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Cat Face Joe posted:big gnoll fan here  Give me playable gnolls in Spire (I know they're in Heart).
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Apr 28, 2020 19:03
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Josef bugman posted:It's not the best. It makes gnolls not a "species" so much as "randomly occurring demon based event". At least in the books as written. Personally prefer the "just happen to be people covered in fur" approach that Spire does. i don't even accept "is a demon" as a reason why the demons in the setting should be considered universal enemies
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Apr 28, 2020 19:10
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There is no way to depict violence in a way that is meant to be fun without it being at best problematic.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:13
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Serf posted:i don't even accept "is a demon" as a reason why the demons in the setting should be considered universal enemies neaden posted:There is no way to depict violence in a way that is meant to be fun without it being at best problematic. Pretty much this. No opponent you fight is ever going to be "okay" to fight really. Other than Nazi's. I dunno, violence, the nature of conflict and what can be "justified" are all big old questions.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:26
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I feel like just not having violence against thinking beings break down on a fusion of racial and moral lines is often more than enough. “They’re henchmen hired by the villain to break your face’ or ‘they’re the foot soldiers of the enemy’ are fine if they’re not also ethnicities. I’m fine with player characters being Bronze Age warriors or whatever and having a different perspective on violence than the modern, or doing dark fantasy alleyway mafia killings in the Chronicles of Darkness; those don’t require ‘acceptable targets’ beyond ‘this person is the worst or between me and my important goal and it came down to the knife fight.’
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Apr 28, 2020 19:37
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Gnolls eventually went from being "orcs, but hyena-flavored" to being linked directly to demons, such that they basically are now demons in 5E. They're not considered a people, they're an abomination concerned with doing evil for evil's sake. Even if you're OK with demons as "kill on sight, no redeeming value in their lives" it's honestly a pretty boring take.quote:every one of the species you listed has people out there who think they get a bad rap and would like to see them get the same treatment as elves and dwarves etc. i made a comment about how gnolls seem to get shafted in d&d and was surprised at how many gnoll fans there are out there. i always considered them one of the more obscure monsters but people really dig them I like the idea of a hardy culture of scavengers who don't live on the same moral framework as other cultures and don't mind getting a little filthy. I think any creature that doesn't have a choice in whether or how "evil" it is, is necessarily a little more boring than creatures for whom a different path is possible. Generally this choice was given even to demons in readings of demons as fallen angels. D&D crosses a sort of Rubicon when it tells you a race is elementally evil but then later you can also play it as a protagonist. This helps serve to create the language we saw about orcs that sounds a lot like Nazi or antebellum slavery propaganda that is theoretically intended to get you to want to play them (!), somehow. At the basic level, not a lot of thought went into it.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:38
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Josef bugman posted:Pretty much this. capitalists are unproblematic enemies but tbh i'm not talking about finding a way to make the violence unproblematic. i just don't want the motivation for the gnolls to be "their alignment is listed as chaotic evil." the gnolls should have goals and needs. those goals can run counter to the protagonists of your game, and violence might be the answer they choose. but the gnolls don't attack because they're mindless beasts (who still wear clothes, use weapons and employ tactics) they attack because they're starving or they have seen their communities burned down by elves or whatever. that way there is a reason for the violence to occur, and if the players want there are routes they could take that could avert conflict and even turn enemies into allies. combat is a robust part of most games and i'm not going to invalidate that, i just would like if there was a material reason for it to be happening also i think there are plenty of things you could fight that aren't problematic to kill. a gelatinous cube is basically just an animal that wants to eat you. although i suppose a neat way to handle it would be to make the cube essentially invincible to traditional forms of violence and turn it into a puzzle for the characters to solve. or maybe they're dungeon environmentalists and their goal is to capture the gelatinous cube and keep it safe from less scrupulous adventurers
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Apr 28, 2020 19:44
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fighting owlbears will never be problematic, it's both self-defense and a mercy killing
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Apr 28, 2020 19:53
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Even with Nazis or whatever you are still dealing with propaganda and conscription. Even if you are selling with hard core people who made their choice you still are dealing with the glamorization of violence. In the same way that you can't make an anti-war movie I don't think you can make an anti-violence game where the violence is intended to be fun. I'm not saying to never play any violent games, just that there are always doing to be troublesome elements that we should keep in mind and you'll never be able to solve it by picking the perfect villains. I would say it's similar with fantasy races where you are always going to be dealing with a setting where some elements of racism, even if it's relatively benign, are factually true.
