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Madoka Magika is what happens when Gen Urobuchi says "I wanna make a Magical Girl show that's similar to Yasuko Kobayashi's seminal masterpiece Kamen Rider Ryuki" and it's pretty good! Gaim is what happens when Urobuchi says "I wanna make a Kamen Rider show that's similar to Madoka Magika" and it's exhaustingly bad. But Gaim was a huge influence on my current Rider TTRPG so yeah you can learn a lot from it too, I guess. But I'd rather watch Mystic Knights of Tir na Nog because at least its dipshit protagonists aren't loudly and explicitly homophobic.
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May 13, 2021 06:28
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DoctorWhat posted:Madoka Magika is what happens when Gen Urobuchi says "I wanna make a Magical Girl show that's similar to Yasuko Kobayashi's seminal masterpiece Kamen Rider Ryuki" and it's pretty good! I just brought it up because it's another Rider War, if you want to broaden it to Rider in general there's plenty of better options than Gaim, certainly.
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May 13, 2021 06:32
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:Good news, there's already a game for that, especially the way I run it. I don't know if you know that I'm the author of fellowship and are making a joke, or if you're the king of dramatic irony but yes thank you, I'm glad you like my game
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May 13, 2021 06:34
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Yeah, sorry for getting rude about it. And Gaim has its fans - loud ones. The suits are excellent.
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May 13, 2021 06:34
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I also want to talk about Westerns. Like was said above, Westerns are usually not about Cowboys vs Indians, and often have no native people at all. They are about conflict in a place where "law" is a man on a horse with a gun. The main requirement that makes this problematic is needing a region where expansion and settling can happen - what happened to the people who already lived there? In sci-fi, it's easy to do a Western. You just have a planet that never had any intelligent life a long way from contact with the rest of human civilization, where people are now settling. In fantasy it's a little trickier because a huge uninhabited landmass on a world with civilization strains credulity even in fantasy, but there are some known ways to do it. For instance, you can have some kind of apocalyptic event clear the land of civilization - that's how we get the Mad Max series, which are basically Westerns, and which rule. What is difficult is doing a Western set in the real world with our real hosed-up history. Real history is monstrous and it is not easy to treat that history with sensitivity in entertainment.
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May 13, 2021 06:37
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Jimbozig posted:I also want to talk about Westerns. Like was said above, Westerns are usually not about Cowboys vs Indians, and often have no native people at all. They are about conflict in a place where "law" is a man on a horse with a gun. The main requirement that makes this problematic is needing a region where expansion and settling can happen - what happened to the people who already lived there? Well why not just do what western tv shows and films did? They were basically wandering knight-errant stories. The plot of Blazing Saddles is (intentionally) a by the numbers western plot, with valuable land and good natured folks living on it and bad men that want those good folks off of it. Those stories were basically kids stuff sadly, and I've seen a couple dozen episodes of various western shows. Unfortunately, they get boring and they boring fast as it's very rinse and repeat. There's no criticism of systemic things either. You'd think running into a dozen crooked sheriffs in your life would make you ask some questions about law enforcement but nope its a bad apple every time. Racist person? Whole town isn't racist, just one or two dickheads etc. Sci-fi westerns can certainly be a mixed bag, Star Trek certainly had more than its fair share of stupid bullshit, like the Nazi planet episode, where a Federation historian sent to live among aliens decided that this divided planet needed to become one united fascist hellscape and the episode ends with Kirk saying "yeah gotta watch out for those charismatic leaders lol". (and then they just fly away) Or the one where he finds literal native americans (italians) and teaches them how to irrigate crops and poo poo and he fucks the chief's daughter and then she dies and he goes "well that loving sucked" and moves on.
