"Tournament of Rapists" - Three Years On, What We All Definitely Learned And Did Not In Any Way Forget Or Overlook

"Finally, some peace and quiet!" My house, before I let it run down.

In late summer 2015, a significant kerfluffle (don't ever use those two words together part 2: together again), erupted regarding a Drivethrurpg-sold supplement called Tournament of Rapists, a supplement for the Black Tokyo d20 Modern game line.  It resulted in a clarification of OneBookshelf's content policies, and an outcry that freedom of speech had been completely destroyed; permanently eliminated, never to return.

This news was a great relief to me. I for one was enthusiastic about an impending future where all free expression was eradicated, and I'm sure wasn't the only one: "Finally, some peace and quiet!"  Still, somehow I survived, and so did RPGs and, shockingly, so did talking about  them on the Internet.

The Pickpocket's Debate: Linen Gloves or Deerskin?

The "debate" that raged (few enough people were talking to each other and nobody was listening to each other, so the word is a poor approximation) was almost exclusively over how and whether Drivethrurpg.com should go about selling The Damned Thing, a debate that to me that, as a RPG purchaser (and drivethrurpg.com reviewer), sounded for all the world like arguing over which pistol people thought the robber ought point at me. Naturally, we all know that at this late date, with the gloom gathering and the stars overhead going out, anyone you buy anything from is trying to dredge as much out of you as possible for as little as possible in return.  Of course every business you have dealings with will cheat you, lie to you, poison you, and steal from you, if they can make a nickel doing it, or, shortly, those businesses will die and be replaced by one that will. Such is the nature of buying and selling in this best of all possible 21st centuries.  People want the inhuman commerce machines who control every aspect of our waking day (and many hours of our dreams!) to reflect their values, but the best the "business community" can ever do is pander.  On their normal days the entities we traffick with simply lie to us and on their worst days, they torture us.  They will never be human and so can never be virtuous, but hope springs eternal, outrage is an adrenaline-spiking fire, and disappointed snark is free.

So during this conflict I found myself in a strange place - every accusation against Tournament of Rapists seemed to be deployed only to try to persuade DriveThruRPG to refuse to sell it, and, similarly, the defenders of the product, such as they were, responded as if free expression itself would fall if it wasn't sold in their favorite (?) storefront.  I suppose the agitation nerds feel towards the commercial keepers of their interests shouldn't surprise me at this late date. Fox canceled a pretty average, middle-of-the-road space Western 15 years ago and the crazed freakout this decision caused is, as far as I can tell, still going on.  ("The real injustice was the cancellation of Terriers!" I howl, but nobody's going to ask me about that on a convention panel.)

Few were really directing their concerns to the product itself, and - quite surprisingly - none of the defenders were.  Everyone who styled themselves a defender of Tournament of Rapists, with ritualistic fervor bordering on tedium, had to denounce The Damned Thing before they demanded DriveThruRPG try to sell it to them. "Good luck, you're gonna need it!" one imagines them cheerfully concluding.

Only a few, on either side, were attempting to actually engage with the material and respond to it on its own terms.

I mean, I can explain what is objectionable about George Fitzhugh's Cannibals, All! (a deranged pro-slavery pre-Civil War publication). Perhaps even I can urge that its publication was harmful, a wicked deed, and it ought to have been suppressed, but in order to do so I have to look at what it is - the circumstances of its publishing, its form and style, its content and arguments, its emotional and moral appeals, its audience and their inclinations.  Or perhaps we conclude after an examination of these qualities that as vile as it was it was comparatively harmless and its suppression would be useless.  Or perhaps we conclude that it was vile, but it reflected a well-established vileness in society, so its suppression was not possible or would not have been effective, and should not have been done.  Or we conclude that it was vile but we are all right with vile pamphlets of this sort being published because it does not cross some other line.  (I suppose in Trump's America I ought to consider the possibility that someone might find a deranged racist pro-slavery pamphlet not to be vile at all, but please leave me my illusions for as long as I can keep them.)  Not until we have situated the work in the context of its time, place, form and format can we make these evaluations with any kind of thoughtfulness.