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Apr 28, 2020 20:05
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I don't wanna backseat mod, but: the discussion seems to be more about the philosophy of roleplaying than "TG as an industry" and that thread could really use more substance than just "let's all yell at hyphz some more." I'm interested in a deep dive into the difficulties of violence in roleplaying, the difficulties of sapient enemies who the PCs are expected to freely kill without moral hazard, etc. and I think that might be a good thread to do it in?
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Apr 28, 2020 20:06
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This topic is timely cause I had to shout a guy down last night since he would not shut the gently caress up about killing this pile of goblins that severely outnumbered us and had a hostage while I'm actively negotiating with them.
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Apr 28, 2020 20:43
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Leperflesh posted:I don't wanna backseat mod, but: the discussion seems to be more about the philosophy of roleplaying than "TG as an industry" and that thread could really use more substance than just "let's all yell at hyphz some more." I'm interested in a deep dive into the difficulties of violence in roleplaying, the difficulties of sapient enemies who the PCs are expected to freely kill without moral hazard, etc. and I think that might be a good thread to do it in? This seems like a good move.
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Apr 28, 2020 20:48
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Loxbourne posted:It quietly drops the matriarchal "all males are enslaved" stuff, and the priestesses having sex with demons, and the "their dark skin is the result of a curse from the Gods for being evil" crap. Spire just casts the Drow as an ethnic group with a triple-aspect moon goddess and some religious practices around spiders. This is a significant step forward. I think Spire shows that to fix a fantasy group like Drow or Orcs, you have to do two things: be aware of common racist tropes (or you fall into the Eberron gnome problem) and you have to protagonize the group in question. Half the problems with Orcs could be solved by moving them from the monster manual into the PHB (remove Half-Orcs entirely) and the other half would be solved by replacing Mike Mearls with a writer who is better at dealing with (racist) legacy material (Quinn Murphy would be my pick, but there are loads of people better at this than Mearls). Also wouldn't hurt to hire an artist who makes Orc original character art in their free time. Most stuff that's well known for having better orcs than usual (like warcraft or maybe the Roegadyn from FFXIV ) just emphasized them as characters the players would want to be.
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Apr 28, 2020 20:49
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I don't know that I'd consider Warcraft to be positive orc design.
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Apr 28, 2020 21:10
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Being the change I want to see in the world, here is a port of this thread into the "games philosophy" thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3920895&pagenumber=10#post504461810 I quoted a lot of you, my apologies for not quoting everyone but that would have been too much, if I skipped you please don't feel bad. I just wanted to include enough that readers of just that thread could get the context.
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Apr 28, 2020 21:11
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Toshimo posted:I don't know that I'd consider Warcraft to be positive orc design. Oh it's far from perfect, but those orcs are lightyears better than WotC orcs.
