|
Meinberg posted: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. The point is that Kevin Crawford IS trying to move away from that legacy though, just not in the way RPG Twitter would prefer right now.
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 00:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 18:33 |
|
|
If your game doesn't travel back in time and kill Gary Gygax it's mired in his incredibly toxic beliefs.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 01:18
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:I mean you can also do both. The Payday gang ain't good people but those waves of cops and PMC guys both had it coming and volunteered to be there. Also they came through the portal from the Cop Dimension, so obviously they're demons, or maybe modrons with guns
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 01:44
|
|
|
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. Sure but as soon as the vampire taunts you in his haughty accent and says he wants to drink your blood (or whatever) he's made a choice that makes you want to fight him. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with fighting intelligent humanoids you can communicate with - that's often really fun! What I'm saying is that if you are going to kill those people, it should be because of what they did and not who they are. There's no reason to say "vampires are inherently evil," because if you encounter a vampire, it's going to be very rapidly obvious if that vampire is evil. The only reason to say "X is inherently evil" is so you can go immediately to lethal violence with no dialog or provocation. Which, when you do it with sentient/sapient creatures capable of making choices, is pretty inherently messed up. "There are some people who by their nature cannot coexist with us" is a core tenet of fascism, a lot of settler colonialism/imperialism, a fair bit of racism, and lots of other really bad ideologies, and is a component of zero good ones. That doesn't mean you're inherently bad if you bring it into your game, but it means you're creating a fictional world where an untrue key element of lots of terrible ideas is true. I'd really suggest you think hard about why you might want to do that. Particularly if (this being the industry thread), you are then going to publish it rather than just play it with friends who you trust will understand that you're doing that. I'd also suggest that the extent to which this comes from Tolkien is actually overblown. His orc stance is bad, no bones about it, but in fact pretty much every time the heroes fight in LOTR and The Hobbit it's a defensive battle and the orcs (or whatever) attack first. D&D is, generally, a very significant escalation on this. In D&D premades (particularly early ones) you almost always go in to the lairs of these creatures knowingly, on very little pretext, and intent on extermination. It's not near the same thing. The demon case highlights it even more, in fact: the Balrog (which turned into a literal demon in D&D) is not evil by nature. He's the same kind of creature as Gandalf, Radagast, and other good characters. He's evil because he chose the other side in an ancient spirit war - and because he attacks the Fellowship. Gandalf talks to him first, and in fact, I think you can make a pretty strong case that if he'd come to Gandalf as a supplicant, said he regretted it, and asked Gandalf to put a good word in with the Valar when he got back, Gandalf would have gone for it and moved on in peace. This is the same guy that praises Frodo for sparing Gollum, after all. This is not to say that Tolkien is perfect or anything, but rather that when we lift kill-on-sight races for our games, we aren't lifting very directly from Tolkien or most literature, we're lifting quite directly from early D&D modules that are genocide simulators. As ably noted: Meinberg posted: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. It's really easy to move away from these beliefs. It's really easy to do so by carefully choosing enemies, or even by just talking to the players a bit and saying you're establishing a few quick bits of shorthand to let them know that their characters realize a fight is to the death. Removing implied fascist beliefs from your game, particularly a published game, has very little cost, and adds value in most cases by making it clear what is and isn't a hook. It should just be standard in 2021.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 01:55
|
|
|
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. Or tell the players that their characters know that the (orcs, goblins, whatever) are horribly evil and it's perfectly okay to slaughter them, and then over time let the players (and maybe the PCs?) come to to the realization that it isn't actually true. Quote from a game I GMed as the PCs snuck up on a group of gnolls: "We can't kill them - they're *fishing*!"
