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Young Freud posted:I haven't cracked open the beta, but it sounds like, from the box copy, they've completely ditched the whole mecha combat angle and instead allow all the characters to be Tagers. Allow seems disingenuous. Tager is now the only option given in the book. You cannot not be a tager. And whoever came up with this title font needs to be dragged out back and shot. 
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Sep 15, 2015 04:48
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Apparently the plan is to go all FFG and have a Tager RPG, a Mecha RPG and a...gently caress if I know, wizards and psychics vs. spies RPG?
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Sep 15, 2015 04:50
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Maybe Mages won't suck this time around? And Pyschics won't be completely useless until you spend a poo poo-ton of XP at which point they can blow up the Moon? Hahaha, who am I kidding?
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Sep 15, 2015 04:52
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Kurieg posted:Allow seems disingenuous. Tager is now the only option given in the book. You cannot not be a tager. Considering Tagers were the only characters to be worth playing, that's not bad, although has less to do with Cthulhu, since everyone knows that they ripped off the Guyver for that. unseenlibrarian posted:Apparently the plan is to go all FFG and have a Tager RPG, a Mecha RPG and a...gently caress if I know, wizards and psychics vs. spies RPG? Oh, that makes sense now. It also keeps a lot of the poo poo, objectionable or otherwise, segregated out of each of the lines. I don't really care to hear about Deep One rape camps or Dionysus' Club antics while I'm trying to play not-Guyver or not-Macross. And of course, the CthulhuTech magic is so loving broken that I don't know if anyone would care to play the "baseline" game.
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Sep 15, 2015 05:02
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unseenlibrarian posted:Apparently the plan is to go all FFG and have a Tager RPG, a Mecha RPG and a...gently caress if I know, wizards and psychics vs. spies RPG? CthulhuTech v2 posted:While other books will present rules for creating other kinds of Characters, The Shadow War focuses on those who have Yup. Also, WildFire's website has last been updated May 2013 
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Sep 15, 2015 05:05
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I actually think these various Mythos-huffin' mash up settings would be better if they mostly played it straight, perhaps with a suggestive fluff element or two, until the Big Encounter that starts making poo poo seriously weird. GURPS's Cthulhupunk book did this with their take on their house Cyberpunk setting, and you could just as easily do it with something like Macross or whatever. Hell, I think Macross even has such creatures around. Just start making a question of why, exactly, it is that warbling pop singers have such power...
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Sep 15, 2015 05:33
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Kurieg posted:
That is a godawful font. So I'm not big into Cthulutech, what's the deal with these symbiotes? They're here so you can play Venom or Fillia from Skullgirls?
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Sep 15, 2015 08:49
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Crasical posted:That is a godawful font. Ultraviolence ahead.* They're living suits of power armor, pretty direct rip-offs of Guyver. A little like Iron Man but with tentacles and space aliens instead of genius inventors. Not a terrible seed for an over-the-top Cthulhu-esque cyberpunk dystopia adventure game. * They made two US-based live action movies of the Guyver. The first co-stars Mark Hammill as some filthy drunk detective; the second stars David Hayter, voice of Solid Snake up until MGS5. The first one also features Jimmy JJ Walker in his That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 08:58
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unseenlibrarian posted:Apparently the plan is to go all FFG and have a Tager RPG, a Mecha RPG and a...gently caress if I know, wizards and psychics vs. spies RPG? If you aren't going to go to the trouble of trying to balance a single game around various disparate power levels and modes of play then this honestly doesn't seem like a terrible way to go about it. The various "types" of games Cthulhutech ostensibly supported didn't mix very well to begin with...on the one hand you have giant robots as part of a grinding, all-consuming war on the front lines facing giant bugmonsters from space, on the other hand you have spies and feds busting cults, then over there you have Tagers doing whatever it is Tagers do, etc.
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Sep 15, 2015 09:04
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CthulhuTech 2 is still going to be bad even without the rape and tentacle dicks because it's a level of super-edgy darkness no-parents crap that makes WoD roll its eyes, covered with a thin layer of played-out Lovecraft tropes and mechanics that don't work. And the skeletons disadvantage should be "your player character is being chased by skeletons."