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May 13, 2021 07:09
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Jimbozig posted:But that is essentially what Crawford was doing that started this whole thing. A group of people (in the fantasy sense of the word, not necessarily humans), who are cursed by big bad evil magic villains to be brutal and aggressive and serve as the villainous army. It's not biology, it's magic. I think just where the line is drawn depends a lot on individual circumstances, but in the case of the WWN Anakim, I think my issue with it is that the magical xenophobia curse is honestly enough to make them adequate antagonists. "Magical corruption makes them supernaturally hateful to non-anakim, so they're commonly found as bandits and raiders, and they'll fight to the death in conflicts with other species even if it's against their best interests" -- pretty complete justification for a stock D&D humanoid combat encounter, with reasonable justification for PC actions (fighting anakim bandits, not just 1d6 Random Wandering Anakim), and leaves room for individual personality and nuance for anakim characters. Making them also all brutal, indiscriminant psychopaths (who are extra-evil and dangerous if they're developmentally disabled, for the "ogres"/"brutes" -- and in that Twitter blurb, Crawford specifies this is biological and heritable!) is just ugly, boring writing, and feels like a justification for the "kill the species on sight and feel good about it" murderhobo play that's rapidly and understandably falling out of style.
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May 13, 2021 11:02
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i'm generally on the "literal demons who are personifications of the concept of evil is probably fine" side of the argument, but I also don't really see what's so vitally important about having a species-level class of antagonist in the first place you can just have ideological groups who are kill-on-sight because they're fascists or a doomsday cult or whatever and not only does it work perfectly well for making them antagonists, but it makes far more sense for a group like that to be living together in a fortified dungeon that the PCs would have a reason to attack
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May 13, 2021 11:10
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IIRC the original Chainmail scenario that D&D is based on is framed as an elite team of specialists invading a castle under siege by sneaking in through the dungeon. it takes more weird rationalizations and handwaving to turn classic D&D gameplay into a fantasy of colonial extermination than it does to just make it about political/military conflict between quasi-medieval powers e: the siege scenario: - establishes time pressure (risk of discovery + progress of the siege itself) - why the players can't just back out of the dungeon (mission failure) - why intelligent defenders might fight to the death (believe in the cause / boss kills deserters / defending their home) - why the players don't generally take prisoners (discovery again, mission comes first) - why you have a loving dungeon in the first place lol (it's a castle) - power balance (players are attacking someone who owns a castle) obviously it's not something you can copy and paste endlessly without it getting a little strange but it makes way more sense than "the wilderness is full of abandoned ruins that are nonetheless all full of both critters and untouched loot, and you have to murder all the people who've moved in since the original owners left" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 11:32 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 11:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:IIRC the original Chainmail scenario that D&D is based on is framed as an elite team of specialists invading a castle under siege by sneaking in through the dungeon. it takes more weird rationalizations and handwaving to turn classic D&D gameplay into a fantasy of colonial extermination than it does to just make it about political/military conflict between quasi-medieval powers blackmoor was also fairly consistent, what with the players losing because they spent all of their time in the dungeon and not preparing for the BBEG's army
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May 13, 2021 12:47
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I’m honestly mostly confused by why they’re called Anakim. The Anakim were just giants. They were just big and hungry. Goliath was their descendant after they got shoved out of the Holy Land by the Israelites, who were scared of them because they were really big, and therefore strong,
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May 13, 2021 12:51
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Well why not just do what western tv shows and films did? As you implied, there was never a "frontier," only a border with other peoples' land. You could do a "stranger rides into town" problem-solvers-type game that assertively faced conflict over land between white settlers and indigenous people whose land it was, or indigenous people displaced and far from their country, of course, but that wouldn't look like Kung Fu anymore.
