Customer Service & Community Manager
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I wrote the following to close out a different, but similarly themed thread. Since it's a Sunday night, I've closed and removed posts and will review the thread tomorrow.
The sentiment that “gaming is for all” is one that is incredibly important to us and one that we hope encourages our fans and players to be inclusive with their games. There are those, both at Paizo and in the broader gaming community, who have felt unsafe, harassed or excluded by actions or words from someone using the justification that they were just 'in game' or ‘my character would do it’. This includes harassment or exclusion based on a person coming from a marginalized community. There are also those of us both at Paizo and in the broader gaming community who have unintentionally acted as gatekeepers to gaming or unwittingly made another person feel excluded or unwelcome at our gaming table. As we as a company and as gamers learn and grow together, we hope we can use sections like this one to provide opportunities for gamers to empathize with the people at their table who may have very different perspectives and life experiences, and work to ensure they are feeling welcome and having fun. At the start of a new game, seeking consent over the inclusion of subjects that may be traumatic and actively asking players at the table if there are topics that they wish to avoid not only helps you not accidentally hurt them, but also establishes that those requests can be made if a player later finds themselves faced with content they find traumatic or offensive.
With a new edition, we have the opportunity to create a more inviting space for gamers new to Pathfinder and, in some cases, introduce new players to gaming in general, helping them learn and grow in a hobby that we all enjoy. It’s part of our mission to encourage and support gaming environments where people feel welcome, included and safe. This isn’t to say that people gaming should never feel uncomfortable or that all content must be sanitized to a G rating. Games can be an excellent way of exploring and testing boundaries and ideas. It can be a place where we can explore things that aren’t acceptable or possible for us in real life. And it can also be a place where we reinforce social norms or use word choice and storylines to indicate what is important or valuable to us. When we seek consent and establish boundaries and expectations at the beginning of a new adventure, we can help ensure that the entire table is on board with the content or gaming style and helps ensure we don’t accidentally harm our friends and fellow gamers during play.
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Customer Service & Community Manager
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This thread's title and premise are focused on real world politics. The paizo.com forums have been on an ongoing break from political topics. For more information you can check out this post: Political Threads No Longer Hosted on Paizo.com.
There are ways to discuss inclusiveness without politics. If this is something you are interested in doing, please first review our forum guidelines which can be found here: Community Guidelines.