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 02:35
|
|
|
Or gently caress it, like someone else said, quit puzzling about how to make your PCs kill more often :\
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 02:39
|
|
|
Pasha posted:Or tell the players that their characters know that the (orcs, goblins, whatever) are horribly evil and it's perfectly okay to slaughter them, and then over time let the players (and maybe the PCs?) come to to the realization that it isn't actually true.  Present: Dungeons & Dragons. I think a lot of this is more about the casual use of a gross trope, rather than the deliberate use of a narrative device.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 03:16
|
|
|
Tibalt posted:So basically the only people making money off MTG will be content creators and streamers? 1: Telling someone "you can totally make a living off this leisure hobby" is probably not something you should be doing. If someone happens to find a way to do it, great - but making out like it's a viable and sensible career path to pursue and doesn't involve utterly lucking out at some point is tempting people down a primrose path to ruin. 2: Doing it when that hobby involves an IP you have perpetual control over, so for people to make a living off it they have to pay you money to acquire cards, build decks, practice etc. is incredibly sleazy. (AIUI some tournaments work on the basis of giving you a sealed deck or whatever at the start, sure... but even then, I feel like the odds of someone doing well at tournaments without spending a significant amount of money to keep up with the current game and deckbuilding principles and whatnot are remote.) You are basically setting up a gold rush in which you are the only person selling shovels and part of the reason I love the DIY ethos of many RPGs and dislike stuff like proprietary cards/dice in games is that it means tabletop RPGs are somewhat less vulnerable to this slippery slope than CCGs. 3: The combination of #1 and #2 means that promoting "pro Magic player" as a valid professional goal that people should feel encouraged to pursue, rather than something a few people might be able to do if they are very talented and lucky but not really a career goal people should aim for, is a monstrous obscenity and Wizards should never have done it. 4: However... because Wizards did do it, going back on that is a knife in the back of everyone they sold on the idea. You could argue that it's kind of on them for embarking on a career path whose very viability depended on the whims of a corporation that, unlike actual employees of said corporation, they don't even have an employment contract with. Encouraging people to take up this career and then pulling the plug on it without providing them with any sort of assistance on an exit strategy is even more of a monstrous obscenity than promoting the idea of "pro Magic player" as an aspirational goal in the first place.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 14:05
|
|
|
Was pro MtG actually a thing for more than a dozen players? I can't imagine people honestly expected to pay their rent by playing competitive magic. 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. This is a great observation. I'd offer that it's not the absence of law but of consequences that's the defining feature. A big part of Westerns is the righting of wrongs and delivery of the villain's comuppance. The absence of law just lets the karmic balance skew towards villainy until the movie begins.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 14:21
|
|
|
Pro Magic stopped being the primary focus of WotC back in like 2008. Set design shifted away from hardcore combos and complicated mechanics, to focusing more on emotional vibes and marketable characters. The official end of support for the Pro Magic scene isn't some kind of sudden and abrupt change, it's just ending life support for something they haven't considered necessary to the game for a long time now. This article from two years ago saw the writing on the wall. https://adjameson.wordpress.com/2018/12/04/an-open-letter-to-cedric-phillips-gerry-thompson-and-the-pro-magic-community-at-large/
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 14:29
|
|
|
No one not involved in the pro circuit or hoping to be in it cared about the pros for the last decade, yeah.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 14:34
|
|
|
The amount of travel and time necessary to participate in any of the tournaments they're still running means that you essentially have to make it your job. This hasn't been practical for a while, but WotC pretending this is some sort of image problem rather than an intentional way they structure they tournaments is a bit rich.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 15:25
