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Lord_Hambrose posted:
A bastard sword is a hand-and-a-half sword because it's the bastard offspring of two- and one-handed swords. It has nothing to do with calling anyone names. "Zweihander" means two-hander. You'd think he'd have looked into this.
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Oct 13, 2021 12:49
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This guy made his whole career in tg by ripping off Warhammer, and he feels the need to take jabs at both the game and its publishers. This is kinda of amazing mindset
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Oct 13, 2021 12:55
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I don't know if what Dan Fox is doing is "alternate history", it's more akin to "history as setting", where you sort of treat it as a series of elements you enjoy and detach it from 'the real world', like a show about women in the victorian era fighting vampires or some poo poo and they do wicked sick backflips and poo poo. I am not entirely sure what the problem is in ignoring stuff like that since there's no real attempt to marry it to history, dude just likes tricorner hats and shooting redcoats. another example of this is Call of Duty Vanguard, which is nominally set during WW2, and uses plausibly-accurate British and Soviet characters to represent POC and women, but also takes several liberties with gun classification and performance metrics in order to maintain a segregation of weapon types in keeping with established norms (which leads to things like an StG44 being used in a battle two years before it was introduced to front-line service, or dumpster diving into the Forgotten Weapons archives to come up with more than one "assault rifle"), as well as only ever having Allied troops fight other Allied troops in multi-player matches (presumably so that they don't have to create elaborate character bios for MP-enabled Germans), even if it leads to confusion on the battlefield there are diegetic issues, and practical knock-on effects, and it can feel a little hand-wavey, but I think there's also a middle-ground where it's passable as long as you don't get too deep into the weeds of how this is possible, because down that path lies having to create backstory that can stray into the "ah well slavery is over everything worked out" pastiche
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Oct 13, 2021 12:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:another example of this is Call of Duty Vanguard, which is nominally set during WW2, and uses plausibly-accurate British and Soviet characters to represent POC and women, but also takes several liberties with gun classification and performance metrics in order to maintain a segregation of weapon types in keeping with established norms (which leads to things like an StG44 being used in a battle two years before it was introduced to front-line service, or dumpster diving into the Forgotten Weapons archives to come up with more than one "assault rifle"), as well as only ever having Allied troops fight other Allied troops in multi-player matches (presumably so that they don't have to create elaborate character bios for MP-enabled Germans), even if it leads to confusion on the battlefield Thank you for respecting my nonbinary pronouns, Ronald Reagan.
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Oct 13, 2021 13:44
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thefakenews posted:Ok, but it does appear from news articles that the current Pope has been explicit that they have to contain at least some gluten to qualify as wheat. all Catholics are heretics by the standards of Catholicism, some of them just don't know it yet 
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Oct 13, 2021 14:20
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Hasbro's CEO just unexpectedly died.
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Oct 13, 2021 14:53
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potatocubed posted:I think they might be angling for "American gothic, horror"? It doesn't even work from that angle! Like I'm no Lit major but I understand that a central part of X Gothic as a genre is that characters are kind of hosed and distinctly not heroic and the happiest ending you get is "Wow, that sure was some poo poo, glad I got to escape it with my life intact. Too bad everything is hosed up and I'm traumatized now." Like don't get me wrong I am AOK with "Hey let's dress up as minutemen, throw out the explicit bigotry, and play fight cthulhu zombies!" but that is not gothic, it's just popcorn action. WORDS MEAN THINGS!
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Oct 13, 2021 14:53
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That's fair enough. I knew that 'American gothic' meant something, but I didn't know what.
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Oct 13, 2021 14:58
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Puppy Time posted:It doesn't even work from that angle! Like I'm no Lit major but I understand that a central part of X Gothic as a genre is that characters are kind of hosed and distinctly not heroic and the happiest ending you get is "Wow, that sure was some poo poo, glad I got to escape it with my life intact. Too bad everything is hosed up and I'm traumatized now." I don't think I've ever seen someone use "American Gothic" to refer to anything other than the painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic. Anything Gothic by americans authors have just been "Gothic".
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Oct 13, 2021 15:07
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I usually find that most altHistory people are always more interested in what if the shitheads won. What if Hitler won, what if the Roman Empire never fell, what if Japan nuked US, etc.  https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/baghead/diana-warrior-princess/
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Oct 13, 2021 15:09
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Hel posted:I don't think I've ever seen someone use "American Gothic" to refer to anything other than the painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic. Anything Gothic by americans authors have just been "Gothic". I watched at least one of these
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Oct 13, 2021 15:15
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I usually find that most altHistory people are always more interested in what if the shitheads won. What if Hitler won, what if the Roman Empire never fell, what if Japan nuked US, etc. The main issue in making your own fantasy setting is that it adds unwelcome complexity if you're just making a "shoot zombies but it's the WIld West/Colonial Times/World War II" work. The main point of the whole thing is to make it really quick and easy to plug action genre style into a preexisting set of loose setting assumptions, and extra worldbuilding on top of that is just adding more hurdles to get to the fun parts of doing sick kickflips in a corset and bustle while making zombie heads explode from how awesome you are. Making it its own fantasy setting means now everyone has to get on the same page about the world and who's who and what's what and there's all these words when all I wanted was to put on a tricorn hat and shoot cthulhus with a musket for freedom!!!  Like there's definitely conversations to be had around whitewashing history, wokewashing history, and all that, (and there's 100% a place for works that wrangle with the past realistically) but sometimes as a minority type person you just want to set aside the real life ugliness of history and be allowed to play brainless cowboys and zombies like straight cis white dudes without having to wrangle once again with how your identity would lock you out of being awesome in that setting. Adding homework via "here's the worldbuilding" to that misses the point. E: Hel posted:I don't think I've ever seen someone use "American Gothic" to refer to anything other than the painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gothic. Anything Gothic by americans authors have just been "Gothic". I think "X region Gothic" (Southern Gothic, New England Gothic, etc) is more common, but it exists, just in kind of an ivory tower way because most regular people don't care about the distinctions. (Or, really, Gothic literature as its own Thing.) Puppy Time fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Oct 13, 2021 |
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Oct 13, 2021 15:26
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https://kotaku.com/hey-magic-the-gathering-your-story-is-doing-great-wi-1846627064quote:Teferi is a Planeswalker, the “main characters” of Magic’s story who have the unique ability to travel between worlds. When we meet Teferi in Return to Dominaria, he’s lost the ability to Planeswalk, and he’s trying and failing to crack open a tomb filled with traps and puzzles with his grown daughter, Niambi. His story manages to weave in elements like the joys of fatherhood and the regrets of his past into this Indiana Jones-type action adventure filled with time spells instead of cultural graverobbing. There’s no racism or weird racism allegory, and these characters, through their names like Niambi that evoke African-ness and the clothes they wear in card art, are still culturally identifiable as Black. Reading Teferi’s story in Return To Dominaria gave me this feeling of “this is what I’ve always wanted” in stories that feature Black people, and it makes me wonder why storytellers in TV and video games seem to lack Magic’s imagination.
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Oct 13, 2021 15:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:another example of this is Call of Duty Vanguard, which is nominally set during WW2, and uses plausibly-accurate British and Soviet characters to represent POC and women, but also takes several liberties with gun classification and performance metrics in order to maintain a segregation of weapon types in keeping with established norms Don't remind me. It hurts. I just wanted to play a cool Soviet woman stabbing Nazis in the kidneys. It's too much. Please, make the game stop. Make it stop hurting my soul.
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Oct 13, 2021 15:43
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Puppy Time posted:It doesn't even work from that angle! Like I'm no Lit major but I understand that a central part of X Gothic as a genre is that characters are kind of hosed and distinctly not heroic and the happiest ending you get is "Wow, that sure was some poo poo, glad I got to escape it with my life intact. Too bad everything is hosed up and I'm traumatized now." My understanding of what defines 'gothic' horror has always been that instead of gore splattered everywhere, the horror is provided by ambience, disturbing sensory experience, and emotions, especially a building sense of dread. Which does not really sound much like 'Minutemen shooting possibly Hessian zombies', to me.
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Oct 13, 2021 15:49
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Maybe the protagonists are aware of the future and know that all their efforts are doomed to result in modern America, that's pretty depressing
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Oct 13, 2021 16:02
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When someone says "American Gothic Horror" I think of like, the headless horseman. Generally it feels pretty restricted to the Northeast, maybe the midwest. Possibly because that's only part of the US that lines up with the European aesthetics for gothic horror?
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Oct 13, 2021 16:10
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StG44s in Stalingrad are so loving awful. Also there was enough diversity in real WW2 that you shouldn't need to stretch anything for representation. It might be an embarrassing American perspective (the US military was segregated) that WW2 was about white people fighting, but I don't know if a more diverse group exists in history than the Allies. The impression that it was all white people probably comes from Hollywood, which was at peak racism when WW2 films were in vogue.
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Oct 13, 2021 16:14
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Thranguy posted:Pinkertons. I've used them as villains for a Western game. Worked out wonderfully. The players realized some very important facts early on. First the Pinkerton's are mercenary to the core. So you don't need to fight them. Just steal their pay chests. Also stealing the pay chests means a chance to rob a train. You can also use corrupt mining barons, corrupt cattle barons, corrupt land speculators, corrupt lawmen, corrupt railroad barons, Indian Agents (no non-corrupt ones), and a bunch more.
