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Kestral posted:A Ken Hite-led V:tM has the potential to be incredible, insofar as you can really do anything new with Vampire. Alright Onyx Path, color me cautiously interested in the full release, but after the fiasco of the Exalted Kickstarter, I think I'll pass on backing this one. It's not Onyx Path, it's Paradox's White Wolf subsidiary.
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May 12, 2017 18:37
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It's not Onyx Path, it's Paradox's White Wolf subsidiary. A vitally important distinction, too. Onyx Path and White Wolf operate from entirely different viewpoints and hiring patterns. Whatever comes out of this, odds are it'd be something current Onyx Path would never publish.
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May 12, 2017 18:43
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Mors Rattus posted:A vitally important distinction, too. Onyx Path and White Wolf operate from entirely different viewpoints and hiring patterns. To the point that it looks like W:TA is backsliding to it's 1st edition roots. In the sense that the Garou nation is run by utter morons and can only be saved by the Player Character's party and their amazing superpower of "Critical Thinking Skills".
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May 12, 2017 19:54
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Kurieg posted:To the point that it looks like W:TA is backsliding to it's 1st edition roots. Hm. That doesn't sound appealing. Source(s)?
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May 12, 2017 20:22
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Things I've gleaned from various websites. But the Black Furies are going back to reactionary neo-feminism. E.G. "We won't help save you until you treat your women better.", The Red Talons have somehow managed to convince the rest of the Garou nation to start up a 2nd impergium. The Garou have figured out how to transmit the first change via bite to their kinfolk, but anyone thus-changed is completely sterile, and it's not a 100% guarenteed chance to work, so they're utterly destroying any long term chances of the Garou nation surviving to have a handful of more soldiers now. Also apparently the current leaders of the Nation are heavily implied to be the people who fled from the Last Battlefield during the apocalypse, and they've made a lot of sweeping changes to the Litany (Including a double whammy of "GarouxGarou sex is 100% A-OK but you should kill all Metis on sight)
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May 12, 2017 20:40
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Kurieg posted:Things I've gleaned from various websites. But the Black Furies are going back to reactionary neo-feminism. E.G. "We won't help save you until you treat your women better.", The Red Talons have somehow managed to convince the rest of the Garou nation to start up a 2nd impergium. The Garou have figured out how to transmit the first change via bite to their kinfolk, but anyone thus-changed is completely sterile, and it's not a 100% guarenteed chance to work, so they're utterly destroying any long term chances of the Garou nation surviving to have a handful of more soldiers now. Also apparently the current leaders of the Nation are heavily implied to be the people who fled from the Last Battlefield during the apocalypse, and they've made a lot of sweeping changes to the Litany (Including a double whammy of "GarouxGarou sex is 100% A-OK but you should kill all Metis on sight) I'm pretty sure this is all from the By Night Studios LARP book, not neo-White Wolf's next W:tA version. BNS's setting work is generally deviant from everything else and shouldn't be taken as relevant to anything else.
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May 12, 2017 22:35
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I thought they got some of that from WWP? Regardless Considering that the first thing we got out of Swedracula regarding nunuWolf was "A return to Crypto-Fascist Eco-Terrorism" and we know they want to do a return to the Impergium I'm not giving them the benefit of any doubts.
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May 12, 2017 22:40
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They touted that as cocreated with White Wolf, yeah, and Swedracula is, like, the most into LARPing. So into LARPing, you have no idea. Basically his speeches on WoD have been focused almost exclusively on the LARP experience, with video games being a distant second and tabletop itself almost never brought up.
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May 12, 2017 23:14
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Mors Rattus posted:They touted that as cocreated with White Wolf, yeah, and Swedracula is, like, the most into LARPing. So into LARPing, you have no idea. The kind of LARPing he likes has literally nothing to do with any LARP products ever released by White Wolf, however. BNS will probably either be able to do whatever they feel like because Swedracula gives zero shits about Mind's Eye Theater and thinks it's for dorks orrrrrrrrr Paradox finds a way to cancel their license so MET doesn't mess up their branding with Swedracula's expensive Scandanavian-style LARPs.
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May 13, 2017 00:34
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I started reading Designers and Dragons based on seeing it mentioned here and it's very good. About to the death and sale of TSR.
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May 14, 2017 03:25
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Pope Guilty posted:I started reading Designers and Dragons based on seeing it mentioned here and it's very good. About to the death and sale of TSR. They're great books, although dry at times. A buddy of mine complained they required too much knowledge for a casual player of RPG's, he is one, but he said they were entertaining nonetheless.
