Josef bugman posted:

I was going to say, from the description the only thing I can think about the Vagabond is "good". Like, I'm not going to lie here, every single one of the various animal empire seems like dicks, and kicking them in the face repeatedly seems like a great time.

It's not good game design, but it is good to see

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

That sounds like you'd say an ex-nazi legion mercenary living fat off murdering people in Africa is good to see, because the British Empire, Jim Crow USA, and Stalin's USSR all sucked.

Politically, Vagabond doesn't win by helping anyone, Vagabond wins by causing indiscriminate murder and chaos instead of having an ideology or being loyal to anyone. Vagabond is a libertarian. Vagabond wants you to know it's ephebophilia not pedophilia. Vagabond has a sixteen part youtube video about how Star Wars was cucked.

Josef bugman posted:

Pardon? "Wandering hero is able to cause problems on purpose for massive empires that are happy to trade lives for dominance" does not equate to Neo-Nazi death squads and I'm kind of a bit flummoxed as to how you'd draw that comparison.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Politically, Vagabond doesn't win by helping anyone, Vagabond wins by causing indiscriminate murder and chaos

Staltran posted:

note also he didn't say Neo-Nazi, just ex-nazi. The point (as far as I can tell) isn't that Vagabond is a nazi, just the indiscriminate slaughter in his wake.

e: also, I might be reading too much to what you said, but you seem to be reading anti-imperialist motives to the Vagabond's actions. But you don't just get points for burning down Eyries and the Marquis's industry, but anyone and anything.

Servetus posted:

But that doesn't really undermine the Vagabond as an anti-imperialist, it just shows that they don't consider any of the other factions to be 'good' empires.

I'm haven't picked up the game yet, so I'm only going off of what has been written here, but I got a strong sense of the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin off of the Vagabond, in particular the notion of "propaganda of the deed". By destroying the holdings of the various factions and killing their troops the Vagabond/Anarchist/Folk Hero creates the idea that the various proto-states are not omnipotent, and life is possible without their rule is possible.

Xander77 posted:

The Courier ending in F:NV is the first thing that springs to mind.

Josef bugman posted:

Yeah this is more how I saw the Vagabond. From reading this thread, which has been my only exposure to Root, they seem more to be "gently caress all of you"

Xander77 posted:

The Courier ending in F:NV is the first thing that springs to mind.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Arivia posted:

The courier ending? What one do you mean?

Josef bugman posted:

Essentially you choose to tell Mr House, the Legion and the NCR to gently caress themselves as you take over the entirety of Nevada as a separate beginning to a state. Much of it is predicated on you finding none of the other factions to be in line with what you believe.

Triskelli posted:

The craziest part is the designers didn’t discover these hyper-aggressive strategies before the public beta testing, and had to nerf how many points they got for fighting people multiple times. It was so bad initially that even fighting a roided out Vagabond scored them points outside the vagabonds’ turn.

Would have loved to see how the designers played the game in private playtesting, the other ways the Vagabond can score points such as completing quests or becoming allies with another faction are such uphill struggles in comparison.

CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:

So why haven't they fixed the Vagabond? What would make it fun for everyone?

Xiahou Dun posted:

Dawg do you mean “the Yojimbo route”?

Rashomon route sounds fascinating but impractical.

citybeatnik posted:

"What if superhero, but evil!" and "haha you fool, any being with that sort of power would be a terror in the real world!" stories/examples with regards to Superman as a monolith always lose the plot since it ignores a great deal many things. The most important one being that Clark's actions in the narrative metaverse actually led to the weakening of the KKK in the real world.

citybeatnik posted:

Do you *have* to have a player actually play the Vagabond in a game session?

Josef bugman posted:

It also makes the whole argument that "power corrupts" which is something I disagree with. Power doesn't corrupt it reveals, and the fact that people with power refuse to use it well reflects poorly on them. Not on wishing to have and use power. It provides a view of power that is only ever used by the various different levels of bastard who have power in our systems.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

I think the problem with a lot of the "superman turns BAD oh no" stories is just that the only real 'fix' undercuts the entire premise - you have the superhero lose to some other superhero or get talked down, which doesn't really address the fundamental problem, or you have them lose to mundane forces, in which case they weren't really 'super' in the sense of being able to essentially veto the entire political apparatus at any time with their sheer power. Plus the problem isnt the superhero going 'evil' at all, rather just the problem being the unaddressed question of 'what if the political dimension was entirely replaced by superhero fiat'. The one comic series that I know of that sort of went into it was Fist of the North Star, where the states of post-apocalyptic world are basically just cults organized around people who can explode people with their fists. Its not a great world to live in if you can't do that.

