SJWs Always Project

Really quick: if you want something similar to Dungeons & Dragons, but which focuses on fun, usability, and quality—yet isn't grossly overpriced—as opposed to social justice progressive politics, propaganda, and irrational, obsessive hatred over mere disagreements and arbitrary thought crime violations, check out Dungeons & Delvers.

It's funny. I post this, where at one point I wonder if there's a mental illness, in which someone is unable to differentiate reality from fiction, or believes that imaginary things are "real" (closest I could find would be a mix of delusional disorder and borderline personality disorder), and then yesterday I catch this as part of a retweet/reply:

As an SJW/NPC/woke so-called progressive, Chris isn't open to conversation, something perhaps tens of people received a crash course in yesterday.

He disingenuously states that he doesn't "get" the appeal of an evil campaign, even though he's apparently fine "playing an asshole", someone that's “extremely selfish” (which I have a sneaking suspicious is, for the most part, just him playing himself).

No problem there, but pretending to be someone who is vaguely characterized as “evil”? Oh no, no no no. That's a bridge too far. Red flags popping up everywhere...even though, depending on your interpretation of evil, an asshole or extremely selfish person would still to some extent fit the bill.

Words matter. NPCs know this, which is why they like to redefine words (and omit others), or at least keep things as vague as possible. This makes it easier to accuse, and then deflect, double-down, and/or downplay as necessary when the narrative begins to unravel. Here, Chris just says "evil campaign" without any specifics. No criteria, no examples.

This is because an evil campaign could technically, simply be a party of characters with an Evil alignment component, but don't do anything particularly bad to humans and demihumans, the races that Neutral or Good character wouldn't normally go out of their way to unduly harm (unlike, say, inherently evil orcs that only racists would regard as stand-ins for a real world race).

Evil people aren't wholly psychotic marauders who destroy and kill everyone in sight. If you're not like Chris, and have actually exposed yourself to varied media, you'd see that many of the best villains have a code, limits. Unlike NPCs, they can possess nuance, aren't monolithically defined by a few surface traits, invented pronouns and genders, and are capable of experiencing an entire range of emotions, good and bad.

He also asserts that all players wanting to play in an evil campaign are doing so purely so they can have free reign to do "horrible shit in-game", but this says more about Chris than anyone else.

First off, think about the "in-game" bit. In-game. As in within the imagined reality of the game. As in not real. This is why you can kill imaginary people and not get charged with murder. At least, not in real life. This is why you don't have to pay taxes in the real world for imaginary treasure obtained. This is why you the player don't really die when your character does. 

But I get that. Most people do. It's a game, something you play for fun. Well, normal people do, anyway. You play it whenever you want, time and opportunity permitting, and when you're done engage in other hobbies, or focus on more important matters such as family, friends, and work. You don't obsess over games, use them to try and fill various voids they won't, or rather, can't (a practice which I think accounts for a lot of NPC misery).

As for "horrible shit", I see two explanations for this.

The first is that Chris believes human nature is so inherently malicious, evil, that without being shackled by rules we would regress to engaging in wanton slaughter and destruction, that only the threat of imprisonment is what keeps us in check (at least, the unenlightened savages that understand what a game is). Nevermind that were that the case, we'd never have progressed this far in the first place, and there wouldn't be nearly enough police or military to stop us.

The second—and I think more plausible one—is that Chris is projecting. After all, besides being perpetually miserable and lying, NPCs always project. Chris thinks that, were you to play an evil character you would simply indulge in all manner of imaginary atrocities, which I think is precisely what he would do. Perhaps as a way to vent frustration of not being able to act on such desires in reality and get away with it? The fear of getting caught? A lot of these people get outed as sex pests and molesters, so we'll have to wait and see.

But Chris would never admit to this. Instead he'll accuse everyone else of desiring freedom of choice in an elf-game, solely so they can by his definition abuse it. Nevermind all the DMs routinely playing the bad guys, or everyone playing games without any sort of alignment system, yet somehow refraining from going on unhinged monologues describing in excruciating detail grotesque acts of violence and depravity. 

I must have really lucked out those times we played Shadowrun without it devolving into torture or rape sessions, and the handful of Star Wars games I managed to play in, where the worst of it was one guy playing a hutt and stuffing destroyed battle droids into his fat folds in a poorly conceived (and worse executed) attempt to hide the evidence.

I have no idea how many players have tried a full-on "evil campaign", or at least a one-shot where everyone had an evil alignment (likely a good number judging by the responses Chris was getting), but I'm guessing for most it was more or less business as usual, just with random, stupid or silly acts of arbitrary, daresay "edgy" violence.

Case in point, I played in a one-shot nearly...twenty years ago. We randomly rolled everything, and I ended up with a monk. Terrible class in 3rd Edition. Pretty sure someone was a cleric, and I can't remember the other character. We all had Evil in our alignments, and best I can recall the village we found ourselves in was under attack by orcs, or ogres, or a mix of inherently evil humanoids that only racists consider representative of real world demographics.

So of course, rather then help we decided to start looting, starting with the inn because it was either the closest building, or we knew it would at least have some cash. We barged in, killed the innkeep (I probably had to use flurry of blows to just barely hit an unarmored, average-Dexterity commoner), and then ended up having to fight our way out of the village, eventually fleeing to a farm. For some reason the farmer had a lot of money (the DM made sure to mention this multiple times), so we killed him and took it.

I'm pretty sure we played for a bit after that before stopping for the night, but I don't remember and it doesn't really matter. The point is, that was the worst of it, punching and macing random NPCs for money, but even if we continued playing that would have remained the most egregious of our (imagined) transgressions.

Have others players done worse? Oh, I'm sure. Is that the norm? Doubtful. I've never known a single player or group, or heard of a player or group, that regularly wanted to be the bad guys. In fact, all told I'm guessing the number of times it's even been pitched over the course of over twenty years could be counted on a single hand.

Oh, but Chris doesn't want to hear that. How dare you question him, prove him wrong:

NPCs hate that pesky "evidence", because they are never able to defend their positions, and are outraged at the reasonable expectation that they should have to in the first place. They throw things out on the internet, hoping to get attention and emotional validation. They take the first step in initiating a public conversation, but when challenged on their moronic opinions default to telling any dissenting voices to shut up.

Chris doesn't want to hear how he's wrong, because you're wrong. Because he said so. Is it really so bad to just want to say whatever you want, and have people either blindly agree, reason and evidence be damned, or to just keep their mouths shut? It is, if you're a narcissistic NPC, but in case you're one of those innumerable istaphobes Chris has one more surefire trick up his sleeve:

A classic NPC maneuver: say something stupid, accuse and/or pretend to be the victim, block.

There's a quote that goes something like, if you run into one asshole, then you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day long, you're the asshole. Too bad Chris lacks the self awareness to realize that he's the problem. Oh well, at least everyone else without pronouns in their bio seems to get it.

While Dungeons & Delvers doesn't have alignments you can be as bad as you want. No judgements, here: we know it's just a game.

Unless you're a paladin, of course. They have to be good guys. Here's a class preview: