probably. i think it's more that she's a trekky that understands we aren't even close to there, and for her, a commune was always a close second anyway.

that's the bit

i admit i didn't know any of that, my experience of the game is just that picking your race is mechanically important to a suspicious degree and the alignment system is shit

at least in D&D’s original mode of play.

Which endured for a few years in the 1970s for a small audience before it was wholly eclipsed by subsequent editions, expansions, and authors.

The central foundational gameplay loop of D&D (and derived fantasy dungeon-crawlers) is to invade other peoples’ homes and take their stuff. It is an explicitly settler-colonialist game that uses the exact same excuses as real-world religious and ethnic violence (these people are monsters, they worship evil gods, they are irredeemably corrupt, etc…)

The earliest adventures posit a group of common people raiding the large fortified estates of land barons and aristocrats, in the style of English Privateers or Robinhood-esque revolutionaries. It is no more "explicitly settler-colonialist" than a game featuring a bank robbery is a story lionizing greedy capitalists.

Gary Gygax was an arch-conservative and proud settler-colonialist.

Gary Gygax was a guy obsessed with medieval themed war games who had about as much to do with settler-colonialism as Daniel Craig has to do with The Red Scare. What's more, he ceased serious input into the franchise when he sold the license to WotC in 1997. Long before then, the property was littered with derivative settings and works that ran counter to whatever gameplay one-liners buried under three tiers of links you can dredge up. Whitewashing D&D as uniquely the product of Gary Gygax erases the works of countless other openly progressive authors, from Margaret Weis to Monte Cook to Ajit George. Hell, it whitewashes away all the young people happy to play the game within a progressive context.

He explicitly condoned the murder of orc prisoners, including non-combatants like, children because “nits make lice,” drawing an intentional parallel between the killing of monsters in D&D to the genocide of Native Americans.

You could as easily argue he was arguing for the massacre of the Romanov Children or the execution of the scions and cronies of French Nobility. Hell, the original "evil races" included the pale pig-shaped Orcs and dog-headed Kobolds, far more closely associated with 19th century Europeans than the Good-Aligned Elves and Halflings who better paralleled American Natives or Pacific Islanders.

The leap of logic you're making is entirely the consequence of this sequestered western liberal view of history.

Modern D&D has deviated from the dungeon crawl as the central gameplay loop, and I think that it’s possible to develop a non-colonialist dungeon-crawling framework, but people should be very critical of D&D’s roots.

The critique of the Dungeon Crawl Loop skips right over where Dungeons even come from. Specifically, they are prisons constructed under the large fortified manner houses of the aristocracy, for the purpose of hording looted resources and imprisoning/torturing dissidents. Even as the game has evolved to focus on exploration and social encounters than the grind of room-to-room combat, there continues to be - as there always has been - a through-line of play that revolves around toppling villainous hierarchs by displacing them from their centers of power.

That's about as Leftist a theme as they come.

I never understood the need to defend treats as being leftist, like Steven Universe is one of my favorite animated series and it's probably the most lib media product ever created on the planet, it's fine to enjoy things that aren't explicitly communist folks

Like sure, the game chock full of racial essentialism and colonialist tropes headed by a company that literally sends Pinkertons to people's houses is left wing :shrug-outta-hecks: It's just kinda vapid because there's tons of rpgs that literally are leftist and about leftist themes but instead we get dissertations about how Call of Duty is actually leftist because one of the DLC packs was made by Stephen King or something

The central foundational gameplay loop of D&D (and derived fantasy dungeon-crawlers) is to invade other peoples’ homes and take their stuff.

I subtly made it so the rewards/treasures that my party got in their most recent campaigns were voluntarily given gratitude gifts from the people they helped. :sicko-wholesome:

leftist D&D wouldnt have halflings, it'd have child laborers with rickets cos they had to work 18 hours in a mine every day. and there'd be only one playable class, the working class.

D&D has classes but they’re some weird obfuscated shit

I would be more critical of "Levels", which are the class-hierarchy mechanical equivalent. But you're not ready for that conversation.

it’s also class-collaborationist.

That varies heavily on the game being played. A Robinhood-esque story of rebels in the woods fighting a despotic thieving sheriff is very different from a Knights of the Round Table campaign in pursuit of Rules Based International Order.

and heavily race-based.

Practically speaking, the race-based aspect is just an excuse for stat adjustments. From a storytelling perspective, the "races" are stand ins for "nations/cultures", and the multi-racial party is a compelling metaphor for Internationalism.

A game in which a handful of misfits overcome their differences to collaborate on a project of revolutionary change is... fascist how?

:shrug-outta-hecks:

Not much you can do about people who are nakedly dishonest except avoid them.