I’m not sure why its being historical makes it special.
Some things about the present are problematic. I don’t want to go on about my own distinctive beliefs, but let’s imagine a socialist GM—not a believer in Scandinavian style capitalism with redistributive taxes, but one who believes that wage labor is inherently exploitative and destructive. If they run a campaign set in the past quarter millennium, and in any of the rich countries, wage labor is going to be nearly omnipresent, even more so than slavery was in the American South before 1865.
So if they start a campaign with a fantastic element, such as Elder Gods or aliens or mutants or just advanced technology, must they run it in a different version of the 19th or 20 century where wage labor is absent? Wouldn’t that be making the more desirable (in their view) social arrangements a theme of the campaign, one that might even displace the overt theme of Elder Gods or whatever?
Or must they run it with a lot of episodes about the evils of wage labor, and have the player characters spend time coping with demanding bosses and insensitive corporate hierarchies and the fear of joblessness and destitution? Again, that seems to be different from the theme they might intend.
Can they just say, “Yes, this is 1955, and people work for wages, but that’s not what this campaign is about”?
Is there a reason that modern-day campaigns are not analogous to historical campaigns?
When I ran my campaign set in 1930s New Orleans, there was the threat of the police; there were random incidents of white bigotry; and there were elements of sexual coercion, since some of my players had chosen to create characters working at or associated with a colored sporting house (and since I took an unromanticized view of prostitution, similar to that in Working Girls or Street of Shame). Every player in that campaign chose it, and the majority of them over other proposed campaigns that had no such elements. No one was urged to do so by other players, and the players who didn’t like that campaign ended up in other campaigns, not sitting things out. So do you think there’s something wrong with my telling players, “If this isn’t the game for you, don’t choose it?”
It almost sounds to me as if you might be saying that I’m not entitled to propose the themes that interest me, or to be guided by the artistic integrity of the theme in realizing it, if any prospective player might be unhappy with the resulting treatment. And I don’t think I would accept that. It seems to me that informed consent is the gold standard here, and that people who don’t consent have every right not to participate, but no right to stop people who have consented from doing so. So if you are saying what I think, I think I have to disagree with you.
If it’s a case of “I’m out because I’m not interested in the setting/mechanics/game system/etc” then fine. But if it’s “I would like to play because it’s something I would really enjoy, but I don’t want to encounter X” and your response is “well, I’m keeping X because it’s essential to the setting, go play something else” then I’d consider it a problem.
And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If something is truly essential to a setting - eg you couldn’t remove Nazis from a WWII setting - you can work with players to define boundaries and how they can feel more comfortable with these elements. From something as simple as “if there are spiders, just don’t have them crawl on me” to making sure a specific type of violence (eg sexual assault) only happens “off screen” and never to a player’s character, or making sure players always have a way to prevent it happening.
Part of the problem is most people don’t know much about the past even when they think they do. That’s ok. There’s a whole hell of a lot of “past”. Even a professional historian spending their whole life studying “the past” will only know so much about some specific times and places and nothing about others. Sometimes when we think we know something from some sources, later sources and research prove us wrong anyway.
For one example of what I mean by most people don’t know the past, see what @RogerBW already mentioned: there were a lot more people of African descent in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe than most people seem to realize.
Or for another example, take the assertion made a few times now in this thread that child brides were a relatively common thing. For pretty much all of recorded human history that has never been true. The average age of marriage for women has generally fluctuated between late teens to mid twenties. In medieval Europe specifically, best we know from church records, women typically married from around age 19 to 22. It goes higher in heavily urban areas, usually into the late 20s, around 27-28 and in some specific regions it goes lower, but not lower than 16-17. That’s under most European / North American age of majority laws today, but hardly child brides. So why do we have this popular image of child brides? Because the few times it did happen, it’s the nobility doing it for political reasons, and they’re the ones everyone knows about. But we also know that those child marriages were rarely consummated until the girl was at least 16.
More generally, forcing someone to role play something they are uncomfortable with in the sense of racism, sexism, sexual assault or gender-based violence, experiencing homophobia or transphobia, slavery, child abuse, etc. should always be a no go. If you want to do a historic campaign (or modern day one!) that will include one of those, get everyone’s buy in first and make it clear that everyone has the right to ask for a pause or whatever if any individual finds a specific moment getting to be too intense. Ideally, there would be a specific mechanism in place to easily facilitate that.
On the other hand, I agree with posters above that rewriting things to just remove marginalized peoples, e.g. America but no Native Americans, is a big problem. That’s erasing an entire people just because you don’t want to deal with them. Figure out something else. Change the power dynamics so there isn’t the racism and genocide or something. But don’t just erase them.
If you’re doing a fantasy setting based on a real-world historic setting, feel free to otherwise leave any out of the negative that you want. Why not get that history “wrong”? I 100% guarantee you’ll be getting something else wrong that you think you’re getting right.