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May 14, 2017 03:46
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One of the store owners (of The Good Store) locally just griped about a different store (The Crappy Store) in a local facebook group for Star Wars Destiny. In our area, we've got 7 Destiny Store Championships being hosted during the store champs season. Great! Good Store is great about keeping the calendar updated (in store and online), and also creates Facebook events in the local player groups as reminders. They set their date for the Destiny Store Champs and announced it literally the same day that Fantasy Flight announced the list of the locations hosting the events. I like playing at this store. It's clean, the employees are good, and it's a nice environment. Crappy Store datestomped them, scheduling their store champs for the same date, 2 weeks after the other one was announced. It seems so stupid. If the dates didn't conflict, each store could have 80-100 players rather than splitting the base and having each of them get 50 players on the same weekend. Setting a different date is better off for everyone, including the players! I was talking to a friend who is friends with the owner of Good Store (and runs a lot of events for them, because he plays every game ever). He was telling me that he tried years ago to coordinate with Crappy Store to get their calendars pre-aligned so they don't conflict. He said that their owner was completely unwilling to deal, and told him "You guys do what you do, we do what we do. Our player base will come on whatever date we set"  That store is so, so weird. It's bizarre that it continues to exist. It has been around for 30 years, and has a multigenerational core clique fan base of people who only play games there. And the store has dirt cheap rent in a sorta sketchy part of town, and closes at 7 PM most nights. Same guy told me that the store ownership houserules/bans stuff within the store for people playing there. You'd get asked to run something different (or even kicked out) if you dared use a Twin Laser Turret upgrade in X-Wing. I am constantly amazed with the crappy and bad business practices that people in hobby retailing are allowed to get away with because there aren't many alternatives.
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May 15, 2017 17:47
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A lot of LGS are run as hobbies of multiple people, with "break even" the only goal. It seems bizarre to me how many game stores are "owned" by 4+ people who bought in and have to work two other jobs to make ends meet.
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May 15, 2017 22:46
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Dragons Are for White Kids with Money: On the Friction of Geekdom and Racequote:I love Stranger Things, not just because it is pure nostalgia for the films that helped shaped my early childhood, but for the simple fact that in the opening scene, a young child of color is playing Dungeons & Dragons with no shame. It is hard to be a geek more often than not, and when you are a geek who also happens to be a person of color, things only become more complicated. quote:On the one hand, I can run a D&D campaign about how poorly certain races like half-elves are treated, and my group will rail against the injustice of it all, but if I bring up any real-world situation of inequality, I get the cold shoulder at best or at worst booed down and given “focus on the game” lectures. As Junot Díaz allegedly said: “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s 1/3 in Elvish, but put in two lines of Spanish and [white people] think we’re taking over.” quote:But I am not alone, even if it once felt that way. I have seen how much my local game stores and comic shops have changed, and I’ve gone from being the only brownish face in a store to being one of several, and depending on the geek endeavor, one of many. Even games are changing now, and one need only compare the ’70s artwork from Dungeons & Dragons to the artwork released today to see the whole shift in representation, both with women and people of color. There is progress; we now have an unapologetically black super hero series in Luke Cage. There is BlerDCon (Black Nerd), and Blerds (the term is typically inclusive of any non-white nerd) even get a shout-out in a song (thanks Childish Gambino).
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May 20, 2017 05:02
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This twitter thread is pretty relevant to that, too: https://twitter.com/Avonelle/status/863937589052669952
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May 20, 2017 11:55
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gnome7 posted:This twitter thread is pretty relevant to that, too: The first reply to that is really telling "race isn't a slur. You're the real racist"
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May 20, 2017 12:16
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This is a great article. I did make the mistake of scrolling down to the comments and discovering that they are 10 times longer than the article, which is never a great sign. gnome7 posted:This twitter thread is pretty relevant to that, too: I have always used "species" instead. Also removing humans or calling humans something else seems to help. So much of our idea of what personhood is is bound up in the word "human".
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May 20, 2017 15:54
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Serf posted:I have always used "species" instead. Also removing humans or calling humans something else seems to help. So much of our idea of what personhood is is bound up in the word "human". Is there a published RPG that does this? I'm having a hard time thinking of one off the top of my head. Everything that has alternative species just has humans as the default and the others are just modifiers off the human template.
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May 20, 2017 16:18
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Well there were the old furry RPGs Jade and Ironclaw which didn't have humans in them at all.
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May 20, 2017 16:25
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TBH I don't really like selecting "races" in RPGs. It always seems to be too much work to explain and understand all the different ones compared to saying "call yourself what you like and give yourself a +2 bonus to a stat" or whatever
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May 20, 2017 16:30
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Nystral posted:Is there a published RPG that does this? I'm having a hard time thinking of one off the top of my head. Everything that has alternative species just has humans as the default and the others are just modifiers off the human template.
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May 20, 2017 16:31
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While I don't think we will ever get beyond the core appeal of Playing A Tolkien, RPGs can definitely do better than push the same Colonialist Pillager Simulation storyline, and eliminating the racial element of your acceptable victims is a good first step.
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May 20, 2017 16:43
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In pugmire it's your breed. Because you're a dog. There's still some fantacy racism against Mutts though.
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May 20, 2017 16:52
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Nystral posted:Is there a published RPG that does this? I'm having a hard time thinking of one off the top of my head. Everything that has alternative species just has humans as the default and the others are just modifiers off the human template. Fantasycraft (and to a lesser extent, Spycraft 2.0 in its fantasy expansions) uses "species" as the core term, at least. Though it uses "race" interchangeably in the text, and "splinter race" refers to subtypes like drow / wood elf / high elf, "species" is the official system term it uses. Fragged Empires uses "races" as a term but has no core human type - the closest are the Corp, which are near-humans defined by money and ambition rather than being a generic default.
