transfemmeDM

But is there a thieves guild with a legitimate monopoly on theft outside of the Discworld? In normal fantasy, they're bribing the government and murdering competitors, right?

As for where the Thieves' Guild came from, Fritz Leiber did indeed invent it. My theory is that The Court of Miracles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (not so much the novel, but specifically the 1939 film, the one with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo) was a major influence both for Leiber's story and the trope as a whole. See here:

Allegedly they did have their own opaque jargon and oaths of loyalty and silence. They also absorbed crooked priests, merchants, and lawyers into their faction.

The only problem is that Green treats the legend more or less as fact, and it's really not. There was indeed a big trial in 1455 in Dijon, and people got hanged, and intriguingly left behind a record of their jargon, cant, argot. But these Coquillards were just a group of miscreants hanging about in brothels, pimping, and doing petty crime (theft, counterfeiting, fraud, that sort of thing). And okay, counterfeiting was actually considered a major crime at the time, hence the gallows, but in the context of the complete fucking mayhem that was the Hundred Years' War and its aftermath, all this was peanuts. Others had been killing and pillaging indiscriminately, slaughtering babies, mutilating people for laughs, and occasionally eating them, and here was a bunch of… frat boys that somehow got painted as this sinister criminal organisation.

The activity of these Coquillards was highly localised, and it lasted a few years. It's a stretch to even call them a gang. But over the next centuries, itinerant beggars also got called Coquillards (there's zero evidence that they called themselves that), and there's nothing respectable law-abiding people (so. our historical sources.) love more than vilifying an already marginalised group, especially when they roam and don't stay put. So the two got conflated, and the Coquillards were now painted as a sinister and strictly hierarchical criminal organisation that had spread all over France, like miasma. Good people, beware!

You know how Trump started calling Antifa (with a capital A!) a terrorist organisation, as in a single group and indeed organised (lmao), and inventing wholecloth Latin American cartels and calling them narcoterrorists, and wildly exaggerating the scope, scale, reach, and danger of criminal groups that do exist? It's kind of like that, though the moral panic was less engineered with intent, and more spontaneously springing from the prejudices and narrow interests of those respectable people.

"oh, did you make the font bigger and more legible?"

"no we're just doing the next edition in D&D5e"

"we're making our video game more accessible!"

"oh did you add an option to remap the controls?"

"which part? what did you make accessible?"

it is a very popular trend right now to add, like, features that skip the engagement with an interactive work of art, such as skipping combat or making combat impossible to lose in a combat-focused video game, or in the scene of TTRPGs making your TTRPG completely dumbed down or just hastily and mindlessly making it a D&D5e hack "because people already know how to play D&D5e and I want it to be accessible" instead of expecting people to actually read and learn and engage with a set of specific rules, and call all of that "accessibility" instead of adding "accessibility" features that would actually help disabled people access the "meat" of whatever the interactive art is.

If it's a combat-focused video game, some examples would be helping them engage with the full depth of the combat by allowing the controls to be fully remapped to something easier for their hands(or lack of hands), or the option to disable flashing lights or reduce the intensity muzzle flashes on the guns or something.

I think I have come up with a good example to illustrate this point. Let's say there is an FPS where you shoot aliens. Pretend it's, like, Halo but not specifically Halo.

And let’s say there’s a group of disabled gamers who are excited for this video game.

Missing Finger Guy, Deaf Guy, Colorblind Guy, and Poor Eyesight Guy.

Missing Finger Guy is missing at least one finger that corresponds to the Dodge button, he can’t reliably press it especially on short notice when aliens are coming at his character. So, he can’t really play the game because dodging is required to beat the levels. The game devs provide an “acccessibility” easy mode that turns off combat or makes the enemies do so little damage that he never needs to use the Dodge button. So, Missing Finger Guy can play the game now, right? Wrong. Dodging enemies *is* the game, and he still never gets to play with the Dodge button, or engage with any of the other elements of the game that are watered down by making enemy attacks not matter. To make the fun gameplay of dodging enemies accessible to this player, the answer is to allow remapping the Dodge action to a button that he can reach.

