Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Shrecknet posted:

well if anyone was gonna make this thread it was gonna be me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC-OjR62D40

In 1991 Mark Rein�Hagen (yes the hyphen is stylized that way, yes it is stupid), the son of a Lutheran minister in suburban Atlanta, unleashed Vampire: the Masquerade on the world - a rip-roaring, blood-soaked and sensual gothic superhero RPG based on not just playing a vampire, but playing a vampire to the hilt.

His one great conceit was to take the Vampire monomyth and break it down into its component elements, and let each aspect have center stage as the defining characteristic of the many Vampire clans comprising the secret society of Vampires.

For instance, you want Nosferatu-style disgusting monsters like Count Orlok? Namesake clan. Anne Rice-style romantic tragedies? Toreador. Shapeshifting, feral Draculas? Gangrel. And so on for each of the clans...

The many, many clans (once the game was a hit and they realized they needed to sell more splatbooks to remain solvent as a company)

The big thing that made V:tM a giant hit among gamers (and later the world - see the opening credits for the weekly TV drama the game got) was the deep and absolutely compelling lore. The oft-repeated joke over in TradGames is that White Wolf was a company that made bathroom readers with an RPG stapled to them.

To wit, regarding the lore: in the world of Vampire, all vampires are descended from Cain (from the Bible), who was the first vampire. This means that the bible is literally correct and accurate, which means Vampires are (as stated) definitionally young-earth creationists, as noted. However, there's also the Setites, who reject this lore and insist they are descended from the Egytian god Set.

This is just one of many contradictions in the lore that is partly intentional to create inter- and intra-group drama and conflict, and partly accidental because we are dealing with a few goth kids from Atlanta playing with worlds and histories they were not equipped at the time to explore (do not read about the Ravnos, they are a big through and through)

I'm not sure whether this thread is best served by meta-dissecting the various clans' stances and overarcing actions in how they would react or move on current events or to talk about the horribly mangled understanding of history and religion, and how that's reflected in the writing.

If you haven't read it, TG Goon Halloween Jack's FATAL & Friends writeup of the system and its history is pretty exceptional snarking on the subject of the game from a game-design and cultural viewpoint.

I always read the many, many clans with their many, many mythologies as "no one side has the right of it, make your own choices," which is really the central thing about Vampire. Even the first Gehenna sourcebook I know of is a series of theories about what the apocalypse will be, not the set-in-stone course of events. I recall that in most versions, Cain does not even show up.

It's also worth noting that no matter what character you create, there are at least two factions and probably many more who have a blood feud with you from the start. It's non-stop political bloodsport, largely based on lineages, and you can't even win by not playing. "Your lineage is your identity, and other characters will use it to pigeonhole you especially if you walk away from it" is also a central part of Vampire when I still had any bathroom readers, which is also something common to roleplaying games at the time. (I was more involved in the V:MQ Big Green Book era).

That last part is what there's been a growing backlash against in the roleplaying community for a while now.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 20:28

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:32

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

MonsieurChoc posted:

Oh you better believe there's Vodou! First off, within Vampire itself there's the Samedi, a Bloodline of vampires who all look like decomposing corpses with a special Necrosis-based Discipline. Their Founder, and the closest thing they have to a leader, is only known as The Baron. Then there's the Serpents of the Light, an offset of the Setites who instead follow their own Voudoun religion and also are members of the Sabbat. Then later-on they introduce a bunch of Blood Magic not limited to clans and of course Vodou Blood Magic and Vodou Necromancy are part of the deal.

In Mage: the Ascension there's also some Voudou magic, and in Wraith: the Oblivion there's Les Invisibles which is the afterlife for believers in Voudou and Santeria and other similar faiths. Cause Wraith is at least partly about the dead making up their own afterlives based on their living religions and then the subsequent Dark Kingdoms fighting each other for control over the Soul Supply.

Edit: For those who don't know, the Setites are a clan of evil Egyptian cultist vampires who worship the god Set but are mostly just James Earl Jones from Conan.