The real life analog for this really would be the how gods were treated in antiquity - just ultra powerful entities that you sort of had to work around with ritual and contracts in order to survive in their world.

Harold Fjord posted:

Superman has to be born that way because no one is trying to turn themselves into a supergod who isn't already an rear end in a top hat.

Schwarzwald posted:

It's not that the political dimension is replaced by superhero fiat, but rather that superhero fiat is an analogy for the political dimension.

Like, ultra powerful entities that we sort of have to work around with ritual and contracts in order to survive in this world already exist. That's any given bureaucracy.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

Fortunately for you, you start every game of Root with a weak vagabond - you get to know the home address of the Kent family and you know they got a little baby that will grow up with the power to fart your entire world into a sun the second he thinks you're being too unfair or some poo poo about how you run things. And to win Root, you must go gather your forces, go forth, and kick that baby's rear end. Really, kick his rear end. Like, six times, hopefully. I'm talking like, Yakuza beatdown mode here, you're using every part of the room to destroy infant Clark and then when he crawls off into a forest you sit tight right outside those woods with your clubs and torches and chase down that little poo poo when he emerges to try to get a little extra hammer from his playpen.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

I will say the different there, as minute as it can be when you're dealing with such entities, is that governments and states are bound and chained by the very things they have to implement to sustain their own power. Genghis Khan famously decided to not murder every peasant since, if he was going to sustain his new empire long term, he'd need a tax base. You can fight and eek out real victories even against a plutocratic state since, as it is far cheaper and efficient to rule by law than by force alone, you can take those very laws and use them against them. This sort of relationship and ongoing series of developments was what gave Marx confidence that the capitalist state would destroy itself in the end. You can espouse a lot on why bureaucracies fundamentally fail to address your needs,, but the entire political theory of why the superhero decided to give you your stolen purse back as opposed to creating new subatomic particles by hitting you in the face really hard just amounts to "well I guess they felt like it".

Servetus posted:

So the solution to having Superman to deal with is to guarantee you have Batman/Inigo Montoya/The Punisher/Conan/John Wick/some versions of Robin Hood to deal with by going after Wayne Manor, Locksley village or Frank Castle's house? This is the origin story of the classic vigilante super hero you know.

"We went after this simple farming family and slaughtered the village because a prophecy said this kid would grow up to be a living nightmare. Problem is the kid escaped somehow, then got trained as a warrior to a level few can match, and is now wandering the countryside slaughtering our soldiers in his quest for vengeance."

Schwarzwald posted:

This seems too fine a distinction to make if you also want to argue that the Otters in Root are capitalists or whatever. If I were to posit that real world ideologies are based on material circumstances while the entire political theory of cute board game animals was "well I guess they chose to play by the rules of the game" you wouldn't find that very convincing.

Stories about superheroes are as much defined by their narrative as games are defined by their rules. I think the largest distinctions between the two are largely downstream of the fact that valuable superheroes IPs are more constrained by market forces than indie table top games.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

I think the problem with a lot of the "superman turns BAD oh no" stories is just that the only real 'fix' undercuts the entire premise - you have the superhero lose to some other superhero or get talked down, which doesn't really address the fundamental problem, or you have them lose to mundane forces, in which case they weren't really 'super' in the sense of being able to essentially veto the entire political apparatus at any time with their sheer power. Plus the problem isnt the superhero going 'evil' at all, rather just the problem being the unaddressed question of 'what if the political dimension was entirely replaced by superhero fiat'. The one comic series that I know of that sort of went into it was Fist of the North Star, where the states of post-apocalyptic world are basically just cults organized around people who can explode people with their fists. Its not a great world to live in if you can't do that.

Arivia posted:

Oh, you mean Yes Man. Gotcha. I've never heard anyone call it the "Courier ending" before, I was wondering if you meant the ending of Lonesome Road or something.

Xander77 posted:

Is it the ending where Yes Man ends up ruling NV? Like the Legion ending or House's ending?

