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MonsieurChoc posted:One of the designers is a "Nixon was right to bomb Cambodgia" Republican. Kenneth Hite. The neat thing about this is that Delta Green were supposed to be an above board XCOM-esque unit decades ago until the bad guys (and their own gently caress ups) got them black balled. Hence the push towards a more extremist angle. You're literally playing your bog standard outlawed extremist group in RPG's that wants to save the world by doing unethical things. That includes all the baggage that comes with that. Also Delta Green isn't so much a political oo-rah for neoliberalism as much as it is a Deux Ex-esque look at a world ten minutes before it straight up just loving ends. That whole tagline Deus Ex's latest incarnation started out with, "It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here." could sum up Delta Green pretty well. I remember there being a fiction blurb that even shows this happening. One of the Delta Green agents (Presumably one of the hard liner types you just described.) earned the attention of...something... which decided it was entertaining enough to witness the end of the world. So we fast forward to many years in the future as the guy's life deteriorates and he's forced to watch it happen many years in the future. I think it's at least implied that the guy basically eats a bullet as much from the eldritch horrors as from fact that it's evident to him at last that all the awful poo poo Delta Green got up to in it's later years accomplished nothing but maybe bought people a decade more of time to live before being annihilated. With the caveat that better (or eviller) groups might have found a way off world to survive with the time they bought. Key word is, might. TL;DR: Delta Green is a bleak as gently caress game and it's kind of fitting that it has that as a political metanarrative as a result. It's like someone stripped all the horny and anime out of Cthulhutech and focused on making some bleak apocalyptic fiction out of it. Only instead of going full anime like in Cthulhutech humanity more or less gets curb stomped in the end instead of just going "Yeah, gently caress this poo poo." and getting Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 02:14
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Maybe it's the existentialist in me, but delaying the inevitable apocalypse seems heroic and meaningful and triumphant enough. Death is certain. I know that without a doubt one day I and everyone I have ever known or loved will be dead. If I was to save a loved one from death, I'm not literally saving them from death, I'm just postponing the inevitable. Death is certain. Like I enjoy Delta Green and CoC - problematic as both are - and agree with you that DG is SUPER loving bleak, but I dunno, I still can't help but feel like 'we delayed the apocalypse' is still a triumph because that's literally all anyone ever does outside of apocalyptic fiction where the plot is legit about the final victory of good over evil - and that sort of thing is often rare even in fantasy games. Also I forget how DG and CoC handle it, but considering the whole ~Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan~ and some of the other blurbs in the Shadow Out of Time, we know that the end of the world - in either the sense of sane humans or of life on Earth - isn't for quite some time. It's centuries if not millennia before Big C wakes up.
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Aug 4, 2021 02:22
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Maybe it's the existentialist in me, but delaying the inevitable apocalypse seems heroic and meaningful and triumphant enough. Doesn't DG also go after the eldritch entities and cultists that want to help as well? I dimly remember some intimations that they're on their poo poo list as well. If so, they might end up hurting as much as they help. Like, I know at least one alien race and one conspiracy was supposed to be looking into off world evacuation. Granted, their methods are horrific to a human, but still. Like, it seems like they'd not be down with letting humanity flee into the Dreamlands or something that would let them live on in some form that isn't necessarily human anymore. They've gone all Warhammer 40k-esque "death to the Edit: And there is definitely some fiction blurbs of the eldritch gods potentially loving up Earth earlier than that. Though they might have changed that. In addition to that even a cursory look for this stuff online leads to the TVTropes page that touches on another very iffy political issue for a lot of people - The Manning and Snowden leaks contained data about one end of the overall US and affiliated operations on the conspiracy/Delta Green end of things. Any implicated personnel were instructed to pretend to be insane or a criminal on pain of death. Also, any journalist that pieced things together is implied to be dealt with, though none has managed to do so yet. Governments murdering journalists is a pretty hosed up thing. And the text basically suggests the US is approaching the issue of handling leaks and troublesome journalists the same way that nations like Russia does. Which is kind of yikes. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 02:25
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Archonex posted:Doesn't DG also go after the eldritch entities and cultists that want to help as well? I dimly remember some intimations that they're on their poo poo list as well. If so, they might end up hurting as much as they help. Depends on the Agencies/Factions. Delta Green itself, especially during the Alphonse years, was fairly pragmatic and willing to work with horrible people in order to save lives. One of their higher ranking members was a Ghoul after all.
