I don’t like politics in ttrpgs because that means less time SMITING and more time with boring words. Unless the politicians are secretly vampires, then I can keep SMITING.

NO TALK ONLY SMITE.

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Exactly. What they’re really mad about is the fact that there’s a black person, a gay person, or woman with normal sized tits in the game.

But you’re making the statement that it’s okay to kill people if you want their stuff. The politics are there even if you don’t choose to examine them.

normal sized tits are such a rarity

How come gay people don’t already have rights in your setting?

man I just wanna play my lyre and have an adventure and have fun. I don’t wanna argue over politics. I game to get away from all that.

I think it’s ok to want to have some space between stuff.

I mean I can understand having occasional exceptions to the rule so the players can get an interesting non standard experience, but straight evil aligned critters should always be present in fantasy settings especially ttrpg and DND specifically.

Same people who complain about Nazis being the enemy in Wolfenstein

EVERYTHING is politics. It absolutely affects every aspect of life, ESPECIALLY fascism

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

I’m not sure about always. That’s just lazy world building to have orcs naturally evil instead of predominantly mind controlled or ruled by evil leaders or some sort of blood fued. It’s the same with good aligned races. Unless you want to focus on the definition of good and evil.

Let me introduce you to Spec Ops the Line. A game where wanting to blow stuff up is the political statement.

Deleted by creator

Hah, gotta edit it at least a bit. I’ll leave the original viewable.

Meanwhile every Ubisoft title, no matter how inoffensive, add the disclaimer:

This game was created by a diverse team of people with different beliefs, sexual orientations, and gender identities

“Politics are genuinely fun and everyone wants to see them all the time, and the people who say they don’t want to see it like it even more, they just wish they were seeing different politics.” -hbomberguy

Anything they see in there that goes against their own personally DESIRED to be status quo is an insult. Theyve just got shit views so well rounded culture shocks them and it reminds them all about how their shit stinks and they aren’t really all that smart or morally sound. Cause if they were, they wouldn’t have identified with any that stuff to begin with or realized the perils.

And it makes them know the cringe at how they’re viewed (but they say its just how they’re PORTRAYED to pass the buck on being that way being their own fault and indicative of their lack of stats and general lack of character)

No, I’m not. Because my mental development moved past three years old and I’m able to differentiate reality from fiction. Do you also believe that Super Mario players advocate for animal cruelty towards turtles?

They do. Doesn’t stop dipshits from arguing though. Case in point.

That doesn’t make any sense. If they already have rights then what are they arguing for?

As I wrote in my original post, some people just have a narcissistic need for self-promotion. They will preach to the choir and bring irrelevant political topics into the game because they feel like the real world doesn’t appreciate their valiant efforts towards weaponized inclusivity enough.