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May 20, 2017 17:06
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Fellowship does not have the words "race" or "class" within its text.
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May 20, 2017 17:12
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Star Wars, naturally, has always used "species." It helps that there are no half-Duros or 3/4 Rhodians.
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May 20, 2017 17:23
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In the context of how we bind the idea of personhood to the word human, I had one GM make a fantasy world in which 'human' was the word used for basically any bipedal sapient. So I and my co-player were both dwarves, but that was akin to saying we were both black-haired--it was just a trait that described the characters. It took a minute to absorb the concept but when it clicked it made the othering of traditional non-humans a lot easier to discard.
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May 20, 2017 18:08
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Are Half-Orcs and Half-Elves races or species?
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May 20, 2017 19:07
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Mostly they're a bad metaphor
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May 20, 2017 19:08
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Ominous Jazz posted:Mostly they're a bad metaphor I like your style.
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May 20, 2017 19:08
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Burning Wheel uses "Stock," which nicely bypasses a lot ugly racist baggage, while also accommodating the genre trope of culturally divergent branches of the same species being mechanically distinct: Elves and Dark Elves aren't different species, because a Burning Wheel Dark Elf is just a regular elf whose Grief has turned into Spite, but it's easy to think of them as different stocks because the term connotes culture and heritage rather than biology.
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May 20, 2017 19:29
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Hybrids are a real thing, but that's getting into a real sticky situation when it comes to sentient beings.
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May 20, 2017 19:29
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Garl_Grimm posted:Are Half-Orcs and Half-Elves races or species? If "human/orcs" and "elf/humans" exist and can continue to make babies then elves and orcs and humans are likely all just members of the same species with different adaptations, I believe, more like various sub-species. If orcs and elves can't interbreed then they might be part of a "ring species". Of course the lines for this kind of thing can be fuzzy and arbitrary, so it's hard to definitively say.
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May 20, 2017 19:32
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Serf posted:I have always used "species" instead. Also removing humans or calling humans something else seems to help. So much of our idea of what personhood is is bound up in the word "human". See i dunno calling someone another species seems way more uncomfortable than calling them another race to me
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May 20, 2017 19:35
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phenotype
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May 20, 2017 19:54
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You call them "cultures" or "peoples" and then stop having lovely boring monocultural species in your fantasy games.
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May 20, 2017 20:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:If "human/orcs" and "elf/humans" exist and can continue to make babies then elves and orcs and humans are likely all just members of the same species with different adaptations, I believe, more like various sub-species. If orcs and elves can't interbreed then they might be part of a "ring species". The most commonly spread myth about how species are defined, is that they're solely and exclusively defined by reproductive incompatibility. This is false. You can breed for example a horse with a zebra, they're still separate species. I've studied taxonomy a bit and one of the most important things to grasp is that the way we humans categorize life is just the creation of a model. Models help us to understand things and how they relate, but it's always a mistake to start thinking that your model is the thing. The truth is that there no such thing as a "species." I could point out that there are individual organisms, which tend to exist in populations, and that various populations tend to have varying rates of gene flow between them, ranging from zero to very high, and that over time populations with low or no gene flow between them tend to speciate. But every scientific word in that sentence is based on an imperfect model: an indivudal organism, at least here on earth, is often an interacting accumulation of symbiotic and parasitic things - none of us could survive long without our gut bacteria, for example. The definition of "population" is somewhat fuzzy and open to varying interpretation. Gene flow between populations isn't necessarily an accurate representation of how related or unrelated they are or will become, especially for populations of organisms that do not reproduce sexually. "Speciation" is another word that refers to imperfectly defined models of how different living things become more different in various ways. This is all a long explanation for saying that there's no "best" way to discuss the differences between people that are based on genetic heritage. That there is only one surviving species of the genus Homo may be typical or atypical of planets with civilizations - we only have our own example to go by. But in nature, life has found a lot of different ways to be interrelated: different "kinds" might be called populations, morphs, breeds, races, hybrids, cultivars, species, sub-species, etc. and all of those terms are merely imperfect models. When we talk about our fantasy and science fiction settings, I think an approach attempting to use scientific terminology to differentiate between people is therefore a mistake. What we should do is recognize that some words have enormous and often tragic baggage, and try to avoid them. We should recognize that roleplaying or interacting with "people who are different from you" is always going to be evocative of the often painful, controversial, sometimes tragic, and certainly difficult real-world current and historical racial struggles, and be sensitive to that. We should try to pick words and use concepts that are respectful, and take pains to explicitly recognize and address the areas of a game that are more likely to cause distress or be insulting to someone.
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May 20, 2017 20:47
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Clade it is then.
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May 20, 2017 21:00
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gnome7 posted:Fellowship does not have the words "race" or "class" within its text. This false consciousness will not stand!
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May 20, 2017 22:49
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psychopomp posted:Clade it is then. Baramin, surely.
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May 20, 2017 22:52
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