|
KingKalamari posted:You can very easily get unambiguous bad guys that the PCs aren't going to feel bad about killing without going down this insane, 19th century scientific racism route! Like the very sort of people who espouse that 19th century scientific racism, as a for instance.
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2020 21:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 06:50 |
|
|
KingKalamari posted:Can we just all take a minute to appreciate how lovely Gygax's fantasy biological determinism worldview was?
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2020 22:14
|
|
|
GimpInBlack posted:Like the very sort of people who espouse that 19th century scientific racism, as a for instance. Why limit yourself to one century there?
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2020 22:14
|
|
|
KingKalamari posted:Can we just all take a minute to appreciate how lovely Gygax's fantasy biological determinism worldview was? It's worse than that. You don't need races of inherently evil monsters to slay; you can use wild animals for that. You need races of inherently evil monsters to take their stuff. 80% of XP in oD&D came from loot, not from killing. And this is related to another issue. oD&D was a fantasy Western in the worst possible ways.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 00:11
|
|
|
neonchameleon posted:And this is related to another issue. oD&D was a fantasy Western in the worst possible ways. absolutely. it's not even the fun kind of western where you're dealing with corrupt railway companies or oil barons or whatnot, it's 100% Colonialism Ho.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 07:30
|
|
|
Sodomy Hussein posted:The argument would be "orcs are not people, they are inhuman abominations made by evil gods" and other signifiers you could get by reading fantasy of the era, or really any horror. This expresses the sentiments I was going to post this morning in a much less snarky and caustic way than I had written and then deleted, so I appreciate this post. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have creatures that are objectively, irredeemably evil in a fantasy setting - hell, I'm even alright with letting people play them as long as the table buys in to the idea that yes, these entities are damned and the game will in some way be about that, ala the way Burning Wheel presents Orcs. The problem arises when you start equating them to humans, and making them playable as heroes, because now you have to do some workto justify the fiction. Kestral fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Oct 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 09:31
|
|
|
Kestral posted:This expresses the sentiments I was going to post this morning in a much less snarky and caustic way than I had written and then deleted, so I appreciate this post. Given the way Burning Wheel presents Dwarves and the antisemitic poo poo therein, I wouldn’t hold it up as a good example.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 12:45
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Given the way Burning Wheel presents Dwarves and the antisemitic poo poo therein, I wouldn’t hold it up as a good example. Citation needed.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 16:48
|
|
|
Kestral posted:Citation needed. So, let's talk about how the basic traits all dwarves share are Greed and beards. Let's talk about how the entire thing is explicitly and exceptionally Tolkien-derived, and how Tolkien literally, verifiably based his dwarves on Jews. He directly said so, in fact, talked about how he based Dwarvish on Semitic languages and so on. Let's talk about the antisemitic stereotypes surrounding money and greed, the appearance of the stereotypical Ashkenazi Jew and their relation to that whole Greed and beards thing. Let's talk about how you take something Tolkien did that already wasn't super sensitive and make it super based in stereotype, how Greed is now the defining trait of dwarfness, and how that relates to antisemitic stereotyping. e: even beyond this let's talk about how hosed up it is to define an entire species of people by the trait of Greed. Burning Wheel fuckin' loves species-wide definitive psychological traits. It's kiiiinda hosed up.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 16:57
|
|
|
Also, making an entire 'race' axiomatically evil is dangerous unless you take extreme pains to make sure they are utterly inhuman and have no ties to stereotypes of existing human groups. Having a race of non-sentient deterministically evil mooks for you to fight gets gross real fast if you have them dress up like Indigenous Americans for some reason.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 17:10
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:So, let's talk about how the basic traits all dwarves share are Greed and beards. Let's talk about how the entire thing is explicitly and exceptionally Tolkien-derived, and how Tolkien literally, verifiably based his dwarves on Jews. He directly said so, in fact, talked about how he based Dwarvish on Semitic languages and so on. Let's talk about the antisemitic stereotypes surrounding money and greed, the appearance of the stereotypical Ashkenazi Jew and their relation to that whole Greed and beards thing. I agree with you in that the way Burning Wheel did it is uh "flawed" at best, specifically because it's taking Tolkien things and not really thinking through what it's passing on, but I appreciate that it's at least trying to flesh-out a sentient, non-human group that has a different mindset. The way it does elves is way better but still a solid B- ; I just like that if we must have different "races" (loving hate that word), it's at least more interesting if they're not "functionally identical to a human but I have horns and +1 CHA" or whatever. If I'm gonna play a non-human race I want it to be like the Puppeteers or the Hosts or something truly different rather than "I'm like me but I'm 2 inches taller and have a thing on my forehead." What I'm getting at is I'm not gonna say that Burning Wheel doesn't have some Capital-P Problems, but it's at least exploring in a vague direction that I'd like more games to investigate. And I appreciate that and would rather see it grown on and fixed than shut down in its infancy.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 17:23
