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LatwPIAT posted:I can give you one right here and now: I don't like transness and other forms of queerness being made the domain of specific fantasy creatures, because it implies being trans/queer is like being a fantasy creature, sets up the trans/queer as an Other, and implies that humans should be cishetero. Yeah, it's far from perfect. There's a lot of baggage with just "humans" in fantasy all being assumed to broadly be the same culture. Ideally a setting would have multiple human cultures that likewise have their own approaches to gender and sexuality, like the Orlanthi example listed above. You want to avoid the problem the 5e books have where Waterdeep is supposed to be a grand and bizarre and diverse city...and the example is Volo treating non-cis people as strange window dressing.
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Dec 29, 2018 23:01
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LatwPIAT posted:I can give you one right here and now: I don't like transness and other forms of queerness being made the domain of specific fantasy creatures, because it implies being trans/queer is like being a fantasy creature, sets up the trans/queer as an Other, and implies that humans should be cishetero. Always? I guess I personally find it interesting when societies (races) have specific social structures and norms as long as they're not boringly portrayed as infallible truths. Pratchett's dwarfs were brought up earlier, and I feel like that sort of demonstrates the point, even if doing it partly for laughs can be problematic I'm sure. Their society is interesting partly because it is "other", and that character is interesting partly because she breaks with their conventions. It reflects how our society has a bunch of rules and conventions that do not conform well with reality. But then, I don't have that much skin in the game, so I get if it's a personal preference.
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Dec 29, 2018 23:24
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An assumption of diverse kingdoms with different proportions of races within the population of them works interestingly for developing a setting but then, of course, still relies upon racial essentialisms for "the elves are wise and orcs are strong" stat lines and player concepts. And doesn't explain why, if these various creatures can procreate with each other, theres extremely distinct racialization and that the borders of, say, elf and human haven't changed over time.
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Dec 29, 2018 23:28
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ProfessorCirno posted:It largely boils down to fantasy being an intensely conservative genre in most aspects. Even beyond it's take on sexuality and sex and gender, the most common fantasy story is "a thing is happening - stop it from happening!" Fantasy heroes rarely make the world a better place - they tend instead to simply uphold the status quo. This isn't even touching fantasy's fetishization of a non-existent medieval state complete with "good kings" and "peasantry rabble," and a terrifyingly racist outlook where each "race" has their own kingdom they stay in, basically glorifying a series of goddamn ethno-states. One of the things that thematically cements Star Wars firmly in the space fantasy genre is that the aim of the protagonists is to restore the "good old days" of the theocratic Republic. The fact that there are far more aliens than humans of non-European descent (or, for that matter, women) also has never been a good look. It's not that science fiction can't be problematic. Sci-fi's biggest tradition is allegory and sometimes that fucks up the optics when you don't take into account the sociological ramifications. (See: Firefly's confederate apologism.)
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Dec 29, 2018 23:32
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Impermanent posted:An assumption of diverse kingdoms with different proportions of races within the population of them works interestingly for developing a setting but then, of course, still relies upon racial essentialisms for "the elves are wise and orcs are strong" stat lines and player concepts. And doesn't explain why, if these various creatures can procreate with each other, theres extremely distinct racialization and that the borders of, say, elf and human haven't changed over time. Who says they need such racial essentialisms? Even beyond Death to Ability Scores, it's far more interesting when each fantasy group has a unique power rather then a specific set of modifiers. You can have dwarves who's only mechanical uniqueness comes from them having the ability to momentarily harden into divine-stone, rendering them momentarily near-invulnerable, and that would still be enough to make them unique from elves who can re-adjust their magical immortality to lessen all negative effects on them and lengthen all positive ones.
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Dec 29, 2018 23:37
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I just thought of something - surely charging players per game played would reduce the number of games actually played? Since there would be no cost to just acquiring and reading RPG books, but a distinct cost to running the games? Doubling down on Hyphz' original problem with the industry?
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Dec 30, 2018 03:40
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I'm very excited for the moment we and Hyphz discover his computer has accidentally connected to a trans-dimensional internet and we're from bizarro universes to each other.