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Aug 4, 2021 02:44
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I want to throw out some other questions about games where you literally play as reactionaries who are also entirely correct like delta green. What makes this so appealing? This is not a game that is marketed solely to reactionaries and attracts a a large amount of leftists and liberals to it. Even in running my games, I’ve had a few dark moments of talking to players with “well, you’re the cops, so you can totally do that.” It’s almost like the Stanford Prison Experiment with seeing how players react. What makes delta green interesting is that it explicitly has sanity rules that make you risk losing it for inflicting, experiencing, or witnessing violence. So just killing everyone like in D&D will result in risking at least some sanity. Going in and murdering their families in the night risks a lot more. Moral implications are effectively codified in the game. Having the characters argue and threaten each other over what to do is a core part of the game. Some of them are roleplaying characters. Others just dislike another player causing them to possibly lose sanity points. This is where you get some really interesting ideology coming in. Players don’t want to lose the game but they have to argue in the terms of the fiction rather than the game. In this case, they have to make moral arguments for what to do, and as is the case in real life may escalate to material threats. It’s is fascinating because in the Meta of the game, what they must do is whatever it takes to stop the monster, while also sacrificing themselves to do it. The players try to avoid that fate as best as they can and inevitably come to a contradiction where they must choose one or the other. “Winning” the game? “Winning” the argument? Or “winning” at morals? All of these things require sacrifices. So many games have you mowing down enemies as “objective completed” and this is one where it’s “good job, now roll to see how much sanity you lost for this.” Delta green posits that every decision hurts. Every decision has sacrifice. Every decision has luck and fighting and chaos. There is a meta narrative that I have never heard played out in a single game. As I mentioned, it’s a bunch of NPCs who would all die or go insane after several in game missions. Delta green is fun to PLAY because it forces these melodramas of morals and gameplay. It’s a game that forces ideology at every turn. You are playing agents of (arguably evil) ideological forces. You are confronting monsters of an ideological (racist) storyteller. You are making choices from ideological motivations. Edit: no offense, but the most boring thing in the world to me are conversations about higher ups and the narratives of the game beyond the basic timeline. I could read a timeline of the CIA and have a completely bereft of context and emotion understanding. The actual play of the game of delta green, not the reading of it, but the PLAYING of it, produces far more interesting reads of ideology and the like. I could give a poo poo if colonel hardcastle is a byakhee or how the x-1 artifact has produced 37 lasers each held by one of the main protagonists or antagonists of the setting. A bunch of d&d players in heated argument over whether to torch an above ground cistern that may have a demon or a kidnapped woman in it is far more interesting to me. fr0id fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 03:43
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fr0id posted:What makes delta green interesting is that it explicitly has sanity rules that make you risk losing it for inflicting, experiencing, or witnessing violence. So just killing everyone like in D&D will result in risking at least some sanity. Going in and murdering their families in the night risks a lot more. Moral implications are effectively codified in the game. Having the characters argue and threaten each other over what to do is a core part of the game. Some of them are roleplaying characters. Others just dislike another player causing them to possibly lose sanity points. I actually don't think this is all that surprising. Heroically bearing the burden of being the one who knows and fights the darkness is some bog-standard fascist poo poo. Think of the lone cowboy who saved the town riding away because he knows he just secured a peaceful and god-fearing society that has no place for him, or like, literally anything from The Walking Dead. The archetype, and thus the fantasy, in American culture is basically being The One Man Able To Do What It Takes But Who Is Then Really Sad About It Afterwards. I don't see "fighting monsters causes your character to go insane" as being a contradiction, in other words, I consider it a core feature of the power-fantasy. "I get to play as a man who heroically sacrifices his life, relationships, and sanity to protect the unknowing and defenseless sheep from foreign monsters? Sign me the gently caress up!"
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Aug 4, 2021 07:46
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John Scott Tynes is fairly active on Twitter if you wanted to ask him a few of these questions.
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Aug 4, 2021 07:56
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MonsieurChoc posted:One of the designers is a "Nixon was right to bomb Cambodgia" Republican. Kenneth Hite. Hite is part of a nearly extinct breed of non-conservative old-school pre-Tea Party Republicans, which makes his politics really interesting and sometimes difficult to parse out. He shares precisely zero of the GOP's flagstone modern cultural stances, spent the entirety of 2015-2020 mocking Trump and all his works, being horrified at the direction his own party was going, and co-hosting a podcast where he regularly makes it clear that he's mostly on the right side of history in terms of American social trends. "America hosed up every other country it got its hands on" is such a regular take for him that it's become almost a running joke. My armchair psychologist take is that a fair amount of this has to do with Hite having an honest-to-goodness eidetic memory and an obsession with research; the trademark conservative cognitive dissonance is probably harder to maintain under those circumstances. Speaking of Cambodia and the horrors perpetrated by America, that is a subject Hite has returned to a couple times. Qelong is his Fantasy Cambodia / Vietnam setting in which a fertile and beautiful region has just been fought over by nigh-godlike beings for its resources, and is turning into a nightmare hellscape as a result. The metaphor is, uh, not subtle, but the execution is a masterclass in designing a setting to be playable. Anyone looking to combine their roleplaying with an investigation of military intervenionism and colonialism is advised to check it out.
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Aug 4, 2021 09:27
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fr0id posted:I want to throw out some other questions about games where you literally play as reactionaries who are also entirely correct like delta green. I think part of it would be that as a society we're conditioned to see these people using their power as good, and even for people who can recognise that these people using their power is bad, actually, that conditioning doesn't really go away. Fantasy offers us an opportunity to indulge that conditioning in an environment where actual people don't get hurt. On some level, anyone raised in western society wants all the stuff we were told as kids about the police, the security services, being there to keep us safe to be true, even if we've had to punch that part of us down and supress it as we later realised the truth. Most of these games feature a deep secret that only the initiated know that justifies actions we'd see as evil in our world, but ironically the true fantasy here is basically the exact opposite. When we play something like Delta Green, on the surface we're playing a game where our actions as members of the authority are motivated by the dark secret of eldritch horror, but what we're really playing is a game where the actual real-world dark secret that the actions of members of the authority are motivated by capital, patriarchy and racial supremacy is untrue.
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Aug 4, 2021 10:20
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When my group play Lovecraftian RPG's, tonally we go full Hellboy and that's the way we like it. 
