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Arivia posted:the divine inspiration of the Framers did not extend to board game reviewers If only John Locke had been inspired by Game of Goose.
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Jul 21, 2023 21:18
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This was posted on the WoD thread, but feels very relevant to this thread as well: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/werewolf-the-apocalypse-5th-edition-and-the-anti-indigeneity-in-the-gaming-industry.912221/
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Jul 22, 2023 07:11
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3 Action Economist posted:This was posted on the WoD thread, but feels very relevant to this thread as well: "A name that was still fine in 2018" really just ties up WW for me. They cannot and apparently do not care to stop doing this poo poo. Giving Ericsson the boot made everyone sigh with relief, but apparently his problem was that he was just too loud.
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Jul 22, 2023 08:27
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Like, we all know there was tons of appropriative stuff that happened in the 90s, and in recent days we're realizing it's really not okay even if it was not based in bad intentions or even misguided good intentions. I just don't understand the resistance to things being changed. It's not part of your loving trade dress or something that puts your intellectual property in jeopardy. We know they can retcon poo poo. The 5th edition changes to Vampire to make it make sense in the 2020s has been mostly good and has changed a fair bit, and with some polish it was mostly for sensible in-universe reasons. (Though then they "pulled a 90s" where they made reference to real world tragedies in a way we thought was super cool and edgy at the time because we were all the worst. I think it was something in Chechnya, I don't recall the details.) So why is it they are unwilling to make similar changes, or at least hire a sensitivity consultant to review this instead of dismissing it? Is it pride? Some financial angle that's unclear from outside? Fear of angering the right-wing dipshitosphere? It just seems so low profit.
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Jul 22, 2023 09:59
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Magnetic North posted:(Though then they "pulled a 90s" where they made reference to real world tragedies in a way we thought was super cool and edgy at the time because we were all the worst. I think it was something in Chechnya, I don't recall the details.) IIRC, Mark Rein-splotch-Hagen implied that the ruling political faction in Chechnya was an insane vampire cult or something along those lines, which somehow got media traction and made the authorities not very happy.
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Jul 22, 2023 10:12
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Specifically, the statement in the Camarilla sourcebook was that Chechnya is more or less openly ruled by vampires and that the actual, really-happening-in-real-life anti-LGBTQ+ pogroms in Chechnya were a smokescreen to hide that fact from the international community. AFAIK it's never been clear who, specifically, wrote that bit. Rein•Hagen definitely wrote some wanky Facebook posts on Facebook about how it was brave and edgy and whatever, but when people started saying that he actually wrote it he backpedaled pretty hard with basically "folks, I live in Georgia (the Eastern European country, not the US state), please stop saying I wrote this thing that got the Russian translators interrogated by Russian authorities." GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 10:43
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Magnetic North posted:Like, we all know there was tons of appropriative stuff that happened in the 90s, and in recent days we're realizing it's really not okay even if it was not based in bad intentions or even misguided good intentions. I just don't understand the resistance to things being changed. It's not part of your loving trade dress or something that puts your intellectual property in jeopardy. We know they can retcon poo poo. The 5th edition changes to Vampire to make it make sense in the 2020s has been mostly good and has changed a fair bit, and with some polish it was mostly for sensible in-universe reasons. (Though then they "pulled a 90s" where they made reference to real world tragedies in a way we thought was super cool and edgy at the time because we were all the worst. I think it was something in Chechnya, I don't recall the details.) So why is it they are unwilling to make similar changes, or at least hire a sensitivity consultant to review this instead of dismissing it? Is it pride? Some financial angle that's unclear from outside? Fear of angering the right-wing dipshitosphere? It just seems so low profit. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Jul 22, 2023 |
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Jul 22, 2023 11:26
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There's a loooot of unexamined racism towards First Nations peoples, even among self-considered progressives, that I think gets particularly bad with those who are used to plundering their cultures as a free idea bucket.
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Jul 22, 2023 11:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a loooot of unexamined racism towards First Nations peoples, even among self-considered progressives, that I think gets particularly bad with those who are used to plundering their cultures as a free idea bucket. They are and aren’t progressive the same way they are and aren’t many things. All friction as been removed between the two positions so they can switch at will. So on one hand, racism is bad because it is just an excuse for oppression. On the other, they love excuses because that’s how you make yourself frictionless. So they end up with the shifting mass of ideas that racism is bad but it’s real but minorities have special powers so it’s good but it is also bad. It is like one of those optical illusions where things are stationary where you focus your eyes but everything is shifting in the periphery.
