When They Think You Aren't Watching, Storygamers Declare: "D&D is Fascist"/"Gygax was Fascist"

Storygamers have, for as long as they've existed, maintained a careful double-discourse on D&D and regular RPGs.  Whenever it's convenient for them, they'll pretend they have no problem with D&D, pretend they're fans, etc.

But whenever it's convenient for them, they have been all too happy to claim that D&D is incoherent, that regular RPGs cause brain damage, that the masses of the 'great unwashed' who like normal RPGs are morons.

And of course, as the discourse of identity-politics began to try to worm its way into the RPG hobby, the Storygamers (being predisposed to all elitist bullshit) adopted it wholeheartedly.  This is how we get something like this:

This is from a thread in the Storygames forum called "How Does Your Game Fight Fascism"? It begins with the presumption that RPGs are 'fascist' in nature, and that it is therefore a duty of 'woke' gamers to actively run and presumably write games that work to oppose that 'fascism'.

Naturally, by the 3rd post in the thread D&D is explicitly named as a "pro-fascist RPG". And that killing orcs is an example of "cruel, discriminatory thinking" (pity the poor orc!).  And then the statement that "My sense of Gygax is that he probably was a little bit fascist", because he "yearned for heroic adventuring".


So there you have it. Do you like killing orcs? Do you yearn for something heroic? YOU'RE A FASCIST, according the Storygames crowd. Because they define anything heroic as inherently at least "a little bit fascist", just like Gary "Adolph" Gygax. 


There's a lot that could be said about all this, and we're chatting about it on theRPGsite, but fundamentally, there's three things I want to point out here:

a) it shows the two-tongued nature of the Storygaming crowd.  Anytime they pretend that they have 'no problem with D&D', remember how they said D&D and Gygax/Arneson was 'fascist'.

b) It shows their own moral bankruptcy that they equate the ideas of heroism and the struggle against evil with 'fascism'.  

c) And here's the most important point: they're just WRONG.

I explained exactly how this argument is wrong in an earlier post. But for the sake of 'tl;dr', here's the summary of it.  The narrative the storygamers want to push is basically this: "D&D players are crypto-fascists that make orcs a substitute for dark-skinned people and the D&D game is a fascist exercise in the extermination of 'lesser races', imperialism, colonialism, misogyny and everything we don't like. Heroism is wrong, and fighting evil is not virtuous. Civilization and rule of law are horrible and oppressive, and D&D promotes those things so it is evil too."

But that's not how almost anyone who plays D&D views it.

Here's the REAL 'narrative' of the typical D&D experience:
"a multiracial group of courageous individuals from different backgrounds, genders, social classes, and levels of education putting aside all their differences, religious and non-religious, lily-white defenders of the law and those with a somewhat shady criminal past, country-folk and city-folk, all coming together in unity and collaborating in an autonomous (and usually non-hierarchical) collective, a fraternity with a common cause, often run by consensus, to save helpless innocents from the orcs. And it is the orcs, not the PCs or their players, who are greedy vicious racists that hate everything that isn't them and would destroy any chance for peaceful co-existence and the rule of law (that can only be brought about by civilization)."

Yet somehow, that's never how the Storygamer-Swine want to see it. Because they don't just fail to understand D&D, they want to despise it, and anyone who likes it. 


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