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Aug 4, 2021 11:39
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Kestral posted:Hite is part of a nearly extinct breed of non-conservative old-school pre-Tea Party Republicans, which makes his politics really interesting and sometimes difficult to parse out. He shares precisely zero of the GOP's flagstone modern cultural stances, spent the entirety of 2015-2020 mocking Trump and all his works, being horrified at the direction his own party was going, and co-hosting a podcast where he regularly makes it clear that he's mostly on the right side of history in terms of American social trends. "America hosed up every other country it got its hands on" is such a regular take for him that it's become almost a running joke. Just a side note, but criticism of the US government and the idea of a noble murderous conspiracy fighting against _____ alien horrors probably extends past that one dev as well. Keep in mind that one of the devs for Delta Green was involved in the [Prototype] series, which has a clear Delta Green expy in the form of Blackwatch. Blackwatch is even worse than any incarnation of Delta Green to the point where at times it almost seems almost like they're poking fun at Delta Green and other conspiracy fiction's bad habits in a satirical manner. To get into it: Blackwatch regularly indulges in unlawful and nonconsenting human experimentation, genocide of US and possibly foreign civilians, and generally has all sorts of ugly poo poo going on on it's research end. Hell, the first scene of the first game has you in a literal human incinerator/test chamber like they're the gestapo. And then they release hordes of viral infected on you, all while the lead researcher literally cheers you on as you devour them.  In a hilarious twist of events, all of this was to stop the apocalypse they knew was coming, much like how Delta Green occasionally gets up to some poo poo. Or to put it another way, it's the usual narrative sop of the organizational equivalent of the whole "the shady authoritative strongman was right even if he did some tremendously evil things". Except...No, not really. Since bioterrorism is a huge thing in the setting of [Prototype] it shouldn't come as a surprise that viruses can mutate and take new forms. So after fifty some years of prepping for the outbreak the idiots find themselves fighting an apocalypse (In New York City due to them setting up research centers for a virus and it's new form that had might as well be two Tzimisce antediluvians from the OWoD on steroids. Again, they did this in a major population center that's indispensable to the global economy. So they can't just nuke it straight off without it being obvious to the outside world that things are really off the rails. Suffice to say that it's obvious that the lack of oversight and accountability from the public or competent bits of the government at large due to being a conspiracy has made Blackwatch go a bit off mission objective.  ) that they're all but totally unprepared for due to one sociopath that they themselves employed to work on modifying the virus that they were supposed to keep from triggering the apocalypse.Also, the last outbreak of it was technically triggered by them and would have stayed contained indefinitely if they had just stepped down the aggression and focused on containing the test subjects of the hosed up experiment they did in rural America decades back. Meaning the entire thing is literally their fault on multiple levels and in multiple ways. Since not only did they focus on aggression against perceived threats over defense of key assets they absolutely had to defend to fulfill the objectives of their organization, they were the ones that pushed the aforementioned scientist into unleashing an apocalyptic bioweapon out of spite due to their dickish conspiratorial actions. After that, by the time the sequel has rolled around they've seemingly realized how hosed their efforts were in the long run due to not understanding one basic scientific concept. So, instead they've ripped off the mask, instead mostly going all in on trying to genocide the poor and minorities (one of their side hobbies) in lieu of a pretense of any noble goal. It's notable that the genuinely good military faction, the National Guard, is almost completely missing in the sequel due to seemingly having given up on NYC (Or more likely having been ordered away by the politicians, generals, and capitalists that control Blackwatch so that there was no risk of some officer just ordering the National Guard to waste the Blackwatch troops and scientists on the ground out of sheer disgust at their antics and the inevitable apocalyptic consequences they lead to.) leaving Blackwatch and the other villains to basically use New York City as it's own personal petri dish. Edit: Also, [Prototype] was a fun as gently caress game and it's a shame that the company that made them closed down after the second one. At least a bunch of indie devs are making great progress on Cepheus Protocol. Which is a fun as gently caress RTS/simulation game inspired by Prototype from the perspective of the conspiracy. Notably, it lets you choose your RoE. Meaning you can choose to go the Delta Green route or be the more lawful and positive route that never gets featured in games that are grimdark that focuses on protecting and providing medical treatment to civilians while dealing with the threat like how a government organization is supposed to do. Archonex fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 14:17
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The original Delta Green had a very different feel, I think, to the new one. The original was more of a personal horror, we're screwed, nothing we do matters, but we try anyway, because drat it, somebody has to, but holy poo poo, even the purely human oppo you run up against is sanity blasting. The new revision really feels like more of a 'the world is full of monsters; the monsters you happen to be working for are the US Government. But hey, better the devil you know. Also, we're going to use you up until you're useless, then we're going to throw you away.' Conspiracy X was another 90s secret agent vs the hidden world sort of game, and another where I preferred v1 to v2. Now, if you want to talk politics in 90s tabletop games, lets talk Ray Winnegar's Underground, aka 'what if Vietnam vets coming home, but they're genetically engineered supersoldiers conditioned to think they're comic book superheroes?' Chew me baby, I'm untouchable.