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:No one not involved in the pro circuit or hoping to be in it cared about the pros for the last decade, yeah. This isn’t true. There are a lot of people who play Magic who don’t care at all about pro play, certainly, but I’ve known a lot of players who enjoy following the pro scene, just like you can enjoy following any other kind of sport. Heck, I’m one of them, but so are a bunch of the folks who come to my store, who went to my events, etc. There are certainly people who recognize they won’t go pro but enjoy being able to see incredible play, or who go to a Grand Prix every few months as a vacation and hope to get crushed by a favorite, or who weekend warrior it and their goal is literally “make one Pro Tour so I can see it and say I did.” None of that has to do with whether funding all that is worth WOTC’s time or whatever, and I’m sure for some people they followed an impossible dream to their detriment (which tends to happen in virtually every interest), but the appeal of the game having very high level events definitely extends far beyond the people who ever expect to be at that top level - or even want to be.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 15:44
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:The amount of travel and time necessary to participate in any of the tournaments they're still running means that you essentially have to make it your job. This hasn't been practical for a while, but WotC pretending this is some sort of image problem rather than an intentional way they structure they tournaments is a bit rich. Well part of that, of course, is that they farm out the lower level stuff to game stores. One good thing I’m hoping for from this announcement is talking about supporting the lower levels of play - they cut off all the ways for smaller LGSes to tie in to the bigger events a few years back, and I’d be thrilled if they let us run things like that again.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 15:52
|
|
|
Isaac Childres' apology (in the newest Frosthaven Kickstarter update) for his essentializing fantasy "races" in Gloomhaven, mandatory imperialism in Frosthaven, et cetera sounds like he really took what he learned from cultural consulting to heart. He's also explicitly offering refunds on Frosthaven to anyone aggrieved by this horrifying new rampage of kindness, inclusivity, and respect.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 17:47
|
|
|
Mandatory imperialism?
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 20:24
|
|
|
homullus posted:Isaac Childres' apology (in the newest Frosthaven Kickstarter update) for his essentializing fantasy "races" in Gloomhaven, mandatory imperialism in Frosthaven, et cetera sounds like he really took what he learned from cultural consulting to heart. He's also explicitly offering refunds on Frosthaven to anyone aggrieved by this horrifying new rampage of kindness, inclusivity, and respect. The simple fact is, most of the world-building was done for his own home D&D game, and it ingested a lot of those D&D things. GH is not as bad as a lot of games, but it's got some rough edges with its treatment of race in particular. (Like, really, lay off the vermlings!) He's brought in a cultural consultant to help him with his own blind spots. Here's the link and the Whole Thing. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frosthaven/frosthaven/posts/3185807 quote:Hello! Today we're going to get right into a discussion of some news I'm really excited about. I didn't want to spend too much time talking about other stuff, but rest assured that progress is still being made on all fronts of finishing up this project, and I'll have more updates on all of that next time. Kavak posted:Mandatory imperialism? dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 20:29 on May 14, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 20:26
|
|
|
I made the mistake of reading the backer comments. Don't do the thing I did.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 23:44
|
|
|
Leraika posted:I made the mistake of reading the backer comments. You might get KS to act on literal hate speech but random slurs here or there? Whatever. It'll be interesting to watch that space over the next few days to see who's withdrawn their pledge and who's full of poo poo.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2021 23:52
|
|
|
There's one way to moderate it, and it's to instantly refund anyone and be lovely about it in a DM. That probably only worked if you were cool with whoever's supposed to keep that from happening though. (Because you're that person.)
