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remusclaw posted:I feel like one of the reasons violence is so acceptably game-able, ie abstract-able in an acceptable way is it’s distance from our general day to day existence. I would say it's some of this and some of combat just generally being easy to make interesting, balanced, and achievable even if you're not good at fighting in real life. And similar attempts at non-violent conflict resolution tend to resemble a fight, like the social combat rules many games have, or the Matrix navigation hackers/deckers do in Shadowrun.
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Oct 23, 2018 14:24
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With Burning Wheel, it's important to keep in mind that yeah, your campaign setup and chargen is going to take an entire session even with Charred helping out, and if it takes less than that you're probably doing it wrong. BW is a game meant to be played in long campaigns though, unlike Mouse Guard or Apocalypse World, so the "chargen to time played" ratio comes out pretty favorably if you're using the system as intended.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:33
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I dunno, DCC roleplaying is pretty great. It could be that I'm taking its "you don't need any backstory or setting or any of that newfangled nonsense!" attitude a little too at face value. It doesn't necessarily seem like a bad game. Well, as long as you're willing to accept such old chestnuts as "rolling 3d6 down the line is actually fun!*" and just roll with its fawning over AD&D (which raises the question of "why not just play AD&D?", but I'm not clearly not old-school enough to understand). It's big on One True Waying to a level I rarely see in games and that's a pretty hard turnoff for me. That's not a comment on the actual rules, though. * Which always, always feels bizarre to me, because even Gygax frowned on that in the core text. Meinberg posted:I'm not sure if this is the correct place to talk about this, but I recently put up a blog post about strategies that game designers and runners can employ to make their games less appealing to fascists. I think one of the core issues you run into is that fascism, to an extent, has always preyed on and parasitised itself to our modern image of heroism. Take Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which is loaded with radical leftist politics, yet has the modern White Wolf calling it "heroic fascism", and neither statement feels particularly untrue to me. Or the gyrations of the modern alt-right Star Wars fans who think that the Rebel Alliance was always supposed to be their poor, pitiful, put-upon themselves, hence making the First Order a twisting-around of the franchise. I'm reminded of Umberto Eco's definition of Ur-Fascism (full article here, for those with the time). Essentially, core to Fascism is the notion that its followers are special and heroic, and core to most RPGs is the notion that the characters being played are special and heroic. As such, the notion of "fascism-proofing" an RPG seems like it could be a tall order. Obviously one way is just to do it aesthetically, of course. Legend of the Five Rings doesn't get much fascism attention (mind, you still have duders freaking out now because there's more womens) because it's pointedly non-European. But that's just kind of a stopgap measure and it's dependent on fashion. I don't think anybody would have predicted a child of Tolkien's work to be played by white supremacists, but here we are. In general, pacifist and disempowerment themes do a lot to undermine their appeal, but that also pulls things farther away from the power fantasies a lot of folks find appealing. Of course, stuff like decolonization is generally moving just towards better writing habits. Ultimately, though, I feel like any change is going to have community-based. When white supremacists have had heated arguments as as to whether or not they can be drow fans, it's hard to imagine much they couldn't undermine. I think while not serving them up fresh red meat can be useful, none of that matters if the community ignores and tolerates them.
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Oct 23, 2018 21:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:[...] What about an idea following chinese thought, that those who are player characters are less special and more aberration? Not held up high, but cast down. Or is this just another variant of specialty veiled by a too-similar-logic (totalitarian maoism)?