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Jul 22, 2023 17:37
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Magnetic North posted:Like, we all know there was tons of appropriative stuff that happened in the 90s, and in recent days we're realizing it's really not okay even if it was not based in bad intentions or even misguided good intentions. I just don't understand the resistance to things being changed. It's not part of your loving trade dress or something that puts your intellectual property in jeopardy. We know they can retcon poo poo. The 5th edition changes to Vampire to make it make sense in the 2020s has been mostly good and has changed a fair bit, and with some polish it was mostly for sensible in-universe reasons. (Though then they "pulled a 90s" where they made reference to real world tragedies in a way we thought was super cool and edgy at the time because we were all the worst. I think it was something in Chechnya, I don't recall the details.) So why is it they are unwilling to make similar changes, or at least hire a sensitivity consultant to review this instead of dismissing it? Is it pride? Some financial angle that's unclear from outside? Fear of angering the right-wing dipshitosphere? It just seems so low profit. For something of a timeline: Karim Muammar is one of the line editors for the WoD 5e books. He was in Paradox and started working on the WoD stuff alongside Martin Ericsson (Swedracula), and has continued to work on it through Paradox taking back in-house. And that decision to pull it back was prompted by the Chechen political incident iirc? So my guess is that the answer to the question of "why would someone be this lovely and resistant to sweeping all the appropriative racism out of Werewolf: the Apocalypse?" is that he's from that same vein of old school edgy WoD LARPers the other nuWW guys were part of and don't see a problem with it.
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Jul 23, 2023 04:47
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I would think they would want to adhere to the maxim of that one song in A Chorus Line: "Keep the best of you, fix the rest of you." Then again they may have just felt they needed more racism.
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Jul 23, 2023 05:44
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I’ve never really been sure what the draw of owod over nwod is anyway so I have no trouble believing it’s the racism
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Jul 23, 2023 05:54
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Berkshire Hunts posted:I’ve never really been sure what the draw of owod over nwod is anyway so I have no trouble believing it’s the racism let's say more opaque in a lot of the nWoD games; or at least that was my experience.
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Jul 23, 2023 08:44
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Berkshire Hunts posted:I’ve never really been sure what the draw of owod over nwod is anyway so I have no trouble believing it’s the racism For me I just like the setting of oMage better than nMage, but I'd do a lot of editing if I ever wanted to run it again.
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Jul 23, 2023 08:53
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Berkshire Hunts posted:I’ve never really been sure what the draw of owod over nwod is anyway so I have no trouble believing it’s the racism Its like pro-wrestling. Both in why you might prefer owod and the sheer amount of problematic stuff in there.
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Jul 23, 2023 09:13
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OWOD had a bunch of talented writers cranking out cool lore for two decades, just an endless ratatat of throwing poo poo at the wall to see what sticks. Not all of it worked (and some of it, cough, hasn't aged well) but through the process of selection they grafted and pruned all those cool bits into something that is really good at activating the monkey coolness neurons. NWOD is the product of some very experienced writers looking at OWOD and trying to do a distillation of what's cool about it and maybe omit some problematic bits. It's usually pretty functional and there's a lot of good stuff there as well, but it's hard to Engineer The Cool in a top-down approach from the first try. The second editions of NWOD games, I find, have had the luxury of time and iteration and are better at it than the first editions.
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Jul 23, 2023 09:21
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WtA screams its theme at you over wailing guitars: You're the eco-terrorist dog soldiers of a hippy goddess. Your enemies are evil corporate occult mutants who drink toxic waste. They want to bring about the eponymous apocalypse. WtF requires several read-throughs and conversations online, but: You're spirit world ICE cops. You fight the other werewolf faction in a werewolf civil war that goes back to their creation myth. Some of that probably goes back to art direction, since WtA leaned into its neon 90s toxic waste vibe while WtF was Very Sepia. There's also a lot of nostalgia, but what'sb easy to miss is that it's not explicitly nostalgia for WtA - it's TMNT, toxic avengers cartoon, Halloween 3, Return of the Living Dead, toy recalls, and whatever's happening in this photo:  Like, it's a continuation of an established day-glow genre of PG-13 horror that a certain kind of kid was saturated in. It probably won't resonate if you weren't there for it, but a lot of people were.
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Jul 23, 2023 10:45
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To quote someone on this topic. “If you're going to examine Werewolf, you really have to start from understanding that at the time of its writing, if you put Bill Bridges in an elevator with the CEO of Exxon, it's very likely that only one of them would have still been alive when it reached whatever floor it was going to. It was not put together from a position of "haha, man, it's so dumb that we're ruining our own planet." It was put together from a perspective of "A small group of absolutely clear-eyed people are rendering this planet literally uninhabitable for my great-grandkids in order to line their pockets. Hundreds of millions of people will eventually die in misery because of them. They know this, and just don't care, because by the time it becomes everyone's problem, they'll be long gone having enjoyed a life of luxury along the way. Those people absolutely deserve to be beaten to death with a pipe wrench while they beg for their lives through a mouthful of broken teeth." It's a game about the world giving you big claws and muscles and magic gifts to help you get within arm's reach of those people. It is a game about righteous, murderous anger. It's a game about running down the worst people in the entire world and ripping out their guts with your teeth while they're still alive and screaming. (This is crystal clear in the 1e corebook, and massively diluted in every book that followed because it's incredibly difficult to keep that kind of intensity going or communicate it to freelancers who aren't emotionally invested to the same degree as the game's original authors.)” Its the frustrated eco-warrior RPG, we don’t have a lot of those. One could argue its time is coming again.