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Apr 28, 2020 23:43
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Octavo posted:Most stuff that's well known for having better orcs than usual (like warcraft or maybe the Roegadyn from FFXIV ) just emphasized them as characters the players would want to be. The Roegaydn are pretty clearly norse giants, what with having a fire giant/ice giant split and the old Roegaydn tounge sounding very norse-ish. No, I think the true ork equivalents are the Au'ra- specifically the Xalea culture, who are the local mongolian equivalents in the Far East and really like fighting and tribes and more fightin'. The Raen culture, on the other hand, has integrated into wider Far Eastern society, aside from like one group of them who lives peacefully in a bubble under the sea. So aside from looking way less orky than the Roegaydn, I think they're the best equivalent.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:12
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the best orks are warhammer 40k orks, who have literally won that setting because what they really love to do is fight, win or lose; and all you can do in that setting is fightin' plus they're made of fungus, and their inspiration is as stand-ins for cockney football hooligans rather than something racist and they're latent psykers whose main powers are: when more orks are around poo poo gets more and more orky, until a Waaaagh! spontaneously breaks out and it's time to ally up and go fightin', and, their technology all works because they believe it works, so they can assemble any old looted garbage together and make shootas and choppas and big orky vehicles out of them (and red wunz really do go fasta) because of the actual real magical power of their convictions. The ethics of fighting and killing space orks go right out the window because poo poo, that's what they genuinely want you to do, and if you win that scrap well, they just gain some respect for you (and come back with more boyz next time). The lesson here is that you can simultaneously lighten up your setting and give your players antagonists to fight without moral hazard, by setting up those antagonists as light-hearted parodies and making them actively and honestly invite combat and death as the fulfillment of their every desire and want in life; and plus they don't have babies, they reproduce by spores, so there's no "...and now what do we do with the children" dilemma after you win the battle. This is an approach you can use for other antagonists too, perhaps making variations on the theme. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 00:20
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Leperflesh posted:their technology all works because they believe it works, so they can assemble any old looted garbage together and make shootas and choppas and big orky vehicles out of them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS1c_HtvvNo
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Apr 29, 2020 00:29
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Ratoslov posted:The Roegaydn are pretty clearly norse giants, what with having a fire giant/ice giant split and the old Roegaydn tounge sounding very norse-ish. No, I think the true ork equivalents are the Au'ra- specifically the Xalea culture, who are the local mongolian equivalents in the Far East and really like fighting and tribes and more fightin'. The Raen culture, on the other hand, has integrated into wider Far Eastern society, aside from like one group of them who lives peacefully in a bubble under the sea. So aside from looking way less orky than the Roegaydn, I think they're the best equivalent. It’s Welsh, not Norse-derived. Extremely not Norse, even.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:37
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Ratoslov posted:The Roegaydn are pretty clearly norse giants, what with having a fire giant/ice giant split and the old Roegaydn tounge sounding very norse-ish. No, I think the true ork equivalents are the Au'ra- specifically the Xalea culture, who are the local mongolian equivalents in the Far East and really like fighting and tribes and more fightin'. The Raen culture, on the other hand, has integrated into wider Far Eastern society, aside from like one group of them who lives peacefully in a bubble under the sea. So aside from looking way less orky than the Roegaydn, I think they're the best equivalent. Tbf, I've only played a little of FFXIV. I just though they looked like big sexy green toothy orcs. Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong creatures entirely.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:41
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Octavo posted:Tbf, I've only played a little of FFXIV. I just though they looked like big sexy green toothy orcs. Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong creatures entirely.  I can see it. But like the rest of the FFXIV playable races, they're colonizers, oppressing the poo poo out of the monstrous races and taking their land.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:46
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Leperflesh posted:their technology all works because they believe it works, so they can assemble any old looted garbage together and make shootas and choppas and big orky vehicles out of them (and red wunz really do go fasta) because of the actual real magical power of their convictions. You know GW retconned that, right? It came out of one side book and it was only a throwaway remark as someone conjectured it. GW's actual in-house authors deemed it insufficently grimdark, and you won't find it anywhere in any official publication (although I hear it was mentioned in one of the novels). Or to put it another way, no GW does not have enough of a sense of humour to run with it. You will have your grimdark suffering, and you will EAT it and you will LIKE it.
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Apr 29, 2020 00:58
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Loxbourne posted:You know GW retconned that, right? It came out of one side book and it was only a throwaway remark as someone conjectured it. GW's actual in-house authors deemed it insufficently grimdark, and you won't find it anywhere in any official publication (although I hear it was mentioned in one of the novels). GW officially retconned it, and 99% of GW's fans ignored their official retcon and stuck with the funhaving one, because people who take the grimdark darkgrimness too seriously are insufferable, and that includes certain GW executives.
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Apr 29, 2020 01:09
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It's actually much funnier that the space fascists are so incapable of believing their supposed lessers may have abilities beyond their own that they come up with extremely convoluted explanations about how actually these idiots are so dumb they outstupid reality when the actual truth is that The Working Class can just. Have greater understanding of technology.