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Oct 23, 2018 21:57
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I'm a DCC stalwart so forgive me if I'm biased but everything you just wrote sounds like you already knew you weren't going to like it and gave the rules enough of a cursory glance to be dismissive. The 3d6 down the line character creation is something I really like actually, but you arent restricted to one character which is the whole point. It also lets you play the funnel adventures which are really loving fun. The book itself though even says the authors think you should give it a chance but many people just skip that part and build characters directly. It is not dogmatic about anything.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:12
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Mr.Misfit posted:What about an idea following chinese thought, that those who are player characters are less special and more aberration? Not held up high, but cast down. Or is this just another variant of specialty veiled by a too-similar-logic (totalitarian maoism)? I'm gonna think this through out loud a bit, and apologize in advance for a bit of a mental diarrhea post. The protagonist(s) of a story are generally special at least by virtue of being the protagonists; I'm not sure how you could make a role-playing game in which the the players are not portraying the special focus of the story (and this problem is not escaped by playing the antagonists, either). From the point of view of not being appealing to fascists, I suppose "special" here is meaning, physically or mentally or morally extraordinary compared to the common person. But given that role-playing games in addition to characters and settings typically have plots - however arrived at - and given that plots are typically conceived-of as a series of scenes or encounters or events, each of which involves some kind of conflict, how could you have the characters be unremarkable in every way, and yet still routinely succeed at the challenges they face? I guess you can have games like Cthulhu, where the investigators are presumed to be doomed. In other words, they don't succeed, at least eventually. (Ironic, given the problems with Lovecraft's stances on things like race, gender, etc.) So you can have very typical and ordinary by human standards protagonists in stories where they muddle along and any success they enjoy is down to luck (or player cleverness not reflected in character abilities, as sometimes happens in any RPG) rather than the benefits of the characters being special in some way... that does not sound very appealing to me though, outside some very niche game types (Paranoia springs to mind, where the goal of the game is just to betray your fellow characters faster/harder/funnier than they betray you, in a larger context of certain failure). Even with games like these, I think you need to give the players something interesting on their character sheets to engage with. Is fun or engaging to play a role, if all the roles are "normal" or average or unremarkable in every way? Aren't we playing RPGs at least in part as a form of escapism from our own personal normality? I guess you can try to make all the interesting parts happen in the setting and plot rather than in the characters, but I think most folks would agree that good stories should have points of interest in all three. Can mundanity ever be sustainably interesting? I'm not sure even if you started with totally mundane characters if it'd be possible to prevent your creative players from endowing them with unusual attributes during the course of play, anyway. In the end I think this is all silliness based on the fallacy that because fascists cling to tropes about their own specialness, we therefore cannot have special characters without promoting fascism. I think various games will sometimes appeal to fascists as a side-effect of the kind of game they are, and that it's a mistake to then automatically reject or criticize those games solely on that basis. The goal should not be to make games impossible for fascists to like, but only to make games that do not actively or directly promote fascism. That's a much easier goal to achieve, and I think the only reasonable approach.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:38
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Leperflesh posted:The goal should not be to make games impossible for fascists to like, but only to make games that do not actively or directly promote fascism. That's a much easier goal to achieve, and I think the only reasonable approach. I think that's reasonable as well because they could just weaponize their support and take a game that's supposed to be anti-them and try to twist into being a fascist game like they did with the cartoon frog, dairy products and the okay sign.
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Oct 23, 2018 22:51
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andrew smash posted:I'm a DCC stalwart so forgive me if I'm biased but everything you just wrote sounds like you already knew you weren't going to like it and gave the rules enough of a cursory glance to be dismissive. Nah, I didn't honestly have any strong opinion and had heard good things before opening it. It's got tons of interesting ideas around the edges, I feel, but the core itself doesn't grab me. The introduction is probably one of the most offputting I've ever been exposed to, I'd definitely admit, and it's hard not for that to color anything I read following it. Leperflesh posted:The goal should not be to make games impossible for fascists to like, but only to make games that do not actively or directly promote fascism. That's a much easier goal to achieve, and I think the only reasonable approach. More or less, it's just the argument of "what promotes fascism" is going to be a subject of debate, particularly when it comes to subtext. There's still a big debate about what fascism is, really.
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Oct 23, 2018 23:02
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Fascism evolves. It also attempts to incorporate and co-opt signifiers of good things. There are no shortcuts for identifying fascism; it is necessary to understand your own society.