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May 13, 2021 16:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i'm generally on the "literal demons who are personifications of the concept of evil is probably fine" side of the argument, but I also don't really see what's so vitally important about having a species-level class of antagonist in the first place
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May 13, 2021 17:36
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homullus posted:As you implied, there was never a "frontier," only a border with other peoples' land. You could do a "stranger rides into town" problem-solvers-type game that assertively faced conflict over land between white settlers and indigenous people whose land it was, or indigenous people displaced and far from their country, of course, but that wouldn't look like Kung Fu anymore. I've dipped out of the conversation a bit I probably shouldn't have but I got my second shot and have been working through a hell-fog of headache and fatigue, but that first part actually one of the two times I tried working on a Western game. Fantasy setting using trappings of Westerns, I had just been playing Disco Elysium and drew on a more benign pale as inspiration for the West ("the world unravels into the collective dream" or some pretentious poo poo along those lines), Eastern settlers trying to pin it down and tame it destroying the lives of the people already there in the process, PCs resist the advance of colonization and the destruction of their homeland. Didn't get far beyond setting pitches for myriad reasons, though I had scraped together a few adventure ideas I might come back around to. The other effort was... rescuing Dogs in the Vineyard, back before DOGS was announced. That didn't work out either. At least I kept the notes around here somewhere for those. There's an unfortunate number of ideas I've had or projects I've started that I purged the notes for a long time ago. Don't do it any more but does mean I don't get to see what ideas or discussions I had past a year or so ago. That may be a totally useless aside but maybe explains where my initial angle came from.
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May 13, 2021 17:43
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For me the identifying feature of Westerns isn't conflict between settlers and natives over land, it's conflict (usually between one group of settlers and another) in hostile territory without centralised or consistent law enforcement. In Westerns that lawlessness comes about because of imperialism, and its associated atrocities against indigenous people. But you don't need those things to tell a story about hard people living in lawless times. You just have to set it somewhere so hostile that it doesn't support intelligent native life, but which has valuable resources for people to fight over. And, like, frickin' all of space fits that bill perfectly.
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May 13, 2021 17:43
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gnome7 posted:okay I feel like you're trying to take the piss but that sounds good though Isn't this a thing you're letting players do in Skull Diggers?
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May 13, 2021 18:14
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homullus posted:As you implied, there was never a "frontier," only a border with other peoples' land. You could do a "stranger rides into town" problem-solvers-type game that assertively faced conflict over land between white settlers and indigenous people whose land it was, or indigenous people displaced and far from their country, of course, but that wouldn't look like Kung Fu anymore. Some day (if and when I can put in the research and effort to do it right, and probably hire a sensitivity reader or two) I want to write and run a campaign where the players are employees of something like the Freedmen's Bureau for their respective (probably fictional) setting. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:20 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 18:18
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Whybird posted:For me the identifying feature of Westerns isn't conflict between settlers and natives over land, it's conflict (usually between one group of settlers and another) in hostile territory without centralised or consistent law enforcement.
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May 13, 2021 18:19
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Whybird posted:In Westerns that lawlessness comes about because of imperialism, and its associated atrocities against indigenous people. But you don't need those things to tell a story about hard people living in lawless times. You just have to set it somewhere so hostile that it doesn't support intelligent native life, but which has valuable resources for people to fight over. And, like, frickin' all of space fits that bill perfectly.
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May 13, 2021 18:23
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Terrible Opinions posted:There is a Korean version of the Good the Bad and the Ugly but set during the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria. Which creates its own lawlessness due to imperialism, but without even a remote chance of the audience sympathizing with the imperializing force. https://youtu.be/6Tk80iXCspM
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May 13, 2021 20:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i'm generally on the "literal demons who are personifications of the concept of evil is probably fine" side of the argument, but I also don't really see what's so vitally important about having a species-level class of antagonist in the first place Paizo has moved heavily towards this. Even their 'lovable psychopathic gremlin' mascot goblins have been retconned in Pathfinder 2e to no longer be wacky evil just because they're goblins, and various other non-PC-race antagonists have gotten broad (and sometimes clumsy) rewrites to have specific organizations and leaders be the source of evil ideologies rather than that being an inherent thing to a given species. It still leaves some legacy 'evil race' stuff, but it's a much more active attempt to fix it than, say, anything in D&D 5e has ever tried.
