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As for it being "watered down" over time in the official setting and lore books... I mean, what else do you expect? They're trying to make their products and setting at least MOSTLY family-friendly sandbox/theme park TTRPG setting in order to assure they can retain mass market appeal. Including depictions or descriptions of intimate sexuality in the books is very much a kind of line in the sand drawn between adult content and family-friendly materials.I agree with the rest of what you said, but I don't follow the rational on this part. The game arguably became *more* sexual through the life time as 1e, both to its peak in 2012-2014 and as 5e took over. They rewrote Arshae to not just be about freedom but sexual liberation with Chronicle of the Righteous in 2013. They give you a succubus girlfriend in Wrath of the Righteous. It's been redacted now, but they released Socothbenoth's fiendish obedience in 2017, where you would "achieve sexual relief" very violently with a mandatory partner, plus Nocticula's who is much more obviously violent requiring a pint of blood to be shed. The bigger contention however lies in the fact that most people here don't see watering down as a necessity to achieve or safely maintain mass appeal.
Most of the people I see blogging complaints about the content of Paizo products admit they are not even Paizo customers.
I'm a little lost on what we're talking about now, honestly.
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I believe we've moved mainly the the "Do we even need to censor to have mass appeal?" question.
Most of the people I see blogging complaints about the content of Paizo products admit they are not even Paizo customers.
So we are back to the 80's where we are kowtowing to random moralizing people that don't even play the game or are otherwise really a part of the community?
I don't think that's the case, for what it's worth, and I'm a little wary of "people who disagree with us are outsiders who don't really play the game" takes.
EDIT: Okay, the links got deleted, so I'll scrap my rebuttal.
Anyways, people have been complaining about excessive "cheesecake" since the days of Dragon magazine--heck, as a kid, I disliked how awkward the rampant fanservice made it to bring issues into school with me. Regardless, attacking someone's genuine interest in the hobby is ad hominem. It doesn't actually refute their critiques.
Paizo probably moved from the massive amounts of fanservice and risque canon conent because they don't want to make it harder for kids to get into the hobby and start school clubs and such. I'm sure Discourse played a role, but assuming that call solely came from outside the house just doesn't feel respectful.
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Freehold is all for chainmail bikinis.
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I was complaining about over use of cheesecake in 1e a lot xD In 2e its been better because its not universal and when it happens it applies to both masculine and feminine characters :p
Freehold is running for office on universal cheesecake platform. CHAINMAIL BIKINS FOR ALL
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I don't think that's the case, for what it's worth, and I'm a little wary of "people who disagree with us are outsiders who don't really play the game" takes.
I'm not saying that people who disagree are outsiders or not part of the community, but at least by what Driftborne alludes, it would seem like community sites, like say the 2e forums, are being brigaded by people who don't play the game and are essentially just pearl clutching at something that shouldn't concern them.
So we are back to the 80's where we are kowtowing to random moralizing people that don't even play the game or are otherwise really a part of the community?Can't tell if you're for or against chainmail bikinis
Honestly, I'm asexual, I couldn't give a darn, and I think that anyone who does is being overly squeamish about a part of reality (in general) and then complaining via projection of their own insecurities. It's the same problem of being too uncaring or sometimes even unable to compartmentalize reality and fiction. The only reason I could ever see myself denying someone "bikini mail" in a game is because they are trying to treat it mechanically as full plate and not even being clever in regards to "extra pieces" that could make up the difference. (E.g. a reasonable exception to the above.)
My quoted comment was more in reference to how everyone assumed people who play D&D in the 80s and 90s were actual cultists and so the community went to ground. Now, it seems it's gotten popular (again?) so the moral majority has found something "impure" to try and silence the hobby by attacking this portion of it (while totally missing other things like drug use, slavery still being common in canon in many places, so on and so forth for things that are described as explicitly evil). So Piazo tries to go the appeasement route, and I think it's completely unnecessary to even pay attention.
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There's also a difference between not wanting cheesecake/fanservice and not wanting any risque content. It's a complicated and fine line, but a real one.
I don't think the line is at all that fine, in fact it should be super easy to cut out cheesecake while leaving in written references to sex, rules and lore that support sex as a thing that exists and happens, and so on.
There's no reason that Paizo had to release the front cover of Giantslayer book 4 with both Amiri and Iridjka's entire buttocks on display from behind in bent over (sword swinging) positions, and there's no reason that not having that would have any bearing on any rules released. Seoni's side boob doesn't magically make it necessary for the first encounter post Sandpoint goblin assault to be "come to my father's basement, there's something I want you to look at..."
A GM for a bunch of kids can take that encounter from Runelords and make it only go as far as kissing if that's what they want. On the other hand, the same GM can't take back if one of those kids gets ahold of a book cover and just sees as much as you can legally see on a book cover because they just grabbed the wrong book of a shelf, or even worse, opens up a book and finds one of the couple of times paizo actually published a monster will a full breast (including nipple) on display. While I'll still argue society as a whole really doesn't need to be that afraid of a human's (or even an undead or monster's) body, my point is that neither of these things are really tied to one another.