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Oct 23, 2018 23:04
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Bongo Bill posted:Fascism evolves. It also attempts to incorporate and co-opt signifiers of good things. There are no shortcuts for identifying fascism; it is necessary to understand your own society. Pretty much, these days probably should be all the proof you need that there's not actually a magic cheat code to trick fascism and it's friend capitalism away from ever existing, culture and society plays into that stuff more than anything. This poo poo isn't happening because Gygax failed to put the no-nazi runes in his books it's because they consume and interact with stuff just as much as we do. It's about adapting and basically making them feel unwelcome, not really about pre-cog poo poo.
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Oct 23, 2018 23:50
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Mr.Misfit posted:What about an idea following chinese thought, that those who are player characters are less special and more aberration? Not held up high, but cast down. Or is this just another variant of specialty veiled by a too-similar-logic (totalitarian maoism)? How is this Chinese? What?
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Oct 24, 2018 03:50
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Oh lol good take. That Maoism is about crab mentality for pulling the peasants' betters down the gutter.
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Oct 24, 2018 04:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:How is this Chinese? I dunno about that, but I'm definitely into the vibe of outcast/abberant rather than hero/special protagonists.
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Oct 24, 2018 04:12
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yeah if there's anything alt-right people don't do it's brand themselves as put-upon outcasts who are shunned by society
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Oct 24, 2018 04:15
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AlphaDog posted:I dunno about that, but I'm definitely into the vibe of outcast/abberant rather than hero/special protagonists. That’s a cool and good theme for a game. I just have no idea how it’s “Chinese” and that seems weird as gently caress. Like even if you reduce Moaism to being Chinese (a HUGE loving LEAP), it doesn’t follow.
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Oct 24, 2018 04:18
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I'd say a Chinese preference for outcast stories would be stuff like Water Margin or all those Wuxia novels/movies set during the Qing or other widely reveled dynasties or governments where the protags are bandits or rebel leaders or normal people who beat the poo poo out of the local government officials.
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Oct 24, 2018 04:20
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Countblanc posted:yeah if there's anything alt-right people don't do it's brand themselves as put-upon outcasts who are shunned by society Yeah, but their brand is that of the Real People trapped in a land overrun by Others and I'm talking about protagonist-as-Other. I also have no idea whatsoever how "Chinese" fits into this.
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Oct 24, 2018 04:24
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Plutonis posted:I'd say a Chinese preference for outcast stories would be stuff like Water Margin or all those Wuxia novels/movies set during the Qing or other widely reveled dynasties or governments where the protags are bandits or rebel leaders or normal people who beat the poo poo out of the local government officials. That’s literally well over 1,000 years out of date. What?
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Oct 24, 2018 04:28
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Xiahou Dun posted:That’s literally well over 1,000 years out of date. That's why I avoided saying that those are related to Maoism. It's rather that there might be a tradition of roguish/outcast protagonists on Chinese culture as a whole(and modern media too, such as movies like Disciples of the 36th Chamber)
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Oct 24, 2018 04:33
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Plutonis posted:That's why I avoided saying that those are related to Maoism. It's rather that there might be a tradition of roguish/outcast protagonists on Chinese culture as a whole(and modern media too, such as movies like Disciples of the 36th Chamber) What. I can’t. It’s a whole culture how can you. gently caress. Please stop talking. I’ve spent 10 years reading primary documents in various kinds of old Chinese. Pleas shut up. poo poo complicated.
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Oct 24, 2018 04:42
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Why the gently caress do I even try to engage in good faith with people here. gently caress off.
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Oct 24, 2018 05:01
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Meinberg posted:I do think that people sometimes underestimate the degree to which the media consumes their thinking. Not necessarily in a "violent games make people violent" direct correlary, but to the degree that unexamined notions about violence may impact the way that people view violence in the real world. I believe strongly that the sanitized violence of D&D and similar games, especially where the narrative and mechanics present violence as an inherent good, is a not great, especially in aggregate. In D&D, the solution to almost all problems is to make that problem dead, which I think is a structure that is worthy of further examination, and one which I believe supports an heroic view of violence. This is much more relevant to something like a Masks game where the opposition is other people, than say D&D where the characters are living in a world full of aggressive wandering monsters where a well-honed capability of instant violence is a necessary survival skill. The knee-jerk reaction to violence as bad misses out on a lot of why fiction (especially interactive fiction, like games) can very effectively use violence to tell a story that is attractively different from the audience's real life problems. Sometimes it is greatly cathartic to take an afternoon off from worrying about how you're going to pay your student loans to pretend in a world where you can, in fact, hit the bastard starving your family in a face with a claw hammer.