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 00:17
|
|
|
I think one of the other major factors that keeps the "Always Chaotic Evil" bullshit ball rolling in D&D is the fact that it's a reflection of the biological essentialism and racialism that was deeply baked into some of the more prominent pieces of fantasy fiction that inspired the game and is still held in high esteem by a number of players. People will frequently defer to Tolkien when talks of orcs being always evil come up, but I really think that attitude has its roots more in the works of Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other "weird fantasy" authors from the early 20th century. These were authors whose works were mostly published in an era when racialism and other such post-imperialist justifications were still considered scientifically valid by a lot of white people and that bled through a lot into their work: The Conan stories, for instance, tend to have entire in-universe racial and ethnic groups that are portrayed as being innately "savage" or antithetical to the concepts of human civilization and often has characters express decidedly post-colonial ideas of racial identity in a pre-Iron Age society. Burroughs, on the other hand, really bought into the whole idea of eugenics and this ended up informing a lot fo the worldbuilding for his Barsoom and Amtor series. Even when he was being more generous about racial determinism, it tended more to fall into the realm of White Man's Burden with the "barbaric" humanoids being a product of "savage" or otherwise immoral cultures who just need a strapping, square-jawed white guy to step in and show them how to be less evil. Howard, Burroughs and a number of other pulp writers were among Gygax's favorites, moreso than the likes of Tolkien, and the racialist ideas of the era in which they were active seemed to have heavily informed Gygax's own worldview when he created D&D. And, indeed, stuff like Conan and Barsoom are still fairly popular with a decent chunk of the people who play D&D today. I think a decent number of people who espouse the "Orcs must always be chaotic evil" attitude attitude and get into arguments about it online fall into that attitude as a defense mechanism because admitting that the idea of an entire species of sapient almost-humans that are universally evil and morally justifiable to exterminate being a little bit hosed up would require them to admit that some of the fiction that they really enjoy is also kind of hosed up. Then, because a lot of people directly tie their identity to the media they consume, from a lot of these people's perspectives admitting that the media they enjoy has racist undertones that would imply that they themselves might be racist. If you really want to have a group of "exterminate on sight" enemies that are still sapient just throw in some corrupted mutants like in the Taarna segment of Heavy Metal. Y'know, when those raiders got covered in LocNar goop and it made them all green and evil?
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 04:08
|
|
|
KingKalamari posted:If you really want to have a group of "exterminate on sight" enemies that are still sapient just throw in some corrupted mutants like in the Taarna segment of Heavy Metal. Y'know, when those raiders got covered in LocNar goop and it made them all green and evil? What makes this better?
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 05:07
|
|
|
I feel like my group in SotDL are actually enjoying the fact that they are facing something where it's hard to even begin to think they can be reasoned with. Beastmen attacking small lumber yards on the edge of a vast forest with the intention to pilfer useful supplies, forcibly turn anyone they can into more beastmen and eat those they can't and/or turn them into armor and tents. My players don't need to know that the beastmen themselves aren't from the forest, that they are a scouting party for a much larger herd. They don't need to know the leader of this herd is seeking a relic that will begin turning humans randomly into more beastmen until there are more of them than humanity, so they can crush civilization and in the chaos that follows allow the world to be swallowed up by the void. They don't need to know any of that yet, anyway. Cause figuring out the threat is part of the fun. But you really do need to start off with making it clear what they are dealing with cannot be reasoned with.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 05:28
|
|
|
RiotGearEpsilon posted:What makes this better? That it's not 'they were born evil, gotta kill them before they reproduce'? It's not a super complicated operation, any more than 'these are killer robots produced in the killer robot factory.' It also makes it fantastic enough that there's really no isomorphism to genocidal ideation IRL, which is just nice.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 05:30
|
|
|
RiotGearEpsilon posted:What makes this better? Joe Slowboat posted:That it's not 'they were born evil, gotta kill them before they reproduce'? Nessus fucked around with this message at 05:33 on May 15, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 05:30
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:That it's not 'they were born evil, gotta kill them before they reproduce'? I'll be honest, I literally don't see any difference between, 'There's a machine churning out evil clones you can kill on sight' and 'there's an evil pool of goo churning out evil mutants you can kill on sight' and 'Grummush is an evil god who's churning out evil orcs you can kill on sight'. I would be uncomfortable and grossed out at best if someone tried to present one of those as the 'solution' to 'always evil' races in a game.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 06:27