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Aug 4, 2021 14:44
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My regular group of players are almost all trans so our games rapidly turn into queer revolutionaries bringing about positive change in their community even though they are literal monsters. The best for this, was our Werewolf game. In Chronicles of Darkness, werewolves are basically a border patrol between the worlds of spirit and flesh, except that's not a great analogy because unlike nations, these two worlds exist on top of each other in a form of symbiosis. Human actions and emotions, or the lack of them, feed and create spirits while those spirits also influence those elements they are made of. The spirit world is a complex ecosystem of larger spirits feeding on smaller spirits that are either of the same type or that has natural or thematic links with them. For instance, cat spirits could eat other, smaller cat spirits, but they could also eat mouse or rat spirits, fish spirits, curiosity or stealth spirits. Now the werewolves have the responsibility to maintain balance. Each tribe has a different gribble that they "hunt". Blood Talons hunt werewolves gone bad. Bone Shadows hunt spirits and ghosts that cross over. The Hunters in Darkness hunt other half spirit/half flesh monsters called hosts that are basically swarms of rats or spiders or roaches inhabiting human skin suits. Iron Masters are the ones responsible for making sure human society and human monsters like vampires or wizards are under control. Finally Storm Lords are the ones who hunt down spirits who have merged with living things to create a monster called the Claimed. Anyways, my players were mostly Iron Masters and were based out of a homeless outreach center one of the players had helped to found before their first change and much of the game was spent securing funding and increasing the resources and allies available to keep The Squat functional and safe as was spent fighting monsters. They did everything they could to keep violence away from The Squat, including making sure cops stayed away. Because of their efforts, their neighborhood was actually stabilizing and even improving from the economic decline it started off in. When we resume that game at some point in the future, their efforts will have paid off, only now they need to stop the gentrification that will have started since their stabilization and crime prevention will have attracted vampire attention of both the dracula as well as the real estate speculator variety. Of course this is also the game where the players combined their powers to create a gatornado when attacking vampire/werewolf run genetic research facility that was committing crimes against nature in the swamps.
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Aug 4, 2021 16:04
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fr0id posted:Edit: no offense, but the most boring thing in the world to me are conversations about higher ups and the narratives of the game beyond the basic timeline. I could read a timeline of the CIA and have a completely bereft of context and emotion understanding. The actual play of the game of delta green, not the reading of it, but the PLAYING of it, produces far more interesting reads of ideology and the like. I could give a poo poo if colonel hardcastle is a byakhee or how the x-1 artifact has produced 37 lasers each held by one of the main protagonists or antagonists of the setting. A bunch of d&d players in heated argument over whether to torch an above ground cistern that may have a demon or a kidnapped woman in it is far more interesting to me. What the organization does in-setting is important in how it set boundaries for the players are willing to do, though. If they know the higher ups are willing to trust a ghoul, they might do the same. Kestral posted:Hite is part of a nearly extinct breed of non-conservative old-school pre-Tea Party Republicans, which makes his politics really interesting and sometimes difficult to parse out. He shares precisely zero of the GOP's flagstone modern cultural stances, spent the entirety of 2015-2020 mocking Trump and all his works, being horrified at the direction his own party was going, and co-hosting a podcast where he regularly makes it clear that he's mostly on the right side of history in terms of American social trends. "America hosed up every other country it got its hands on" is such a regular take for him that it's become almost a running joke. Maybe he was misquoted for the Cambodia thing, my bad if so. I'm certainly interested in looking up Qelong. There's always an interesting side to how authors' politics can affect a product, either inw ays they intended or not. Grabowski, for instance, is I think something of a libertarian, and wrote both Exalted 1E and Wraith: Dark Kingdom fo Jade as takedowns of the enlightened tyrants/hero-saviour stories. He especially hated Qin Shi Huang Di and made him into one of the vilest characters in the oWoD.
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Aug 4, 2021 16:08
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One of the most infamously gross supplements produced by White Wolf was Freak Legion: a Guide to the Fomori. This was published under their "mature" imprint, Black Dog Game Factory, which started as an inside joke and self-parody in the Werewolf games, and then became a thing in the real world that produced exactly the kind of edgelord stuff the parody was making fun of. From the first edition Book of the Wyrm A Fomori, for those not familiar, is a human who has been corrupted and transformed, through a combination of evil spirits, "Science", and magic, into a monster. They are often unwilling participants in an experiment, people trying to improve themselves, or just those unlucky enough to eat fast food. They are generally created by Pentex, a corporation that controls basically all industry, and is devoted to the Wyrm, the spirit of corruption and depravity that Werewolves spend their existence fighting. Basically, take any random Captain Planet episode, but filter it through White Wolf's gothic-punk sensibilities, and you'll get the idea.  This, but they're also all Werewolves Now, as with a lot of Werewolf products, this one rocks back and forth pretty severely between "Just describing the world as it is" (gas and petrochemical company with a reputation for irresponsibility "Endron", for example) and "Bizarre parody that reveals a lot about the author's insecurities". Freak Legion is steeped in a particularly 90s fear of anything "unnatural" or "chemical", and nowhere does this come out better than in the section "Recruitment." This chapter details the various organizations and groups that help turn normal people into Fomori. Unfortunately, because of the game's fetishization of "natural", the examples it chooses are... interesting. There are eight total example groups: Action Bill Tattoos! -- In a genuinely clever piece of writing, one of the ways that Pentex pursues its goals is by vilifying the Werewolves through a GI Joe style TV show. Action Bill and his friends Atom Sargent, Hero Worm, and their mascot Wolf Skynner battle against the evil werewolf forces of W.O.L.F. These temporary tattoos featuring the characters each contain a bane fragment and will corrupt the kid. Conceptual Services LTD -- a fertility clinic that will turn the mother into Mia Farrow from Rosemary's Baby, and she'll give birth to Macaulay Culkin from The Good Son Dr. Viridian's Workout Program -- a fitness organization selling supplements that will transform a 90 lbs weakling into a muscular, attractive rear end in a top hat with a magnetic personality. Eventually, they will end up in a "throwback" state of degeneration, but this hasn't happened much yet. Until then, Dr. Viridian "continues to rake in the bucks and crank out an army of muscle-bound fuckheads". Notably, his products don't work well on women. The Fellowship -- An evil orphanage that raises kids to obey authority without question, consider themselves stupid and worthless, and then places them in abusive households as they transform into monsters. Homogeneity Incorporated -- a genuinely terrifying gay conversion therapy group.  