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Xiahou Dun posted:They couldn’t even predict reunification? I think it was consensus belief that the Eastern Bloc will keep on trucking pretty much until the Berlin Wall fell. Although it seems that there was always a countervailing strand of collapse is coming Real Soon Now.
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Dec 5, 2022 02:34
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At least it's better than Palladium RPGs, which was still publishing 'modern setting' RPGs in the year 2000 that referred to the Soviet Union as a going concern.
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Dec 6, 2022 14:12
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Maybe those writers went to my high-school, where our "current events" history class (don't remember what it was actually called, but it covered modern day events and counted as a history credit) that used textbooks that referred to The USSR as a growing threat. In the 2000's.
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Dec 6, 2022 14:33
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SirPhoebos posted:At least it's better than Palladium RPGs, which was still publishing 'modern setting' RPGs in the year 2000 that referred to the Soviet Union as a going concern. quote:The psychic stared out the window for a minute, turned, and without looking directly at the reporter said, "I nuh . . . know people think I 'm a retard, Muh, Mister Sheridan. Buh but, um, that's where they 're wrong. Yep, wrong. I 'm not stu . . . stupid. Buh but I 'm difefrent. I 'm difefrent. I know . . . difefrent. It 's okay. I am what I am . . . um . . . like Popeye. " he added with a childish giggle. The flavor text of the Autistic Psychic Savant character class in Palladium Games' Beyond the Supernatural 2e.
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Dec 6, 2022 14:43
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Xiahou Dun posted:They couldn’t even predict reunification? To be honest I don't think the Lyran Commonwealth has any characteristics that makes it specifically West German over just "German", other than maybe it entering a union with another state (briefly). It's also worth mentioning that a lot of games made before the end of the Soviet Union just tended to roll with it and become more alt-history rather than make sweeping changes to account for real events (So for some examples the USSR collapses later in Battletech's timeline, and still exists in some near future settings like Cyberpunk, etc). I think that's honestly the best way of handling these things with game settings - having to constantly rewrite a setting to conform with current events would be a chore.
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Dec 6, 2022 17:46
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Disproportionation posted:To be honest I don't think the Lyran Commonwealth has any characteristics that makes it specifically West German over just "German", other than maybe it entering a union with another state (briefly). I was going off what that poster said. My personal knowledge of Battletech is sketchy because the fluff slides off my brain. I tried to 4 times to read that big info-post up there because by the time I'd be done reading a sentence I'd already subconsciously evicted the beginning from my memory.
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Dec 6, 2022 18:28
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TheCenturion posted:The flavor text of the Autistic Psychic Savant character class in Palladium Games' Beyond the Supernatural 2e. Also see: anything written about the Coalition States from RIFTS. One comment that stuck with me from the FATAL & Friends thread regarding Kevin Simbieda: "At a certain point, it no longer matters whether this is deliberate or you are just that stupid."
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Dec 6, 2022 19:52
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Xiahou Dun posted:I tried to 4 times to read that big info-post up there because by the time I'd be done reading a sentence I'd already subconsciously evicted the beginning from my memory. Shortly after 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim prejudice in the Western world, Battletech developers decided to name their big world-shattering pseudo-holy war event the "Jihad". The early 2000s BattleTech developers were shithead right-wingers (and one of them, who had an in-game character named after him, was a child molester).
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Dec 6, 2022 20:26
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Carbolic posted:Shortly after 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim prejudice in the Western world, Battletech developers decided to name their big world-shattering pseudo-holy war event the "Jihad". Yeah, my brain has that eviction notice for a list of reasons. I've been near Battletech spaces enough to know the reputations.
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Dec 6, 2022 20:33
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Carbolic posted:Shortly after 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim prejudice in the Western world, Battletech developers decided to name their big world-shattering pseudo-holy war event the "Jihad". A ‘fun’ way this manifests is that in the 3rd millennium, when the “United States” as a concept stopped being a going concern almost a thousand years ago, a good percentage of characters seem very fixated on the US civil war. It seems to be a bigger part of military history to them than napoleon, either world war, or the past 1000 years of history. And you’ll never guess which side of the ancient US civil war all these military figures in the 31st century have the higher regard for.