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:So, let's talk about how the basic traits all dwarves share are Greed and beards. Let's talk about how the entire thing is explicitly and exceptionally Tolkien-derived, and how Tolkien literally, verifiably based his dwarves on Jews. He directly said so, in fact, talked about how he based Dwarvish on Semitic languages and so on. Let's talk about the antisemitic stereotypes surrounding money and greed, the appearance of the stereotypical Ashkenazi Jew and their relation to that whole Greed and beards thing. let's talk about you and me let's talk about sex ba-by
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 17:40
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:I agree with you in that the way Burning Wheel did it is uh "flawed" at best, specifically because it's taking Tolkien things and not really thinking through what it's passing on, but I appreciate that it's at least trying to flesh-out a sentient, non-human group that has a different mindset. The way it does elves is way better but still a solid B- ; I just like that if we must have different "races" (loving hate that word), it's at least more interesting if they're not "functionally identical to a human but I have horns and +1 CHA" or whatever. You'll excuse me if I don't really feel the same way here, given that "Jewish" isn't exactly my idea of "truly alien" and "Jewish stereotype" isn't, either. e: ultimately, I have actually come to conclude that "really alien" aliens are just, not actually possible if you want to talk to them or explore them in any depth, because the person playing the alien is still a human being. They're always going to be "humans, but X" because of this. We can imagine how their different circumstances and history result in them acting differently, but we can't actually write them as starting from a fundamentally inhuman base and still, you know, inhabit their minds for the purpose of roleplaying them, because we're not aliens. Because of this, I'm much more concerned about them being interesting and well-written as people and cultures than I am with them being convincingly inhuman. Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Oct 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 18:49
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:He directly said so, in fact, talked about how he based Dwarvish on Semitic languages and so on. Tolkien thought that racism was real, at least for a while, and also thought, for a while, about the similarities between his Dwarves and Jewish stereotypes. His "Dwarves are like Jews" was not there in his early writing, was there in The Hobbit, and then starts getting walked back in LOTR and onward. Make of that movement what you will. "You" in that sentence is "the reader" rather than Mors Rattus. Also he based Elvish on Finnish. This explains why Frodo has that awkward sauna scene with Galadriel.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 19:14
|
|
|
remember all the licensed tcgs from the late 90s
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 20:29
|
|
|
I had a starter deck of the Doctor Who CCG. I wasn't even into Doctor Who. Edit: Neither were the designers, I don't think. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Oct 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 20:31
|
|
|
Shout out to the Star Wars CCG for being the most pointlessly-complex-for-verisimilitude CCG ever made
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 20:35
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:You'll excuse me if I don't really feel the same way here, given that "Jewish" isn't exactly my idea of "truly alien" and "Jewish stereotype" isn't, either. We're entirely agreed that the whole concept of even trying to align a weird fantasy species with a human ethnic group is monstrous and terrible and should never be done. For like 47 layers of reasons. But I like the general idea of mechanically incentivizing trying to get a fundamentally different world view. I brought up the Puppeteers and the Hosts for a reason as two examples of some truly out there and fundamentally non-human ways of thinking about the world. So while Greed and Hatred from Burning Wheel are garbage and Grief or whatever it's called for the elves is pretty meh, the idea of "you're a weird space-slug and your whole jam is avoiding Salt" seems like an interesting design space. (Example for humor rather than efficacy.)
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 20:37
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Also, making an entire 'race' axiomatically evil is dangerous unless you take extreme pains to make sure they are utterly inhuman and have no ties to stereotypes of existing human groups. Or, even if you don't dress them up like that, have them fit basically the same niche that Indigenous Americans would in racist Westerns (ie, pretty much all Westerns which aren't directly criticising the roots of the genre). Primitive, aggressive towards PC races, constant bickering tribal warfare when they aren't raiding? Yeeeeah.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 21:33
|
|
|
Darwinism posted:Shout out to the Star Wars CCG for being the most pointlessly-complex-for-verisimilitude CCG ever made More or less than the Star Trek CCG? Because to this day I still don't understand WTF is up with that game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 21:39
|
|
|
John Romero posted:remember all the licensed tcgs from the late 90s it was really cool seeing how games could have developed before the "put creatures on the field, have them attack each other/the player" design meta settled. the DBZ CCG was legit one of my favorite games and the Panini reboot in like 2015 was really good too. unfortunately the game got killed because Bandai-Namco wanted to release their Very Not Good dragonball super ccg in the West.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 21:49
|
|
|
I still have a bunch of Sailor Moon cards somewhere. Never did find anyone interested in playing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:05
|
|
|
Hats off to all the people still making sets for Decipher Star Trek. I look forward to Lower Decks cards.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:08
|
|
|
Warthur posted:Or, even if you don't dress them up like that, have them fit basically the same niche that Indigenous Americans would in racist Westerns (ie, pretty much all Westerns which aren't directly criticising the roots of the genre). Primitive, aggressive towards PC races, constant bickering tribal warfare when they aren't raiding? Yeeeeah.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:15
|
|
|
Darwinism posted:Shout out to the Star Wars CCG for being the most pointlessly-complex-for-verisimilitude CCG ever made on a scale of pokemon to dbz for pointless extra numbers and accessories what are we talkin here?