But, of course, because it's the 90s, they're led by Ed Buck  Registered Artists Worldwide -- a talent agency that produces cheap and disposable artists, who are generally discovered making fetish pornography, and then proceed to get addicted to fame, producing bad music and movies. The writer of this section apparently had a bone to pick with Quentin Tarantino:  Realm of Deceit -- an evil MUD. Corrupts it's users by getting them to play video games for too long, desensitizing them to violence (in a text based game?), and then persuades them to kill five other players in order to advance to the highest level. Smoker's Bane -- an anti-smoking organization, which delivers an evil spirit via the group's weekly grape juice toast to self-control, which proceeds to possess people's lungs and make them evil.   A common thread running through each of these is that the unnatural or artificial is bad. Artists should come up naturally through their own talents, not be chosen by corporations. Gay people should be allowed to be gay. TV and games shouldn't promote violence or hatred. Those are pretty tame examples that anyone could agree with. But the pernicious ones are things like vilifying a fertility clinic and an adoption agency. Is this an endorsement of "natural" birth and parenthood over the other forms that exist? Is it wrong to work out and improve one's body? Is it evil to seek help for quitting an addiction? Are those really on par with the others? I'd normally try to be charitable, and say that they're doing that thing where you take something special and good, and twist it to create a sense of horror, but the way the entries are written, be it the "jocks vs nerds" of Viridian, or the "jerks who want to feel good and have friends as they work on an addiction problem" of Smoker's Bane, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. The writers seem to understand this on some level, but the unexamined politics behind their choices, and their underlying belief that there's no hope for jocks except to be put down by werewolves, are pretty bad. In the real world, corruption is a choice. The horror, for me, comes from having the ability to do otherwise, but not doing so because of personal gain. Something like "evil orphanage that transforms little kids into demons" doesn't really work for me for the same reason that "Orcs are all born evil, and their evil society produces evil people who do evil things" doesn't really work. When something is predestined, it becomes as interesting as shooting Hitler Youth in a WWII game. The idea of a moral quandary is there, but the sort of game about teaching a racist kid not to be racist is very different from a game about shooting people and getting the (thing) to the (place). Notably, there's no mechanical aspect of the game about curing or de-possessing fomori. It is mentioned in passing towards the end as something hard to find and even more difficult to follow, but, as with Hunter, the game world sets up your hopeless death pretty much immediately -- it doesn't want you playing Battle Angel Alita, even though that would likely be a deeper game than "Gantz, but everyone is into it due to the evil spirits in their heads".     Here's some more Captain Planet: 
Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 16:25
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That is more knowledge then I would expect from some random person on the street in a hoodie and earphones.
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Aug 4, 2021 17:30
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fr0id posted:I want to throw out some other questions about games where you literally play as reactionaries who are also entirely correct like delta green. It's a bit extreme to read it as a Stanford Prison Experiment. No one generally takes it that seriously unless they already have other problems. The thing about any tabletop RPG game is that there are three games: 1) What the designers intended. Games say lots of things on the tin. 2) What they actually wrote. Games often have breakdowns between intentions and how they work mechanically, or have cargo cult design problems that have nothing to do with the other intentions. 3) How players actually play it. It's a game and people treat it like a game. In rare cases you get a game that is good enough to enforce its setting on players or that everyone agrees and is equipped to play along with, but players playing D&D and Vampire in the same way is not exactly unheard of. D&D is the dominant RPG, and resists coherent philosophical or political issues besides those that it accidentally corners itself into by doing so. It's a violent power fantasy about plundering tombs full of goblins. In games like Delta Green and Vampire, your character is generally doomed from the outset. Delta Green because Lovecraft, Vampire because the entire game is basically about organized crime with vampires, so from the outset there are always powerful groups trying to eliminate you. At that point, if your choices don't ultimately matter, the power fantasy is what remains. You make choices that you think will win a game, or you do what seems most amusing at the time over chips and beer (nothing wrong with that). In this sense, games where you can actually fight Cthulhu or pre-flood vampire antediluvians and expect to win are rather refreshing, especially when any complete library of RPGs would have an entire wing devoted to fatalistic Lovecraftian games.
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Aug 4, 2021 19:37
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To think of it in movie terms, a lot of GMs say they want their game to be Schindler's List, a ponderous examination of horror and the human condition and someone doing the right thing in the face of impossible odds and with a sense of futility that makes them wonder if they could have done more? What a lot players actually want to play, though, is Inglourious Basterds. Speaking personally, if I wanted to feel sad and powerless, I could just live my regular life. Counter-intuitively, it's pretty easy to come up with scenarios where sad things happen and nothing matters. It's fairly difficult to write a convincing story where the "horror" is defeated, often because that requires advocating for a particular solution or worldview, as opposed to simply bemoaning the current state of things.