Setites are the closest thing the setting has to a faction of moustache-twirling villains, as they have no one's best interests in mind, not even their own.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 06:25

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Wanderer posted:

In the original edition, it was very much magic antiheroes vs. The Man, with the Technocracy as basically every information-suppressing villain from '90s pop culture rolled into one. The introduction even has a newbie mage show up with a katana hidden under his trenchcoat. They knew what they were about.

That's just Shadowrun with more steps!

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 00:59

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

radmonger posted:

You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists).

If I recall previous internet discussions, they had to add some text somewhere saying �vaccines don�t work the way you would logically expect them to given the rest of the setting, they are actually a good thing and definitely not an excuse for the Technocracy to microchip the masses�.

Oh man if the wizards don't get into the vaccines and chemtrails as written, the vampires definitely will.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 01:09

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

My Animal Farm gaming is limited to Armello, looks like I have another one to pick up.

(Armello is mostly just Game of Thrones-tier politics in terms of complexity, or lack thereof).

# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 21:51

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Triskelli posted:

You�d most easily slip into the role of the Vagabond, who plays an RPG while everyone else is playing Risk.

(Beat up the beaver at every opportunity, or this WILL happen).

There�s not much in the way of political commentary going on with the Vagabond, whichever class you pick is going to be an individual puttering around the forest scoring a few points here and there until you�re strong enough to go on a muderhobo rampage. Your strength is determined by the number of Items you have such as boots and swords, which exist in ruins and can be created by you or the other players for a VP reward. If someone makes an item you can wander over to their territory and forcibly take the item by giving them a card. This improves your relationship with the common folk of that faction, and eventually you can get chummy enough that you can move an opponent�s soldiers with you when you move!

The most incisive commentary in the vagabonds� design is that other people can only really interact with you (an individual) with violence. Anything they do that helps you out is usually incidental (and smart players will do everything in their power to slow you down)

I'm not saying that I'm allergic to sociopolitical gaming, just that Armello to my reading is fairly simple as far as messaging.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2021 00:07

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

fr0id posted:

I want to throw out some other questions about games where you literally play as reactionaries who are also entirely correct like delta green.

What makes this so appealing? This is not a game that is marketed solely to reactionaries and attracts a a large amount of leftists and liberals to it. Even in running my games, I�ve had a few dark moments of talking to players with �well, you�re the cops, so you can totally do that.� It�s almost like the Stanford Prison Experiment with seeing how players react.

What makes delta green interesting is that it explicitly has sanity rules that make you risk losing it for inflicting, experiencing, or witnessing violence. So just killing everyone like in D&D will result in risking at least some sanity. Going in and murdering their families in the night risks a lot more. Moral implications are effectively codified in the game. Having the characters argue and threaten each other over what to do is a core part of the game. Some of them are roleplaying characters. Others just dislike another player causing them to possibly lose sanity points.

This is where you get some really interesting ideology coming in. Players don�t want to lose the game but they have to argue in the terms of the fiction rather than the game. In this case, they have to make moral arguments for what to do, and as is the case in real life may escalate to material threats. It�s is fascinating because in the Meta of the game, what they must do is whatever it takes to stop the monster, while also sacrificing themselves to do it. The players try to avoid that fate as best as they can and inevitably come to a contradiction where they must choose one or the other. �Winning� the game? �Winning� the argument? Or �winning� at morals? All of these things require sacrifices.

So many games have you mowing down enemies as �objective completed� and this is one where it�s �good job, now roll to see how much sanity you lost for this.� Delta green posits that every decision hurts. Every decision has sacrifice. Every decision has luck and fighting and chaos. There is a meta narrative that I have never heard played out in a single game. As I mentioned, it�s a bunch of NPCs who would all die or go insane after several in game missions. Delta green is fun to PLAY because it forces these melodramas of morals and gameplay. It�s a game that forces ideology at every turn. You are playing agents of (arguably evil) ideological forces. You are confronting monsters of an ideological (racist) storyteller. You are making choices from ideological motivations.