Deaf Guy

The game expects the player to rely on audio cues to know when enemies are sneaking up behind them or when a grenade lands at their feet or when an enemy is about to do a specific attack. Obviously the deaf player can’t hear these and can’t play the game because he’ll just die all the time to attacks which are literally impossible for him to predict. Again, this could be “fixed” by a mode that makes it so it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t hear a grenade land at his character’s feet by removing the consequence of death for failing to notice the grenade, or you could add the option to turn on subtitles for both story dialogue and sound effects like “[grenade beep]” and “[screatchure scream].” One of these allows the deaf gamer to play on roughly the same playing field as other players and react to threats the same way that hearing people can do that he can engage with the meat of the game, and the other doesn’t.

Colorblind Guy

The video game features enemies that are identifiable by their red and blue armor. Red aliens throw red grenades that you can catch and throw back, and blue aliens throw blue grenades that explode by proximity and you just have to fully avoid. Obviously, a colorblind player cannot reliably tell these apart, and would either have to try to throw back grenades at random and hope for the best, or just avoid all grenades to be safe. You could “fix” this by removing the consequence of death for getting exploded by a grenade, or you could fix it by adding a togglable colorblindness mode that switches the color distinction to something visible or adds some other distinctive feature besides color to one of those grenade types. One of these allows the colorblind player to engage with the intended gameplay of the game by taking informed risks by trying to throw back certain grenades, and one of them doesn’t, making it just not matter what decision he makes.

Poor Eyesight Guy

You get the formula by now. The *actually* accessible feature would be allowing him to adjust the text to be more readable instead of making it not matter if he can read the directions that tell him how to get through the minefield safety by removing the consequences for stepping on a mine.

A mode that simply removes consequences for failing to engage with and react appropriately to the threats the game presents is, at best, appealing only to people who don’t actually *like* the gameplay in the first place, while still shutting out the people who *want* to engage with the full depth of the gameplay but can’t because of some disability that prevents them from doing so as intended.

Because the gameplay isnt just seeing the cutscenes and getting a “level cleared” achievement, it is dodging the enemies, throwing back the grenades, listening for the screatchure screams, etc..

If there is an enemy who is super tough from the front and will kill you if you can’t get around behind him, you don’t make the game more “accessible” by making him so weak from the front that it doesn’t matter where you shoot him, or making his attacks so weak that you can shrug them off long enough to whittle him down from the front, youve actually removed this enemy from the game by making him just like the common enemies that can be shot from the front. You have actually made the element of the gameplay provided by this enemy inaccessible by doing this, because the quick thinking and tactical usage of the game’s features required to get behind him *is* the gameplay.

I like difficulty levels, sometimes I don't enjoy a specific aspect of gameplay or I just want to blast through from cutscene to cutscene, and being able to toggle a zero-consequences baby mode is a nice option to have.

Option to hold or toggle buttons for running

Quick Time Events on a toggle, or not involving quick, successive button presses (just one press)

Ability to change the colour, font and size of subtitles!

Ability to re-map buttons

ABILITY TO USE A NONSTANDARD CONTROLLER

Ability to change brightness, colour saturation, lighting intensity and filtering

ABILITY TO TURN OFF FLASHING LIGHTS OH MY FUCKING GOD

Volume control that lets you turn up the dialogue and atmospheric sound but turn the music down

Ability to turn off camera shake and blur

And you might ask 'well how is x an accessibility feature'

But consider:

People who have issues with their hands (muscle weakness, missing fingers, impaired reflexes)

Folks who are hard of hearing or have other hearing issues

good example of a feature that would actually make the challenging gameplay of Dark Souls and related games more accessible to disabled players rather than removing that challenge.