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Oct 13, 2021 16:18
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moths posted:StG44s in Stalingrad are so loving awful. yeah no don't get me wrong I did not at any point mean that it was "unrealistic" or "anachronistic" whatever for there to be black and women soldiers in the context that Vanguard pulls them from sorry if that got conflated with my remarks on the guns
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Oct 13, 2021 16:21
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Haystack posted:When someone says "American Gothic Horror" I think of like, the headless horseman. Generally it feels pretty restricted to the Northeast, maybe the midwest. Possibly because that's only part of the US that lines up with the European aesthetics for gothic horror?
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Oct 13, 2021 16:24
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Leperflesh posted:There is no non-problematic historical (or hell, modern) real-world setting, is there? That said, I think part of the issue is scope. For comparison, I never saw anyone criticize Godlike or Never Going Home for not doing more to address racism in American society during WWII or WWI. Or, like, The Mountain Witch for not addressing classism and sexism in Sengoku Japan. But these are also games where you're usually on a mission, far from home, not really partaking in ordinary society. If the game is even a little "sandboxy," for lack of a better word, having the PCs traipse around the contemporary US with social issues pushed to the margins becomes a pernicious fantasy. (For a contemporary example from other media, The Witch doesn't catch hell for not literally addressing the Pequot War, because it's about a family going crazy in isolation. That would be a fair criticism if the movie were set in Boston.) Having leafed through the free preview, I have to be fair to FoF on a couple points: first, I don't think it's going for Lovecraftian horror, even superficially. So it's not that sort of low-effort garbage. Second, they put significant effort into being inclusive and addressing class issues beyond "Cthulhu zombies attacked so no one cares about racism." There are sections on different minority perspectives, and inclusiveness in details like character illustrations. But this framing device, where the war against the occult pushes bigotry to the side, is really wrongheaded. Another comparison: Times That Fry Men's Souls is an OSR hexcrawl with a remarkably similar premise. But it doesn't explicitly use the rise of the supernatural as a framing device to try to make the setting less hierarchical. The sample characters include a woman, a Frenchman, a trans man, and an indigenous man--and it doesn't tell you how to embody those characters, it just gives you the sheets. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Oct 13, 2021 |
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Oct 13, 2021 16:38
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Thomamelas posted:I've used them as villains for a Western game. Worked out wonderfully. The players realized some very important facts early on. First the Pinkerton's are mercenary to the core. So you don't need to fight them. Just steal their pay chests. Also stealing the pay chests means a chance to rob a train. One of my favorite things about the Dracula’s America setting (which posits a weird western world where Dracula is now president for life, so historical accuracy is iffy) is that the two main antagonist organizations tie to the most unambiguously evil actual history of the 19th century. Railroad barons? Making deals with the literal devil. Ex-Confederate landowners? Stole the secrets of voodoo from their slaves and now use it to make zombies. Perfect bad guys that you don’t feel bad about killing.
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Oct 13, 2021 16:43
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Xiahou Dun posted:Whatever happened to Staircase : an L5R Spooky Time anyway? Covermeinsunshine posted:This guy made his whole career in tg by ripping off Warhammer, and he feels the need to take jabs at both the game and its publishers. This is kinda of amazing mindset KingKalamari posted:Along these lines: Why is "historical horror fantasy" a genre I've seen come up multiple times among retroclone peddlers? That was also the general pitch for LotFP if I remember right? I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this type of setting, it just strikes me as weird that multiple developers have gone for that setting despite there not being a lot in the way of popular media representation for it?