Edit: no offense, but the most boring thing in the world to me are conversations about higher ups and the narratives of the game beyond the basic timeline. I could read a timeline of the CIA and have a completely bereft of context and emotion understanding. The actual play of the game of delta green, not the reading of it, but the PLAYING of it, produces far more interesting reads of ideology and the like. I could give a poo poo if colonel hardcastle is a byakhee or how the x-1 artifact has produced 37 lasers each held by one of the main protagonists or antagonists of the setting. A bunch of d&d players in heated argument over whether to torch an above ground cistern that may have a demon or a kidnapped woman in it is far more interesting to me.

It's a bit extreme to read it as a Stanford Prison Experiment. No one generally takes it that seriously unless they already have other problems. The thing about any tabletop RPG game is that there are three games:

1) What the designers intended. Games say lots of things on the tin.

2) What they actually wrote. Games often have breakdowns between intentions and how they work mechanically, or have cargo cult design problems that have nothing to do with the other intentions.

3) How players actually play it. It's a game and people treat it like a game. In rare cases you get a game that is good enough to enforce its setting on players or that everyone agrees and is equipped to play along with, but players playing D&D and Vampire in the same way is not exactly unheard of.

D&D is the dominant RPG, and resists coherent philosophical or political issues besides those that it accidentally corners itself into by doing so. It's a violent power fantasy about plundering tombs full of goblins.

In games like Delta Green and Vampire, your character is generally doomed from the outset. Delta Green because Lovecraft, Vampire because the entire game is basically about organized crime with vampires, so from the outset there are always powerful groups trying to eliminate you. At that point, if your choices don't ultimately matter, the power fantasy is what remains. You make choices that you think will win a game, or you do what seems most amusing at the time over chips and beer (nothing wrong with that).

In this sense, games where you can actually fight Cthulhu or pre-flood vampire antediluvians and expect to win are rather refreshing, especially when any complete library of RPGs would have an entire wing devoted to fatalistic Lovecraftian games.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 19:37

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Relevant Tangent posted:

Let's talk about when WW decided to write about the Gothic-Punk streets you were going to encounter in their games. Let's talk about Destiny's Price:

The year is 1995 and WW has released their first (and only shockingly enough) Black Dog game factory book for their Mage line. As you can guess from "Ripple and cum" up there, this is a journey.

Let me guess, this book isn't about how your vampire can get involved in the crack epidemic.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2021 19:23

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

"Fishmalk" generally is short-hand for "just be zAnY" and "random" to the point that it derails games and what other players want to do, by the way. See also Chaotic Stupid.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2021 23:00

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Killer robot posted:

More into the internet era: Specifically, the complaints about 3e were almost exactly the same as the complaints about 4e, all about it trying to be dumbed-down, balanced, like a video game, throwing away all sorts of proud tradition. There was even a Pathfinder analog then with how HackMaster used AD&D material under license for what was a bit more tongue-in-cheek parody of older versions, but still definitely a draw to angry grognards who couldn't cope with losing THAC0.

It's just that it was before "real" social media, so the internet drama played out on smaller and less organized forums and stuff.

Yeah, pretty much every edition of D&D has had edition warring. 3E came at the dawn of the modern Internet and was ended as a product line during Facebook's heyday. This means that for a bunch of millennials it was the One True D&D, Everyone on the Internet Says So, which has led to 3E and its general design ethos hanging around like a bad smell for well over a decade. Anything previous to 3E may as well have not existed by comparison of how much it was getting talked about.

(SA is a rare enclave in that most of the tabletop gamer posters are very pro-4E or at least anti-Mike Mearls and co).

Web publishing, digital tools, and 3D printing caught up to gaming in the last few years, so there's been a whole new generation of gamers since this 2008 3E/4E schism with a lot more choices of what to play and how to play it. So it feels like more and more of the community is less invested in building a particular version of D&D into their ego.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2021 05:33

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Mundrial Mantis posted:

3E coinciding with rise of the modern internet doesn't get talked about enough. I always wonder if there was something about online forums and 3E's rules that lead to dissections of the rules and game design, along with character optimization and unexpected builds. So the core of 3E players learned the rules among the dozens of splatbooks which sorta leads to a sunk cost.