Also while I'm thinking about it but don't have the time or energy to go into it in a nuanced way, to address a lot of the other comments, this post is not saying that all Easy Modes should be abolished from all games, in fact I think that Easy Modes have a pretty important place in giving players of lower experience levels a place to start (though I am also not saying that every game should have an Easy Mode).

Uma Musume style horsegirls introduced to the Forgotten Realms; setting's lore revised so that they've always been there.

Advancement rules now stipulate per-session XP bonus based on lifetime D&D Beyond purchase history.

Compendium of exclusive feat trees for specific gender and sexual identities. Bisexuality receives no feats of its own, being mechanically implemented as "half gay"; the resulting synergies are disgusting.

Editorial error in revised Dungeon Master's Guide accidentally refers to Dungeon Masters as Hasbro's employees.

"Noble savage" coding of barbarian class walked back, refocused on European folkloric touchstones such as the Ulster Cycle; all barbarian characters become Irish stereotypes.

AI-based DM service trained exclusively on work of Ed Greenwood launched; withdrawn a week later citing "guiderail issues".

Expanded discussion of navigating player expectations frames "not showing up at all" as a valid playstyle.

Equiping an armor tutorial

The ending stands out to me the most as not exactly bad but underwhelming in contrast to everything else. I think the ending is very good and earned in many ways and it does wrap things up in a very neat and sweet way and it is in many ways a perfect resolution to the story. But,

A level 7 Generalist Wizard

Okay so not only is Artax in the referenced article actually a 7th-level Mage, as was appropriate for the time, but "generalist wizard" also just isn't actual D&D terminology from any edition. A non-specialist magic-user, when such a distinction was of any relevance, would be called either a Mage (2nd) or Wizard (3rd). Pathfinder has *shudder* Universalists, but that's a heretical text so it should be disregarded in this context.

the first one in '96 reads like a reminder of proper terms to me, but the one in '98 is a descriptive reference. generalist as opposed to specialist is clearer there, with nature, shadow, song and wild mages from dragon and splatbooks in the mix. it even has sun mage spells, who may be NPCs in just one spelljammer adventure.

the splatbook boom bankrupted TSR, would be far weirder if they'd kept the keywording proper for all these years, really

You see this a lot in standalone horror novels that don't get caught up in their own "lore." My absolute favorite example of this is "The Library Policeman" by Stephen King. The creature in that book and how it "works" is wholly defined by the scope of the protagonist's personal trauma. It does not "exist" nor has "logic" independent of the protagonist's emotional journey. Sure, it all makes "sense" in that story but trying to tease out the creature as an independent entity with a consequential "existence" simply falls apart.

I would also point to something like Frank Miller's Sin City stories. The characters are BOLD archetypes with no substance behind their evocative presence. Senator Rourk is a complete tautology. He is a Senator because he's rich and powerful and is rich and powerful because he is a Senator. Things happen because Rourk wants them to happen. By what means? What's the power structure propping him up? Who are his allies? Who are enemies? What is the network composing his wealth? These things are not only unanswered, I would suggest they are UNASKED. It simply doesn't matter. Rourk might as well be Zeus.

It is that element of UNASKING, I am focusing on.

No, this was never a legend meant to operate on a 21st century biology, the blood is blood but it's also life, and so on.

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.

Level 2: We shouldn't treat mental health facilities as objects of horror because it stigmatises mental illness.

Tall and proud [Théoden] seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, A sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder [….]

Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and he sprang away.

There’s a lot more really incredible stuff about him essentially rivalling one of the Valar of old and so forth and so on, but this is Théoden at the beginning of the Battle of the Pelennor: fierce and joyful and fey and free in what he fully intends to be the last glorious act of his life, redeeming himself in blood on the field.

No, you see, the one who hits blank screaming nihilistic rage is, as noted above, Éomer Éomund’s-son, on discovering what he thinks is the body of his sister on the field. He grieves his uncle, but he perceives his uncle’s death the way that Théoden did - his words are in fact recorded as Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen.

Then he sees Éowyn.

He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face turned deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.