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:I mean you can also do both. The Payday gang ain't good people but those waves of cops and PMC guys both had it coming and volunteered to be there. This is 110% my entire philosophy of running Shadowrun and other cyberpunk genres. Yes, being a violent thief is not morally good. The corps have done far, far worse, and the people you're stealing from have it coming. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 07:15 on May 15, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 07:05
|
|
|
KingKalamari posted:Howard, Burroughs I appreciate this post, and in a broad way totally agree with it; in particular with the assessment of Burroughs. I have to disagree on a couple of points w/r/t Howard, though. Howard's Hyborian Age setting is indeed "pre iron-age" since, strictly speaking, it's supposed to have happened prior to the actual iron age; but, it's a setting with steel, during the times Conan lives, and before that era, there had been multiple previous ages, some of which had high, mysterious, weird sciences so advanced as to be basically magic. It's not particularly anachronistic to throw in any specific more-modern concept or technology into that setting: it's already 100% anachronistic from the start, and Howard went out of his way to make sure that he didn't have to concern himself with avoiding anachronism. A character expressing a "post-colonial concept of race" was fine, in that it wasn't outside of what fit into his setting; I'll leave it individuals to judge whether it was fine, in terms of being suitable in theme or style or whatever. He also presents some obviously deeply problematic concepts about race: as you pointed out, his setting treats different ethnicities as essentially distinct species, rising and falling multiple times from "anthropoid" apedom and back to human-hood. It's sort of a borrowed psuedo-darwinian idea, that there's a track of evolution that is locked on rails between pre-human hominid, and fully-human homo sapiens, the latter inevitable from the former. He also borrows from a (IIRC) 17th or 18th century, never particularly popular, pseudo-historical racist fantasy that circulated in europe that proposed that "the sons of Aryas" - literally, the Aryan races - arose directly in europe and spread to I guess India and parts of Asia but no further, a distinct and separate path unrelated to that of the african, american, and eastern asian races. Howard did not actually believe in that theory, practically nobody did in his time (the late 1920s-early 1930s), but he found it an interesting framework on which to construct his forgotten-age pre-pre-historic setting. (As an aside, I find it interesting that both Howard and Tolkein used that conceit, entirely independently: neither was aware of the other's work, as far as I know.) Anyway, aside from the background of his world, Howard's presentation of race within the Conan stories themselves is highly variable. On the one hand, there's a story where Conan visits a white governor who is the master over a dark-skinned race and vocally expresses appreciation for this man's superiority and mastery of the dark people. On the other hand, there's a story where Conan meets up with a black warrior and pals around with him, treating him both in deed and in his own thoughts as essentially an equal. Howard has black-skinned races like the Stygians, an ancient, powerful culture steeped in mysticism and learning, but who worship the evil snake-god Set and practice human sacrifice; and he has pale-skinned forest savages, the Picts, the oldest continuous race in Conan's world, but with no written records because they're just straight up painted skin-wearing stone age cavemen, basically. Howard was a product of his upbringing, in rural texas post-WW1 oil towns. He was obviously influenced by Burroughs; he corresponded with HP Lovecraft, with whom he carried out a years-long, sometimes very heated debate over the nature of civilization, but clearly the two men deeply respected each other's works, and were influenced by each other. Yet, I think it's fair to say that Howard may have been actually offended by Lovecraft's flagrant racism, which was enough to actually shock white people in 1930, and the later Conan stories have a lot less of the racist stuff in them than the earlier stories. I hope it's not just me coloring my read of his stories with the hope that that was the case, but I've seen other analyses that agree with me on this. With regards to how Gygax in particular understood and interpreted Howard, though? I think you've got it dead on. Howard's audience - that is, the audience of weird pulp fiction magazines in 1030 - was white, lower class boys and young men. They wanted lurid stories, with scantily clad maidens and rippling muscles, pure male power fantasy; and white male dominance was an intrinsic part of that genre. There's a feedback loop there, in which the stories reinforced the prejudices already built into that demographic. I doubt Gygax ever had the clarity to question whether white men with swords slaying savage dark-skinned men (or bestial subhumans), probably to rescue or win the favor of a half-naked white lady, might be a wee bit problematic? Whatever complexity or evolution Howard went through during his tragically short writing career was probably completely unrecognized by Gygax. Orcs (or maybe more accurately, Drow) might as well be Picts or Stygians or whatever. Gygax didn't particularly care to interrogate the idea that "these people are evil because of their broken cultural norms" is distinct from "these people are evil because their race is an evil race" - he had his alignment chart and that worked great for assigning a shorthand attribute for DMs and players alike to understand whose hit points they should freely subtract. I just want to make it clear that even Howard never laid out any of his Hyborian age races as "intrinsically evil, always, and totally irredeemable." But it might take a careful reader to have noticed that distinction, and I don't think Gygax was that sort of careful reader. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:13 on May 15, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 07:08