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Dec 6, 2022 20:58
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Carbolic posted:Shortly after 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim prejudice in the Western world, Battletech developers decided to name their big world-shattering pseudo-holy war event the "Jihad".
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Dec 6, 2022 21:03
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Best Friends posted:A ‘fun’ way this manifests is that in the 3rd millennium, when the “United States” as a concept stopped being a going concern almost a thousand years ago, a good percentage of characters seem very fixated on the US civil war. It seems to be a bigger part of military history to them than napoleon, either world war, or the past 1000 years of history. You would think that, say, the big interstellar civil war that heavily defines the setting would be the go-to reference for people in that setting (even for the shitheads), but 
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Dec 6, 2022 21:10
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Doublepost, but to give one sliver of credit to Kevin Simbieda, he did not go loving rabid over 9/11. Part of it is to do with him still being scared the Satanic Panic is going to get him, but from what I heard he lives in a predominantly Muslim part of Detroit. He's had enough sense to not go anywhere near the Middle East or Abrahamic religions beyond the most bland cultural presentations. Of course, Kevin's style is so predictable that one of the FATAL & Friends goons like Alien Rope Burn could write RIFTS: Middle East in a way that would seem 100% authentic. But that's another story.
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Dec 7, 2022 01:41
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Best Friends posted:A ‘fun’ way this manifests is that in the 3rd millennium, when the “United States” as a concept stopped being a going concern almost a thousand years ago, a good percentage of characters seem very fixated on the US civil war. It seems to be a bigger part of military history to them than napoleon, either world war, or the past 1000 years of history. Something I saw pointed out recently is that until recently there weren't really wasn't very much enthusiastic pro-union sentiment to balance out all the lovely romantization of the confederates. So among the sorts of enthusiasts who write Battletech you got a disproportionate number of confederate fanboys just by lack of anyone to push back against their bullshit.
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Dec 7, 2022 04:28
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Haystack posted:Something I saw pointed out recently is that until recently there weren't really wasn't very much enthusiastic pro-union sentiment to balance out all the lovely romantization of the confederates. So among the sorts of enthusiasts who write Battletech you got a disproportionate number of confederate fanboys just by lack of anyone to push back against their bullshit. Which is an interesting case study in how effective the Lost Cause was in catching on. I barely knew who Grant was besides "a Union general in the American Civil War" before I actually got into history and it's been slow learning because I don't specifically like that period. Basically, only nerds knew much about him until relatively recently. (Cool nerds, no shade.) But in his actual time period dude was loving President. Twice. Who stole Lee's land and made it into a cemetery for war dead. You know, after he fuckin' won. The Lee worship had to get through that.
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Dec 7, 2022 05:32
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You should look into Grant. Dude came out of nowhere and ran three highly successful campaigns culminating in Vicksburg. Then he went east and got in Lee's face and stayed there until Lee gave up. Abandoning his supply lines to get at Vicksburg was genius, and he followed that up by simply staying in contact after The Wilderness. Tenacity and brains is an amazingly potent combination in a general.
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Dec 7, 2022 07:01
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mllaneza posted:You should look into Grant. Dude came out of nowhere and ran three highly successful campaigns culminating in Vicksburg. Then he went east and got in Lee's face and stayed there until Lee gave up. Abandoning his supply lines to get at Vicksburg was genius, and he followed that up by simply staying in contact after The Wilderness. Tenacity and brains is an amazingly potent combination in a general. You'll note the careful use of past tense in that post.
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Dec 7, 2022 07:04
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mllaneza posted:You should look into Grant. Dude came out of nowhere and ran three highly successful campaigns culminating in Vicksburg. Then he went east and got in Lee's face and stayed there until Lee gave up. Abandoning his supply lines to get at Vicksburg was genius, and he followed that up by simply staying in contact after The Wilderness. Tenacity and brains is an amazingly potent combination in a general. Also, he was a significantly better president than given credit for.
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Dec 7, 2022 09:25
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Xiahou Dun posted:Which is an interesting case study in how effective the Lost Cause was in catching on. I barely knew who Grant was besides "a Union general in the American Civil War" before I actually got into history and it's been slow learning because I don't specifically like that period. Basically, only nerds knew much about him until relatively recently. (Cool nerds, no shade.) The concerted effort to rewrite the Civil War history was talked about in the most recent "Checkmate Lincolnites" which is a series of ACW historical video essays in a debate style. As a series, it takes a few episodes to find its groove, but one conceit is that the primary southern defender's comments are often taken directly from his YouTube comments, which is both funny and demonstrates that it's probably not a strawman. Previously, I had (wrongly) always imagined it was more organic and (wrongly) figured it was too late for a central authority like a king to control it but too early for modern media to sculpt the narrative.