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Oct 13, 2021 17:10
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KingKalamari posted:Along these lines: Why is "historical horror fantasy" a genre I've seen come up multiple times among retroclone peddlers? That was also the general pitch for LotFP if I remember right? I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this type of setting, it just strikes me as weird that multiple developers have gone for that setting despite there not being a lot in the way of popular media representation for it? It seems like a counter-reaction to people questioning why most mainstream fantasy settings implicitly used medieval Europe as a default setting and asking for more variety in representation; by putting their foot down and saying "this is explicitly Crimea in 1375 but there are also witches and dwarves" or whatever, they can cut off that criticism at the pass
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Oct 13, 2021 17:14
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Lumbermouth posted:One of my favorite things about the Dracula’s America setting (which posits a weird western world where Dracula is now president for life, so historical accuracy is iffy) is that the two main antagonist organizations tie to the most unambiguously evil actual history of the 19th century. Railroad barons? Making deals with the literal devil. Ex-Confederate landowners? Stole the secrets of voodoo from their slaves and now use it to make zombies. Perfect bad guys that you don’t feel bad about killing. I was shaky on the whole Necromantic Confederacy thing in Dracula's America until I saw the artwork and models. I'd still hesitate if I met someone who assembled an army of Confederate revenants, but the imagery of the CSA colonel in pristine dress whites surrounded by the shambling corpses of his comrades was a striking one. It has the perfect tone of "yeeeeah, how's that whole Confederacy thing workin' out for ya?" Pleasingly, you could raise posses of Angel Gunslingers, Cowboy Templars, and armies of Freedmen who could become willing voodoo zombis on death to fight back. And the good guys' zombis retained their personality. The demonic railroad company was hilarious, too. Excellent use of the crossroads demon mythology and a solid use of American Gothic materials. I particularly liked the way their posses' leadership structure works - they have the guy who thinks he's the leader and the scheming wannabe who actually runs the coven.
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Oct 13, 2021 17:32
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I've toyed with the idea of writing an RPG where the players are members of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands during Reconstruction (or a Freedman's Bureau-inspired fantasy organization) but, well, it goes on the pile next to "Chronicles of Darkness mer-people fan splat" and "hack Demon: The Descent to run on Glitch's ruleset" in terms of stuff I've been putting off for years, with the added bonus of being a much heavier subject and needing an incredibly specific group to play it.
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Oct 13, 2021 17:35
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The Chairman posted:It seems like a counter-reaction to people questioning why most mainstream fantasy settings implicitly used medieval Europe as a default setting and asking for more variety in representation; by putting their foot down and saying "this is explicitly Crimea in 1375 but there are also witches and dwarves" or whatever, they can cut off that criticism at the pass
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Oct 13, 2021 18:08
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What is ‘wokewashing’ in this context?
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Oct 13, 2021 18:20
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The Chairman posted:It seems like a counter-reaction to people questioning why most mainstream fantasy settings implicitly used medieval Europe as a default setting and asking for more variety in representation; by putting their foot down and saying "this is explicitly Crimea in 1375 but there are also witches and dwarves" or whatever, they can cut off that criticism at the pass I obviously can’t speak for everyone but I run a lot of historical games, and at least for me it really is just taste (I happen to enjoy learning history) and the simple fact that there are more historical settings than modern ones. But I’m also using real historical things as a jumping off point to have something more meaty to jump off from than generic medieval firsoothmyliegeville ; sure I could make up my own thing for a setting about a fortified city under siege, or I can use the battle of Harfleur as a rough base and tweak poo poo until I’m happy with (kind of like rolling it randomly, but I didn’t). However there’s definitely a contingent of people who do it just so they can shoot down things that are “unrealistic” (note : “reality” is often a synonym for white cis dude’s impressions of things). And those folks suck.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:43
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moths posted:Also there was enough diversity in real WW2 that you shouldn't need to stretch anything for representation. Female Polish Home Army partisan, Nisei soldier, Brazilian rifleman, American proto-leather-gay motorcyclist, bisexual British fighter-pilot, escaped Buchenwald prisoner turned British commando, female SOE agent, female Congolese journalist-turned-French Resistance fighter, female Yugoslavian partisan, Gurkha chindit, female Russian-Buryat sniper, Finnish flak officer sneaking off to have sex with Wehrmacht officers and turning it into a career in erotic gay illustrations, Ethiopian soldier, Albanian communist partisan, Claude Cahun-but-with-a-gun, Tuskegee Airman, Moro insurgent, Măori battalion machine gunner, Malay resistance fighter, British drag performer and AA gunner, lesbian Night Witch, Cuban volunteer to the US Army... I think the only stretch here is Claude Cahun-with-a-gun, and I'm not 100% on whether any of the female Soviet snipers were specifically Russian-Buryat.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:50