“Éowyn, Éowyn!” he cried at last. “Éowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!”

Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: “Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!”

(This almost gets him killed, as it’s a stupid reckless charge that ends up with him and his immediate knights encircled on a hill, except instead he gets the most cinematic moment in fucking ever where he gets to spit defiance at what he THINKS is the approaching Corsair fleet only to have the wind unfurl Aragorn’s white-tree-seven-stone-seven-star standard instead, and for them to get to literally cut their way through the stricken and demoralized enemy to meet on the field.

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).

But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.

The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.

My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.

I think this holds up doubly for media like ttrpgs: yes, colonial violence and vigilante "self-defense" turn up in d&d, but most players will just suspend disbelief and work around it. many will try to resolve conflict non-violently too, and RP and exploration are gaining, not losing clout in the culture. I may be mostly looking at its less combat-heavy side, but this could be the one upside to disregarding half the rules.

all that to say I agree justifying violence as heroic self-defense happens more in discussions around, than in the game, so the issue is more "of the culture". as @thydungeongal said, the game is not at fault.

I'd add, monster manuals may be partially at fault here, but even then, people choose smash or pass, i.e. how to engage with the medium. the Uncaged series did great work rewriting female monsters that way, and Radiant Citadel and others show ways towards less colonial play.

This is tangentially a topic that I think about a lot in general as I've been trying to introduce my kiddo to my hobbies. I've found that many of the games and shows I enjoy have at least some small element of violence, even those that are ostensibly made for children.

Many sports have their roots in war games, as do many board games like checkers and chess. Even cosy games like stardew valley have fighting that is essential to the core gameplay loop. Mario kart has you set traps and directly attack other drivers. The few exceptions I've found are edutainment games I played when I was a kid, and that seems to be a completely abandoned genre of games, some of which are literally abandonware.

we teach by old-ass war game sometimes, but also by hopscotch, marbles and lego, and the thing most have in common is social rules. we learn other skills depending on the game, but respecting rules for group cooperation is the most important skill for life in a society - we even have rules for war!

ttrpgs aren't great at teaching the geneva convention or other rules, but as they descend from the kriegsspiel, I wouldn't expect them to: they were supposed to teach you Clausewitz' strategies, but now we roleplay action figures and house with them. part of why discussions on what the rules even are often end up in chaos, imo.

afaik sports class also was a warlike German, but I don't know much about team sports. there was a fantasy baseball ttrpg scene tho, before D&D.

you can tell very different stories and learn a lot of things by playing, but thinking all of it is war games anyways is not helpful. we just like to put life-or-death stakes into stories, cause its easy shorthand for serious.

thats just the thing: this is about almost every single english language magical girl game i have ever encountered. this is about princess: the hopeful, this is about girl by moonlight, this is about starlight burnout, etc etc etc. just look at these inspiration lists:

there are seven listed inspirations here. of them, two are magical girl shows, in a game purporting to replicate the dynamics of the genre.

nine listed inspirations; two magical girl shows, one magical girl 'deconstruction' fic.

nine inspirations, three magical girl shows. noticing a pattern with which two shows get featured every time?

A lot of people are wistfully nostalgic about Sailor Moon but allergic to touching any other mahou shoujo... especially works actually geared at young girls.

I totally get disliking PreCure, I don't like it either! Only the very first Futari wa Pretty Cure looks appealing to me. But, it's really not the only magical girl anime out there. You loved 90's Sailor Moon? The same cast went on to make the only shoujo demographic adaptation of Cutey Honey, Cutey Honey Flash! It's even in the same art style as Supers and Stars. (The original Cutey Honey of the 70's, while concieved as a girl's show to sell clothes-changing dolls, wound up only securing a late night time slot and was reworked into more of an ecchi show for older male viewers, although some young girls still enjoyed the stories! Go Nagai would later go on to make another mahou shoujo series, Majokko Tickle, for a shoujo demographic.)

You like idol anime and magical girls? Creamy Mami! Magical idol anime are their own genre too.

