J.E. Sawyer Comments on Wizards of the Coast Morality Guidelines

Remove all ads!

J.E. Sawyer has joined the discussion of Wizards of Coast morality guidelines for Dungeons and Dragons games. He explains, among other things, that those guidelines aren't set in stone but change from time to time, more or less as Wizards see fit, resulting in logically inconsistent output. Another obvious inconsistency is that, while Wizards insist D&D is not a game for children and shouldn't be portrayed as such, they still censor games and make excisions of material that doesn't strike as unsuitable for young adults who are the primary target audience according to Wizards. Here's a snip:

That assumes that guidelines are consistently upheld and enforced. WotC revised their content guidelines while games like Jefferson were in development. They ultimately reserve the right to censor or allow anything. A game with a quarter of the "evil" content of the Book of Vile Darkness could easily be rejected. The original Dark Alliance's "salacious" female characters would not be allowed today (hint: check out Dark Alliance 2 and the obviously raised necklines) even though books like Faiths and Pantheons can show an avatar of Loviatar in a dominatrix outfit with ass piercings. Don't believe me? I'm pretty sure there's an interview with a WotC rep on enworld that says exactly that. I'd find it myself but enworld is slower than the mystics from Dark Crystal.

Further, J.E. Sawyer complains about Wizards' naive black and white vision of the world accompanied by resentment towards mature themes. As an example he mentions a game he made and believed to be mature D&D game, requiring the player to weigh his morals seriously rather than to take easy paths. He has no delusions as to what the Wizard's reception of that product would be. Here's what he says:

Take drugs and sell slaves? Yes, you can do it, but if anyone finds out, characters who care will care and will do something about it. Kill a kid out in the middle of nowhere? Unless there's some extra-special reason why things should happen to the contrary, you're probably going to get away with it. I like games where people can make decisions based off of what they intuit (for the most part) the consequences will be. I like writing characters who are appealing on many levels but have a twist to them -- like an honorable Sembian duellist who's horribly racist against Thayans and uses slurs against them constantly, or an extremely pious, humble paladin CNPC who happens to be homosexual.

The main theme of The Black Hound was guilt. One of the viewpoints that many characters suggested in the game was that it's not okay to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, nor to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. This is moral ambiguity, and it manifested in almost every faction you joined. Even the "good guys" faction of the game was torn between two sides -- those who wanted to save the soul of the antagonist and those who simply wanted to kill her to prevent harm from coming to anyone else. I was very happy to make what I hoped and believed was a mature D&D game. Sadly, I don't think that game would pass WotC's guidelines without being utterly mangled to a pulp.

Ultimately, he claims that the guidelines are instruments of Wizard's policy and are used for such purposes as preventing a game from being finished on time.

That's my point; they aren't consistently enforced. I would rather have hard and fast (but restrictive) rules than ethereal guidelines that start to be enforced in an ultra-conservative manner when an interested party doesn't want your game to come out on time.

Read the whole thing at RPGCodex.