The Safety Brand

As IP becomes increasingly integrated with other brands and popular culture at large, it gets blander and blander. Taco Bell will not want to make the Forgotten Realms Nacho Grande if a game is associated with demons, horror, dark fantasy, or violence.

Welcome to the world of becoming a "safety brand."

It happens to everything that achieves a certain level of popularity in the culture. Bart Simpson used to be an alternative punk symbol and counter-culture icon, but then he started appearing on every product, from candy bars to video games, and became "uncool."

To make the most money with D&D, I feel Wizards must purge any controversial content and massively tone down the violence. I bet  part of the reason you see college life and other nonviolent expansions is because the "brand is changing" and "it needs to move beyond its violent past."

This is not me speaking; these are New York and Hollywood brand managers.

I have worked with these people before. They will come into a company with the "Wall Street agenda" and push to make your brand more like other successful brands, and work to increase the "synergy" and "cross-marketing potential" of your brand so you "play better with others."

And they will change your game, and try to leave their mark on it, make no doubt.

They would sit in those skyscraper conference rooms, put the words "dark and violent past" on a whiteboard under "problems with the game," and then ask the people who run D&D, "how are you going to address this?"

• Do you have demons and a "Hell" in your game?
• Your game leverages Christian beliefs in its divine magic system?
• Does your game show blood or promote violence?
• Are the spells and powers that take away consent?
• Does your game have mysticism and magic?
• Does your game include real-world religious parallels such as druidism, wiccanism, or paganism?
• Your game includes horror elements?
• Your game requires players to "kill things" to "level up?"
• Your game requires you to "steal wealth" to "gain experience?"

China banned video games from using mysticism and magic, so while some of the above seem outrageous, they are not too far off the mark. I know "barbarian" is a frowned-upon word in some circles, and it does not feel too far away from "druid" and "witch" to join those "culturally sensitive" classes and be banned. Even "thief" became "rogue" in some games.

When a game goes pop and mainstream, this happens. It may not be how you and your group play, but the forces and corporate manipulation are always there.

A lot of players use roleplaying as a way to work through mental health issues and conquer fears. I love that games can sometimes dive into mature content to help serve as a "harmless fantasy exploration" of feelings and issues in players' lives. This is why we socialize and have communities - to help each other work through challenging and complicated lives. To ban that from our games is to tell us we aren't allowed to use fantasy to work through real-life issues.

This is also why we have systems to talk about the content in our games, know our players, and talk about things we are okay (or not okay with) within a game setting. But we are allowed to have them, the switches and toggles are there, and the game has not "written these options out."

This is part of why I like the OSR and these smaller indie-game communities. They do not have the smell of Wall Street and corporate meddling in the game's content, nor do they force you to avoid specific topics or exclude content from your game. There are times I feel in some games, the "how to play the game" writing approaches the level of "cultural police," and they put the expectation on players and DMs to "get people in line" or face ostracization from the community.

All in the name of profits.

And "push players to police their games" would be one of those solutions that would get written on the whiteboard.

DMs, please keep your players from doing anything above a PG rating because, you know, we need that Taco Bell deal, and we don't want people to think negatively about the game "we all enjoy."

Don't you want to be a "good" member of the "community?"