to video games being popular for so long or if gamers are just getting older and prefer a different type of game. So when people are looking for a tabletop RPG of course they look to the best known one (like or hate D&D it's the most popular).

>So you identify yourself as a skin color?

Other people identify him by his skin color, would it be so weird if he also does it himself?

Not my feeling, but my head user, you can't be this level of stupid thinking you save any kind of effort drawing white people.

So you are your skin color? And than some racist call you a nigger because all he sees in you is your skin color, how can you blame him right?

When and if they ever make 6e, sales are gonna drop like a stone. None of this new 'wider audience' is gonna stick around long, mark my words.

>Swedes and Danes

>implying I couldn't recognize a swede by his looks

So he plays the game by the racists rules? Smart.
No wonder identity politics never solved anything.

>I’m sure it’s just faux-nerd hype

Nice strawman.

>Have you heard about bruce lee, and tons of asian movies that are literally cult movies in the west?
Yes, the literal "kung fu flick" genre.
Gimme a call when a period movie can make it without being based around wire fu.

You know the problem is associating skin with stereotypes and generalizations, not the color itself, right?

>some racist insults you how can you blame him

The process of blame is actually not very complicated. First, you start out by saying "what the fuck did you just say to me you little bitch," and I'm sure you know the pasta from there.

Also probably got something to do with the reduced output by them. They're saving quite a bit of money by not printing three new splat books every month, all of which are optional and probably not being bought by anyone outside of a few.

user, you have officially jumped the shark with this, now leading the thread with banal nonsense in order to derail the topic.

So all your drawings of black people have white skin?

Whilst it wasn't really an issue in Europe, in Asia there was constant fighting fuelled by subtle differences between Chinese, Mongolians, Koreans and Phillipinos. India too had fighting between the lighter northerners and the much darker southerners, sub-saharan Africa had the same but in reverse.

I never specified it as the most prominent cause for war, just that wars justified on it do exist.

>what are green eyes

...

> in two decades.
I like how he can't say three since early D&D was 20x bigger than any RPG published since.
>tfw you'll never see D&D in regular dinky Walmart-tier places anymore

Do you have sources on race hate fueled conflicts in Asia hundreds and thousands of years ago?

because /pol/ is fucking everywhere. Can't talk about anything without those retards making it into a fight about niggers/faggots/women.

Those russian bots should've been decommissioned after the election

Speaking only for myself, I'm just interested in it because video games (specifically MMOs) aren't doing it for me anymore, and this just seems easy to get into. I'm familiar with DnD from NWN, Baldur's Gate, etc. as well as occasionally lurking here. I'm not into streams or podcasts or anything so that doesn't have much influence on me. The PHB was 40% off on Amazon the other day so I just bought it on a whim. I don't know if I should try to play online or at one of those adventurers league things at a local store first though.

But if the main cultural source of D&D is medieval europe, you understand that most characters, if not all, should be white skinned right?
You seem to care about your heritage, would you be ok if a meso-american inspired setting had blacks, asian, arabs, slavs, as much as central-american indigenous people?
As you said, it feels good when your heritage is accurately represented. But it works for all cutlures/races, even "white" culture.
I'm perfectly fine with generic fantasy setting that are a mash of all earth cultures, representing all our different people. But if the game is about european culture, don't tell me I can't my heritage being represented because it needs "diversity".

Mostly an American thing, but from experience "white" culture is assumed to be the standard in the USA. Naturally, "black" culture is built in comparison to "white" culture. A big way of noticing this difference is the emphasis put on heritage on the white side of things - whites are far more likely to distinguish between German-American and Italian-American, for example, because that's what matters for them. Anyhow, this basically means that for blacks culture is inherently tied to skin color, and to a lesser extent location (hence the East Coast versus West Coast fights, for example). In short, skin color is inherently tied to culture in the eyes of black people. Hence the notion of "whiteness" dating back to W. E. B. Du Bois

Don't get so triggered you can't reason anymore.
If you reduce yourself to your skin tone, how can you expect other to not do so? Act like a nigger, be called a nigger.
Serves to white people too. If you all you care about yourself is being white, you are acting like a Nazi, then get called a Nazi.

>But if the main cultural source of D&D is medieval europe, you understand that most characters, if not all, should be white skinned right?
D&D settings are not medieval Europe, at all, and take from all over the world in terms of legends and mythos.
You are making the fallacious argument people make when they actually know nothing about D&D, but want to start shit. Call this your last (you), because you just waved your flag.

Those movies were made for an Asian audience. They cast Asians because that's who they were for. Them becoming popular in the west is incidental, and the films which did become popular represent a fraction of what is produced in Hong Kong, let alone the rest of the non-English speaking world.
Additionally "Cult" implies that they only ever achieved popularity with a limited audience, which they did. As such they were clearly not embraced by the majority of white people.
This small, partial exception to the stated principal doesn't really prove anything except that films of a particularly high quality cross cultural boundaries.
A better example for the argument you are trying to make is that Hollywood productions often do very well in China despite featuring a primarily white caste.
But again we see Hollywood bending over backwards to place Chinese stars in these films and feature them prominently in Chinese marketing material, which seems to further support other anons theory that people find media featuring similarly appearing people more appealing.

D&D has only the most superficial resemblance to medieval Europe. D&D has a much relation to medieval society as a ren faire, and has about as much need to be all white.