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Dec 30, 2018 03:51
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Joe Slowboat posted:I just thought of something - surely charging players per game played would reduce the number of games actually played? Since there would be no cost to just acquiring and reading RPG books, but a distinct cost to running the games? remusclaw posted:I feel like fantasy creatures often end up standing in for other groups and cultures as well and it never feels right. Where those people would show up in a story otherwise, in fantasy, there appears the fantastic creature to take their place and deflect from having to take responsibility for how that character was portrayed. "Oh, I'm not being racist, that's just how Orcs are, they are born evil and dumb and uncivilized and no matter how they are treated or raised they will never be able to rise above their lot in life." Most of the classic D&D fantasy races are essentially humans with a couple of modifiers. The modifiers can be important but they are so obviously similar to humans, often to the point of creating interfertile offspring, that it breaks my own mouth-taste if they have some fundamentally different detail. It feels like the distinctions in that case should be primarily cultural. It is way easier to accept great divergence from humans when they are explicitly aliens - like thri-kreen or Kzinti or whatever.
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Dec 30, 2018 04:07
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Joe Slowboat posted:I just thought of something - surely charging players per game played would reduce the number of games actually played? Since there would be no cost to just acquiring and reading RPG books, but a distinct cost to running the games? It's my  theory, but I suspect that this territory was probed a few years ago when FFG released WHFB3 and then the Star Wars game that required* players to own unique components like non-standard dice, ability cards, etc. WotC did a similar thing with cards in Gama World (and 4e to a lesser degree,) but there was an attempt made in the industry to monetize players beyond the PHB and maybe a player-facing source book. (*I realize they weren't 100% required.)
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Dec 30, 2018 04:57
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I think the first people to have that particular idea were White Wolf with the Changeling the Dreaming cards.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:08
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Nessus posted:I think the first people to have that particular idea were White Wolf with the Changeling the Dreaming cards. I'm still amazed at how ridiculously awful their approach was.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:11
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Bieeanshee posted:I'm still amazed at how ridiculously awful their approach was. Never heard of this, can you elaborate?
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Dec 30, 2018 05:13
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Basically, they released it the same way you'd print a CCG those days. Instead of a slim deck with all of the cards that you needed for play, they were sold as completely random boosters. I think I saw maybe one box of 'em in person, and they'd all but vanished by the time anyone I knew actually tried to play the game. They could have done them as whole decks, or even as themed, non-random boosters, but someone decided to turn a pretty play aid into an expensive mistake.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:34
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Nessus posted:For me the division is kind of, are they meant to be aliens or are they a different window on humanity? It's not quite TTRPG but Final Fantasy XIV tackles this problem somewhat nicely. The six playable races are all generically called Humans, with the physically human ones being called Hyurs. Elf-like Elezen, anime hobbit Lalafell, big wide muscular people Roegadyn, actual catgirl Miqo'te, and huge-guy-tiny-girl-patches-of-scales Au Ra. There's thus far been one Hyur-Elezen woman that's appeared in the game but not a lot of talk from the Official Lore people about how viable each pairing is. It's a minor change but moving the Human/Humanity label from the most human-looking people to the group as a whole does a lot. Furthermore, though there are communities across the land composed primarily of one race, the three starting city-states have diverse populations. The best thing though, is that people are defined by the culture of the city-state they come from rather than their race. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual standard monoraces with their monocultures in a lot of fiction.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:37