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Aug 4, 2021 20:05
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MonsieurChoc posted:What the organization does in-setting is important in how it set boundaries for the players are willing to do, though. If they know the higher ups are willing to trust a ghoul, they might do the same. 1) Qelong is a book I would not recommend buying (buy it used or :files: it instead if you can). Not because of Hite or the content, but the publisher is James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Raggi/LotFP are full on turbo-chuds. (Hanging out with Jorp, standing up for the infamous Zak Sabbath, etc.) 2) The interesting thing about Delta Green is that several of the other main authors (Dennis Detwiler for sure, and I believe John Tynes) are radical leftists themselves, so it's that mythical balance of people with different viewpoints working together on an artistic political project. Arivia fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 21:02
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Toph Bei Fong posted:To think of it in movie terms, a lot of GMs say they want their game to be Schindler's List, a ponderous examination of horror and the human condition and someone doing the right thing in the face of impossible odds and with a sense of futility that makes them wonder if they could have done more? A lot of players will also tell you they want this when what they really want is for the atmosphere to start out that way before transitioning into, as you say, burning Hitler to the ground after shooting him eighty times. People love to feel like they beat the odds, like this was impossible but somehow their characters made it.
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Aug 4, 2021 21:10
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Night10194 posted:A lot of players will also tell you they want this when what they really want is for the atmosphere to start out that way before transitioning into, as you say, burning Hitler to the ground after shooting him eighty times. People love to feel like they beat the odds, like this was impossible but somehow their characters made it. One thing Exalted did on that front (at least in the first couple of editions, don't know about newer ones) was set up a world that was doomed by about a half dozen apocalypses at once so it was perfectly legitimate to play a game about tragic heroes acting out their personal dramas on a dying world, or even being monsters helping in its fall. But also being very explicit that you're playing divine fate-altering heroes and for all that you start off in a bad place, here's how you can do a campaign where even the darkest things are redeemed and the most crushing evils are overthrown.
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Aug 4, 2021 21:18
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fr0id posted:Edit: no offense, but the most boring thing in the world to me are conversations about higher ups and the narratives of the game beyond the basic timeline. I could read a timeline of the CIA and have a completely bereft of context and emotion understanding. The actual play of the game of delta green, not the reading of it, but the PLAYING of it, produces far more interesting reads of ideology and the like. I could give a poo poo if colonel hardcastle is a byakhee or how the x-1 artifact has produced 37 lasers each held by one of the main protagonists or antagonists of the setting. A bunch of d&d players in heated argument over whether to torch an above ground cistern that may have a demon or a kidnapped woman in it is far more interesting to me. I feel like this was one thing The Forge got right in its approach to talking about dicegames.
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Aug 4, 2021 22:24
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Let's talk about the Baali. They are vampires who have been almost hunted to extinction because "they worship Satan." Think the Satanic Panic, only in the WoD it also had fangs and scared vampires as well. They're Third Way Democrats turned into a bloodline (they're a clan, really, most of them are so busy doing vile things that they don't have time to travel and they can't interact with vampire society without everyone trying to murder them) that is written as the most evil in the setting, despite the fact that they're generally the only ones even trying to keep the demons asleep. The Baali are the only vampires in the setting who have a sensible goal. All they want to do at the end of the day is keep the demons, which they know are real, asleep so they don't destroy the planet. This involves vile things, because demons. I feel the political comparison is obvious.
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Aug 4, 2021 22:24
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Relevant Tangent posted:Let's talk about the Baali. They are vampires who have been almost hunted to extinction because "they worship Satan." Think the Satanic Panic, only in the WoD it also had fangs and scared vampires as well. They're Third Way Democrats turned into a bloodline (they're a clan, really, most of them are so busy doing vile things that they don't have time to travel and they can't interact with vampire society without everyone trying to murder them) that is written as the most evil in the setting, despite the fact that they're generally the only ones even trying to keep the demons asleep. The Baali are the only vampires in the setting who have a sensible goal. All they want to do at the end of the day is keep the demons, which they know are real, asleep so they don't destroy the planet. This involves vile things, because demons. I feel the political comparison is obvious. This seems like a bit of a stretch, barring me missing something. Unless that is Pelosi, Hillary, and other centrists secretly have a spawning pool they visit where they take their victims to be used as incubators for the insect and amphibian hordes to serve as an offering to an eldritch horror. But i've probably missed that memo if so. As of their latest writing I feel like it'd be fair to say that the Baali have a lot of really evil people in their ranks that wouldn't mind starting an apocalypse with the caveat of that one group you mentioned. The rest do want to wreck the world up and are proud of it or just want to usurp the demons of the setting to the point that they have a devil complex. It'd be more accurate to say that they're something way off the mark from a political ideology barring a few smaller groups. While there's implied to be at least three factions of Baali, the apocalyptic ones more resemble a straight up doomsday cult with satanic (and as they got more writing attention, pseudo-lovecraftian) leanings. And by doomsday cult I mean most of them are in later writing implied to want to cause a literal doomsday. To do a TL;DR it: The group you're talking about is only one faction out of like what's suggested to be three. In the case of the one you discussed, they want to stop the apocalypse (by doing horrific poo poo that would probably be pre-empted by just getting the nearest mage cabal, small army of werewolves, or just reawakening the loving Exalted or whatever to burn the eldritch horrors down). One other are card carrying villains that are outright proud of trying to murder the world in the most sadistic way possible, and the last have a major devil complex. And even that one antiheroic "good" guy faction may have a group inside of it that just spitefully said gently caress it and wants to burn the world down for being forced into becoming vampires of the literal worst type. And all this doesn't get into the really crazy poo poo that requires a deep lore dive and navigating numerous retcons. Like some of them worshipping/trying to stop the release of what may essentially be OWoD's version of the Neverborn (Which reading between the lines are more than likely just demons that got offed during the war instead of being imprisoned in mega-super-ultra torture land for millenia on end until they went nuts. Granted, they're still nuts and evil, but that's probably because they got dipped in the abyss just like the living ones.  ) while others rightfully want to keep what may just in fact be a bunch of undead insane fallen angels locked up. If anything they seem more like a group of religious cults with varied apocalyptic leanings. Only these cults have secret insights into the more hosed up parts of the OWoD, as opposed to your usual bog standard apocalypse cult. Which way they lean on those insights depends on the group. Also, they're unilaterally abusive as gently caress religious cults because there's some subtext there that's about as subtle as a hammer. To give an idea of it Saulot lost his poo poo so thoroughly upon seeing the "we want to stop the apocalypse by doing horrific poo poo" faction in their human form that he basically went on a murder spree (Which could definitely drop him out of Golconda, incidentally.). That last bit means that whatever they were doing to each other must have been really hosed up even by the standards of abusive cults. Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Aug 5, 2021 |
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Aug 5, 2021 03:05
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Arivia posted:2) The interesting thing about Delta Green is that several of the other main authors (Dennis Detwiler for sure, and I believe John Tynes) are radical leftists themselves, so it's that mythical balance of people with different viewpoints working together on an artistic political project. They're all left leaning or leftists except for Hite, which they made fun of him for at at the big Delta Green panel at Gencon in 2019. Adam Scott Glancy talked to my buddy and I about how much he hated the fascists in the PNW unprompted and we talked about the old Neo-Nazi booth that was at Gencon and how it was good it was gone. It was a booth that sold bootleg war movies, random military paraphernalia, and mixed in with that was Nazi paraphernalia and propaganda films. So in-between Russian war films and other bootlegs was the Eternal Jew and Kolberg. Tabletop games have some weird politics but wargaming was and still continues to be riddled with fascists in the US.
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Aug 5, 2021 20:09
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I just want to talk more about Puerto Rico. It's such a good game, mechanically. The brown tokens are clearly slaves, and once you figure it out you're just stuck going "ooooof"
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Aug 5, 2021 20:26
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I'm surprised that nobody has brought up Secret Hitler. I'll assume it's part of the fascist misdirection.
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Aug 5, 2021 21:37
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Mr. Wiggles posted:I'm surprised that nobody has brought up Secret Hitler. I'll assume it's part of the fascist misdirection. The less said about Max Temkin, credibly-accused rapist and maker of the game that says "it's ok to laugh at racist/homophobic/transphobic jokes since the cards said it, not you (the person who played the cards)," the better. Secret Hitler is actually a really fun and well-made deduction game, which they then decided to ruin with the absolute worst-thought-out theme ever.
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Aug 5, 2021 21:49
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Kavros posted:I just want to talk more about Puerto Rico. Just make them another color..not red. Not yellow. Green, maybe? Heck, I'll just raid my copy of Agricola and use sheep.
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Aug 5, 2021 22:14
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Shrecknet posted:The less said about Max Temkin, credibly-accused rapist and maker of the game that says "it's ok to laugh at racist/homophobic/transphobic jokes since the cards said it, not you (the person who played the cards)," the better. I loving hate milkshake duck.
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Aug 5, 2021 23:13
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TheCenturion posted:The new revision really feels like more of a 'the world is full of monsters; the monsters you happen to be working for are the US Government. But hey, better the devil you know. Also, we're going to use you up until you're useless, then we're going to throw you away.'  The Latin says, indeed, "better the devil you know".
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Aug 5, 2021 23:59
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Secret Hitler is, itself, a fascist game. It's about rooting out the lizardmen who hide among us and are the only reason our society's going bad.
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Aug 6, 2021 04:42
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Ferrinus posted:Secret Hitler is, itself, a fascist game. It's about rooting out the lizardmen who hide among us and are the only reason our society's going bad. Is this SuperMechagodzilla thing a new bit, or something you've been working on for a while?
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Aug 6, 2021 05:21
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Sinteres posted:Is this SuperMechagodzilla thing a new bit, or something you've been working on for a while? Dude you get dealt cards at the beginning of the game and they look like this:  Did the actual Hitler get into power through subterfuge such that no one realized they were electing a fascist? Am I taking crazy pills here??
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Aug 6, 2021 05:27
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Okay the cards are admittedly weird, but I still think it's a stretch to say the social deduction game that uses Hitler as the bad guy to be rooted out (and which then went on to make a version replacing him with Trump) is actually itself secretly Hitler. Besides, rooting out subversive elements is far from exclusively a right-wing activity. That isn't to say the game does a good job of representing actual Hitler, and it's not a game I've ever had any interest in playing, it just feels like a stretch to suggest he's a stand-in for the victims of fascist oppression.