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Sep 15, 2015 09:13
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The Deleter posted:CthulhuTech 2 is still going to be bad even without the rape and tentacle dicks because it's a level of super-edgy darkness no-parents crap that makes WoD roll its eyes, covered with a thin layer of played-out Lovecraft tropes and mechanics that don't work. But what if the skeleton... was inside you all along?
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Sep 15, 2015 09:15
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I kind of want to do a review of CTech 2, but I'm worried that their attempts at sanitizing it some will just take it from "hilariously bad" to "boringly bad."
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Sep 15, 2015 09:45
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chiasaur11 posted:But what if the skeleton... The true horror.
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Sep 15, 2015 10:30
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That was actually an amazing Ray Bradbury story.
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Sep 15, 2015 10:54
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Traveller posted:<war rape background> Honestly, the adverse reaction people sometimes have to any implication of rape in CthulhuTech feels a bit like an over-reaction. The issue shouldn't be that it's mentioned, but rather that it's treated so lightly and used almost exclusively for edgy shock value. Acknowledging that, sometimes, people do horrible things in times of war - especially wars of genocide - should not really be a mark against CthulhuTech. Instead, we can hold against it that it describes all amlati children of war rape as "damaged goods". PurpleXVI posted:I kind of want to do a review of CTech 2, but I'm worried that their attempts at sanitizing it some will just take it from "hilariously bad" to "boringly bad." Having looked at it, it's a generic not-very-good system. It's also almost exclusively mechanics in the preview, so there's not much opportunity for truly idiotic worldbuilding to be presented. Still, though, it betrays a bias towards contemporary US ideas of wealth. The flaw Broke 1 says that "You’re lower class and own a small residence, an old vehicle, and have little disposable income." which is a very US-centric idea of what it means to be broke; owning a car is considered pretty well of in large parts of Europe, which is not exactly a poor region on the whole. And in the densely packed arcologies of CTech, poverty should instead be measured in Oyster Cards and bicycles. A quick summary of system weirdness that I noticed: Character creation is done through a mix of package purchases and point-buy. Packages can increase Skills by +1. If you have multiple packages adding to the same skill, you add the bonuses. If you buy a skill with point-buy, the cost is quadratic. The net result seems to be that some builds are more point-efficient than others. The Nazzadi get a bonus to stealth. I wonder if that's still justified with "they have black skin". There's a pretty long skill list. 45 skills, 10 of which are field skills with freeform fields. The game still mocks you for taking Hobby 5 or Trivia 5. It has an Advantages/Disadvantages system, with the usual problems:
"There are those things about people that aren’t easily explained, those things that are unusual but that also define a person. In CthulhuTech, those things are classified as Talents." - one talent is "Double Tap", which lets you double tap. This is apparently unusual and character-defining. Double-tapping a pistol. There are White Wolf-style Stereotypes. It still uses Poker Dice.
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Sep 15, 2015 13:06
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Plague of Hats posted:Ultraviolence ahead.* Max is a filthy drunk CIA agent, not a detective.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:05
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Max is a filthy drunk CIA agent, not a detective. I haven't seen it in years! I should fix that. I think it's on Netflix.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:10
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LatwPIAT posted:Honestly, the adverse reaction people sometimes have to any implication of rape in CthulhuTech feels a bit like an over-reaction. The issue shouldn't be that it's mentioned, but rather that it's treated so lightly and used almost exclusively for edgy shock value. Acknowledging that, sometimes, people do horrible things in times of war - especially wars of genocide - should not really be a mark against CthulhuTech. I mostly agree with you but there's another issue that comes up for me. It's actually the same issue I had back when the generally progressive setting of Blue Rose came into question, in fact: rape, along with those kinds of bigotry, is the sort of thing where I do feel it's kind of lazy and to a degree wrong to make a background radiation of your setting. Not because that isn't a real issue, not because those things shouldn't be talked about, but because I really feel they shouldn't be there unless your group of players specifically wants to engage with that kind of material. If somebody comes in and says they want to do a gay character who was specifically motivated to start adventuring because they wanted to find their own way in life and be themselves, or that they want to do a child of rape who's hunting down their offending parent and struggling with deciding whether they themselves deserve to live, then they can be there. But those things really shouldn't just be a footnote in the setting, or a value on your character sheet somewhere that only matters because it gives you +x to some skill and a starting trauma disadvantage or some poo poo. Theoretically there's some value in having characters who are, for example, survivors of rape who have successfully moved on and are basically unaffected by it now but the problem is in a roleplaying context those only really have value if they're played by an actual person who experienced the same thing. You've got to go to other media in order to get general societal benefit out of such a portrayal, like a tv show that has such a character.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:19
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unseenlibrarian posted:Apparently the plan is to go all FFG and have a Tager RPG, a Mecha RPG and a...gently caress if I know, wizards and psychics vs. spies RPG?