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:With regards to how Gygax in particular understood and interpreted Howard, though? I think you've got it dead on. Howard's audience - that is, the audience of weird pulp fiction magazines in 1030 - was white, lower class boys and young men. They wanted lurid stories, with scantily clad maidens and rippling muscles, pure male power fantasy; and white male dominance was an intrinsic part of that genre. There's a feedback loop there, in which the stories reinforced the prejudices already built into that demographic. I doubt Gygax ever had the clarity to question whether white men with swords slaying savage dark-skinned men (or bestial subhumans), probably to rescue or win the favor of a half-naked white lady, might be a wee bit problematic? Whatever complexity or evolution Howard went through during his tragically short writing career was probably completely unrecognized by Gygax. Orcs (or maybe more accurately, Drow) might as well be Picts or Stygians or whatever. Gygax didn't particularly care to interrogate the idea that "these people are evil because of their broken cultural norms" is distinct from "these people are evil because their race is an evil race" - he had his alignment chart and that worked great for assigning a shorthand attribute for DMs and players alike to understand whose hit points they should freely subtract. Yeah the alignment chart concept never progressed beyond Gygax's wargaming background. A wargaming force is static and has keywords applied to it, and when he went from two armies fighting to a broader campaign model he never at any point considered that there's a difference betwen an organization (such as an army) having traits and a species having them.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 07:21
|
|
|
I think the easiest way to judge how racist these pulp writers are is to see what happened when they placed their stories in Africa. Here's a quote that really struck me when I read a collection of REH's Solomon Kane stories more than a decade ago, and while I no longer have the volume, thankfully Australia's Project Gutenberg considers them to be public domain, so I was able to track it down. It's from "Wings in the Night", first published in Weird Tales, July 1932.quote:KANE stood with the ju-ju stave in one hand and the smoking pistol in the other, above the smouldering ruins that hid forever from the sight of man the last of those terrible, semi-human monsters whom another hero had banished from Europe in an unknown age. Kane stood, an unconscious statue of triumph—the ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth, whether he be clad in wolf-hide and horned helmet, or boots and doublet—whether he bear in his hand battle-ax or rapier—whether he be called Dorian, Saxon or Englishman—whether his name is Jason, Hengist or Solomon Kane. It's not subtle.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 07:23
|
|
|
I don’t have an answer for how to handle always evil species but part of the reason I love the setting of Final Fantasy XIV is the way it avoids always evil species. There are groups and forces that are antagonistic to the player but no group is a monolith. There’s the voidsent, which are basically demons, but the newest job they just revealed seems to have a tamed/friendly one Man, I just want a game set in Eorzea
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 07:35
|
|
|
You know, in all the times I've seen this discussion play out, I've never once seen a convincing argument for why having an enemy force that you can kill at will without having to talk to them first makes a game more interesting, not less. There are plenty of reasons why, in the kind of rough, lawless world where might makes right, two groups of intelligent beings might still come to blows. Going back to cowboy films again, none of the antagonists are Always Biologically Evil. And if you're fighting over something, that means there are many more ways the fight could go and many more tactical options available to you. So why are people so drat eager to find a way to hold onto Always Evil when it doesn't serve any game function?
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 09:49
|
|
|
If you have to have something you can just kill, use mindless undead. You're doing them a favor by putting them down.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 10:58
|
|
|
thetoughestbean posted:I don’t have an answer for how to handle always evil species but part of the reason I love the setting of Final Fantasy XIV is the way it avoids always evil species. There are groups and forces that are antagonistic to the player but no group is a monolith. There’s the voidsent, which are basically demons, but the newest job they just revealed seems to have a tamed/friendly one Same. Endwalker hype makes me kind of want to run one but I've never had a Final Fantasy-ish game turn out well (for different reasons every time, but still).