You mostly liked the filler expanding on the characters in the 90's? You liked the slice of life scenes best of all? You like bittersweet anime with elements that make you cry your heart out? Full Moon o Sagashite, about a 12 year old with terminal cancer who gets to be older with the help of the reapers tasked with claiming her soul in one year, which she learns in the very first episode... the manga a little more than the anime, as it goes more into depth into their lives and the soul reapers' past lives, but the anime expands on her idol career and has a different ending from the original author, so it feels true to the characters and satisfying.

You want to see a magical girl anime that's inspired by Sailor Moon, but Takeuchi Naoko also greatly enjoyed it and made fanart of it? Wedding Peach!

You want those early cute witch magical girls without any big enermies to face? Just dealing with everyday things? Marvelous Melmo (an orphaned girl gets the ability to change her age with the help of red and blue candies from Heaven given to her by her dead mother's spirit, but she also later learns she can shrink back into an undifferentiated zygote and turn into whatever creature she was thinking of beforehand! It's sex education for girls in the 70's, but with a lot of comedy and heart too), Sally the Witch (the original! .... I did not see this one, but it's inspired by the 60's show Bewitched!), Minky Momo (although, Minky Momo can get heavy sometimes, it's usually fun, about a princess from the land of dreams trying to bring her planet back in orbit because it's drifting away due to humans losing faith in their dreams... it's also the one where Shudo Takeshi, head writer of the Pokemon anime, famously gave a toy company that wanted to pull the plug on the successful anime that just wasn't selling toys, by having the first incarnation of Momo KILLED BY A TRUCK FULL OF TOYS... she revives in the same episode, but it sure was a loud and clear message... second Momo stars in her own season and is reborn as the biological daughter of the earth couple the first Momo brainwashed Chibiusa-style into believing they were her family.)

You like cute and colourful characters and care a lot about the environment and endangered animals? Tokyo Mew Mew! I didn't watch this one yet, but I really do wanna see the reboot and it was super popular back in the day. ^^ All the designs look so cute.

If you want more modern magical girl anime that are on the cute and chill side, but actually geared at girls and it's not just PreCure, Cocotama is full of magic and adventure, while being very cute... I caught some fun episodes with witches and dragons and quests, but also some Hamtaro-esque episodes where it's just the cute mascot characters navigating a much bigger world and interacting with each other, it's fun!

I think it starts with the inclusion of Girl by Moonlight as the first example, which I think is a misrepresentation of how those touchstones are presented in the book. "Brink of the Abyss" etc are the playsets within the book, that's not a list of overall touchstones for the entire project. It's "if you are trying to play a game like this, use this playset", which is different from "these are the media I referenced when making the game". A subtle difference, I'll grant, but one that I think makes a difference. GbM doesn't have that overall list, so it is the closest we get, but that's still not interchangeable.

Beyond that, it feels a little gatekeeping to me, but I think framed more academic than usual. I don't really think you need a Complete Historical Education of a Genre to write about it. You just need to be excited and interested enough. You can learn genre conventions without consuming the entire genre.

It feels like the post makes a lot of assumptions about why things were or weren't included. I can't speak to the intents of the designers making these books, but I know that touchstones are usually selective. Half of the time, I feel like I end up including ones that I'm worried people will accuse me of cribbing from if I didn't call them out. The other half, I'm picking my favorites.

And I'm still always learning about media I simply had never heard about until after the book was written.

I'll admit to not knowing the Magical Girl Genre particularly well, but to my mind the prime example is Sailor Moon. It's likely the go-to for most people because that's what was available. Whether it's The Most example of the genre is pretty subjective, and the older shows were much harder to find.

I don't think that a lack of deep, esoteric knowledge hampers my ability to write about a subject. I'm one person with a limited amount of time. I can still write about things that excite and interest me without putting a full college Syllabus in the Appendix. I'll try to research what I can, but the world is a huge place and I've got only so much time. I'll do my best, and hopefully leave room for people to add what they like.