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Halloween Jack posted:No, but the thing is, that's not a bad thing. We want to problematize settings so that we can deal with their issues. There are reasons we're looking askance at this game when we probably wouldn't if it was about, say, the War of the Third Coalition. There's a groundswell of interest in the history of the US as a white settler state, and a growing recognition that lionizing the Founding Fathers is not unlike lionizing the architects of South Africa and Rhodesia. I mean I don't disagree with this as one possible type of narrative in games but sometimes you just want to put on a historical costume and shoot the bad guys without having to make the whole thing a sociology class or an Exploration of Important Themes. Especially when you're already dealing with those issues in real life and you need some goddamn escapism before you scream. Which is not to say that FoF is doing it well. I just feel like there's room for both A Very Serious and Important Game About History and "We're just dressing up as cowboys to shoot zombies, and if your cowboy is actually a Black trans woman, nobody in setting cares because that would take away the fun of shooting the zombies. (Albeit, the latter should probably at least have a page saying, "Yeah that time was bigoted as gently caress but we're not bothering with that any more than we are the realism of action/adventure tropes, and if exploring themes of historical bigotry is what you want this is not the game for you.") GreenMetalSun posted:What is ‘wokewashing’ in this context? I've always understood it as just throwing in a bunch of "progressive" stuff without doing the work to make it actually progressive. Basically tokenization but over more than just characters. I understand there's a more broad definition by right wingers but whatever.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:51
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Halloween Jack posted:I've definitely seen more OSR stuff in the past decade that's, for lack of a better phrase, flintlock fantasy--using a more explicitly Early Modern Europe background, even if the setting isn't historical at all, rather than box-standard vaguely medieval Europe.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:01
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Xiahou Dun posted:I obviously can’t speak for everyone but I run a lot of historical games, and at least for me it really is just taste (I happen to enjoy learning history) and the simple fact that there are more historical settings than modern ones. I'm at the point in my life where I find 95% of fantasy worlds to be dreadfully boring and would rather learn about, say, the Italian Wars and figure out where I can put a haunted manor or a race of fish people.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:03
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LatwPIAT posted:Female Polish Home Army partisan, Nisei soldier, Brazilian rifleman, American proto-leather-gay motorcyclist, bisexual British fighter-pilot, escaped Buchenwald prisoner turned British commando, female SOE agent, female Congolese journalist-turned-French Resistance fighter, female Yugoslavian partisan, Gurkha chindit, female Russian-Buryat sniper, Finnish flak officer sneaking off to have sex with Wehrmacht officers and turning it into a career in erotic gay illustrations, Ethiopian soldier, Albanian communist partisan, Claude Cahun-but-with-a-gun, Tuskegee Airman, Moro insurgent, Măori battalion machine gunner, Malay resistance fighter, British drag performer and AA gunner, lesbian Night Witch, Cuban volunteer to the US Army... hell I'd settle for if they just gave us a Philippine Scout operator
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Oct 13, 2021 19:04
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Lumbermouth posted:I'm at the point in my life where I find 95% of fantasy worlds to be dreadfully boring and would rather learn about, say, the Italian Wars and figure out where I can put a haunted manor or a race of fish people. Same. I'll accept historical-ish so long as it's not just another Renfaire or Steampunk. Hell, I'll accept Steampunk if it's actually got a level of research. But man, there are so many really cool periods of history that just get no love in fantasy.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:08
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thefakenews posted:Ok, but it does appear from news articles that the current Pope has been explicit that they have to contain at least some gluten to qualify as wheat. Catholicism is both a church and a bigass bureaucracy, and frequently both Catholics and non-Catholics get confused about which requirements come from which standpoint. My understanding is that theologically Catholic teaching is that the form doesn't matter because transubstantiation takes place at the spiritual level and that's what matters, there's nothing magic about bread (and to some extent I think there's even an argument that to claim that there was something specific to the form of the Host would be idolatry because it's paying attention to the vehicle rather than the message). Separately, Canon law tells priests exactly what they're supposed to use because the church is Real Big on standardization. That's not a theological argument, it's the church trying to run a huge organization where history suggests that even stupid little differences can start big debates that can lead to schism (see: the current debate about whether Mass should be said in Latin or not).
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Oct 13, 2021 19:11
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Notahippie posted:Separately, Canon law tells priests exactly what they're supposed to use because the church is Real Big on standardization. That's not a theological argument, it's the church trying to run a huge organization where history suggests that even stupid little differences can start big debates that can lead to schism (see: the current debate about whether Mass should be said in Latin or not). So many people still megapissed at Vatican II
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Oct 13, 2021 19:18
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GreenMetalSun posted:What is ‘wokewashing’ in this context? Something like Hamilton where the horrors of slavery, racism, and other such nasty things are ignored in favor of just pretending that black people were there and it was great and no one had a problem with them. Which, honestly, is fine sometimes, because sometimes you just want to tell a romance story about the ton without someone doing heavy analysis on how Mr. Darcy was probably a slave plantation owner.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:20
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Yeah, There is like no time that I ever, ever want to like actually feel oppressed while playing a tabletop game, or video game for that matter. Like I couldn't stand parts of Mafia 3 for that specific reason, despite it being pretty good, I really really don't need my games, to simulate police sense, and oppression in white spaces. I think it's cool they did it, but man playing it just completely spiked my anxieties, in a very unfun way.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:30
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