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Sep 15, 2015 14:23
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Foglet posted:Meanwhile, CthulhuTech v2 entered open beta and is free for anyone to download. Yeah, I remember them saying the same thing about The Void, which then had opening fiction about a woman's trauma stemming from being menaced by tentacles. Not technically rape, everyone! They're moving forward! 
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Sep 15, 2015 15:38
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We shall see, WildFire, we shall see.
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Ineptitude: any and all artistic skills. Skeleton 3: every time my character does anything art-related, people die and the Elder Gods pay attention to what I've created. It's not that I'm a terrible artist. I'm just poo poo by human standards. By a non-Euclidian tentacle beast's standards, I'm Rembrandt. One time I played a kazoo too high and it was like a dog whistle for the Hounds of Tindalos. Another time I drew a sketch on some looseleaf of a stick figure dancing and seven classmates went so insane they killed themselves.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:59
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pkfan2004 posted:Ineptitude: any and all artistic skills. Tyler Zann, long-lost descendant of Erich Zann.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:00
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LornMarkus posted:I mostly agree with you but there's another issue that comes up for me. It's actually the same issue I had back when the generally progressive setting of Blue Rose came into question, in fact: rape, along with those kinds of bigotry, is the sort of thing where I do feel it's kind of lazy and to a degree wrong to make a background radiation of your setting. Not because that isn't a real issue, not because those things shouldn't be talked about, but because I really feel they shouldn't be there unless your group of players specifically wants to engage with that kind of material. If somebody comes in and says they want to do a gay character who was specifically motivated to start adventuring because they wanted to find their own way in life and be themselves, or that they want to do a child of rape who's hunting down their offending parent and struggling with deciding whether they themselves deserve to live, then they can be there. But those things really shouldn't just be a footnote in the setting, or a value on your character sheet somewhere that only matters because it gives you +x to some skill and a starting trauma disadvantage or some poo poo. Not that I disagree with your point, but your examples kind of make it sound like you're putting LGBT representation and casual hints at rape in the same category and they just... aren't. Anyway, I agree that the biggest problem here is that this raises the amount of "acceptable" rape references in the game, both because that makes the game feel generally rape-y and because it makes it seem that much more acceptable for people to include more rape in their games. It all comes together to make Cthulutech feel like a really uncomfortable game to sit down and play, even if a good group could and probably will spend the time and effort to avoid all the weird casual rape references.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:01
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LatwPIAT posted:It still uses Poker Dice. This and the concept of Tagers are the only thing that made me a little interested in CTech in the first place. Everything else in it destroyed that interest pretty hard, and still does, but I do like dice mechanics with a little more flavor than just roll and add.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:12
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Poker dice are interesting but they wreak absolute havok on probability and appropriate Difficulty targets. There's lots of huge spikes in the beginning but once you get to the higher ends of the scale the probability of a "Difficult" and "Impossible" task succeeding is virtually the same.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:16
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Does it still have the awful 'roll more ones than anything else is a botch' failure rules? Because that was the big dice issue before, since it led to a lot of 'you raised your stat, you are now worse at everything' stuff.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:20
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Kurieg posted:Poker dice are interesting but they wreak absolute havok on probability and appropriate Difficulty targets. There's lots of huge spikes in the beginning but once you get to the higher ends of the scale the probability of a "Difficult" and "Impossible" task succeeding is virtually the same. Hey, I never said it was a well-designed mechanic, just a neat idea at a glance. Non-standard dice rules is one of the things that makes Wulin one of my favorite games, but it's also thought out a lot better there.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:23
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 We read Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All. This one might really be the first heartbreaker. If you want something that combines long rambling speeches about the importance of nobility, casual disdain for "women's lib," and big timecubey style rules, you should rush out and buy this. It'll be around a dollar.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:27
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unseenlibrarian posted:Does it still have the awful 'roll more ones than anything else is a botch' failure rules? Because that was the big dice issue before, since it led to a lot of 'you raised your stat, you are now worse at everything' stuff. For the most part, no, but it looks like if you cap out your stats and wheedle enough bonuses from Ads and gear, you might make it happen. Or, if you roll poorly against a vastly weaker foe and they also roll pure poo poo, since then it's about what you both rolled instead of the absolute numbers of normal tasks. PS There's rolled defenses per attack in this system! 