At least from what I remember of 3E forums during the 2000s, threads about rules, character builds, and game design overshadowed people talking about their groups and campaigns. But telling stories about your current D&D campaign requires having a group and involves a lot of "you had to be there" to get the full effect.

Anyways, have some complaining about 3E not being real D&D.

Without making an overlong TG-style post about how it all works, 3E character theorycrafting involves planning everything the character will do from levels 1-20+ because of how levels stack on top of each other for requirements purposes, often fudging assumptions about rules interactions that won't actually work if interpreted honestly by the reader, or generous assumptions about what their DM will actually tolerate in play (or read to check whether it's even technically allowed). There's no real design model for how powerful anything should be at any given level, so the mechanical interactions between two classes that were developed in isolation from each other are unbound.

It's basically the perfect theorycrafting black box for nerds to plunge into.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 01:57

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Arivia posted:

Yes, but the internet offering a community for that theorycrafting to happen in significantly changed how D&D 3e (and games descended from it) were played and designed for. The old �CharOp� (Character Optimization) forum on the WotC forums was infamous for warping how discussion of the game worked, and a lot of what people consider common terms for discussing those editions (class tiers, crunch vs. fluff, et cetera) came from those boards. WotC designers were pretty upfront about how the feedback they were getting from online communities influenced how they wrote new sourcebooks and created new material for the game, eventually leading to Orcus (what became the Book of Nine Swords for 3e) and then 4e itself. It is positively stark how different products were during 3e�s lifetime, the design and writing of 3.0 and its supplements is miles away from what happened in late 3.5. (And there was a design model for how powerful things should be, it was just really inaccurate for how the CharOp people and ultimately most people who read forums played 3e by a few years into the game, I�d guess it was obvious to WotC designers what the edition was really shaping up to be by about middle to late 2002 with the publication of Savage Species and then the 3.5 revision.)

Tons and tons of nerd factionalism.

e: in contrast to the 3e community�s focus on �builds�, most 5e posts are �look at how cool my bisexual disaster tiefling bard is�, and most OSR community discussion is �look at this cool new tool I came up with for GMs and how I used it in the last session I ran.� No opinions which is better or worse, but the game editions definitely lead to different kinds of excited discussions.

This is mainly to my mind because 5E charop is by comparison so boring that there's barely anything to discuss. "Hi guys, nice to meet you. I've brought a character named Dip Warlock."

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 03:59

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

TheCenturion posted:

Well, that's the other thing; people ignore the concept-as-written for martial classes.

IN AD&D 2e, how many DMs actually bust out old PHB Table 16 when Mr Fighter hits level 9, and suddenly finds himself with an army? Or Table 19, when Mr. Ranger might suddenly find himself with a flock of hippgriffs or a fuckton of bears following them around? Or 10th level thieves who suddenly find themselves running a fair-sized gang/guild?

Nope. Mr. Wizard learns how to bend time and space, while Mr. Fighter is still travelling from inn to inn, looking at the quest board and living hand to mouth while being decked out with magical gear.

Now, BECMI was very VERY explicit that the game radically changes as you move up the boxes; Basic has you doing scrub jobs, Expert has you 'adventuring,' Companion has you settling down and carving out a kingdom, Master has you juggling your kingdom and world-altering quests, and I loved the idea of Immortal letting you ascend to godhood.

AD&D has the same system, but doesn't really impose it on you the way BECMI did.

This is another issue with 3E in that every class is expressed in totality as a table you can make in Microsoft Word, not a detailed, interesting thing that does something besides Increase Number.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 19:18

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Just going to drop this in here because I was reminded of it the other day:

https://twitter.com/lindsaaaytweets/status/1278335484041838592

The above bizarre biological determinism is how races have been typically written and treated in D&D. I cannot tell you how much this reminds of most D&D books in how they describe race.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 21:15

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Arivia posted:

And there was a design model for how powerful things should be, it was just really inaccurate for how the CharOp people and ultimately most people who read forums played 3e by a few years into the game, I�d guess it was obvious to WotC designers what the edition was really shaping up to be by about middle to late 2002 with the publication of Savage Species and then the 3.5 revision.