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Dec 7, 2022 10:39
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Xiahou Dun posted:Which is an interesting case study in how effective the Lost Cause was in catching on. I barely knew who Grant was besides "a Union general in the American Civil War" before I actually got into history and it's been slow learning because I don't specifically like that period. Basically, only nerds knew much about him until relatively recently. (Cool nerds, no shade.) The southern planter class was always incredibly good at propaganda. Even before the lost cause, they had the entire south and half the north eating up their fake gentry act.
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Dec 7, 2022 12:31
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Disproportionation posted:To be honest I don't think the Lyran Commonwealth has any characteristics that makes it specifically West German over just "German", other than maybe it entering a union with another state (briefly). I'll give credit to the RPG Twilight 2000 - originally a post Cold War Goes Hot setting - that they rolled with the fall of the Soviet Union and "okay, how can we make this game work now?" They were actually sensible about lots of things: at one point there was some criticism about the background detail of a tactical low-level nuclear war. The chief designer came out and said that while he didn't believe in it as a likely outcome, it was necessary to get the game world setup. Criticising would be like criticising D&D for having magic because "magic doesn't exist".
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Dec 7, 2022 13:06
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Haystack posted:The southern planter class was always incredibly good at propaganda. Even before the lost cause, they had the entire south and half the north eating up their fake gentry act. Eh, given how real gentry acted, I don't know that the southern planters were that "fake". Both sure believed in their souls that everybody who wasn't them didn't count as "real people", and earning a living was for those sorts.
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Dec 7, 2022 21:49
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I hate military history nerdology, but I do like knowing enough so I can dunk on loser Lost Cause dweebs.
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Dec 8, 2022 01:28
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Disproportionation posted:To be honest I don't think the Lyran Commonwealth has any characteristics that makes it specifically West German over just "German", other than maybe it entering a union with another state (briefly). House Steiner is Napoleonic era Prussia right down to the proud professional soldiers being led by social climbers beholden to outdated doctrine.
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Dec 8, 2022 01:39
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MadDogMike posted:Eh, given how real gentry acted, I don't know that the southern planters were that "fake". Both sure believed in their souls that everybody who wasn't them didn't count as "real people", and earning a living was for those sorts. A lot of them actually did have noble titles before 1783, they intermarried, they held all the wealth, land, and political power. They all knew each other. They meticulously tracked their ancestry. They owned estates. They trafficked human beings. Hell let's see what wiki has to say about Robert E Lee's wife: quote:Mary Anna Randolph Lee was descended from southern colonial families, including those of Parke Custis, Fitzhugh, Dandrige, Randolph, Rolfe, and Gerard. Through her paternal grandmother, Eleanor Calvert, she descended from Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore, making her a descendant of Charles II of England and Scotland. Through her mother, Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis, she was a descendant of William Fitzhugh. This is actual nobility. My takeaway is less that they were fake and more that aristocracy sucks rear end regardless of whether they get to keep their fancy hat and list of titles. Stop having slaves and we can talk, Mary.
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Dec 8, 2022 12:05
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Charles II had dozens and dozens of bastards, famously. He acknowledged at least 13.
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Dec 8, 2022 12:27
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The only difference between pretending your family’s nobility and your family actually being nobility is how long you’ve been able to keep up the shtick.