Once you start that undertaking with Tournament of Rapists you start to really run headlong into the same type of obstacles I described in my post about "list of feat" products - the evaluation of RPG products is aesthetically very challenging, since they are best understood not as works of fiction themselves, but technical manuals for a rough, private improvisational performance.  In other words, before it even makes sense to turn our eyes to DriveThruRPG and lecture them on what they should or shouldn't sell - in the same spirit as urging the crocodile eating us to keep its teeth brushed - we need to determine what we ought to and actually do with RPG products when we buy them, and that's not a question most are interjecting into the "debate."

It's even worse for tabletop RPG supplements: Tournament of Rapists is a setting supplement for a game line, Black Tokyo, which is itself based on another game line from an entirely different company, D20 Modern, which, according to the legalese in the front matter, is based on another game, Dungeons & Dragons.  Unquestionably D&D and D20 Modern are extremely relevant to why Tournament of Rapists and Black Tokyo are both creative failures.  Yet neither of those two games were mentioned when most spoke of The Damned Thing.

Would people have been okay with Tournament of Rapists if the title had been less crass, or if the text had been clearer that this was intended as a hall of villains and a description of their perfidy?  Perhaps some might have been appeased by this, but this position doesn't take RPG players seriously as collaborators in a creative process.  Just as importantly, who exactly lays eyes on the titles or texts of digital RPG supplements at your table anyway? One person? Maybe two.  You could just decide not to print out the title page.  (I assume everyone is still printing all the digital RPG supplements they buy because otherwise, the industry's continued use of the PDF format would be, if not technically a crime, severe negligence.)  No, certainly the objections went deeper than just a stupid title.

The flaws in Tournament of Rapists go right down to the conceptual level, yet few were willing to look at it that closely - it was like most people simply couldn't conceive of a criticism of the game on any level other than where it stood in a commercial market.  On the other "side", interlocutors couldn't conceive of a criticism of where the game stood in a market as anything short of demanding its non-existence, and explicitly skipped the step of saying what, if anything, made The Damned Thing actually worthwhile.

Rather, when The Damned Thing came out, most who protested it expressed that 1) they might come across it when they didn't want to, 2) others outside the hobby might come across it and gain a poor view of the hobby that was unwarranted, or 3) another, less horrible, product might be sold next to it.  All these things just endlessly circle a debate over what the identity of DriveThruRPG should be - is it a family friendly channel, broadcast TV, capable on its most dangerous night of having a chaste same-sex kiss at 9:45 PM?  Okay, maybe it can go further and be basic-cable edgy, but not descend to the level of dodgy late-night anime fansubs found in sticky VHS boxes in evidence lockups.  Or maybe it'll deliver hardcore porn on demand to anyone who wants some?  That question is all DriveThruRPG's problem, or a problem between DriveThruRPG and its publisher partners.  It's not our problem as players of RPGs.  It's not my problem as someone who tries to determine if a RPG product is good or bad.

In short, the fault is not in DriveThruRPG dot com; the fault is in our selves.

Our responsibility is to respond honestly to what we are experiencing and know, and to that extent I was let down by my fellow RPG players online.  I saw people who already would never play, purchase or read Tournament of Rapists, who had rejected D20 Modern and D&D for over a decade, becoming very, very agitated about The Damned Thing, as if it could be reasonably expected to affect them, or anyone at their table, or anyone that they know or might ever speak to.

Before I go further, I do want to acknowledge that there were others did try to engage with The Damned Thing, even one I can remember that looked at the excerpts from the product to explain their thinking.  There were also others who had noticed and mocked the Black Tokyo game line for years.  At least both of these approaches engaged with the material.  The people making fun of it found it laughable and they therefore laughed at it; this is a fit and proper outcome. Those that found it disgusting expressed their disgust, those who attempted to situate it in the long and very poor history of the portrayal of sexual abuse in the hobby at least had a point of view on it beyond how it should be situated as a commercial product.  By no means is this blog post meant to say "I'm the only one that noticed these things!"  But in my circles, very few did.  (I won't link those that did because god knows none of them need to worry about people getting mad at my dumb opinion and fucking with them instead of me since I keep my comments section, ears and eyes closed at all times.)