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Oct 24, 2018 05:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:What. I sort of took that they were meaning media such as movies/books/etc, you might be seeing something bad where there isn't.
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Oct 24, 2018 05:28
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Xiahou Dun posted:That’s literally well over 1,000 years out of date. His point is that if someone were to try to claim Chinese thought paints protagonists as outcasts and not adulated heroes (this is presumably the point you don't agree with because it's reducing the entirety of Chinese culture to one statement), why would they point to Maoism and not just wuxia, the genre of Chinese fiction where adventuring protagonists are painted as outcasts and not adulated heroes. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Oct 24, 2018 |
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Oct 24, 2018 06:57
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Chill out folks 
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Oct 24, 2018 08:34
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I have eaten some noodles in my time, let me tell you about Chinese culture.
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Oct 24, 2018 09:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:How is this Chinese? Admittingly, the point was overly simplified, though I can´t exactly tell you where I got the thought from, but I remember a discussion...distantly though, about the idea that the chinese monoculture, especially with the rise of Maoism, has tried to further equalize and destroy the idea of the individual as rising up, the western ideal of The Special One seemingly disdained. In a country where you´re one in a billion, let´s say protagonists are so numerous, they either become less special by the sheer size of their number or the idea that they are but a face among many. As such, being a protagonist requires standing out beyond being a protagonist, it requires a change, either for the individual itself or by breaking its own mold, revolution, so to speak. Sorry, I think I´m currently speaking in very loose terms. But, building on this idea also implies the Wuxia. Wuxia works as it does because of the cultural change from the individual to the masses. When heroes are not made by their individuality but by standing out from the people, they become an implicit threat to stability. As such, being outcast for their actions speaks to that idea. They become the fear of the people by taking on the danger, but are thrown outside of the people for it. The problem with this idea would be that by expulsion the people, or the collective self never grows on these fears. The outcast however grows, but only to disdain the people who threw them out. It creates villains, even. Interesting. Sorry, rambling now, I suppose.
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Oct 24, 2018 11:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It could be that I'm taking its "you don't need any backstory or setting or any of that newfangled nonsense!" attitude a little too at face value. It doesn't necessarily seem like a bad game. Well, as long as you're willing to accept such old chestnuts as "rolling 3d6 down the line is actually fun!*" and just roll with its fawning over AD&D (which raises the question of "why not just play AD&D?", but I'm not clearly not old-school enough to understand). You could just say you've never read the rules, man. It neither fawns over ADnD, actively refuses to be identified as OSR(and honestly, its not..not really) and has very little One True Wayism about it. I can promise you that no One True Way purist would dare suggest letting clerics heal potentially indefinitely.
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Oct 24, 2018 17:23
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It sounds like it's really just the intro essay that bugged him
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Oct 24, 2018 17:25
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Mr.Misfit posted:Admittingly, the point was overly simplified, though I can´t exactly tell you where I got the thought from, but I remember a discussion...distantly though, about the idea that the chinese monoculture, especially with the rise of Maoism, has tried to further equalize and destroy the idea of the individual as rising up, the western ideal of The Special One seemingly disdained. In a country where you´re one in a billion, let´s say protagonists are so numerous, they either become less special by the sheer size of their number or the idea that they are but a face among many. As such, being a protagonist requires standing out beyond being a protagonist, it requires a change, either for the individual itself or by breaking its own mold, revolution, so to speak. You should read some xianxia novels
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Oct 24, 2018 17:31
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andrew smash posted:It sounds like it's really just the intro essay that bugged him But it's a great drat rule set. I wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was. It's exactly what I look for in an RPG nowadays - focused on one thing and on doing that thing really well, keeping the core rules concise and simple, pushing the envelope for its genre, and well-supported in a way that feels expansive instead of prescriptive.