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Argas posted:It's not quite TTRPG but Final Fantasy XIV tackles this problem somewhat nicely. The six playable races are all generically called Humans, with the physically human ones being called Hyurs. Elf-like Elezen, anime hobbit Lalafell, big wide muscular people Roegadyn, actual catgirl Miqo'te, and huge-guy-tiny-girl-patches-of-scales Au Ra. There's thus far been one Hyur-Elezen woman that's appeared in the game but not a lot of talk from the Official Lore people about how viable each pairing is. It's a minor change but moving the Human/Humanity label from the most human-looking people to the group as a whole does a lot. Furthermore, though there are communities across the land composed primarily of one race, the three starting city-states have diverse populations. The best thing though, is that people are defined by the culture of the city-state they come from rather than their race. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual standard monoraces with their monocultures in a lot of fiction. Eberron kind of brushes up against this approach as well, emphasizing nationality over what specific sort of fantasy race you are, which is appropriate for a game whose history is largely steeped in the aftermath of its version of World War I.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:40
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A lot of nations have racial majorities on Eberron though (Zilargo, Mror Holds, Xen'Drik)
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Dec 30, 2018 05:42
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Plutonis posted:A lot of nations have racial majorities on Eberron though (Zilargo, Mror Holds, Xen'Drik) They do yeah, Eberron is still D&D with some attendant D&D baggage (a lot of it by design because that's what the publisher wanted), but it at least attempts to go in more interesting directions with a lot of its stuff when it can.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:53
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Nation states with racial majorities are perfectly valid setting elements, though.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:59
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fortunately the best eberron nation--droaam--is a racial mixing pot of those shunned by the other more racist nations
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Dec 30, 2018 06:02
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Loomer posted:Nation states with racial majorities are perfectly valid setting elements, though. Even in 14 most of the 'majorities' are more like a plurality of two with the other three having varying amounts of less presence. (Technically other ten since there are two 'tribes' within each race of man, but those are anywhere from cultural to hard biological distinctions). e: really if there's any one thing this game's writing is the best at, it's creating a very believable sense of the sort of completely arbitrary, somewhat unfitting, but very precisely even divisions of everything into neat little segments that early modern europeans were obsessed with. e2: also its stance vis-a-vis the goal of fantasy upholding the status quo. Its narrative is primarily about empires falling, monarchies transforming into republics, and from a more cosmic/mythical standpoint about the planet/universe itself moving forward from a previous cycle of civilizations building up only to ruin themselves with hubris. Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 06:14
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In my own work I go with a little of both. Where you're from tells you more about who you are than what you biologically are (with a few exceptions - e.g. Orcs as a whole have sensitive eyes which leads to a lot of the orcish states and enclaves alike having a disparate activity cycle relative to other inhabitants and a generally shared inclination towards either constructing covered markets and streets with awnings to avoid glare or to emphasizing the twilight hours and early evening in their relations with other species), but there are still a lot of states with just minor enclaves of other ethnicities and species in the mix. For instance, there's a majority (to a high degree) halfling state along the coast which emerged that way due to some xenophobic philosophy, but there are also halfling populations with very distinct cultures and beliefs elsewhere and sizeable halfling populations in other states. Size and biological needs will to some extent lend themselves towards the establishment of largely race-and-species unmixed polities - e.g. dwarves may not be eager to cohabit with giants and vice versa (or, depending on vitamin d and whether it exists or not in a given world, even with humans if the dwarves have their standard mountain cities), or frogmen with people who sicken in swampy climates.
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Dec 30, 2018 06:34
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I liked when I got around to reading perennial forum favorite Ian M. Banks Culture series that the Culture is full of humans, but humans are all sort of crazy different things depending on origin and individual choice.
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Dec 30, 2018 06:55
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Loomer posted:Nation states with racial majorities are perfectly valid setting elements, though. On top of what Mister Olympus said, two city-states that you end up questing around for long periods of time have a much less diverse population. It's not even clear if the rest of the world is as diverse as the starting 3 cities. But by having the three starting city-states and its people defined by their culture rather than race, XIV manages to set the "default" of the world differently than, say, World of Warcraft. WoW's writing has taken some steps away from every orc is like this and every troll is like that, but because it started out that way, it's an impression they have to fight all the time.