Tournament of Rapists was a product that was only ever going to sell 4 copies; 2 of them to wealthy rubberneckers, and which almost certainly could never see even a single second of at-table play.  (The mechanical flaws in the supplement are too boring to list here; download any D20 Modern supplement and you'll see them repeated again and again.)  The commercial significance of the product is essentially zero, so critiquing commercial decisions about it's sale or potential lack of sales seems the very definition of woolgathering.  Whatever the problem with Tournament of Rapists was, it certainly wasn't that the actual product would affect people's actual games. It wouldn't turn the RPG hobby in a new direction.   No one was ever going to play it, read it or even look at it, within the margin of error.

But to say the product could never have had any impact is not a defense of it.  If Tournament of Rapists is simply a waste of time, a completely worthless collection of bits and bytes, why not exile it?  If the product won't help anything by its presence, surely we are not harmed by its absence.

Of course Chris Field could simply print it out and hand it to whoever wanted it, so it's not a matter of his legal rights to freedom of expression.  Tabletop RPGs did get made and sold before Drivethrurpg existed, after all.  If Tournament of Rapists isn't worthwhile, what exactly are we "protecting" when we demand a particular position for it in a commercial market?

This whole shebang also put me in a strange position for one reason: I like Chris Field's other work and I have for years.

The Damned Thing

I don't want to defend Tournament of Rapists, because it's completely indefensible and an absolute toxic waste dump all the way down to its rotten core.  But I want to explain why it was actually bad, why it failed on the terms that it presented, not just in terms of being a crass relative at the family dinner table, or a billboard selling beer that was just too ugly to be permitted to stand next to all the other billboards selling all the other brands of beer.

I think Field has created some very strange and interesting things in many of his game lines. I think Otherverse America, one of his other product lines, is a science fiction world that stands absolutely unique in a bland sea of space operas and cyberpunk knockoffs.  Within the confines of the d20 Modern and Pathfinder SRD systems (and more on why this is a major caveat below), he is someone who I see as an innovative voice, and his failures (the Black Tokyo line primary among them) are illustrative of the failures I see independent RPG creators recapitulating again and again.

As always, another picture of one of this blog's fine readers.

So, because I have DriveThruRPG Featured Reviewer access (and thank you to them for permitting me to keep it despite developing a very strange reviewing style whose orbit only intersects with "product reviews" in lengthily disjointed ways), I have a broad view of what exactly is being produced and what world Tournament of Rapists came from.  I wanted to write this to tell you why Tournament of Rapists (and the Black Tokyo line in general) fails as a RPG hobby creation.  I'm not going to tell you why it fails as a commercial product, or give advice to people who want to sell it, or who don't want it sold, or why it isn't "something I like" or why it isn't "something you should like."  Those questions are beyond either my expertise or my interest and anyway, nobody reads this blog except 6 people and 2 dogs, so just using it to give my "opinion" is a waste of everyone's time, especially the dogs'.

I think the best way to explain the flaws in Black Tokyo and Tournament of Rapists (for there isn't a hair's breadth of difference between the flaws, from a conceptual point of view) is to go into detail about my favorite RPG line produced by Field: Otherverse America.

Leave Your Husband, Kill Your Children, Practice Witchcraft, Destroy Capitalism and Become a Lesbian

Otherverse America is a pulp science fiction game portraying a far future world in which the pro-life/pro-choice political conflict over abortion has escalated into a major cultural, religious, psychic, military and even extraterrestrial political divide.  True to its name, it is a game of little relevance to the world outside America, as it portrays an exaggerated view of a peculiarly American modern conflict.

Science fiction has always exaggerated real-world issues in order to provoke thinking on those subjects.  Ghostbusters (1984) is a conservative fantasy-comedy of a group of entrepreneurs trying to make their way as federal environmental regulators try to keep them from saving the world with their new and dangerous products.  H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is best understood entirely as a Victorian extrapolation of extremely exaggerated class politics.

What's innovative about Otherverse America is the type of exaggeration that it portrays - quite unique, and uniquely suited to tabletop RPGs.  In Otherverse America, the pro-choice side of the conflict really is a gang of pagan, queer, hyperscientific communal-living advocates who practice witchcraft, and the pro-life side of the conflict really are fascist, theocratic, aggressive militarists regulating everyone's sex lives, who revere pregnancy as a religious state of grace granting legal and cultural authority for its duration, and you can bet your socks that they also have banned oral contraceptives and condoms. In Otherverse America, each side of this culture war isn't portrayed as possessing the ideals and priorities of their real-life counterparts, even exaggerated; they're portrayed as possessing exaggerated versions of the ideals and priorities their real-life counterparts' enemies attribute to them, and honestly, this is a bit of a masterstroke.