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Dec 8, 2022 13:17
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traditionally nobility implied an inalienable attachment to a particular piece of land, and american lawmakers were absolutely loving terrified of such a thing emerging organically and took incredible steps to make sure parents couldn't stop their failsons from selling the estate (you wanna make a law student cringe, ask them about the rule against perpetuities) whether this very specific characteristic is what matters for anyone else's analysis isn't for me to say, of course, i just think it's funny that a lot of 19th century assholes would've been both very snippy and very paranoid about the subject
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Dec 8, 2022 15:36
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Carbolic posted:Shortly after 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim prejudice in the Western world, Battletech developers decided to name their big world-shattering pseudo-holy war event the "Jihad". The version I remember is that the jihad, or at least an in universe event referred to as such was planned since like 1998, because there's a big lead time when you're dealing with what was at the time a fairly big multi-author novel franchise. The nature of the Jihad changed between when FASA went tits up and MWDA was released where it supposedly went from what was going to be a focused conflict between the two halves of Comstar to "Literally The Reason There's A Timeskip" but for reasons they kept the name in the face of it suddenly becoming a real fuckin loaded term. Things look especially hosed when back to the 90s stackpole novels the blakists were vaguely arab-coded before someone had the good sense to replace those characters with space Catholics and Cyborg doomsday cultists. That said any actual writing on the jihad beyond it being a vague background event didn't come out until like 2005 and that version of events could've been named literally anything else and nothing would've changed.
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Dec 10, 2022 23:24
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Der Waffle Mous posted:The version I remember is that the jihad, or at least an in universe event referred to as such was planned since like 1998, because there's a big lead time when you're dealing with what was at the time a fairly big multi-author novel franchise. You may be missing my point. I'm not disputing that something big was afoot with the Word of Blake ever since they were created, nor complaining (in this thread, anyway) that they changed it to a pseudo-holy war after FASA folded. I'm saying it was incredibly gross to choose the term "Jihad" for the in-game holy war shortly after real life's 9/11. The point of my effortpost earlier in the thread was to provide the receipts to show that they picked the term "Jihad" after, not before, 9/11. Der Waffle Mous posted:that version of events could've been named literally anything else and nothing would've changed. Exactly, but they chose to call it the Jihad because, y'know, Muslims and holy war were topical.
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Dec 11, 2022 01:10
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And they don't have the excuse of say, the Butlerian Jihad. Almost surprising given how much Battletech derives a bit from Dune, with ComStar basically taking the place of the Guild.
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Dec 11, 2022 09:42
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And they don't have the excuse of say, the Butlerian Jihad. Almost surprising given how much Battletech derives a bit from Dune, with ComStar basically taking the place of the Guild. While Battletech derives from a bunch of sources, like any fictional universe, it's sometimes useful to remember that in many ways it's not a game patterned on the future but the past - the Lyrans are Napoleonic Prussia, the FedSuns are basically medieval England and France mashed together complete with hordes of illiterate peasants, the Clan Invasion is the Mongol Invasion, ComStar is the Catholic Church, the Taurian Concordat is Space Texas, et cetera. The universe is bent into its particular shape for one very good reason - namely, so that you can have your cool "knights engaged in battle to decide the fate of whole nations" game except instead of dudes on horseback with lances it's dudes in giant stompy robots with PPCs. The setting exists to support the gameplay, and I do think it matters, because judging the setting on the basis of "do I want to live there" would earn it a hard no - but it's still among my favorite settings because it's a great place to put games about stompy robots.
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Dec 11, 2022 19:24
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:
Honestly, in the context of pop culture sci fi universes, it’s not so bad. There’s constant war but unless that war is happening literally outside your window (or, it’s one of the three times in the thousand year future history when nukes are flying), it doesn’t affect you much. Much like now in reality, your quality of life might range from poverty to wealth, but the median there is basically better than the median now. There’s very few “medium” sci fi settings. In Star Wars it seems everyone’s a slave or scavenger on the hell planet of fuckoff 7, in Star Trek everything is perfect in the imperial core. Being setting driven as you note, battletech needs to be a place where mass politics don’t exist, and planets change hands with a couple dozen big robots. That means everyone is checked out and by necessity, the wars just aren’t that impactful.* *there are in canon tho a number of times the wars are very impactful to regular people. In my opinion, those times break the setting in two, so are best ignored. If two dozen robots and a thousand infantrymen are persecuting your planet of a hundred million people, those hundred million people could absolutely end the occupier. Batrlemechs in-setting are anything but invincible. For context, 300k Americans in tanks and armored vehicles were unable to fully subjugate the small poor countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. Which to me means popular politics and popular insurgency just aren’t things in setting.