Well if sales are any indication it'll outlive 3e, and may just go digital for 6e for AR/VR play options

Yeah but BBT opened up the idea of 'such a geek xD' mentality to the mainstream. The fact that they had the one d&d episode, especially it being the one where shlednod and gf have erp sex, was more than enough. And it wasn't one actually.
Fuck you for making me check the Big bang theory wiki for this, its been mentioned/involved 7 times. Though only 4 are notable.
>S5E4 - Wiggly finger catalyst. Episode opens on a game. Sheldon decides to make all minor decisions with a d20. Hilarity ensues.
>S6E11 - The Santa Simulation. Christmas d&d happens and sheldon kills santa over a childhood grudge.
>S6E23 - The Love Spell Potential. The guys and girls play d&d, love spell between sheldon's and amy's characters makes them ERP.
>S9E22 - The Fermentation Bifurcation. Sheldon creates an AU where Bernadette power fantasy's around as a tall independent woman, who is also a complete murder hobo barbarian.

I'm ashamed that i used to watch this show up until season 4. Then again, i didn't have internet on the weekends i did.

Though i will concede that stranger things probably did more work into mainstreaming it after bbt laid the grounds.

>But if the main cultural source of D&D is medieval europe
laughinghistorians.jpg

The last time D&D had a black and white players' handbook was in the 1980s. Even the 2e one was full color.

D&D was NEVER European fantasy. Literally the second expansion for it, Blackmoor, introduced Monks. One of the earliest published adventures involves Our Heroes investigating a crashed flying saucer.

I can't speak as to 2e Oriental Adventures as I have no exposure to it, but 3e Oriental Adventures had a number of different races depicted in it. Remember that it is a European trend to put all East Asians into a single massive racial group, but 3e OA depicted humans in a variety of colors and body types. No, there were no straight-up Africans, but then the point of Oriental Adventures was specifically for an East Asian setting (specifically, for the most part, Rokugan); whereas D&D has never had any particular setting in mind. Hence why the Monk has been a standard class since 1975.

Al-Qadim, meanwhile, depicted just about every race imaginable, from blond-haired, blue-eyed folk to African folk to East Asians. A major theme of al-Qadim was that it was incredibly cosmopolitan, simply with Arabic/North African window dressing (clothing, architecture, etc.)

Yeah, they're cult classics - cult, as in, a minority of people. While the movies may have sold fairly well and certainly made back their shoestring budgets, no Kung Fu flick with an Asian lead has ever exactly been a money-making machine in America to compare to, say, Psycho, or Indiana Jones, or the like, except maybe Rush Hour, which barely even qualifies.

The Target I work at stocks D&D books and miniatures.

Nigga do you even read?

So D&D SJWs are now into revisionism.
The original booklets, and so many other supplements made reference to "medieval fantasy". Medieval is a time period, not a culture, but It looks pretty clear that it was not a reference to medieval china, or medieval India, or medieval saudi arabia, or medieval Africa (which is probably still in the Stone Age, most of it.)

>tuning your PR so that your company is in line with growing social trends doesn't make your company more popular
the lengths /pol/tards go to

>why can't brown people just be quiet so I can ignore their existence ;_;
We ( that actual brown nerds, not sjws) have been self inserting into non-brown settings for decades with no problem. Now that there are other brown people to identify with it's nice.
Why there is a huge bunch of white nerds that are sjw tier whining bitches complaining whenever there is a brown person in their media? Like I said earlier brown nerds have been self inserting into white characters for their entire lives at this point. Are these people so entitled they can't even let us have a bit of representation?

>medieval Africa in the Stone Age
>what is the many many many empires in modern day Nigeria
>what was the Kongo
>what were the Swahili traders
>what was the entirety of Northern Africa

Africans did learn to smelt and forge iron, but they struggle beyond that.

Armor and weapon styles = check
Social/political arrangements = check
Cultural norms = check
Mythologies= check

Unless japanese used broadswords, arabs were practicing druidism, and african feudal lords were running around on knight's armor, well, I guess D&D main cultural source is medieval europe.
But I get it, SJWs are delusional.

It used to be a reclusive nerd thing
Nerd culture became popular
Lol I know DnD became a normie thing to joke about
With enough mainstream attention the joke became reality
More and more normies started playing
It is now almost near a normal hobby in terms of social status

>It's "/pol/ shits up another thread" episode
I love /pol/. I hate niggers. But sometimes I want to talk about things other than hating niggers. It's becoming more difficult each day.

>So D&D SJWs are now into revisionism.
Advance already had monsters like Couatl &
djinni that aren't from medieval European fantasy, it always took inspiration from all over the world for the setting.

Not quite. Great Mosque of Djenne being a pretty big example of stuff Africans achieved in Medieval times. Saladin was technically African as well. Besides, the Ethiopians were going through Medieval times of their own as well, even involving complex Christian church construction.

They can believe a dragon can fly but a black wizard is too much.

>race hate fueled conflicts in Asia

Race wasn't considered different from culture or tribe back then. It was simply your tribe versus the other tribes, the tribe that looked, acted, and talked like Mongolians. There didn't need to be a concept of race as it is today because the world wasn't cosmopolitan enough for you to run into a Mexican mongolian or a Swedish mongolian.