Even more remarkably, this satirical rule works no matter which political side you're on in the real world.  If the satire was from the particular point of view of one side of the conflict, we could complain that our own views were misrepresented, or that our enemies were either not satirized sufficiently ("but they really do believe that!") or were made out to be too sympathetic.  The Otherverse America method lets us revel in the exaggeration of our own beliefs ("ha ha, this is what they think we're really like!") while similarly feeling no qualms about the treatment of the other side. And of course if you're a squishy middle-of-the-roader, you get to blow both sides up beyond all recognition.  It's a way to keep gamers of all political stripes satisfied, interested, and collaborating fruitfully.  (I am not the sort of person who believes there are no politically conservative RPG players out there; I suspect if you took an exit poll of our little hobby that Trump would have handily won it in percentages he couldn't come close to racking up nationally.)

But that alone wouldn't be enough to really make me love Otherverse America as much as I do. Beyond this broad-stroke exaggeration, Otherverse America relentlessly treats its caricatured versions of the abortion conflict as affecting real people with real motivations.  Consider that each "faction" sourcebook contains dozens on dozens of brief, one-paragraph backgrounds for player characters to choose from or take inspiration from, explaining how they came to be part of the faction and what they see as their place within it.  As crazy as a world with psychic powers, vat-grown clone soldiers, and mecha whose piloting is strictly limited to pregnant women is, Otherverse America is a setting whose characters are meant to be played "straight"; we might cackle at their exaggerated situations (there's a dick-shaped space battle cruiser) and weird values, but in their world they are real and their struggles have weight.  It's utterly bonkers but because of its thematic consistency, Otherverse America's science fiction parody works at the gaming table in a way many that just try to reconstruct an existing science fictional concept fail to achieve.

By contrast, Black Tokyo is a pastiche of violent hentai comics.  It's not based on just "pornography" as a source concept, but the tiniest slice of the tiniest slice of pornographic material.  Black Tokyo doesn't develop any aesthetic independent of this incredibly specific subsubsubgenre, and indeed, when something sneaks in from action movies or horror comics (a tournament of rapists, for example), it sticks out awkwardly and fails to mesh with the remainder of the material.

Often, RPGs use pastiche to call on common cultural ideas and developments that have been established over many works and over many years in a way that can get a RPG group on the same page quickly, by using broad referents that everyone has absorbed some portion of just by existing in modern (Western, English-speaking, ahem) culture.  There's no need to re-do work that the underlying culture has already done.  Freedom City is Green Ronin saying "a comic book city", with all the references and connections of it not to any particular issue of any particular comic book, but to the broader cultural signifiers of Metropolis, Marvel's New York City, and Gotham City.  Every OSR dude with a blog has an "Appendix N-inspired" weird fantasy supplement in their back pocket, it seems, and as pointless as that appears to me, a guy who prefers Ficciones to Conan, it's a really solid way of  bringing materials to the table without forcing people to know a particular reference fiction.  Instead, all you have to know is a type of fiction, a broad subgenre spanning decades.  (In fact, my aversion to the subgenre shows it is a very good thing to base a game on since it will keep away chumps like me who wouldn't appreciate the goings-on if I did show up.)

But pornographic hentai is such a narrow slice of culture, and is itself already usually a pastiche (of non-hentai manga and other sources), that a RPG pastiche has very little to pick from to bring to the table.  Unlike Otherverse America, Black Tokyo and its supplements give us no place to stand - are we interrogating this pornography? Are we celebrating it?  Creating it?  Satirizing it?

Okay, Google, yeah, technically I guess these are lesbian test tubes?

There are other "tentacle porn" games that are meant to be satirical.  Most are silly, over the top, "look at this stuff, aren't people gross for stroking off to it" gags, and in the end, mocking what gets someone else off is a combination of a waste of time, a one-joke enterprise, and, of course, it's normally done in order to reinforce the patriarchy's control over sexuality.  (At least play Otherverse America and be a witchcraft-slinging test tube hell-lesbian!)  But Black Tokyo isn't a satire (although there have been protestations from various quarters that it is, it just doesn't ring true to anyone who's read the material.)  In Black Tokyo, you're not setting up sexual situations, you're setting up action situations with sex (consensual or not) merely a gloss.  Even the additional mechanics of Black Tokyo fail to make the game actually pornographic instead of just exploitative.

