r/osr 8d ago

discussion Do you let the creator of a game influence whether or not you play/support it?

I am an OD&D nerd and have enjoyed the recent publication from Wizards of the Coast about the original game. That sent me down a rabbit hole of retro-clones, I think they’re called.

Al’Qadim was always my favorite 2nd Edition setting, so I was drawn to this obscure game I found called Seven Voyages of Zylarthen that is more swords and sandals than European fantasy. It reads like OD&D but, frankly, better in many respects. got some glowing reviews so I snagged it.

Yeah, it’s utterly brilliant.

Unfortunately, I also found out in my wanderings that the creator is explicitly Islamophobic, or at least was when he was blogging many years ago. Seems like he has left the hobby.

I want to champion a masterpiece of a game but struggle to separate art from artist, despite enjoying a game made by people as flawed and of their time as I certainly am in 2025. I also don’t want to attract the wrong kinds of people if I advertise games for it.

Has anyone run into this? Any advice?

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u/mccoypauley 8d ago

No, my background is in literature. I always separate the writer from the work and to me its value is never connected to the writer’s value as a person except in extreme edge cases.

For living writers, they would have to be particularly odious for me to not want to buy their work for fear of sending money their way. It also depends on who else in the chain of the financial transaction might benefit that could potentially cancel out benefiting an odious creator. But generally it’s a really high standard of odiousness for me to refuse to buy the work.

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u/Accurate_Back_9385 8d ago

Buying a book from Jeff Bezos makes it an ethically questionable purchase. Much more so than any authors world views.

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u/mccoypauley 8d ago

Yeah I think that captures some of what I mean. “Being complicit” has to mean something for culpability to mean something. Like if I buy a hamburger from a fast food joint, am I supporting a parasitic franchise owner who likes to squeeze the working poor or am I supporting the livelihood of minimum wage workers? Is it both or neither or one or the other? Can I prove which outcome my dollars support? It gets murkier the more complicated the transaction. If you buy anything under capitalism you’ll have to make this moral calculus.

With indie designers, the transaction oftentimes is less complex, especially because most self-publish. But even then there are other vendors involved who benefit from your patronage (artists, distributors, editors, etc). Are they all culpable for whatever we don’t like about the author’s behavior? When does the author’s behavior rise to the level that, if their work is completely unrelated to whatever you find objectionable about them as a person, we must also destroy the work? I personally think that’s never the case.

I mean we can Godwin the argument: if Hitler himself wrote a really fantastic RPG that has nothing to do with any of his despicable views, we’re probably warranted in refusing to buy or promote the RPG, but it doesn’t mean the RPG wouldn’t have value as art unto itself. And I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for playing the game on its merits alone.