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Aug 6, 2021 05:30
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I don't think that e.g. Mafia or Avalon are fascist games but if the thing you're protecting is liberalism, and the danger is that the government keeps passing bad policies, and the culprits are lizardmen who lurk secretly among you and can only take power through deceit, there's really no other way to go. It's not just about there being subversive elements that need to be rooted out; it's about taking an obvious problem staring you in the face and pretending that it is, instead, a subversive element corrupting society from within. Like, for god's sake, secret Trump. Secret Trump. Secret Trump. Yeah, that guy really snuck up on us! If only we'd been more vigilant against the seemingly-human fiends1 who lurk among us even now! 1. slavs
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Aug 6, 2021 05:49
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Sarcastr0 posted:Just make them another color..not red. Not yellow. Green, maybe? That’s not gonna work though, you still bring those brown discs in on ships, you still bid on the contents of those ships, and those discs are still sent to sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations. Puerto Rico is so good precisely because it’s mechanics and its setting are so closely linked- it’s a game about developing an island after all. But its… uncritical? bashful? it certainly whitewashes that history and the rulebook tries to swerve to say “oh no these aren’t slaves, you’re buying up citizens”
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Aug 6, 2021 13:56
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I think the traditional format for these sorts of games just frankly cannot give a critical picture of those systems. Maybe there's a genius way to do so, but at least in every one of these games I've seen, the goal is to win, and the way you win is by having the "best" colony/plantation/town/guild, and the fact is that things like slavery and colonialism happened because they were the "best" ways to extract maximum value from land and people, so players are going to engage in those systems. And the problem is that while colonialists may taken people and treated them as property, meeples and cubes really aren't real people, so no amount of trying to get players to consider the moral implications of their actions as colonisers is going to provoke actual deep reflection. To maybe put this more succinctly, I don't think you can make a game that adequately critiques colonialism while simultaneously having the player be the colonialist. What I think we need in that regard are games which more radically reimagine what a game about this period should be. A game which tries to make you think "what I'm doing here is really bad" isn't going to do the job. We need more games from the perspective of the oppressed, that aim to get the player to think "what's being done to me here is really bad", because its much more effective for a critique to get the player on side and emotionally invested in the plight of the victims and put them in the role of victimiser. It's easier to see a token representing an enslaved person as a person when that token represents the player themself, their friend or their family. I have no idea what form those games would take. It would be hard to do sensitively, since these are stories of loss, and you don't want to give some false impression that enslaved people or indigenous people could have "won" if they'd just tried hard enough. At the same time, while you could make a pretty depressing game that lays bare the evils of slavery and colonialism and have a great teaching tool on your hands, it's unlikely to be particularly fun to play, which is an objective we usually want in a conventional game. A game I'd really like to get a chance to play some time is Spirit Island, where the players are trying to expel a colonial power from their island. You draw an adversary Arkham Horror style that determines the monstrous entity you'll be battling against this game, with such foul names as "England" and "Spain". I'm not sure myself how well it handles the stuff I've mentioned, but heck, at least it's worth something to actually see a game where colonialism is the explicit enemy for a change. EDIT: I edited out an example of the game where you're a organising trains to death camps in the holocaust and said this was emblematic of a game that a player would dismiss as "not real", but I looked this up and it was more sophisticated than that. Train sounds like it might have actually been a rare exception by subverting traditional game design to make a more cogent point, though I do think it falls into the category of "worthy, educational, only play once" mentioned before. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 15:21
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Reveilled posted:A game I'd really like to get a chance to play some time is Spirit Island, where the players are trying to expel a colonial power from their island. You draw an adversary Arkham Horror style that determines the monstrous entity you'll be battling against this game, with such foul names as "England" and "Spain". I'm not sure myself how well it handles the stuff I've mentioned, but heck, at least it's worth something to actually see a video game where colonialism is the explicit enemy for a change. Spirit island focuses more on the environmental message than the anti-colonialist one. Invaders, who are various European colonial powers as you said, are on the Island to extract resources and build industry, which causes environmental damage and thus kill the nature spirits that the players control. They also do attack natives who share space with them, but don't otherwise deliberately hunt them down or exploit them. Similarly, the natives don't actively resist the Invaders unless attacked first or a spirit urges them to do so. There are some effects that convert natives to invaders and vice-versa, but the native-colonizer relationship isn't really deeply examined.
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Aug 6, 2021 15:51
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fool of sound posted:Spirit island focuses more on the environmental message than the anti-colonialist one. Invaders, who are various European colonial powers as you said, are on the Island to extract resources and build industry, which causes environmental damage and thus kill the nature spirits that the players control. They also do attack natives who share space with them, but don't otherwise deliberately hunt them down or exploit them. Similarly, the natives don't actively resist the Invaders unless attacked first or a spirit urges them to do so. There are some effects that convert natives to invaders and vice-versa, but the native-colonizer relationship isn't really deeply examined. Ah, that's a shame I guess, but still, the environmental message is a good one, and if nothing else the mere act of representing the colonial powers as the adversaries rather than the protagonists is refreshing all the same. Also no idea why I called it a video game in the bit you quoted, since it's a board game, haha.
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Aug 6, 2021 16:03
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