I'm not inherently against pornography, and, if one is ever produced, even a pornographic tabletop RPG could be done faithfully, if that's what people are into and it's produced ethically and with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.  In this world of Kindle porno, xvideos dot com, and dick pill spam, like, why not make a tabletop RPG that helps a group improvise the production of verbal pornography?  But Black Tokyo doesn't do this.  It doesn't assist a table of players in the production of pornography, especially not pornographic hentai, which relies on visuals to a degree much greater than is supported by the game.  There is no attention in Black Tokyo to the actual production of pornographic play - no way to, say, steer a game from one hentai fetish to another, no attention to selecting a group which will be into each fetish, no attention to creating a safe environment for people to open up about their sexual fantasies, and not even a 101-level look at how to collaborate to make those fantasies come about in an arousing way. The mechanics of the game are as un-sexy as can be imagined, and even the advice to players and GMs is so clinical and frankly un-excited about the concept that it seems to treat the possibility of arousal as laughable instead of desirable.  Neither does it embrace the one-joke parody of the "tentacle porn" card games that are out there.  (At least the card games have hentai-esque art!  Tabletop RPG sessions are verbal!)  So the pornographic material in the Black Tokyo line is worthless as parody, worthless as pornography, worthless as comedy, worthless as game material, and frankly just a waste of everyone's time.

I mean, Otherverse America contains just as much bonkers, deranged takes on sexuality, but unlike Black Tokyo they are presented in service to a theme, an aesthetic by which I can make a judgment call for me and my group: "yes, this material is good, will help us build and inhabit the world of Otherverse America" or "no, this material misses the mark."  For Black Tokyo, there simply is no "there" there.  Otherverse America presents its own ethics, its own strange morality.  It is attempting to carve out its own cultural niche, not pursuing a niche of a niche of a niche, trying to fit itself into something already too small to contain it.

There are many ways the Otherverse America line of products could be improved.  It could put more attention to the satire, discussing how to collaborate with your own group to import new satirical material and have it make sense in the context of the game.  Certainly in the age of Trump, when a guy who unquestionably despises women and considers pregnancy (his word) disgusting, could be made the standard-bearer for anti-abortion activism, the the raw material for satire of this kind is all around us.  In RPGs we can make these themes explicit in a way that a science fiction writer can't, since RPGs are technical manuals for group collaboration in an improvised performance.

Why not take advantage of the form and simply say directly to the game organizers "here's what you can do to help your group make this material work for them, to the goals you select?"  It's telling that the one-star reviews for Otherverse America material often see it as exploitative, certainly a failure state that it falls into at times.  For example, one pro-life gamer posted a one-star review alarmed that Otherverse America's pro-choice faction had a reference in it to disgraced doctor Kermit Gosnell. Of course the poster thinks that Gosnell is actually lionized by choice supporters today, so they don't get the joke.  When Otherverse America's satire falls short, it becomes partisan or exploitative, and loses the only reasons that anyone would ever want to imagine a character in it.  But it at least has a conceptual space that it tries to mark out that's broad enough to permit a player (including a GM) to bring something to the table, to develop the idea of it enough to make play fun and worthwhile.

Otherverse America isn't perfect, and it makes blunders (sometimes quite spectacular ones, given what it's trying to do) but at least it's trying to do something. You can actually think about and talk about what a good Otherverse America supplement is, or about what a bad mistake something in it is.

A +2 Situational Bonus To Fucking

Tournament of Rapists was a dreadful supplement, but what made it dreadful wasn't only that it was exploitative, or failed to develop its own aesthetic or insufficiently respectful of a very sensitive topic.  It couldn't avoid being dreadful in these ways because it's attached to the d20 system.