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Sep 15, 2015 16:29
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unseenlibrarian posted:Does it still have the awful 'roll more ones than anything else is a botch' failure rules? Because that was the big dice issue before, since it led to a lot of 'you raised your stat, you are now worse at everything' stuff. No, but ones still decrease your probability of success because they aren't contributing to a higher value. 
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Sep 15, 2015 16:30
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Poker dice is one of the clearest 'Look we need a clever dice mechanic, I don't care if it actually works' situations I've ever seen in gaming.' Like, even before I found out about all the  from the reviews here, poker dice was enough to tell me no, no I am not going to want to buy this game.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:41
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Not that I disagree with your point, but your examples kind of make it sound like you're putting LGBT representation and casual hints at rape in the same category and they just... aren't. Not presentation, I was referring to settings that have baked in bigotry toward LGBT folk. Obviously you should be allowed to play a gay or trans character if you want, my reference there was more "the player should only have to face bigotry for their character being LGBT if that's what they want to roleplay."
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Sep 15, 2015 16:43
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LornMarkus posted:Not presentation, I was referring to settings that have baked in bigotry toward LGBT folk. Obviously you should be allowed to play a gay or trans character if you want, my reference there was more "the player should only have to face bigotry for their character being LGBT if that's what they want to roleplay." I still hold up how they did sexism in Bretonnia in WHFRP2e as how to do in-setting discrimination. The entire book makes clear that it's bullshit (women have absolutely the same stats, can do every profession as well as men), there's an explicit disclaimer saying it's not the important part of the setting and thus if it makes your table uncomfortable drop it entirely, it doesn't limit a player's options, and exists to provide a plot hook IF your players want to deal with the cross-dressing and hiding identities, etc. I know I've brought it up in multiple threads, but making it clear it's optional, making it clear the discrimination is wrong in-setting and mechanically if you do use it, and making sure players can still play whatever they want and have it as a plot hook rather than a limitation (the example knight character is even a woman in disguise and the book makes it pretty clear that that's quite common) is how you do in-setting inequality. It should always be absolutely clear that in-setting inequality isn't designed to limit players and has no mechanical or factual basis.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:49
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Precambrian posted:I had an idea to revise Plutomancy that might also fit with Kleptocracy. Plutomancy feels weird to me, because the modern perception of wealth isn't hoarding money without spending it, Scrooge McDuck-style, it's all about living beyond your means. So you'd gain charges by racking up debt, which means between credit cards, student loans, mortgages, etc. you'd rack up a ton in a socially acceptable way, but your taboo would prohibit paying those debts. So you'd either be like a dipsomancer who can rack up a few charges easily but can't hold onto them, or you'd spiral out of control as you do everything you can to open fraudulent lines of credit and evade your creditors to hoard charges. kaynorr posted:That's pretty much UA adepts in general, though. It can be difficult to keep a group dynamic going if multiple members of the group have various antisocial (self-inflicted) mental illnesses. But if they didn't, the case could be made that they aren't paying a high enough price for their magic.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:04
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theironjef posted:
I had to pause and go to the store in the middle of this episode, and it completely lost me. That usually doesn't happen with podcasts. This game sounds amazing.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:11
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LornMarkus posted:Not presentation, I was referring to settings that have baked in bigotry toward LGBT folk. Obviously you should be allowed to play a gay or trans character if you want, my reference there was more "the player should only have to face bigotry for their character being LGBT if that's what they want to roleplay." Well the default assumption in Blue Rose isn't really that LGBT characters face baked-in bigotry, that's sort of Aldis' thing is not being bigoted. "LGBT characters face prejudice elsewhere" is a setting detail but as a detail it's not really what I would consider a major one that's employed time and again as a bludgeon despite what people elsewhere trying to mischaracterize the game as SJW feminazi homofascist propaganda would have folks believe. You can play LGBT characters and never once have to deal with that sort of thing if you don't want to and still go adventuring, solve mysteries, defend the kingdom from the Lich King's plots, and do all that fantasy roleplaying stuff you want. Cthulhutech, meanwhile, has a published adventure where the player-characters are inevitably chemically seduced by furries and raped. So, y'know. (Speaking of which, I haven't given up on my joint review of Blue Rose, I'm currently waiting for gradenko_2000 to get back to me with the rest of the feats chapter.)