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The main reason I would rather assume that these changes are mainly made in good faith because the creators want them is that I still think the changes are worth criticizing--particularly in how these changes affect the third party publisher scene. I would rather assume the best of the people that disagree with me so that we're the most likely to achieve some sort of satisfying understanding.
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There's also a difference between not wanting cheesecake/fanservice and not wanting any risque content. It's a complicated and fine line, but a real one.
Vote Freehold.
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My quoted comment was more in reference to how everyone assumed people who play D&D in the 80s and 90s were actual cultists and so the community went to ground. Now, it seems it's gotten popular (again?) so the moral majority has found something "impure" to try and silence the hobby by attacking this portion of it (while totally missing other things like drug use, slavery still being common in canon in many places, so on and so forth for things that are described as explicitly evil). So Piazo tries to go the appeasement route, and I think it's completely unnecessary to even pay attention.You jumped over a lot of logic chasms there, and your conclusion is interesting. So Piazo tries to go the appeasement route, .
Why do you assume that the folks at Paizo are 'appeasing' anyone? What if it's actually their sincerely held belief that they don't want to include this material going forward.
You seem to have missed that they have removed slavery as canon. Why do you think that they wanted to keep including fan service material but can't because they have to 'appease' some imagined audience? Can you imagine that their staff wants these changes and that Paizo is making them of their own accord?
Mainly because the same people who are in charge of the greater lore are the ones who put them there in the first place, who more or less ripped most of Golarion lore from James Jacob's home games. This isn't like the "Old Erastil" debacle where a rogue writer made Erastil a misogynist, was immediately fired and his content retconned. This is without any attempt to smooth over, the Pactmasters suddenly taking a stance against open and prolific trade over all things possible, including life; this is a victorious Cheliax deciding to randomly stop indenturing a race of people they can push around; this is every Orc, Drow, Hobgoblin, and so on just up and deciding at more or less the same time, despite the vast differences in how they were affected by the "edition switch events of Tyrant's Grasp" to give up what had been up until that very moment their possessions. But we also don't see things like animate dead go by the wayside, the literal enslavement and destruction of a soul, despite the impetus in both cases being power through control. The "slavery is gone now" change doesn't even properly address all the cultural issues Piazo thinks it does, or at least in the way they think it does. A better analogy is the north defeating the south, saying "slavery is illegal", going back to the north, and then the south just starting share cropping. Cool, goblins may be "somewhat tolerable" now, but where is the addressment of every other (massive,) in-lore cultural hanging chad from this change?
I say it's appeasement because it doesn't read as if it was written by someone or in a way that someone actually wants to get rid of sex, or slavery, or any other problematic content would write it. Would I say it's explicitly bad faith to do it for appeasement, not exactly, but it's certainly not good faith when the previous interactions with these elements are far more thought-out and interesting than the handwaving they did to get rid of them.
The main reason I would rather assume that these changes are mainly made in good faith because the creators want them is that I still think the changes are worth criticizing--particularly in how these changes affect the third party publisher scene. I would rather assume the best of the people that disagree with me so that we're the most likely to achieve some sort of satisfying understanding.
On one hand, I'm trying to address both sides of this, yes I do think it is still mostly if not entirely for preemptive appeasement of a supposed mass audience they want to attract, but even if it isn't the points from earlier posts are there to also shoot down the changes made in good faith as well.
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Can we please not relitigate the slavery debate? James Jacobs has repeatedly and firmly expressed that the change was something he wanted. Sometimes authors change their minds, especially if they gain greater context after sharing their work with a broader spectrum of people. Regardless, the debate has nothing to do with this thread, does it? Third party publishers have not been told they can't include content involving slavery under the Pathfinder license, have they?
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Can we please not relitigate the slavery debate? James Jacobs has repeatedly and firmly expressed that the change was something he wanted. Sometimes authors change their minds, especially if they gain greater context after sharing their work with a broader spectrum of people. Regardless, the debate has nothing to do with this thread, does it? Third party publishers have not been told they can't include content involving slavery under the Pathfinder license, have they?
I still see it as one of the most baffling things Paizo creative has ever done, but, yeah, the horse has been beaten throroughly into horse paste by now.
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^I guess that means that now it's an Undead Equine Ooze . . . .
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Can we please not relitigate the slavery debate? James Jacobs has repeatedly and firmly expressed that the change was something he wanted. Sometimes authors change their minds, especially if they gain greater context after sharing their work with a broader spectrum of people. Regardless, the debate has nothing to do with this thread, does it? Third party publishers have not been told they can't include content involving slavery under the Pathfinder license, have they?
Wasn't meaning to relitigate it, just bring it up as example of how it and the Old Erastil example, it, and this current discussion are all three separate things with regards to genuineness and benefit. One was just a idiot being an idiot, another I don't buy, and in a still different but similar way, I don't buy that "sex has to be excluded in order to be inoffensive."
