The most publicly-visible online spaces for RPGs have gone downhill over the last decade, but it really started swirling down the drain as the COVID shutdowns kicked off. Forums like this used to be extremely active, with dozens of daily users and hundreds of monthly users. It was niche, sure, but people actually used it, actually cared. You could meet people and start games. Now, not so much. It’s slow. It’s really the same dozen or so people over and over again.

You’ve driven your best people away because they weren’t in lockstep with gay race communism. Until around 2020, people were still willing to offer compromises like “free speech,” an agreement to set politics and to a degree personality clashes aside to play a good game online, either in the form of a MU*, a VC+VTT, “asynchronous” play-by-post, or what-not. But that was rejected, and at first it seemed like you needed to be hard left in order to play RPGs. But those people who left? The Corpse Kings, the Sandy Petersens, the Blaine Pardoes, the Alexander Macrisses? They went on and made cool shit without you.

We’ve got our own milieu now, and we gatekeep troons and the like all the time. They show up, and then they get removed. It’s very satisfying not having to care if something is “problematic,” only concerning ourselves with if it’s cool, if it’s pertinent to the game, if this thing adds to it or detracts from it. Getting rid of the gaymosexuals and the harridans has done wonders for us.

So like… how do you recover from this? How do you fix your shit so that you can be let back into polite society? Is it possible for you to reform, or are you stuck, mired in this ideology forever?

EDIT: This was also posted on BrandMuDay, which is only slightly more alive than this board.