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Sep 15, 2015 17:12
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Cthulhutech is the goofus of TT gaming. Whatever CT does, you'd be well to do differently.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:13
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Kai Tave posted:Well the default assumption in Blue Rose isn't really that LGBT characters face baked-in bigotry, that's sort of Aldis' thing is not being bigoted. "LGBT characters face prejudice elsewhere" is a setting detail but as a detail it's not really what I would consider a major one that's employed time and again as a bludgeon despite what people elsewhere trying to mischaracterize the game as SJW feminazi homofascist propaganda would have folks believe. You can play LGBT characters and never once have to deal with that sort of thing if you don't want to and still go adventuring, solve mysteries, defend the kingdom from the Lich King's plots, and do all that fantasy roleplaying stuff you want. Yup, in the original post I was referring to the discussion that sprang up around the poster who expressed annoyance that Aldis was super-progressive and so forth, which then lead to people discussing whether settings should have written in prejudice and such. Sorry if that confused the issue any. Night10194 posted:I still hold up how they did sexism in Bretonnia in WHFRP2e as how to do in-setting discrimination. The entire book makes clear that it's bullshit (women have absolutely the same stats, can do every profession as well as men), there's an explicit disclaimer saying it's not the important part of the setting and thus if it makes your table uncomfortable drop it entirely, it doesn't limit a player's options, and exists to provide a plot hook IF your players want to deal with the cross-dressing and hiding identities, etc. I know I've brought it up in multiple threads, but making it clear it's optional, making it clear the discrimination is wrong in-setting and mechanically if you do use it, and making sure players can still play whatever they want and have it as a plot hook rather than a limitation (the example knight character is even a woman in disguise and the book makes it pretty clear that that's quite common) is how you do in-setting inequality. It should always be absolutely clear that in-setting inequality isn't designed to limit players and has no mechanical or factual basis. Yeah, I would agree that's probably the best way to do it. Takes out the possibilities of unfortunate interactions, like super-groggy DMs who do legitimately not have any bad intentions but because it's in the settings and the rules harshly enforce that poo poo and make people uncomfortable. LornMarkus fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 17:21
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See, I always figured it as the spiritual successor of early-mid nineties White Wolf. Next they'll finally update their website to say they were bought out by a libertarian commune and sponsor a pro wrestler named "Tager"
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Sep 15, 2015 17:23
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LornMarkus posted:Not presentation, I was referring to settings that have baked in bigotry toward LGBT folk. Obviously you should be allowed to play a gay or trans character if you want, my reference there was more "the player should only have to face bigotry for their character being LGBT if that's what they want to roleplay." I can see what you meant, in that case. Wasn't as clear as it probably should have been, but I see what you meant. Also, on a similar note to Night's comments about Bretonnia, I really like how Legends of the Wulin handles women. You see, wuxia traditionally doesn't exactly have the best gender dynamics and it would have been really easy for them to go "this is a quasi-historical setting, things suck for women, deal with it". Instead, they had a whole section of the book talk about women in China in the time periods wuxia cribs off of and they give you a few disadvantages like "everyone thinks of me as a woman and not as a warrior" and "everyone thinks of me as a warrior and not as a woman". And if you don't take those disadvantages, congratulations, you don't have to deal with that kind of sexism because you didn't put "I want to deal with that kind of sexism" on your sheet, the same way your GM would be an rear end in a top hat if they had your character be constantly hunted by the army if you didn't write "Disadvantage: I am wanted by the army" on your sheet. It's just something that more RPGs should do.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:34
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