Going on with the Magical Girl Genre, I wouldn't even consider writing a game emulating it because the only shows I've watched about it are Madoka, Utena, She-Ra and DoReMi when I was a kid. These are excellent works, but they exist in conversation with previous works that I am woefully unaware of like those presented by previous posters. This does not mean I can't write about the genre, but I should be aware of my own shortcomings within that genre. That should at least make me ponder whether I am equipped to create a work within the genre.

Furthering deadgenerations' point about the subtle orientalism of this problem, this whole conversation changes drastically when you swap "genre" with "culture". We can all agree that orientalism has been a huge problem in the ttrpg hobby and it still is for the most part. It is extremely easy to see that it's not ok for a western person to write about samurai without having previously put at least some degree of effort towards understanding japanese culture. Because otherwise that hypothetical author risks falling in tropes and stereotypes that fail to properly represent the historical period they are trying to write about. Roughly paraphrasing Asians Represent discussion about this kind of behaviour, the problem is not the writing in itself, it is the lack of self-awareness about an author's own lack of knowledge paired with some type of audacity that makes them feel entitled enough to disregard that knowledge in the first place.

Genres, of course, hold less weight to most people than whole cultures. But that doesn't make genres simple or lacking their own structures, communities and expectations. And thus we should approach them at least with a minimum of respect and curiosity before asserting we are equipped enough to participate in it.

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).

But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.

The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.

My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.

I think this holds up doubly for media like ttrpgs: yes, colonial violence and vigilante "self-defense" turn up in d&d, but most players will just suspend disbelief and work around it. many will try to resolve conflict non-violently too, and RP and exploration are gaining, not losing clout in the culture. I may be mostly looking at its less combat-heavy side, but this could be the one upside to disregarding half the rules.

all that to say I agree justifying violence as heroic self-defense happens more in discussions around, than in the game, so the issue is more "of the culture". as @thydungeongal said, the game is not at fault.

I'd add, monster manuals may be partially at fault here, but even then, people choose smash or pass, i.e. how to engage with the medium. the Uncaged series did great work rewriting female monsters that way, and Radiant Citadel and others show ways towards less colonial play.

There IS a very popular semi-canon D&D system of alternate progression that does not encourage killing things for their stuff. Milestone progression. In which the DM rewards you not for combat, but instead for meeting certain points in the campaign.

With that in mind there have absolutely been strides taken to counter the "kill happy" parts of the game. Weather by intent or side effect I haven't a clue (though I suspect the later). That said. Under systems such as milestone player will go to lengths to avoid a fight because it's not meaningfully tided to progression.

Also of note: not everything that attacks the player is a thinking being in the first place. A whole class of non-sapient beings exist as monsters. Beasts namely (though some of those probably count as people too). So such a fight is more akin to fighting a wild animal for your life rather then being a vigilante, such an animal isn't a criminal agent.

more on topic: sapience doesn't make much of a difference, unfortunately. conquering the wild by big game hunting is a colonial fantasy too and even exploring or saving the land can be - see safaris and voluntourism.

what radiant citadel changed is the wild's and civilization's relationship, towards one of mutuality: one adventure had a volcano, the other a river spirit who iirc had their bonds with a civilization broken and the goal was to renew it, not to slay the wild into submission. still a very d&d structure, but the story writes characters back into the land and its culture.

a hunt or exploration story could work that way too, but d&d's rules don't make it easy: most nature spells make it obey (sure, animal "friendship"!), and 5e's expressions of bonds are pretty one-sided: you get a pact, oath or faith by class, but no rule for breaking either. silliest goes to +2 AC, but no social rules for marriage though.

"No, it was perfectly logical for me to jump out of the shuttle at that time. I had a breathing apparatus, and I was certain I could seal the subspace rift by hand before the Romulans opened fire. This was the only solution that would result in zero casualties. I might have died, but giving up is illogical."

She's known as one of the most fearless members of the crew.