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:20
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:Also, making an entire 'race' axiomatically evil is dangerous unless you take extreme pains to make sure they are utterly inhuman and have no ties to stereotypes of existing human groups. This has always been an awkward part of players making skaven characters to be honest. I get that they are meant to be a divinely driven race of monstrous but goofy self destructive fascist ratmen, but that is really hard to embody for a workable PC and many people miss the fascist aspect of them anyway. One of the Warhammer RPGs, for its skaven sourcebook, describes playing a skaven PC as playing someone with 'no redeeming qualities' and to be cool as a group with selfish backstabbing. It's all well and good saying that but I don't think I have ran into any group which would be OK with that on a persistent basis, and even skaven themed one shots (including here) don't really end in any meaningful (and lore fitting) undercutting or backstabbing. You're not intended to be invested in skaven characters based on any positive traits but at the same time, they're they feel conceivably 'human' enough whilst being basically all evil that as said, it feels awkward.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:24
|
|
|
SkySteak posted:This has always been an awkward part of players making skaven characters to be honest. I get that they are meant to be a divinely driven race of monstrous but goofy self destructive fascist ratmen, but that is really hard to embody for a workable PC and many people miss the fascist aspect of them anyway. One of the Warhammer RPGs, for its skaven sourcebook, describes playing a skaven PC as playing someone with 'no redeeming qualities' and to be cool as a group with selfish backstabbing. It's all well and good saying that but I don't think I have ran into any group which would be OK with that on a persistent basis, and even skaven themed one shots (including here) don't really end in any meaningful (and lore fitting) undercutting or backstabbing. You're not intended to be invested in skaven characters based on any positive traits but at the same time, they're they feel conceivably 'human' enough whilst being basically all evil that as said, it feels awkward. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, we need a breakaway faction of Skaven. They're still technophiliac, self-detonating ratmen with no common sense who love to repeat words and eat things, but they aren't fascists and so are a lot more chill in some ways. They don't need to be a large group! Just a small number of rats who formed an anarchist commune or some poo poo, just wildly non-fascist ratmen with radioactive explosives. Give them worse tech because they don't have the Underempire's equipment, higher individual morale and stats because they are committed to various splinters of heroic Rat Thought. They don't have to be totally good, but make them as 'good' as the Lizardmen or the Elves or whatever. Make them a mercenary faction you can field as long as you're not Skaven. Just make it clear that there are non-fascist Skaven, but only a few of them, and they're perfectly capable of being buddies with other species (they just, y'know, are still extremely hectic rats who are either frenzied or panicked at all times).
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:49
|
|
|
Villain games are really fun, though. It's also really great for roleplay when you can get players to pursue a character's goals that are a complete 180 from their own. Having a table full of players experiencing that kind of immersion has been a high point in my gaming "career" and I wouldn't want to have missed out on it over matters of taste.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:53
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:I had a starter deck of the Doctor Who CCG. I wasn't even into Doctor Who. The most off the wall one I had Judge Dredd, which had the bold design choice of everybody using everybody else's cards so unless you sleeved them you had no idea whose was whose at the end. Shadowfist was the best game, of course.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 22:57
|
|
|
The most bizarre card games I remember personally owning back in the day was the Wheel of Time one with weird dice, and the Highlander game that was weird just for existing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:10
|
|
|
Exhibit A in weird TCGs of my past
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:24
|
|
|
The mechanics weren’t weird, but it still blows my mind that Over the Edge got a card game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
That Old Tree posted:The most bizarre card games I remember personally owning back in the day was the Wheel of Time one with weird dice, and the Highlander game that was weird just for existing. I had never heard of the Highlander game and it sounds actually kind of rad. Getting a similar vibe to Anachronism. It probably sucks butts but the idea of Sword Fights the LCG make my inner 8-year old perk up.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:32
|
|
|
Elendil004 posted:Exhibit A in weird TCGs of my past Oh god so many memories just came flooding back. I played way too much of this back in the day.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:39
|
|
|
Elendil004 posted:Exhibit A in weird TCGs of my past That's still the best multiplayer CCG in history. You find three friends and you can have a good time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:39
|
|
|
Elendil004 posted:Exhibit A in weird TCGs of my past
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2020 23:57
|
|
|
The red ball in the lower left corner. VtES is actually getting a new starter pretty soon here and I'm inordinately excited to play it again.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2020 00:02
|
|
|
moths posted:The red ball in the lower left corner. I very weirdly never got a single Nosferatu in any of the boosters I bought.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2020 00:03
|
|
|
I remember it was called Jyhad when it was released. I tried it out and got a blood bag full of red craft beads with it, but had already quit when it changed names.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2020 00:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 06:50 |
|
|
Angrymog posted:I very weirdly never got a single Nosferatu in any of the boosters I bought. Did you count the cards to make sure you weren't just skipping one with super-high Obfuscate?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2020 00:10
|
|