And I meant to address this earlier, but the design model throughout the lifespan of 3E is notoriously tummyfeels. There's no banded math and often no math. Monster challenge rating math for example was never described because it didn't exist, everything just ended up with what amounted to an approximation of what they thought the monster was for, but in practice if the math even existed it wouldn't matter because the casters could obviate anything.

Designer biases were all over every class, and throughout the lifetime of the game it rewarded players who created multiclass abominations rather than those who labored under the sensible but incorrect idea that anything was mathematically balanced or even meant to be as rewarding as everything else.

E: Did not actually mean to triple post

# ¿ Nov 8, 2021 21:23

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Everything about Dragonlance is exceptionally dumb and Kender are no exception. Dragonlance is a prime example about how most D&D aggressively avoids making any internal sense and just tries to perpetuate Saturday morning cartoon logic to everything. Evil wizards wear black robes and good ones white. If you are non-committal to good or evil you wear red. Being a black robe isn't really enough to get you killed on sight by anyone unless you officially join a war, because black robes are subtle whenever possible you see, aside from wearing their morality as an armband that is.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2021 06:52

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

The problem is that D&D races are inextricably linked with real-world peoples, nothing just popped up with no real-world analogue. A dwarf or an orc is not an alien with no recognizable attachment to how cultures and races are treated in the real world. Everything is derived from Tolkien, so for example a dwarf is at core a Jew. Tolkien struggled with whether orcs were truly irredeemable and what that would mean to the overall message of the story if they were.

That kind of nuance is largely lost on D&D and its successors.

1) If you say orcs are demons birthed from muck by the will of an evil god, and not actually people

2) but then turn around and say you can be one wouldn't that be fun

3) and then don't really do any homework on what the existence of an evil god means

...You're arriving at a strange intersection between good harmless fun and games about race wars of extermination.

This is what WoW has become about, obvious real world analogue races engaged in non-stop race war, united only briefly by missions to assassinate god.

Does it matter? These are all just games, right? It's exasperating when everything is political. The stakes and consequences in the moment are low. But as a lens to view stuff in the real world and learn more about it, many of these games are really poor and immature, sometimes with heinous messaging. We also discover that this is not always an accident when we look into who is responsible and their politics.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2021 15:40

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

TheCenturion posted:

This is the thing.

Are Drow biologically incapable of empathy and kindness, except for the occasional one born with what, to them, is a birth defect? Are they divinely created to be unable to be empathetic or kind? Are they perfectly capable of it, but have it purposefully beaten out of them as part of their upbringing? Are they perfectly capable of it, but conform to societal expectations in cities like Menzzoberanzan to avoid being targeted and punished by the ruiling elite? Are they culturally that way due to external pressures?

D&D has always openly stated 'some species, like kobolds, goblins, gnolls, etc, are fundamentally and irrevocably evil, period, full-stop.'

D&D goes out of its way to avoid thinking about any of it and breeds that contempt for thinking about it into a solid portion of the playerbase.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2021 17:09

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SlothfulCobra posted:

They're really not. Like Tolkien may have been inspired by real-world Jews for dwarves, but that was mainly in things like being a diaspora spread across the world after the loss of their homeland, their naming system, their calendar, and their language having semitic phonemes and structure as well as being from a lineage outside of the languages of man and elf. Those are not the aspects that other fantasy works copied about dwarves. They copied the fact that they live in underground tunnels mining, which has no parallel in any earthly culture because there's no record of humans living underground long-term like that, that's just something that was made up about these fictional creatures in their fictional society.

"Tolkien Dwarves aren't Jews later on in other works, just simplified versions of Tolkien Dwarves for brevity" isn't really much of a functional difference, especially when most of these games and stories involving dwarves start coloring them in with Tolkien tropes as soon as what they're doing and how they're doing it comes into play. For example, virtually every dwarf thing involves a semi-secret runic alphabet and some sort of diaspora culture. They are also always war-like in the Tolkien sense and without this they basically cease to be dwarves.