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Dec 30, 2018 06:55
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I feel the need to mention Greg Stolze’s Ardwin setting for Reign here, which explicitly plays around with a lot of this stuff (and ends up looking a lot like Loomer’s setup), to the point where character creation is largely determined by choosing your ethnicity and cultural upbringing (so you could be ethnically orcish and raised in orcish culture, or an ethnic orc raised in a culturally-dwarven area). This is especially fun because the rules of Ardwin heredity make it entirely possible for a child to be a different “ethnicity” than either parent. There are also no baseline “humans” to be the assumed default everyone else is a different deviation from. Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 06:55
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Brother Entropy posted:fortunately the best eberron nation--droaam--is a racial mixing pot of those shunned by the other more racist nations And Breland is particularly cosmopolitan, despite it's majority human population, and the human leadership is kind of a holdover from how the five nations were founded. There's a large portion of the populace that's trying to turn it into a democracy, and the King isn't entirely opposed to that notion (Presumably so long as they still let him hunt in the private forest with death bears and giga-tigers)
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Dec 30, 2018 07:34
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Argas posted:On top of what Mister Olympus said, two city-states that you end up questing around for long periods of time have a much less diverse population. We actually have a pretty clear picture of most of the rest of the world at this point, thanks to exploring the eastern third of things and the lorebooks filling out some of the more briefly visited regions. Doma and Hingashi are basically proportioned similar to the core three in Eorzea; Hyur with the largest plurality, then Roegadyn, then Au Ra, then the rest in a roughly even proportion (substituting Namazu and Lupin for Lalafell and Miqo'te, and the Elezen slice is basically "anyone whose people originated in Eorzea or Meracydia*"). The Ivalice regions basically break down how they were represented in 12/A2/Revenant Wings, sans moogles. Hyur/Hume, then Bangaa, then Viera, then Seeq/Gria. The Garlean homelands are probably overwhelmingly... well, Garlean,** with a minor slice of ambassadors/conquered underclass. Really, the only remaining questions of any detail are "How much of Ilsabard did the Garlean Republic originally cover" and "What do Meracydia and the New World look like?"--the latter even has the beginnings of an answer, in that Sophia's servants represented the base five, so we can assume a similar breakdown to the south, and everything we've heard about the new world implies that it's vastly Mamool Ja; though that could just be the coasts and the interior is different. *The latter, again, being Lalafell and Miqo'te. Cats walked over on a land bridge during the Calamity of Ice, and smol beans sailed over during the following Astral Era. We already know very well where Au Ra come from, given their creation myth is deeply tied to the steppe. Elezen are definitively Eorzea native. Roegadyn started in the arctic but had a wide diaspora because of the trades their build and culture naturally inclines them towards (fighting and laboring). Hyur are impossible to accurately determine because nothing is really accurate before the Allagans... though the Allagans themselves seemed to be entirely Hyur***, and they covered basically the whole world because their society was more technologically advanced than current-day Earth, so it's really impossible to determine whether Hyur were simply the original inhabitants and everyone else is the result of various aether spillages and escaped experiments like the Ixal, or whether they had a similar caste system with a racial element that the Garleans employ, and all the clones, holograms, and personality-records we have of ancient Allagans are from the upper classes. **And while you could make an argument for Garleans being a tribe of Hyur, they definitely consider themselves a distinct race. And I'm inclined to think that way too--the third eye alone wouldn't be any more difference than Plainsfolk and Dunesfolk, but the complete inability to do magic is a much larger gap. ***The one exception to be found is G'raha Tia, but it's very specific that he's a descendant of the royal line--so presumably had a Hyuran ancestor, because Emperor Xande is/was ...ostensibly... Hyur but given the statements already made about cross-compatibility, Miqo'te got mixed in somewhere far enough back that he wouldn't necessarily be aware. None of this has any bearing on your completely valid point, because in all of these cases culture does matter far more. (Except the Garleans, but their culture is abnormally racist in the first place. I'd say it's a chicken and egg problem, but we just met the chicken, so... Oh, also how most Westerners make an arbitrary distinction between "humanity" and "beastmen" based on species and religion when the beastmen are just as sapient too. But there again, that's a touch of realism--in the sense of reflecting the origins of scientific racism but in a more fantastical context, and how much it actually affects anyone's ability to accept beast tribes into society depends entirely on which segments of each society decide to be at war. Qiqirn, Ananta, Mamool Ja, and Goblins have all partially integrated into their societies or maintained their culture as an equal part of whichever nation they inhabit, it seems like Vanu Vanu and Gnath won't be far behind given Ishgard is on a big "cooperating with people that happen to be birds/bugs/dragons is actually good" kick as of late, and the Far Eastern cultures don't actually make this distinction at all--Kojin, Namazu, and Lupin are just as "human" and the religious landscape is much more uniform.) It's just very neat to lay out because Hydaelyn is actually a really good setting for a tabletop, tbh. Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 08:40
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Argas posted:It's not quite TTRPG but Final Fantasy XIV tackles this problem somewhat nicely. The six playable races are all generically called Humans, with the physically human ones being called Hyurs. Elf-like Elezen, anime hobbit Lalafell, big wide muscular people Roegadyn, actual catgirl Miqo'te, and huge-guy-tiny-girl-patches-of-scales Au Ra. There's thus far been one Hyur-Elezen woman that's appeared in the game but not a lot of talk from the Official Lore people about how viable each pairing is. It's a minor change but moving the Human/Humanity label from the most human-looking people to the group as a whole does a lot. Furthermore, though there are communities across the land composed primarily of one race, the three starting city-states have diverse populations. The best thing though, is that people are defined by the culture of the city-state they come from rather than their race. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual standard monoraces with their monocultures in a lot of fiction.