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May 13, 2021 20:45
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https://twitter.com/MSigrist83/status/1392858901134118917?s=20 https://twitter.com/HueyJensen/status/1392863520358690819 WotC is killing professional MtG off, from what a bunch of pros are saying. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 21:12 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 21:09
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i'm generally on the "literal demons who are personifications of the concept of evil is probably fine" side of the argument, but I also don't really see what's so vitally important about having a species-level class of antagonist in the first place It's this, IMO. You can come up with situations that make people kill-on-sight by species that are probably morally adequate. But...why are we interested in doing this? Portraying alien mindsets is vastly more interesting when there's a tension and motivation to understand that mindset, and both difficulties and rewards for learning to communicate despite it. That's not well-served by "these things are KOS" as the correct/assumed conclusion. Why are irredeemably, intractably hostile demons more interesting than ones that aren't? In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, what are you getting from "this person is intelligent and conscious and free-willed, but also there's something about them that means you should kill them and not feel bad about it"? Why are all the parts of that sentence important to have exist together? Because there is a clear and present downside to portraying the situation where it's possible to be a conscious, intelligent, free-willed agent that nonetheless must be interacted with lethally, which is to say, it evokes some really ugly real-world history, and really ugly real-world thought. So what's the benefit of having "Demon" be a species rather than an allegiance? Potentially having rebel demons is interesting. Potentially communicating with truly alien creatures is interesting. If you want intelligent antagonists, what's the down side of making them antagonists of choice (ie, a faction that is intractably hostile) as opposed to antagonists of nature?
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May 13, 2021 21:26
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Lemon-Lime posted:https://twitter.com/MSigrist83/status/1392858901134118917?s=20 as a non-mtg person, what does this even mean exactly? are they just not supporting the scene financially? are they actively shutting down tournaments?
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May 13, 2021 21:32
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Ultiville posted:It's this, IMO. Honestly, I think the answer is it's just more work. Relatable or realistic motivations may be more interesting, but they take time to invent, make consistent, and figure out how to communicate to the players. Which if that's important to the story you're telling go ahead but if it isn't, minimizing the real-world racism parallels by fighting five headed cat demons and sentient octopuses rather than orcs and goblins seems like a decent compromise.
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May 13, 2021 21:37
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Lemon-Lime posted:https://twitter.com/MSigrist83/status/1392858901134118917?s=20 The argument from WotC is that pro magic will stay, but the image of playing magic to pay the bills will not be pushed any more. I suspect they don't think they need tournaments to sell packs and so they're shifting the game to be for collectors more than players because it's more profitable. I think this will be bad for MTG as a game, but good for MTG as an investment for WotC. https://twitter.com/MagicEsports/status/1392862215871467520 "OP will not be explicitly designed to support competitive Magic as a career path. However, there will be Grand Prix, PTQ, and Pro Tour – like events Our focus will be the amount of play and the prize money, and less focus on the lifestyle or it being economically self-sustaining"
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May 13, 2021 21:38
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quote:The 2021–2022 Season
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May 13, 2021 21:38
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So basically the only people making money off MTG will be content creators and streamers? That's... actually probably a more honest and less exploitative approach. There was way too many people trying to grind it out as a pro even in the tiny local pond.
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May 13, 2021 22:01
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Eggnogium posted:Honestly, I think the answer is it's just more work. Relatable or realistic motivations may be more interesting, but they take time to invent, make consistent, and figure out how to communicate to the players. Which if that's important to the story you're telling go ahead but if it isn't, minimizing the real-world racism parallels by fighting five headed cat demons and sentient octopuses rather than orcs and goblins seems like a decent compromise. I get that in some sense, but it's really not more work to say "you can kill these other humans (or humanlike creatures) because they are eagerly waving a swastika flag" or "these giant spiders are animals so you can't talk to them and should kill them" than to decide that the opposition must be intelligent, and their species must be the marker of their intractable hostility.
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May 13, 2021 22:14
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Ultiville posted:I get that in some sense, but it's really not more work to say "you can kill these other humans (or humanlike creatures) because they are eagerly waving a swastika flag" or "these giant spiders are animals so you can't talk to them and should kill them" than to decide that the opposition must be intelligent, and their species must be the marker of their intractable hostility. If anything it's less work, because once you have the Fantasy Nazis you can cobble together disparate threats by slapping a Fantasy Nazi flag on all of them instead of needing to come up with yet another subclade of goblins/orcs/ogres to get any variety.