Many people were down on d20 Modern, though I for one quite enjoyed it.  I liked the concept of attaching classes to the attribute system, always the most worthless part of any D&D edition you want to name.  ("Is this the edition that will finally make attributes good?" Spoiler alert! It's not.)  I also thought a lot of the talent trees were more thematic, consistent and interesting than feats, the chief mechanical innovation of the Third Edition era of D&D.  (Of course, to my chagrin, feats were still an important part of D20 Modern.)  I'm probably one of the few people who could really high-five a d20 Modern game these days.  But attaching an action-adventure system, complete with talents about hit points and feats about how many feet you move in a move-equivalent action is not just a strange decision for a game based on violent hentai pornography; it's a completely stupid one.  This is a subsubsubgenre where back-and-forth combat of the type advanced in d20 Modern just isn't on the table and where even the most rudimentary biology, physics and continuity is routinely ignored.  How a violent-hentai-pornography-inspired RPG ended up a d20 Modern supplement is a sign of how completely the d20 SRD dominated self-published games throughout the 2000s and even into the 201Xs.  There is simply no benefit whatsoever to the play of Black Tokyo from d20 Modern, or any type of action-adventure RPG where resolving challenges are the key function! But this is what RPG players can bring themselves to imagine, so this is what they are sold.

Compare this to Otherverse America, which wholeheartedly embraces the action-adventure elements of d20 Modern - the characters are in a mercenary squad, or they're special forces soldiers for their factions, or they're psychics on the run from one faction's government or another, or they're soldiers who were fighting each other and then put in a bad situation.  Similarly to how Otherverse America develops its own exaggerated political situation, it also develops exaggerated action-adventure situations and they feel organically part of the setting.  You can read Otherverse America and come up with encounters, scenarios and campaigns that the mechanics mesh with, just as in D&D3 and the best of all d20 material.  But in Black Tokyo, the imaginative detail all goes into limp mechanics that have virtually no connection to play because there's no central fictional place for the game to stand.  There's no target for the game to aim at.

Looking things up while fucking doesn't make fucking more fun.

Again, if someone wanted to do a pornographic RPG, I see nothing wrong with that conceptually, but mechanically tying it to an action-adventure system like d20 is beyond foolish.  I'm certainly not going to unravel the knot of violent depictions in pornography here, but suffice to say that I think we can all agree that even if that's the direction you decide to go, it's not tactical violence of the sort organized by the d20 system, and attaching it to such a system absolutely guarantees that you won't be able to present the subject in a way that's engaging, respectful of the players, or - the most telling omission - titillating.  There's nothing in d20 Modern that permits you to create such an experience.

I honestly don't care whether DriveThruRPG sells The Damned Thing, or doesn't sell it, or sells it with a different title, or whether any digital storefront does, or whether it has to be sold on a USB stick in a brown paper bag on a street corner, so long as the government's not involved with the decision and it isn't completely suppressed (what would that even be?).  That's a business decision, and if somehow a virtuous business decision happens to be made, eventually, it will be undone by a later business decision.

No, my concern is with the product itself, as it presents and situates itself, and that's how it should be evaluated.  From its bedrock foundations, right down to its concept, Black Tokyo is a creative failure of a game; Tournament of Rapists couldn't possibly ever be any better than the game line will permit it to be.  It's an artistic failure, not only a failure of good taste or even of (God help us) progressive values that should keep it at arm's length.  It's literally a supplement for a supplement for a supplement of a role-playing game based on a small slice of a small slice of a small slice of pornography.  There isn't any room in it for the players, let alone for a GM's creative direction, let alone for any fun, arousal or energy.  It doesn't even have room to be exploitative of its own accord, it wouldn't know how to be exploitative or have any of the mechanical tools to do so.  When Tournament of Rapists is exploitative, it even has to rely on exploitative concepts developed by someone else!  Black Tokyo and The Damned Thing it spawned are failures specifically on their own terms, specifically within their milieu. As a hobbyist - more, God grant, than a customer - that's what matters to me.

"Did I just read several thousand words - written three years late - just to reach the conclusion that Tournament of Rapists is a bad RPG supplement? Way to go out on a fuckin limb there, JD, thanks for the hot take"

Quiet, you!

love too take that hot house!!!