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 11:06
|
|
|
Whybird posted:So why are people so drat eager to find a way to hold onto Always Evil when it doesn't serve any game function? I think it does serve a game function, actually: to streamline the narrative of dungeon and combat encounters for groups who want to focus on that element of the game and are less concerned with narrative. A lot of people in tradgames hobbies just want to get on with it, and "the things you're fighting are totally evil, don't worry about the ethics of your dungeon raid" is a way to do that that's simple, even if it's lazy and ugly. It's also a matter of existing momentum, IMHO -- if you're a GM trying to design a low-level adventure using the bestiaries of existing fantasy game lines, your options are limited, and often humanoid enemies are the only things that give any kind of tactical depth. It's lazy, lowest-common-denominator play, but that's the level a lot of people operate on: players who just want beer-and-pretzels action and GMs who may not have the time or skill for homebrew monster prep. I think that's a reason it's important for game and adventure designers creating their own products to work more ethical and interesting choices into their core products, so there are better choices at the table for players by default.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 11:55
|
|
|
Whybird posted:There are plenty of reasons why, in the kind of rough, lawless world where might makes right, two groups of intelligent beings might still come to blows. Going back to cowboy films again, none of the antagonists are Always Biologically Evil. And if you're fighting over something, that means there are many more ways the fight could go and many more tactical options available to you. The problem you've got here is that in D&D there are no ways to win a fight other than by killing your opposition (or something as good as killing them, like turning them to stone or whatever). Anything less than that can be recovered from relatively rapidly, especially with clerical magic, and if you're playing an edition with morale rules a failed morale roll generally just means the survivors will disappear into the dungeon and warn everybody else that you're there and/or return with reinforcements. The whole game pushes 'kill or be killed' and once you're at that point it doesn't matter what you're fighting over, because the only way you can get it is by murdering everyone keeping you from it -- and that means that you need enemies it's Okay To Murder because you have precious few other problem-solving options. Contrast with Unbound -- also a game about class-based tactical combat, among other things -- where you specifically set stakes before each combat so that either side can back down at any point if they're willing to let the other side have what they want. You could port this system over to D&D without needing to change anything else and make it a much better game.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 12:40
|
|
|
Yeah, I agree that expectations of "kill or be killed" being so ingrained into both systems and table behavior is a huge part of the problem, and definitely something game designers should be working on correcting. (Among other things, way more games and modules need goals other than "idk, go in there and kill some dudes and take their poo poo, I guess?" I've been binge-reading D&D-oid modules lately, and it's staggering how many don't give players even the most trivial motivations or tasks, just a map and a bunch of stat blocks you can murder.)
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 13:04
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I agree that expectations of "kill or be killed" being so ingrained into both systems and table behavior is a huge part of the problem, and definitely something game designers should be working on correcting. (Among other things, way more games and modules need goals other than "idk, go in there and kill some dudes and take their poo poo, I guess?" I've been binge-reading D&D-oid modules lately, and it's staggering how many don't give players even the most trivial motivations or tasks, just a map and a bunch of stat blocks you can murder.) Yep. D&D being an overt imperialism simulator early on riddles it’s assumptions and rules even to today, in lots of ways. “Evil races” are just one of the more obvious.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 14:37
|
|
|
This is the thread's favourite topic besides Actual Play podcasts and it is, somehow, even more boring I can't believe anyone managed to make me of all people bored with discussing imperialism but here we are
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 15:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 18:33 |
|
|
potatocubed posted:Contrast with Unbound -- also a game about class-based tactical combat, among other things -- where you specifically set stakes before each combat so that either side can back down at any point if they're willing to let the other side have what they want. You could port this system over to D&D without needing to change anything else and make it a much better game. Is this Rowan Rook and Decard Unbound?
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2021 15:31
|
|