"It's just a dwarf, it signifies nothing!" is a pretty tortured way of looking at it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2021 19:35

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SlothfulCobra posted:

Tolkien's dwarves aren't warlike, they have actually have a tendency of sitting out the big conflicts. The Dwarven expeditions to the Lonely Mountain and Moria pale in comparison to Gondor's long fight with Mordor, and the wars the Elves got into in earlier ages were literally earth-shattering.

Runes may be taken from Tolkien's dwarves, but those are specifically not-Jewish inspired. They're literally anglo-saxon runes that have been mixed around a little. Written Hebrew tends to be more caligraphy rather than patterns that could more easily be engraved in stone.

So from that it sounds like you're saying that later incarnations of dwarves are taking more from the non-semitic aspects of Tolkien's dwarves.

I dunno what other works you're talking about where dwarves have become a diaspora, most of the other stuff I've seen them in seems to focus more on them living in their great underground cities.

The question isn't in whether or not any given dwarf is extremely Jewish, it's that all these successor dwarves from other works are reading Tolkien and starting there, even if they cut out the bits that aren't "necessary," and Tolkien dwarves are extremely Jewish through the lens of ancient Jews as Tolkien would understand them as well as linguistically. The modern dwarf is Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off; this is basically inarguable and I have no idea under what rational basis you could determine otherwise.

Throughout modern fiction and gaming, if dwarves haven't been turned out of their ancestral lands entirely, they typically occupy only a shadow of their former kingdom, which is now occupied by the boggarts of the setting, and just as in Tolkien fight bitterly to reclaim what was lost. Your claim that Tolkien dwarves are not particularly warlike is also totally wrong, and even The Hobbit ends with them fighting. Throughout LOTR, if they are not fighting alongside the rest of the races, they are blood-feuding with them.

Dwarves being relatable to things in the real world and history is what gives their depiction meaning and strength in the popular imagination. There isn't some neo-dwarf out there, irrelevant to culture or people.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2021 01:34

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Randarkman posted:

It should be noted that the Skaven are more nazis in the pulp adventure serial context. Maybe specifically the secretly hiding in South America type. They believe themselves to be the master race and scheme and come up with zany plans and evil research that combines super science and occult magic, they've got the highly recognizable and simple and obviously evil-looking symbol and their elite troops are "stormvermin".

e: Also worth noting that not everything about a fantasy race or culture has to be an exact allegory or parallel of something in the real world or history, you can easily have numerous deviations or inconsistencies. Skaven are nazis in a broad, and I think, pulp fiction sense.

Most of the important ones are also doing lots of ~~warpstone~~ drugs.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2021 18:54

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

SirPhoebos posted:

One thing that I've noticed about publishers is that the more obviously fraught a subject is, the better and more considerate the writing turns out even if the rest of their line has a bunch of moments (assuming the writer isn't a full-on chud). The oWoD supplement on Holocaust ghosts is a perfect example. Another great example can be found with the 2nd edition of the the Warhammer Fantasy RPG.

There was a supplement for that RPG on Bretonnia, a land with rigidly codified rules for class and gender. And the book goes out of it's way to explain that if a player doesn't want to deal with that, they don't have to, they have full permission to be the special exception or not have it come up at all. And even if a player wants navigating a society that doesn't accept them to be part of their story, the book makes it clear that for all of Bretonnia's rules, it's relatively easy for an adventurer to take on a role that society says they shouldn't ('if someone is dressed as a knight, then clearly they are a knight!'). Overall it's very well thought out and goes out of its way to make sure that nothing the players aren't comfortable dealing with in their game gets tossed about just because "it's part of the setting".

Meanwhile, the default polity the game is set in (the unimaginatively named "Empire") the topic of gender is "yeah some roles have pre-assumed gender preferences but men and women can have any occupation". And it seems that some of the writers took that as a green light to insert IRL misogamy into the game without any sort of warning or sidebar that perhaps this isn't cool with everyone at the table.