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Dec 30, 2018 10:00
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I think the most common use of 'race' in RPGs is as descriptive shorthand when a group of amateur story tellers come together to collaborate on a shared consensus. The mental picture relies on a few adjectives and perhaps a subversion (two normal elves, and a short fat one!) to communicate. "Orc Wizard, Elf Rogue, Halfling Bard" is distinguishing and evocative enough to describe "three adventurers sitting at a bar " with more specificity in the same number of words as that phrase. When you start tossing around a room with 12 characters, 7 of which exist solely to be slaughtered by the player and one of which is there to escape and hatch a devious revenge plot, developing three dimensional personalities is, perhaps, in excess of what most players need or aspire to. Pensive Warrior Focusing on Living his Best Life: I attack the dark haired man who always longed to be something more. GM: Which one? Pensive Warrior Focusing on Living his Best Life: Ah of course, the one who spent his summers on the western shores of the Auber River, and tragically mourns the growing division in his relationship with his children. GM: *stares dejectedly through the window away from his quote friends unquote* Sometimes the races are used to be significant mechanical decisions. This is rarer these days I believe, and most of my DnD characters are designed to be racial subversions unless they're just humans or half-elves. Sometimes, races are used to try and tell a story about racism or disenfranchisement, or comparison to current society via the Star Trek method, but if you do that, don't write it down because you'll be embarrassed about it in five years. Sometimes, for the fantastical, other races are used to describe truly different mindsets or beings, but if player character races, the depth of this will be limited in both scope and value by the very human players. Oh, and there is of course, the holdover reasons (i.e. because D&D did it and it feels weird not to). I think honestly, the first reason, though the lamest of all, is the one that holds the most weight. It's fun world building to adapt and describe the weird details, but mostly its value is as a quick way to descriptively differentiate. Theoretically, my ideal game is just humans, but practically, I've found that new players use the races to achieve consensus, self differentiate, and to establish baseline character motives and behaviors when trying to roleplay a character out of thin air.
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Dec 30, 2018 10:25
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piL posted:Pensive Warrior Focusing on Living his Best Life: I attack the dark haired man who always longed to be something more. Maybe because it's late nd I'm tired, but this scounds incredible to me.
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Dec 30, 2018 10:34
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Heliotrope posted:Maybe because it's late nd I'm tired, but this scounds incredible to me. Nah. Or maybe yeah. Just don't invite Dostoyevsky. http://existentialcomics.com/comic/45 Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 10:46
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I imagine no matter how good it sounds in theory, it would be annoying in play. I somewhat recently played a game set in Sunless Sea. The GM continued the computer game's conceit of never giving anyone a name, just a sort of title ("The Ambitious Captain", "The One-Legged Scavenger") and even that, which was very atmospheric and not even all that intrusive, still got incredibly cumbersome after like two sessions.
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Dec 30, 2018 10:49
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The Lawful Neutral Sahuagin Arcanist, as the walls fell
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Dec 30, 2018 11:26
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Argas posted:It's not quite TTRPG but Final Fantasy XIV tackles this problem somewhat nicely. The six playable races are all generically called Humans(...).It's a minor change but moving the Human/Humanity label from the most human-looking people to the group as a whole does a lot. It's funny because if you dig a bit into FF14's setting, you'll find out that the human/not human divide is a completely political split designed to justify racism towards and exploitation of the "beast tribes," who are all sapient and all have their own indigenous civilisations that predate the arrival of the "human" races on Aldenard. Creatures in Eorzea are "human" if it's politically expedient to recognise them as people, and otherwise not human whenever "humans" need reasons to be able to murder them and steal their lands guilt-free. It's a neat setting. Mister Olympus posted:The Garlean homelands are probably overwhelmingly... well, Garlean,** with a minor slice of ambassadors/conquered underclass. Really, the only remaining questions of any detail are "How much of Ilsabard did the Garlean Republic originally cover" and "What do Meracydia and the New World look like?"--the latter even has the beginnings of an answer, in that Sophia's servants represented the base five, so we can assume a similar breakdown to the south, and everything we've heard about the new world implies that it's vastly Mamool Ja; though that could just be the coasts and the interior is different. The lorebooks are actually pretty clear on this - ethnic Garleans only come from Garlemald itself, which is a tiny country in a mountainous region somewhere on Ilsabard. They're a small minority within the Garlean Empire, which is by volume mostly comprised of people from the other nations they've conquered - i.e. they're fantasy Romans. Plutonis posted:A lot of nations have racial majorities on Eberron though (Zilargo, Mror Holds, Xen'Drik) This leads to the absolute worst part of Eberron, which is that the gnomes are a secret conspiracy that controls the media and disappears anyone who disagrees with them, while the dwarves retain the already-lovely "money-grubbing misers who would sell their mothers for profit" characterisation from default D&D. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 11:33
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The lack of playable tonberries, moogles, or any other non-standard body shape creature in FF14 is its greatest flaw.