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Oct 24, 2018 18:43
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:You could just say you've never read the rules, man.
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Oct 24, 2018 18:54
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Skelettin posted:Chill out folks
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Oct 24, 2018 21:41
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I'm going to assume everyone has read DCC ...except me. So explain to me as a pleb what one-true-way stuff is/isn't in it specifically.
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Oct 24, 2018 22:03
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'm going to assume everyone has read DCC The intro is some dumb bullshit full of OSR/grognard signifiers. 
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Oct 24, 2018 22:15
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:It neither fawns over ADnD, actively refuses to be identified as OSR(and honestly, its not..not really) and has very little One True Wayism about it. I can promise you that no One True Way purist would dare suggest letting clerics heal potentially indefinitely. I mean, I could quote verse and scripture, and it's a book that actively has an extensive list of OSR blogs it pushes you to check out and definitely wants its readers to explore the OSR community. It tells you to do stuff because it's tradition while admitting some readers will buck that. Of course, you can make your own conclusions about what is OSR and what isn't, and they can say it's not, but I feel like it's more a thing of intent and focus than quibbling back and forth whether or not Lankhmar-esque magic corruption or push-your-luck cleric mechanics or a random quirky luck stat is properly old school or not. Yes, it's somewhat modernized, but the same can be said for many OSR games to different degrees. Kevin Crawford's games are considered OSR but they aren't slavishly devoted to just mimeographing Gygax's words either. I feel like it's OSR. You're welcome to disagree, I'm not too worried about it. Have I read every word of every page of DCC? No, I haven't, I've been digging through a lot of fantasy games to see what'll inspire interesting ideas. I have a pretty good idea of how it works and have at least skimmed through the whole book, focusing in to stop and read how the basic system works and how it plays, how the classes work, how spells are cast, and that much. If I don't like ketchup, I don't need to necessarily drink a bottle of ketchup or taste every brand of ketchup to define the fact I don't want ketchup on something. You can jump to whatever conclusions you like based on that, but you need to start paying me before I read another 150+ page spell section front-to-back, because that poo poo is work. If you think there's some subsystem I may have missed that will turn me into an expanding brain meme, feel free to quote page numbers at me. But just claiming I only read the one thing doesn't help. Here's one thing I really did like: the discussion of what it called "pre-genre fantasy" in the Appendix N section, and it's probably the thing I'll take home from the book. Because, frankly, that's what I'm aiming for in my 13th Age game. Granted, I wish DCC walked the talk a little more in that regard, though I appreciate that it does aim at pulling more from old pulp fantasy. Trying to go to pre-Tolkien sources and not necessarily fall back on the hoary fantasy stereotypes is a fun exercise, and after playing in a Lankhmar game for a year it's definitely where my brain is at. I don't know if I'll succeed in doing more than having different elves, there's still some of the old stereotypes I like and still want to use, but not being bound by them is handy. I just wish the attitude of that essay had been up front instead of... the weird gatekeepey stuff he put up front. I understand that was probably intended as a joke, but I didn't laugh!
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Oct 24, 2018 22:18
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Piell posted:The intro is some dumb bullshit full of OSR/grognard signifiers. I feel dumber for having read that.
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Oct 24, 2018 22:18
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Piell posted:The intro is some dumb bullshit full of OSR/grognard signifiers. Did loving Tycho from Penny Arcade write this?
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Oct 24, 2018 22:37
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Piell posted:The intro is some dumb bullshit full of OSR/grognard signifiers. Christ. I would have read three paragraphs into that, put the book back on the shelf and spent my money on something else. Never mind that I think Erol Otus is hugely overrated, the phrase 'visual hieroglyphs' is not an indicator of quality. (Like the time I read a scifi thing where the aliens used 'bio-organic' technology. That was not a good use of my time.)
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Oct 24, 2018 22:48
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Yah that almost got me to drop my KS pledge. That and the "splash page cultist guy is burning 4e books" post. But. The people making it are objectively less terrible than the 5e team, and the game itself is quite solid in design.
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Oct 24, 2018 22:51
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