In Warhammer any society that didn't have both genders doing everything possible would be crushed by everyone else doing their own full court press anyway.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2022 04:30

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Telsa Cola posted:

She's a daemon princeess. That's like explicitly not mortal.

Yes, but you have to start as a mortal to become a landed daemon.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2022 03:32

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

The core of 40K is black political humor/commentary featuring a bunch of civilizations that are cartoonishly horrid to live in and operate in a perpetual state of a pre-apocalypse that somehow never quite happens. Its writers have spent a long time burying the underlying silliness at the root of it with a gothic space opera preying on the audience's continuing fascination with He-Man and Transformers.

Stuff like the "Dark Angels" faction being led by "Lion'el Johnson" and being concerned with some kind of deep secret about their true nature that they are very embarrassed about is still there. But mostly as Tibalt says, you pick which faction you like the aesthetics and attitude of to stand on top of the skulls.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2022 01:42

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Orks have a Mad Max recycled/jury-rigged aesthetic that allows them to make a functional version of anything anyone else uses, that sometimes actually works better. If it's unstable and randomly kills and maims smaller orks when you turn it on, they've only achieved parity with everyone else's technology.

For some reason it makes a section of ork fans really mad that it's ever implied that the mostly-comedy faction's technology only works because they collectively believe it works, even though everyone's technology in 40K is equally as silly as that. The second option widely presented is that a given percentage of orks are engineered with an innate and almost subconscious ability to just build whatever they need to.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2022 02:52

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

CommieGIR posted:

Isn't it basically implied that the Chaos factions are directly fueled by the very actions the Imperium and others take, directly fueling the Chaos factions through the mind-numbingly insane dystopian world they want to achieve?

More than implied, though the factions themselves are just one aspect of the existential, all-pervasive nature of chaos in the setting.

# ¿ Mar 31, 2022 16:10

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

It's difficult to take the Halo backstory completely seriously because until the Reach game it felt like the story barely existed in-game, and it now exists as a pastiche of other dystopian militaristic sci fi settings, while the games have become Star Trek III: The Search for Waifu.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2022 20:54

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Efforts to recreate Dwarf Fortress from scratch are misplaced IMO, but YMMV

# ¿ Jul 5, 2022 23:00

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

It's easy to think "Ah, of course this was always about politics," but tabletop regressives also likely being political regressives was a distant secondary issue until many of those regressives found a political figure they could all rally behind, and then things like 5E explicitly aligning with these stupid assholes happened.

It's important to remember that there's always been edition wars, 3E vs. 4E is just the first one that was fueled by social media and the many consequences of that. It would have been as minor as every other edition war if the Internet weren't increasingly designed around forming echo chambers. If Facebook/Reddit doesn't happen, people probably just move on from 3E instead of trying to hold it up as a philosophical pillar of gaming or whatever dumb loving thing.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2022 19:59

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Son of a Vondruke! posted:

How does every playthrough not turn into the party defending Jesus at all costs. That's what I'd do. Just to be contrarian.

https://youtu.be/dIeuBPDUzB0

# ¿ Aug 12, 2022 08:57

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I have never seen this before

Mad TV wasn't always great and maybe had two really good years, but when they nailed it they nailed it.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2022 19:23

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Anyway,

Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

# ¿ Aug 12, 2022 21:39

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Randalor posted:

I don't remember the original Star Frontiers being quite so... openly racist. I'm guessing that "NuTSR" is going all-in chasing those horrible, horrible racist dollars and making big bank off of the controversy.

I think it's mostly insane people, since even most KKK splinter groups attempt more false nuance and coded language than this. "Negros are subhuman!!!" is straight-up Aryan Nations poo poo, the type of guys who live in compounds and don't recognize the federal government.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2022 20:16

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:32

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

In Civ you can get a cultural victory by making GBS threads out art at unprecedented levels, but on any serious difficulty someone will raze your territory, or the villagers will grow restless because they can't eat (most) paintings and statues, and raze it themselves.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2023 10:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!