We're Not Playing D&D With The Escapist Ever Again

EDIT:
Periodically this post gets linked from GamerGhazi, where the link here (thanks!) its accompanied by a bunch of attacks on me and the women in my game group (boo!) from folks participating in a smear campaign started by Paul Matijevic / Ettin and his conspiracy theorist friends from the Something Awful boards literally because I like the wrong edition of Dungeons & Dragons (as Mandy explains here). If you have any questions about me or the motive for this post, here's my Ask.fm--I can link directly to evidence, you don't have to ask random Redditors why my allegedly "toxic" rpg presence has gone all Social Justice.

Hi everybody,

As many of you know, we've been working on making new episodes of our D&D documentary series "I Hit It With My Axe" for the Escapist website.

The first time around they gave us a shoestring budget and we figured we'd do it anyway for the fun of it, but this time they gave us a lot more and we were looking forward to doing the show exactly the way we wanted this time--lots of interviews, in-depth looks at the players and how we played games, and lots more jokes. We've been working with the Escapist and combing through the footage since the summer.

But then this week they hired this douche:

So, to put it simply: we refuse to work for the Escapist or its parent company any more.

Why? Well this is us:

Left to right, top to bottom:
Wizard, Druid, Wizard
Thief, Cleric, Wizard
DM, Thief, Druid
Thief, Ranger, Ranger

Without comparing anybody's struggle to anybody else's, you don't need a degree in social science to figure out that since one of the people in our group is a Jew, six are people of color, two were born handicapped and like someteen are bisexual women and one is trans it would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we were, hypothetically, to make money for a company that would then give that money to an actively anti-semitic, racist, ableist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic person. 

So the D&D With Porn Stars crew working with the Escapist under those conditions would be as hypocritical and self-defeating as supporting Think of the children!-anti-sex conservatives like Fred Hicks or Fox News. Here: we let you film us playing D&D, you make money, then take the money, buy a bullet, and shoot us each in the foot with it. 

Well, every monday I log on to Google Plus and run a videochat campaign where Scrap Princess plays an awesome wizard and we're happy to have her. We owe her the same protection we owe all our friends. I'm not gonna shoot Scrap (or Sarah or Ana or Natalie or Morgan) in the foot just so we can have a TV show.*

The most cutting-edge game-designer in the early tabletop hobby and a major force in early video games--Jennell Jacquays--is trans, as well as some of the most innovative folks working today. Jennell wrote Dark Tower, did the arcade conversions for Pac-Man and designed the Quake levels. If the girls in our group get shit on by conservative gamers and conspiracy theorists just for showing up to play and telling trolls to fuck off--I can't imagine what she and other transfolk go through having to actually work in the business.

And, for what it's worth--and many of you may not understand--I'm a porn performer, and so is most of the rest of the group, and you can't get too far in the adult industry without realizing the hours that trans people like Sarina Valentina, Bailey Jay, and Buck Angel put in on their sets are as real as the ones we put in on our sets and the stigma they face every day is real.

Maybe we'll put the new episodes of Axe out somewhere else, maybe not. The Escapist wants to give us a lot of money--but nothing is worth this compromise and any new gamers the show brings into the hobby are not worth the damage the Escapist does by telling people you can be openly transphobic and still get paid to talk about your dumb ideas.

Sometime maybe we'll get to see Stoya fight a manticore, but not today.

-Zak S.

-
-
-
-
-
-
*Yes, I checked with Scrap before linking to her page here to make sure she was cool with this post. She was. I put her official response in the comments below this post if you want to read it.
-

-
-