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The Courier ends up ruling New Vegas via knocking off House and taking over his resources, with Yes Man taking his place in the whole network. (and apparently getting an 'assertiveness upgrade', which I think is meant to more imply he's no longer going to obey literally anyone who talks to him, just the Courier)

It's kinda the most vague of the endings in a lot of ways, since it's explicitly open-ended with how you deal with each minor faction, whether they potentially become an ally or are left to their own devices, and the Courier does explicitly not have the same degree of control and precision over the Securitrons and House's infrastructure in general. (especially if for some reason you choose to destroy the Securitron army bunker)Which I'm pretty sure is on purpose, to leave room for the Mojave to develop in whatever way the Courier has influenced it to.

NikkolasKing posted:

Because when you have sole control over an unstoppable robot army, that rather undermines "No Gods, No Masters."

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The Courier ends up ruling New Vegas via knocking off House and taking over his resources, with Yes Man taking his place in the whole network. (and apparently getting an 'assertiveness upgrade', which I think is meant to more imply he's no longer going to obey literally anyone who talks to him, just the Courier)

It's kinda the most vague of the endings in a lot of ways, since it's explicitly open-ended with how you deal with each minor faction, whether they potentially become an ally or are left to their own devices, and the Courier does explicitly not have the same degree of control and precision over the Securitrons and House's infrastructure in general. (especially if for some reason you choose to destroy the Securitron army bunker) Which I'm pretty sure is on purpose, to leave room for the Mojave to develop in whatever way the Courier has influenced it to.

Tiler Kiwi posted:

The New Vegas Courier is a great example of what kind of political figure an 'apolitical lone hero' figure like the Vagabond is - you have a setting with a complex political situation, with sides having to make concessions and maintain expensive, cumbersome infrastructure to be about to out compete each other politically. And then you have just this one dorkwad who grinded enough to be able to just topple everyone with just brute force alone. New Vegas stands out a bit from other video game RPGs to actually let you stake out your own rule instead of having to pick a side (if given a choice at all), but it also makes one sort of narrative convention stand out a bit more - nobody really acknowledges how completely bullshit it is. Most of your enemies meet their end after sneering at you and declaring they'll kill you, they rarely even react with shock at the fact that one guy just slaughtered an entire building full of armed mooks. The courier is always underestimated - nobody really seems to grasp the absolute terror that they represent.

Reveilled posted:

As I recall, it's never actually implied in the ending of the game that you actually assume rulership over the independent Mojave. Getting the ending does involve you carrying out Benny's plan to topple House and take over, but I'm not sure you ever actually get the opportunity to affirm at any point that taking over is what you are intending to do. You can certainly infer that, since you probably have command over a vast securitron army, that your character does take over, but the game is strangely uninterested in having the player character articulate what "an independent Mojave" actually means to them.

So you get this weird thing where the ending recognises you as "responsible for independence" but that's it.

Magnetic North posted:

I think about this sometimes. This kind of question is inherent in certain politically theme board games. For instance:

• In Fire in the Lake my understanding is that it contains the USA as one of the forces that could possibly win. Obviously if that person is a player, that player needs to be able to win, just due to the way board games generally work. Does having it as a possibility count as historical revisionism and playing into completely impossible ideas peddled by warmongers?
  
• In 1960, one player plays as Nixon, a huge racist and bastard. Is it right to have a game where he could become president and, I dunno, the Civil Rights act never happens?
  
• In Tomorrow the game is about reducing human population in a Malthusian misunderstanding of overpopulation. Check out this goon and game designer's talk on this. Fun fact: I had somehow never heard of Thomas Malthus before that post, or if I had, I had forgotten. If you want more, this is an exceptionally excellent video about that time in the scientific world.
  

(I have not personally played any of these games. 1960 is the the type of game that really, really sounds appealing to me but I don't know who I'd play it against, especially now.)

Are any of these topics, ideas, or structures morally grey to include in board games? I don't know, and as a person who has discussed ethics a shitload in his day, I don't really imagine we'll get far talking about it in this thread. But it is something I think about a lot. Is it simply attempting to engage in a topic with intellectual honesty, or is it harmful, potentially a symptom of some deep poor beliefs or even active misinformation?

This is why I imagine that Root is the most famous and popular 'COIN' game ever: the complete fiction of it and the animals divorce it from us and make it appealing to normal folk.