If your ttrpg story involves SYSTEMS OF POWER, it is a POLITICAL STORY.

Any decision you make with regards to power both in character and out of character is a POLITICAL DECISION.

If a game tells you that it is possible to talk your way past guards, this is a POLITICAL CONCEIT.

Talking your way past guards has become a staple in explaining D&D rules. This tells me we want to live in a world where such a thing is possible. This imagined possibility, then, informs our worlds just as much as the imagined possibility of spellcasting.

When talking your way past the guards is a possibility, but rolling up a charismatic orc is slightly less feasible, we come to understand the way that orcs are written outside of that power structure, which is to say, orcs become politically less viable in a world built as such.

Without drawing any connection to any real world representations of people, orcs come to signify a class of people with less access to the power structure that charisma as a stat, and talking your way past the guards, constructs. This is a political design decision.

So already this abstract representation has built in restrictions when it comes to the capacity for some to enact change within a system of power. Which is to say, kinda, that a low charisma score indicates not one’s lack of charm, but one’s exclusion from political sovereignty.

Thus, to attempt to talk your way past the guards is a political story: it invokes the mechanical differences that adhere to different groups of people that make it easier or harder to gain access to particular guarded areas.

Now obviously you don’t need to have orcs be POC.

But to tell another person that their reading of the power structures within your game is a wrong reading cannot be the correct answer. To say that someone is fabricating a politics with a story where the story itself is always a site of projection is just plain mean.

What is happening here is that you are projecting a particular political inclination into the story, and someone else is projecting another political inclination, such that many meanings emerge from the same narrative that people are taking part in.

The political, then, is always present, because it lives within us, and the various needs we have to explore those political narratives within the game narrative. If this makes you uncomfortable, fine.

If we are both exploring narratives of exclusion, but for me, this narrative points towards my experience as an Asian American person, and for you, it doesn’t, fine. But you don’t get to tell me that this exclusion narrative is NOT about what it is about FOR ME.

I, also, do not have the right to tell you that YOUR exclusion narrative is about being Asian American. It isn’t. Obviously. But in this narrative we share, we will emerge with different meanings. And you MUST learn to accommodate that multiplicity even if it is difficult.

Because what people are asking is for their narratives to be heard. And what you’re asking for is to not hear those narratives, because they are not your narrative. But look. Nobody is taking your narrative away. We are simply adding more complexity to what already exists.

So when people say that you can’t ask something to be free of the political, this is what they mean.

That we are trying to add value, which does not take away value from you. Listen to us.

And if it does, in the end, compete with your narrative, you were racist anyway.

(Also I know some of this is pretty loaded with big words, sorry. Let me know if something needs explaining. I think in the end this is more of a space for me to help those who are interested in better articulating what it is that we mean when we say everything is political!)