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Apr 29, 2020 01:14
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Leperflesh posted:' I mean, I vividly remember that one White Dwarf battle report featuring a scenario inspired by the movie Zulu with Orkz and Imperial Guard. I think you can guess what each army represented in this scenario.
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Apr 29, 2020 01:23
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Leperflesh posted:GW officially retconned it, and 99% of GW's fans ignored their official retcon and stuck with the funhaving one, because people who take the grimdark darkgrimness too seriously are insufferable, and that includes certain GW executives. It depends. For a while, possibly still, mentioning this tidbit could make certain ork fans really mad.
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Apr 29, 2020 01:24
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thefakenews posted:I mean, I vividly remember that one White Dwarf battle report featuring a scenario inspired by the movie Zulu with Orkz and Imperial Guard. I think you can guess what each army represented in this scenario.  The Battle of Orke's Drift will be long remembered in song
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Apr 29, 2020 01:28
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[EDIT: Whoops, replied here regarding the evil-races topic before seeing that the topic was moved to the Philosophy of Roleplaying Games thread; moved what I had posted to there instead. Sorry about that.]
Jerik fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 02:15
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What about the Trollocs in Wheel of Time? They're basically bioweapons with minds, but even then they're depicted as being at the mercy of literal avatars of evil. They still have tribes and presumably unique cultures between groups, but they are more or less explicitly evil, and when not being evil for the sake of being evil, lazy.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:21
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Leperflesh posted:GW officially retconned it, and 99% of GW's fans ignored their official retcon and stuck with the funhaving one, because people who take the grimdark darkgrimness too seriously are insufferable, and that includes certain GW executives.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:22
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I heard there was gnoll chat. Gnolls are cool because even at their worst, there's more to them than orcs and goblins and so on; rather than a host of mostly-identical, poorly-characterized green people you're supposed to kill with impunity, they're low-effort kill-fodder based on an extremely strange real-world animal. You're already one step closer to better ideas from the get-go. Hyenas are taxonomically and physiologically weird in the extreme. There's a rich vein of all kinds of mythologies around hyenas to pull from for inspiring your games' gnolls - they're all intersex, they can mimic human speech perfectly, they're the mythological trickster that brought us the sun, all kinds of interesting stuff. There's obvious plot fodder in notions like lions as the king of the savannah, whereas the big cats are mostly scavenging off hyena kills, and if the bunch of pinkos on this forum can't turn that into a compelling metaphor I dunno what to do with us. Hell, they're an animal that makes noises we interpret as laughter. Literally any one of those statements is more compelling than the majority of bestiary entries in any given game. "Well, gnolls are orcs, but they've got the demons" is such a bullshit copout. There was a Dragon article from 2008 that managed to give a whole bunch of ideas for gnoll societies, as inspiration for PCs and NPCs alike. Only one of the options presented involves demons, and even in that context there's something interesting to mine. Demon-worshiping gnolls are a social phenomenon, rather than some kinda hosed up religious determinism. They also cohabitate with other demon-worshipers, seeing no functional difference between a Church of Satan gnoll and a Church of Satan human, elf, dwarf, whatever. Bam, multi-ethnic society with a set of strange religious strictures and a comprehensible-if-morally-wrong rationale for doing cruel things to other sentient beings. That's on top of the rest of the article, with a whole other society that doesn't revolve around marauding and pillaging. Again, that's just D&D, the genericest, purposefully bland fantasy setting around. 13th Age, Eberron, and Heart all do cooler things still. Gnolls are great. I do have a hot take on fantasy species that influences why I like gnolls, though: mechanical differences between species should exist and be pronounced. If you're going to have humans and you're lazy enough to treat them as a baseline, then another sentient species should be something weird and distinct. Humans, humans-but-prettier, humans-but-short-and-bearded, humans-but-short-and-twee, humans-but-short-and-even-more-twee are as boring as they are intellectually facile. The different player species in Fragged Empire should be the baseline, where they all come from different cultures with different capabilities, and the setting reflects the tension and drama in how all these different peoples have to coexist. Different doesn't mean bad - to bring this back to gnolls, it's silly to look at an eight-foot-tall obligate carnivore and think it's going to have the same beliefs and behaviors and capabilities as a human. Likewise for an uplifted cybernetic octopus, or a genetically engineered supersolider discarded by their creators, or your WoD monster of choice. If the kind of story your table is telling allows for something other than humans, even if those non-humans are not PCs, then players should be able to textually and mechanically engage with those factors just as much as if they're pretending to be a wizard or a ninja. Just, y'know, don't go Jimmy the Greek about it. I will now take questions from the audience about gnolls and why they rule.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:26