So, the Pathfinder Creative Director who assigned freelancers to write the lore about Golarion was ripping off..... himself? And when his name is on the cover of the book, he's ripping off .... himself?
I think you're missing my point, I *am* saying those people wrote it themselves, I'm saying they all wanted it in the game (both the sex, and the other s-word) when they put it in the game. I am saying that because they were the ones putting it in from the beginning, I don't believe they truly just want to excise it, as opposed to say the core writing team now being anyone besides JJ, EM, JB, etc. where it's someone with new ideas having to decide what to drop and what to keep of the old.
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Wasn't meaning to relitigate it, just bring it up as example of how it and the Old Erastil example, it, and this current discussion are all three separate things with regards to genuineness and benefit.
Whether or not I agree with you, it's objectively a terrible example for your purposes. Using an extremely controversial and probably overall unpopular take as an aside in your bigger point is asking for trouble. It's completely distracted from your intended point. Now, instead of engaging with the point you were trying to make--a point about risque content I probably mostly agree with!--we're arguing about whether or not James Jacobs is being forced at cancelpoint to change his setting and lie about wanting to do it.
To be blunt, either you've failed to make your point, or sniping at the slavery thing was the main point. Either way, it's not helpful.
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I'm not even on here all that often and even I know the defense of including slavery is pretty much never brought up in good faith.
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I am saying that because they were the ones putting it in from the beginning, I don't believe they truly just want to excise it, as opposed to say the core writing team now being anyone besides JJ, EM, JB, etc. where it's someone with new ideas having to decide what to drop and what to keep of the old.So, even though James Jacobs is the Creative Director for Pathfinder, you believe that "someone with new ideas" is forcing him to post in these forums saying that he doesn't want to tell that kind of story now?
That he can't possibly have changed his thinking over all these years, and that he is lying to us when he says he has?
Sorry, I believe James, not someone who is pretending to mindread what his motivations and thinking are and announce it as if he knows all that better than James himself does.
You're really having trouble here. Even by your quote, he goes from being very hard on "we should show it as evil" to "let's never touch it again" boilerplate. People can say things disingenuously because they need to project a message. I am calling this disingenuous A) because it's him defending it less than 2 years before his most recent comment, B) JJ still leads the narrative team as opposed to someone who doesn't share his views so the narrative team (or at least its leader) by the previous point doesn't actually hold opinion that it's better to write nothing on the matter instead of well nuanced matter or even just "it's evil, period" content, and C) going "we will never mention this again" is *more in support of* it by being less against it than "it's evil, period."
Wasn't meaning to relitigate it, just bring it up as example of how it and the Old Erastil example, it, and this current discussion are all three separate things with regards to genuineness and benefit.Whether or not I agree with you, it's objectively a terrible example for your purposes. Using an extremely controversial and probably overall unpopular take as an aside in your bigger point is asking for trouble. It's completely distracted from your intended point. Now, instead of engaging with the point you were trying to make--a point about risque content I probably mostly agree with!--we're arguing about whether or not James Jacobs is being forced at cancelpoint to change his setting and lie about wanting to do it.
To be blunt, either you've failed to make your point, or sniping at the slavery thing was the main point. Either way, it's not helpful.
Scroll back up and read how this started again, my claim was that banning sex-content wouldn't be the first time they made a disingenuous move (that was also completely invalidated as a necessity as the start to the entire thread had made several points regarding sexual content).
But you want a different point as to why it's meaningless and unnecessary for them to ban sexual content, let's talk about how the entire D&D community at large (not just those who have already switched to PF) give zero care to any of these larger issues especially when there's even a thin veneer of tradition to support it. Take Goblins as an example, not a problem Paizo has internally or needs to change, but had been a 2+ year debate that saw even those against the WotC setting depictions of goblins not switching from the system in any discernable number; it took the whole OGL debacle before there was any sizable trend of people looking for other D&D-style systems, and that was completely unrelated to the goblin-debate.
Short of objectively bad takes on sex (or other content-matter), I doubt anyone who would otherwise buy Paizo products or even just "unbranded D&D-esque product" would stop buying because of a 3rd party, Pathfinder compatible Book of Erotic Fantasy 2.0. If that's true, who is Paizo placating/pandering to if they don't allow it? If they aren't pandering, why would they block it?
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I don't think there needs to be some bad foreign group being pandered to. I think Paizo wants Pathfinder to be all-ages, and is unfortunately extending that preference to Infinite and the license overall, which I think is excessive.
Trying to find a group of bad guys to blame is just a huge derail and doesn't help us talk about the problem.
EDIT: I mean, I guess if you want a bad guy being pandered to, it's right there in plain sight. The most sinister interest group of all.
Children.
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Damn those children, they've had to too easy for too long!
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The time of the Attic Whisperer Army has come!