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Dec 11, 2022 20:25
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That seems like a common side effect of settings where wargames are set. You need lots and lots of conflict (because the entire raison d'etre of the setting is as a place where there are lots of possible battles) and you need reasons for every faction to fight with every other faction (or even itself), so these sort of settings always tend to be hellworld dystopias of never-ending conflict. My favorite example of the former is the Star Fleet Battles universe, a licensed offshoot of Star Trek where the galaxy is involved in an 18-year long General War of all-against-all. The writers freely acknowledge that this isn't particularly in the spirit of Star Trek, but a wargame setting by definition needs a bunch of wars. My favorite example of the latter is the Warmachine setting, where there are four main factions (Fantasy Russia, Fantasy Britain, Fantasy Islam, Evil Undeads) who all have reason to fight each other and reasons to fight within themselves (civil wars, power plays, etc.). Because it's a miniatures game and you need to have an in-setting reason for any two armies that people bring to the table to fight. The reason Warmachine stuck out in my mind was because they really bent over backwards to try and come up with a reason why the Fantasy Russians in far frozen north would get into large scale fights with the Fantasy Jihadists in far southern desert, despite being separated by thousands of miles (and several other kingdoms).
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Dec 11, 2022 20:41
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Mind, everything to do with its politics is kinda meant to be a disaster This is true but much like WH40k, 'everyone sucks' does not change the fact that people are inevitably going to root for someone based on who you put them up against being even worse and the writers are going to select match ups favoring someone whether they know it or not. And in Battletech that means House Davion usually and hoo loving boy. Or worse, the Clans, which are the most fetishized HARD LANDS MAKE HARD MEN warrior culture worshiping crap imaginable. Josef bugman posted:I do prefer Lancer, where there are still complexities about how the universe works, and people just trying to get by, but there is a large ideological conflict going on. I used to like Lancer, but more and more I've come to the conclusion that it's a schizophrenic setting that doesn't really know what it wants. And that it was written by someone who very much wants to write a book, not a game, and it is accordingly Pretty Bad at accomodating the existence of PCs and giving them things to do. The game constantly writes about poo poo that is just totally loving irrelevant to the player. I went in wanting to like it and ended up balc in the camp of “Battletech is better for actually playing games in, warts and all”. Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Dec 11, 2022 |
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Dec 11, 2022 21:26
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If we're talking Warmachine politics, we can't really leave out the page 5 rule of "THIS GAME AIN'T NO SOFTY GAME FOR BABIES, THIS GAME IS FOR BIG-BALLED NERDS AND SOLID PEWTER ROBOTS ONLY." The lore was fun, the game was fun, but the community was toxic even compared to the most ardent fan of the Adeptus Astartes. And as expected, the plastic space men took back the most popular tabletop wargame title after about five minutes.
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Dec 11, 2022 21:48
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:If we're talking Warmachine politics, we can't really leave out the page 5 rule of "THIS GAME AIN'T NO SOFTY GAME FOR BABIES, THIS GAME IS FOR BIG-BALLED NERDS AND SOLID PEWTER ROBOTS ONLY." I remember getting the book for this very early on (might have even been on release) and then never actually playing it because everyone I spoke to that was already into it felt a little off like that. Didn't they put out an RPG in the setting like right after though? You'd think they wouldn't want to poo poo on people looking for something like that instead lol
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Dec 11, 2022 23:42
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:While Battletech derives from a bunch of sources, like any fictional universe, it's sometimes useful to remember that in many ways it's not a game patterned on the future but the past - the Lyrans are Napoleonic Prussia, the FedSuns are basically medieval England and France mashed together complete with hordes of illiterate peasants, the Clan Invasion is the Mongol Invasion, ComStar is the Catholic Church, the Taurian Concordat is Space Texas, et cetera. Well yeah, kinda the point is that Dune does the same thing. Hence like, future dudes who fight with swords and knives.
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Dec 12, 2022 02:00
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Neo Rasa posted:I remember getting the book for this very early on (might have even been on release) and then never actually playing it because everyone I spoke to that was already into it felt a little off like I recall reading the Warhordes book and actively disliking every army list because they were either cannibals, racists, war criminals or all 3. And very very proud of that fact. It was very weird.
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Dec 12, 2022 02:37
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Let me tell you about the faction wherein you have game mechanics toy torture a baby elephant to buff your other monsters.
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Dec 12, 2022 04:49
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