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Loxbourne posted:It quietly drops the matriarchal "all males are enslaved" stuff, and the priestesses having sex with demons, and the "their dark skin is the result of a curse from the Gods for being evil" crap. Spire just casts the Drow as an ethnic group with a triple-aspect moon goddess and some religious practices around spiders. This is a significant step forward. This also seems to be what Pathfinder 2e is going for, where being a drow (or "Cavern Elf", as it's generically listed) is one of the default PC elf options and its only mechanical effect is getting darkvision instead of one of cold resistance / minor magic bonuses / super ears / forest bonuses.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:28
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Roadie posted:This also seems to be what Pathfinder 2e is going for, where being a drow (or "Cavern Elf", as it's generically listed) is one of the default PC elf options and its only mechanical effect is getting darkvision instead of one of cold resistance / minor magic bonuses / super ears / forest bonuses. The cavern elf in the PHB is not a drow; it's just a separate, non-evil type of subterranean elf. Drow are still very much a thing in Pathfinder 2E—they're in the 2E Bestiary; they're still chaotic evil; they still have innate magical powers; and they were still demonically cursed with their current appearance due to their evil nature. I wouldn't be too surprised if PC statistics for drow appeared in the upcoming Advanced Player's Guide, but there are no 2E PC stats for drow yet—the PHB "cavern elf" is definitely not supposed to a drow.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:35
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grassy gnoll posted:I heard there was gnoll chat. I would personally avoid the whole "Oh just reseach how hyenas work and make gnolls like that!" angle, insofar as the human parallel would be "They act just like chimps!"
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Apr 29, 2020 02:37
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theironjef posted:I would personally avoid the whole "Oh just reseach how hyenas work and make gnolls like that!" angle, insofar as the human parallel would be "They act just like chimps!" that's kinda the whole fun of making fantasy animal-people tho
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Apr 29, 2020 02:42
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The whole orc discussion was prompted by the usage of colonizing and dehumanizing language in their writeup and general design. Gnolls have subsequently been roped into the fray, because they are generally portrayed as irredeemable and demonic. Heck, they're even called out as such in the text that was in question a few days ago. People want to rehabilitate their image, and I'm all for that, but as long as we're trying to do it while avoiding racist language tropes, one of the biggest racist language tropes is "They are like a less-evolved version of the animal that we are" is all. I otherwise don't disagree at all that animal monsters are fun and good.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:46
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MadScientistWorking posted:What was the retcon? I don't think there was actually a retcon, it just wasn't pressed on as hard as it used to be. They dropped some bits in the actual rules where if a vehicle was painted red, it would go a d6" faster - no points cost for this extra ability, the figure just need to actually painted red and it would go a random amount of inches further when you moved it - but I'm fairly sure they didn't drop the Ork belief bits in the fluff. I'm fairly sure the Gorkamorka stuff is still canon - Ork society building up in waves as spores generate gretchin/grots, squigs and finally Orks, etc. Heck, in the Necromunda books I'm sure there's an abandoned hive with some Orks in it from a failed, minor Waaagh!, and Snakebite Orks are probably still a thing - a result when a new generation of Orks grows up from the spores of a defeated Waaagh! but haven't built up much of a technological base yet.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:47
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4e Dragon actually had a lot of stuff for gnoll, but it was all pre PHB3 and they never got revisited so they were stuck with dex/con, a stat pairing almost no class wanted.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:47
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Kurieg posted:4e Dragon actually had a lot of stuff for gnoll, but it was all pre PHB3 and they never got revisited so they were stuck with dex/con, a stat pairing almost no class wanted. literally every gnoll adventurer is that one subclass of battlemind that no one played because the other subclass was so much better
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Apr 29, 2020 02:51
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