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Dec 30, 2018 11:38
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Lemon-Lime posted:This leads to the absolute worst part of Eberron, which is that the gnomes are a secret conspiracy that controls the media and disappears anyone who disagrees with them, while the dwarves retain the already-lovely "money-grubbing misers who would sell their mothers for profit" characterisation from default D&D.  And y'all were always talking up this setting. Is the allure of playing a robutt that great?
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Dec 30, 2018 13:12
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Lemon-Lime posted:This leads to the absolute worst part of Eberron, which is that the gnomes are a secret conspiracy that controls the media and disappears anyone who disagrees with them, No they aren't. They are supposed to be East Germans.
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Dec 30, 2018 13:36
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Nessus posted:
It's a great setting except for that one unfortunate instance of Baker not thinking his metaphors through. Plutonis posted:No they aren't. They are supposed to be East Germans. Zilargo is a police state made up of model towns where there is no justice system and everyone appears to be happily law-abiding on the surface, because if you break the law, the Trust (the secret political police who use blackmail and intrigue as their main weapons, and who have eyes and ears everywhere) disappears you for the good of the nation. This is vaguely inspired by Stalin's USSR in general, rather than the DDR specifically. As a result, gnomes are adept at deception and are explicitly written as using diplomacy to safeguard the interests of Zilargo and the gnomish people as a whole. Zilargo also runs the Korranberg Chronicle (the only internationally available newspaper, which reports on everything going on in Khorvaire). The Chronicle is explicitly stated to be "neutral" and "objective" (except when it comes to Droaam and Darguun) and there's no real indication that it isn't actually those things in-setting. The unintentional intersection of those two elements is where the problem lies. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 13:52
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Lemon-Lime posted:This leads to the absolute worst part of Eberron, which is that the gnomes are a secret conspiracy that controls the media and disappears anyone who disagrees with them, while the dwarves retain the already-lovely "money-grubbing misers who would sell their mothers for profit" characterisation from default D&D. Well dwarves are Scottish.
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Dec 30, 2018 13:57
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Lemon-Lime posted:Zilargo is a police state made up of model towns where there is no justice system and everyone appears to be happily law-abiding on the surface, because if you break the law the Trust (the secret political police who use blackmail and political intrigue as their main weapons) disappears you for the good of the nation. This is vaguely inspired by Stalin's USSR in general, rather than the DDR specifically. As a result, gnomes are adept at deception and diplomacy, and are explicitly written as using diplomacy to safeguard the interests of Zilargo and the gnomish people as a whole. It's actually very DDR. The Stasi were known for their massive networks of informants and in-depth infiltrations of almost everything, in many cases just so they could monitor them in case they could be subversive, and for playing mind-games with people to sap their will to continue their "subversive activity". The NKVD were known for kicking doors down, rounding people up, and shooting them all, usually on the basis of someone thinking they heard someone say something bad, once, maybe.
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Dec 30, 2018 14:04
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spectralent posted:It's actually very DDR. The Stasi were known for their massive networks of informants and in-depth infiltrations of almost everything, in many cases just so they could monitor them in case they could be subversive, and for playing mind-games with people to sap their will to continue their "subversive activity". The NKVD were known for kicking doors down, rounding people up, and shooting them all, usually on the basis of someone thinking they heard someone say something bad, once, maybe. Fair point. There's also the stuff about the Councils of Nine and the Triumvirate spending all their time plotting against each other though, which is just generically totalitarian though. LongDarkNight posted:Well dwarves are Scottish. Scottish people are not generally accused by Nazis of running every bank and investment fund in the world. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Dec 30, 2018 |
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Dec 30, 2018 14:33
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