I think I’m entitled to decide for myself what is essential to a setting I propose. No one has a right to say that I have to accept them as a player, or run a campaign that they want to play in, or run a campaign that they approve of.
I had a quite successful career as a GM in San Diego for more than twenty years, with players of mine actively recruiting other players and recommending me to them. (I also brought together players who then ran campaigns for each other, and are still doing so now that I’m 1700 miles away.) At my peak, I had something like 15 players in three parallel campaigns. And the most important assets I had to offer them were my inventiveness and my artistic integrity. I don’t see the merit in sacrificing those to meet some external set of standards that aren’t part of informed consent.
If someone comes to you and says “I am black. I deal with racism every day. I don’t want to deal with it in a game that you have full control over.” and your response is that they should not be part of your game, that is racist gatekeeping.
If somebody comes to me and says, “I am black. I want to play in a game you are running, and I want you to run it on terms that are acceptable to me, and you do not get to say no,” then they are assuming the right to dispose of my labor without my consent. And my labor is not their property. I would give up roleplaying entirely before I would run games on those terms.
And just to make things explicit, this has nothing specifically to do with their being black. I would say the same to anyone who assumed such a right.
And I will make it explicit that I am talking about the comfort and safety of players. That this is someone from a marginalised group asking for an accommodation that would help them enjoy your game. Not someone demanding you run a different system or let them have an overpowered character.
You are gatekeeping people from playing through your actions. You are the kind of person we talk about when we discuss the problems with getting people who aren’t straight cisgender able bodied neurotypical white men into the hobby. By saying “You aren’t entitled to my labour”, which is true, you are saying “I want to do this and I don’t care if it is exclusionary”.
And I’m being polite when I say exclusionary. If you can’t alter your game to be inclusive to new (or even existing) players who are typically excluded from your game, then you’re not a good designer.
Clearly not every game will work for every player.
When I’m writing for friends, I take their tastes into account.
When I’m writing for strangers, I try to maximise the number of people who might enjoy the thing. Since I can’t appeal to everyone, if I have to cut out a group I’ll try to cut out one that’s well-served by lots of other games.
I am not a designer at all. I am writing as a person who runs sessions of roleplaying games in his or other people’s living rooms, or online.
As for straight white men (and the rest of your list of traits), on one hand, I think that straight white men have a right to choose to game only with other straight white men, just as black people have a right to choose to do things exclusively with other black people. To approve of different rights for people of different ethnicities would be racist, and I think I clearly do not have the right to force myself as a companion on unwilling black people.
But on the other hand, my own campaigns have had players who were black, Hispanic, South Asian, East Asian, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered—and they may have had a majority of women players over men; at any rate the numbers are close. I don’t say this to assert my own virtue, because I don’t need your approval; but to suggest that you might be thinking of me in terms of your own stereotypes about straight white etc. men rather than inquiring into the actual facts.
One one hand, I thought of saying something to you about the particular artistic qualities and themes of my campaigns; and on the other, of discussing the people who have played in them. But on the other, any attempt to do so amount to special pleading—to saying, “I ought to have the right to do this because I have some special merit.” And that’s not what I’m claiming; I’m claiming a basic right to make these choices for myself. I would be entitled to run a campaign on a theme I wanted, if I could find willing players for it, if it were a hack and slash dungeon crawl with no artistic merit, or a cosy murder mystery, or a romance set in the ante-bellum South. It’s been observed that when you start saying that censorship is okay if you’re dealing with pornography, or with Nazi or Communist propaganda, or with hate speech, then you have already surrendered the right to freedom of expression; to preserve it you have to defend the least worthy cases. And that’s what I’m doing.
As for safety of players, I really don’t think that I’m capable of being a threat to the people I game with, and still less to other people who aren’t even in my games. The idea that I’m a source of danger seems to me to be at best delusional. And of course people who feel that way are entirely free to avoid me.
As for comfort, a theme of many of my campaigns is cultural estrangement, the sense that “we’re not in Kansas any more.” I like that in the books I read and the games I play in, and I try to give it to other people. And that does entail a certain level of discomfort.
I don’t consider that people from marginalized groups have any special claim on me. What I owe them is respect for their freedom to make their own choices. Ordinarily I’m prepared to show other people good will, but the surest way for them to forfeit my good will is for them not to respect my freedom to make my own choices. I don’t accept the equation that “your need” = “my duty.”
I don’t think you’re entitled to say that this or that specific thing is a permissible ground for me to refuse a player’s request, and this other thing is not one. If I have any special value as a GM, it must be because of my sense of the artistic integrity of my campaigns as a whole; and I’m not going to forfeit that, or surrender my judgment of what it requires.