[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

I tend not to bring it up [...] slavery, sexism, racism, and the like qualify as "not fun," so I don't include them.

Pretty much this.

I'm not a fan of gaming in 100% historical settings, but inasmuch as I've ever had anything to do with it, I've left uncomfortable social topics unexplored and focused the campaign on action and adventure: mysteries that need solving, plots that need exposing, wars that need fighting, whatever.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

And, of course, for any not-strictly-historical fantasy, I don't have to include it at all [...] if there's anything my players or I will find not-fun, I get to leave it out. And so I do.

And this.

Stuff my players won't enjoy doesn't become part of their characters' society. I either omit it completely from the campaign or I reserve it for use as a part of a foreign society that can serve as a source of enemies and a target for missions paid for by the heroes' homeland.

Originally Posted by Brandy

I agree with this to a point, but at the same time would hesitate to create a setting that required players to accept, as a cultural baseline, values and beliefs that would make them uncomfortable because I fear that it would potentially make the game less fun.

If I'm introducing an element like slavery, misogyny/misandry, or racism to a game world, I'm almost always going to do it in a way that players can realistically choose to have their character's values be opposed to such things

Exactly.

For instance, in my fantasy campaign where the PCs lived in a continental empire formed when Roman-inspired people conquered Greek- and Mongol-themed lands, I ignored the fact that the Greeks, Mongols, and Romans took slaves, and I did the same with any other social element I knew the players would find uncomfortable: human sacrifice, rampant sexism, you name it. I cherry-picked the cool stuff and kept only the historical elements my gamers could live with. Then I had all the rival powers of the world keep slaves, burn people on altars, treat women as property, and so on. This made it easy for me to convince the players that their characters wanted to work within and for their society, not be complete murderhobos . . . because their society was happy to use them as a pack of 007s against pretty much all the nasty empires around them.

There's no especially great reason why every society in a setting would have the same values. On the contrary, differences in basic values are one explanation for national borders. So I just make sure the values my players don't like are on the other side of the border, which means that when they want to tear down an oppressive society they can do so freely and be labeled patriots at home for doing so.