See, they
think they want more mature and dark storytelling but what they really want is
edgy fagshit because the reality of facing something like grey-vs-grey morality, or ingrained systemic racism that goes beyond simple skin colour and often involves real and notable historical actions within the setting,
definitive fact that good and evil are identifiable values that
can be hardcoded into ones race. Tabletop games are hardly the cleanest and most sanitized sources of social grace, and some are much more on the nose with their racial allegories. As much as this one guy whines about "muh racism" against Tieflings being analogous to the Black Experience, I'd love to see his mind blow out his ass reading about the very real political shift in Shadowrun treating Orks as the new Nigger with all the same stereotypes.
It's not good enough to just let these facets sit though. Despite the fact that you can easily ignore any part of lore or setting that you may want to on whatever grounds, I know there's been people like this making pushbacks on some TTRPGs settings and worlds because the spineless cunts can't just accept that a fantasy world might have some bad or outdated ideas present in certain segments of the population. There was a letter published through some third-party writer whose name I forget, but he was used as a mouthpiece by a(n anonymous?) minority to voice their discomfort with slavery themes present in parts of Pathfinder's setting of Golarion. Slavery which is only employed by one nation of the setting, Cheliax, who are the "evil asshole devil worshippers" of their setting, and the use of slaves being very on-brand and in line with similar sorts of master-and-follower relationships common in diabolic pacts. Slavery which, in a few places, is stated to not be something a GM should allow players to wontonly participate in and has only ever been shown as a bad practice of evil people, and is regularly resisted and combated by in-universe organizations like the Bellflower Network. Nah, strike it from the texts and banish it to the penis explosion chamber, it's a much better course of action to simply erase it from reality and pretend it's not real and doesn't exist than to utilize the medium as a way to explore a complicated and dark subject with the intent of rising over it and, honestly, achieving power fantasy catharsis over something representative of an unfair hardship. Worse is that Paizo capitulated on this front, in a similar way that they presented a mewling countenance in the materials for Agents of Edgewatch, an adventure path wherein the players are meant to be part of the guard corps of Absalom, where they gave alternative ideas for how to use the materials if the players happened to have irreconcilable issues with pretending to be law enforcement officers.
The increasing presence of various built-in or shoehorned mechanics or systems meant to serve as emergency exits for sackless bitches that would rather cower and hide from 'triggering content' only serves to demonstrate how no-dicked entertainment media is becoming with the mass pussification of humanity when someone needs a hard out mechanic in case someone says a no-no word and they need to go have a cry about it. It becomes increasingly more necessary to vet potential players various neuroses, psychoses, delusions and other mental illnesses to make sure the game doesn't fall apart the second you try to run anything more dark than another typical "dark evil person does cartoonishly bad things" story. In worlds where literal devils exist and make contracts with people for petty bullshit reasons and can demand the most fucked up kind of payments in return, you better not have anything more twisted than "I occasionally have to murder white, cis men in their mid 20s" because otherwise you might trigger half the table.
Alignment? Nah fuck it. The common player nowadays is too smoothbrained to consider something like obeying a broad scope of behavioural patterns when they can just flip-flop as much as they want and not have to face any kind of mechanical punishment for it. Fiddly as it was to track, no one wants to face the reality that maybe their "well-meaning, good-intentioned" farm boy background adventurer who for the last 3 months of sessions had been advocating such pasttimes as robbery, blackmail, extortion, trespassing, contract fraud, assault and conspiracy to commit murder
might be actually evil in nature and as such would be affected by anything that harmed evil. There can't be any long-term repercussions for their actions, at least none that aren't narratively hooked to the grander story and is just a consequence of their own shitty actions.
I could whine forever about how much I hate modern soycuck players and fuck knows I have a lot of pent up frustration and anger to let out today all of a sudden but I'm already mentally exhausted and it's not even noon.
