One thing that's always struck me as odd is how people act like we're somehow preventing them from making their game all about gay paladins defending oppressed orcs. That sounds really uninteresting to me, but I can't recall having kicked anyone's door in with a gun and declared, "I'll be the Dungeon Master now, and you have to KILL THESE ORCS."

The distinctive genre of D&D (which might be called 'the life of everyone in Hyboria who isn't Conan' is dependent on literature like Elric, Tolkien, Three Hearts/Three Lions, Broken Sword, and Howard. In all of these there are alien/inhuman/wrongbad entities who might be 'outer darkness' or a 'crawling chaos', and these entities (whatever their varied origins and schemes) are definitely harmful to what we consider the laws of physics and human beings socially and physically. The idea of a cosmic conflict between them shows up in Elder Scrolls and everywhere else. It's a well know mythic/fantasy trope that helps people to mentally organize the world and the 'sides' in what was, after all 'an expansion for tabletop wargames'. I think the problem with 'alignment' starting with the AD&D insistence on personally moralizing it, and with players who didn't understand the theme of war that underlies it. People at war really don't give a shit if they bomb Gerry's apartment buildings, or slaughter all the parents in an orc village and it's easy to understand why - they are trying to kill us! People are so sheltered and oblivious to history that the real nature of war is not only offensive to them (I personally don't like how governments conduct themselves on this account) but simply inexplicable. They start trying to apply their 21st century humanist-democratic worldview to a situation that is literally kill-or-be-killed, and instead of alignment being 'allies' it becomes 'my personality/personal interpretation of ethical behavior', which can be interesting in a game like Burning Wheel, but really doesn't grasp what Alignment was supposed to be about, originally.

There are a lot of features to D&D that people will say 'get in the way of roleplaying' or 'constrain the players', but what they're actually doing is giving shape to it so it fits the actual nature of the game. D&D is/was a game first and foremost, not a way to talk about your feelings. They try to make it into something else, force it to do something it wasn't designed to do, and then complain when people who still want to play the damn game try to play the game.

A lot of the Critical Roll crowd will read something like this and say, "that doesn't sound fun! Nobody would want to do that!", literally ignoring the fact that I just said that I do. If I saw a game posting that said, "hardcore fantasy wargaming with BX rules, no-rerolls, must be familiar with the rules, no SJW nonsense at the table" I would sign up for that game instantly, because I can tick all those boxes in a heartbeat. But at most forums it would get taken down, because you're not supposed to make people feel bad by posting about a game they presumably don't want to play in anyway. They just get offended by the idea that some people don't want to be artfags and twitterati douchebags all day.