No, the point of writing all of that was to, first, urge everyone to separate the suitability of a product for a particular outlet from the quality of the product.  You'd think this would have been painfully obvious, but again and again as post after post targeted DrivethruRPG and its role in "the community", it became clear that it certainly was not obvious.  Secondly, I wanted to get across to you that the mistakes of Tournament of Rapists begin at the conceptual level.  Those mistakes ensured that no matter how banal the title might have been made, and how much sensitivity the subject might have been approached with, the supplement would always be terrible.  And it is my experience that these conceptual problems are extremely common mistakes that lots and lots of RPG creators make in many less obvious contexts. So here's a breakdown: 

• Avoid making your cultural referents too specific, too narrow.  There's a reason that even in highly specialized games (Space Wurm v. Moonicorn or Dogs in the Vineyard for example) that there is a broad base of sources (psychic space 70s sf, Westerns) that can be drawn from for inspiration, and plenty of room to permit players to express themselves in the confines of the game.  The OSR veneration of Appendix N is probably the most constructive expression of this. Call of Cthulhu being a roleplaying game from "the world" of H.P. Lovecraft (and all the horror writers he inspired, as it turns out) is another.
• If you're using an action-adventure system (like D20 Modern), make an action-adventure campaign where action and adventure is the main draw.  If D20 Call of Cthulhu can do it, you can do it.  Otherverse America does it, and Black Tokyo doesn't and can't, because it doesn't draw from action adventure properties.  Similarly, don't think that just because the market for something is a particular way that you should take just any old topic and hammer it in place into the market because you don't think you'll make money any other way, because you will hollow out your own idea and make it unable to stand on its own two feet.  In other words, if it's 2004 and d20 Modern is going great guns, don't just make a thing and say "oh yeah, uh, it's d20 Modern" because that's what's selling - instead, look at d20 Modern and think "what is the greatest, most incredible d20 Modern thing I can make"?  Even supposedly generic systems like GURPS or Savage Worlds carry with them assumptions and specializations that make them good at some things and bad at others. D20 Modern is not good at pornography.
• As a player of tabletop RPGs, your primary responsibility is to the safety, enjoyment and collaboration of your fellow players.  If you're trying to collaborate in an area where you don't feel like you have anything to contribute, or where you feel what you contribute can only hurt others, you need to put that feeling on the table.  If you're going to play a game centered around porno, or murder, or golf, that's completely fine, but there ought to be a conversation in which everyone says up front "This is a game where we're fucking, killing, and playing golf" and everyone affirmatively is okay with it.  Actually, wait, that's a good game idea, don't steal that. (writes "Copyright 2018, DO NOT STEAL" on front page of spiral bound notebook.)   Most importantly, you have no responsibility to DriveThruRPG or anyone else selling you the materials for your games.
• Titillating a RPG reader is not the same as helping a RPG player produce titillating material.  No matter what provocation you're trying to transmit through your work (and all RPGs try to provoke something), the important thing is how you help the player provoke that feeling at the table, not how your creation provokes it in the player when read outside of play.  The greatest piece of art you can buy for your work is wasted space and money unless it produces actionable material in play.  (I leave it as a terrifying exercise for a fearful reader what it means that the typical RPG has 3-4 pieces of visual art per page which does not and will never fulfill this requirement.)
• Don't just satirize or strip-mine culture for your RPG referents; extract from it thoughtfully.  Just because Marvel and DC made superheroes this way doesn't mean that's how they should be.  Just because Dickens wrote about Victorian problems that way doesn't mean that's how you have to approach them.  Definitely use cultural referents to quickly bring your fellow improvisers up to speed. But don't just randomly grab them because they sound cool or because you like them.  If you carefully curate what you're bringing in, then your collaborators can fit their contributions with yours like a jigsaw puzzle. Otherwise they will be stuck bringing in random crap and it will conflict both with your goals and each other's.

Okay, but where does that leave the controversy? It's even worse than you thought!  Because between the outcry, the response, and the outcry over the response, and the response to the outcry over the response to the outcry, "the community", if there was one, would have made some progress on these issues. And we unquestionably, thoroughly, in every way, did not do so at all.

My suggestion, that there is actually no online RPG community, so "nothing" was the foregone conclusion, is not welcome and nobody wants to hear it.  Nobody wants me to point to this, or to the dozens of other controversies that shake our little online RPG discussion world, and the absolute lack of changes these controversies cause. Nobody wants to hear me say "look, there, see? there's no community here."  Nobody wants to hear it. Therefore I'll write another 20,000 words about that topic.  But at another time.