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May 13, 2021 22:20
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Ultiville posted:I get that in some sense, but it's really not more work to say "you can kill these other humans (or humanlike creatures) because they are eagerly waving a swastika flag" or "these giant spiders are animals so you can't talk to them and should kill them" than to decide that the opposition must be intelligent, and their species must be the marker of their intractable hostility. I’m not going to use an actual swastika in my campaign and whatever equivalent I come up with it’s going to take work (exposition, interrogation scenes, escape from capture and consequences) to convince my players to see it as a kill-on-sight symbol, and sometimes (not all the time) I want to just skip all that. I think animals as a quick replacement can be unsatisfying because it limits roleplay during combat a bit. A vampire taunting you in a haughty accent is more fun for a GM to do and a player to react off than a series of hissing sounds.
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May 13, 2021 22:34
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You can't just put them in skulls? Pretty sure there's a famous thing out there about skulls and baddies.
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May 13, 2021 22:40
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:You can't just put them in skulls? Pretty sure there's a famous thing out there about skulls and baddies. Last night’s session literally had a dead three cultist captive escape his bonds and kill their horses before my players were willing to kill him.
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May 13, 2021 22:47
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Then it sounds like your players are already on board with the idea that inherent evil doesn't exist and you should get with them on that.
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May 13, 2021 22:53
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Eggnogium posted:I’m not going to use an actual swastika in my campaign and whatever equivalent I come up with it’s going to take work (exposition, interrogation scenes, escape from capture and consequences) to convince my players to see it as a kill-on-sight symbol, and sometimes (not all the time) I want to just skip all that. I have used the swastika as a KoS symbol, but it was a "1930's adventurer" campaign so it was probably already problematic.
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May 13, 2021 23:10
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Mors Rattus posted:Then it sounds like your players are already on board with the idea that inherent evil doesn't exist and you should get with them on that. I’m not out of step with my players, we’ve already talked about this stuff OOC and agreed that demons/vampires/etc are appropriate signals for kill-on-sight encounters while orcs/drow/etc are not. That’s why they were willing to risk it with the cultist because they know he could be redeemed or at least useful.
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May 13, 2021 23:15
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I don't understand why there's such a drive to create groups that are morally acceptable to be violent towards anyway. Like a truly 'good' person would probably not be a player character in an adventuring campaign, why not just acknowledge that you're all playing morally dubious people who kill things and loot the bodies for money and just roll with it?
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May 13, 2021 23:35
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Vanguard Warden posted:I don't understand why there's such a drive to create groups that are morally acceptable to be violent towards anyway. Like a truly 'good' person would probably not be a player character in an adventuring campaign, why not just acknowledge that you're all playing morally dubious people who kill things and loot the bodies for money and just roll with it? I mostly encounter it with cleric or paladin PCs that really want to embody a LG archetype. Sometimes it is a reflection of the player and they keep making characters that are variations on that style but other times it is just the character and the same player would happily pick pockets or whatever in a different campaign. It can be an interesting character dynamic. That is actually also why I set up the rolls that ended in the cultist escaping and killing their horses: I think it’s more interesting if being non-lethal and valuing life requires risk and sacrifice than if it just means playing exactly the same as a neutral character except that you hit em with the non-pointy end on every final blow.
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May 13, 2021 23:44
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Just want to remind folks that Gary Gygax is a racist, genocidal eugenicist, and that any game that does not make a deliberate attempt to move away from his legacy is mired in those incredibly toxic beliefs.
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May 14, 2021 00:22
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Vanguard Warden posted:I don't understand why there's such a drive to create groups that are morally acceptable to be violent towards anyway. Like a truly 'good' person would probably not be a player character in an adventuring campaign, why not just acknowledge that you're all playing morally dubious people who kill things and loot the bodies for money and just roll with it?
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May 14, 2021 00:25
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