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Jul 23, 2023 11:19
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Took a look over the alpha rules for Tales Of The Valiant and... yeah, it's 5e with the numbers filed off, pretty much exactly as expected. It's reasonably laid out as a book (albeit with not enough of a through line in the character creation chapter) and they seem to have done a few things with magic that could be interesting (dividing spells and rituals is probably ultimately a smart step), but ultimately the only big change is to divide lineage from heritage. It's now absolutely possible to pull a Captain Carrot and have human lineage but be raised by dwarves in a mine. Basically, it's fine. It works as a system. You could absolutely play a one shot or campaign in this and be either entirely at home if you already knew 5e or pick it up relatively quickly if you didn't. But that's all it is at this point. They've also put out a levels 1-3 module. I may play that with some people to get a sense of how it all holds together.
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Jul 23, 2023 13:13
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Nuns with Guns posted:For something of a timeline: Karim Muammar is one of the line editors for the WoD 5e books. He was in Paradox and started working on the WoD stuff alongside Martin Ericsson (Swedracula), and has continued to work on it through Paradox taking back in-house. And that decision to pull it back was prompted by the Chechen political incident iirc? The Chechnya Debacle was in 2018. Hunters Entertainment announced they were handling Werewolf in late 2019. Somehow Karin Muammar survived the initial scorched earth when Paradox dissolved White Wolf and was still given the reigns over Werewolf until Justin came back and they yanked development back in house. He’s still there as a writer/editor.
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Jul 23, 2023 13:16
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moths posted:WtF requires several read-throughs and conversations online, but: You're spirit world ICE cops. You fight the other werewolf faction in a werewolf civil war that goes back to their creation myth. I prefer to call Forsaken neighborhood watch in Silent Hill.
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Jul 23, 2023 13:48
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I believe the stated main inspiration was The Wire.
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Jul 23, 2023 13:55
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OWOD's appeal (IMHO) was in the way the splats (clans/tribes/traditions/etc.) were presented. Broad stereotypes that interacted with each other like bitchy high school cliques. They were dumb, and illogical, and easy to ridicule, but boy did they provide an easy hook to get you into character (with pre-existing relationships and attitudes toward all the the other splats and elements of the setting). The NWOD versions were much more interesting and well thought out but they didn't have that instant hook that OWOD splats usually had, and so they were harder to get into and never quite clicked for a lot of people. It's kind of impressive, looking back, how much heavy lifting was accomplished by being able to say "I'm a Brujah" or "I'm a Silent Strider".
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Jul 23, 2023 17:34
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The metaplot was also absolutely part of the appeal. A lot of it was having something to read and talk about, kind of like comics and TV shows with friends, even if you couldn't find time or enough people to play. Had a friend who loved to just do WoD lore-dumps at me to pass the time, and it was interesting and she was funny enough that I was happy to listen. And it was also just right in there with the popular cultural atmosphere - along with the mention of the "day-glow neon PG-13 horror" that kids and young adults of the time were saturated in, we were also growing up with a lot of end-of-the-world poo poo still swirling around, leftovers from the Cold War and people getting wound up over The Year Two Thousand. Plus the mainstreaming of the culture war and evangelical doomsaying, the kind of stuff that gave us Left Behind. Ghostbusters II was already sniping at that at the beginning of the movie in 1989. In a few years there would be X-Files and then Millennium. So the "Final Nights" stuff of Vampire and the Apocalypse of Werewolf and so on, all those slotted right in perfectly. It was exciting and interesting, gave something coherent (relatively speaking) to latch on to for all that stuff, while also appealing to the nerd need to know and categorize The Lore. It's probably a related breed of brainworm to the conspiracy theorist. Plus nostalgia. Let's not kid ourselves. Between attitudes of the times and the ages most of us were probably at around then, a lot of us probably just didn't realize what was awful and why, so we often look back at a cleaner version of it in our heads.
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Jul 23, 2023 17:50
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FMguru posted:Broad stereotypes that interacted with each other like bitchy high school cliques. They were dumb, and illogical, and easy to ridicule, but boy did they provide an easy hook to get you into character (with pre-existing relationships and attitudes toward all the the other splats and elements of the setting). I wonder if OWoD provided some of the inspiration for the factions in D&D's Planescape.
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Jul 23, 2023 17:53
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FMguru posted:
This was also a spectacular way to integrate popular media and gave players an opportunity to use background they already had to dive right in. Players didn't need to even know what the Brujah clan was to play one, seeing Lost Boys was enough. It was also the era where it was popular to take a myspace quiz to tell you what Buffy or Star Trek TNG character you were. People loved archetypes.
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Jul 23, 2023 18:04
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The thing about describing WoD splats as cliques or frats or whatever is that I see no evidence that powerful people in the real world are any more mature than that
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Jul 23, 2023 18:42
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moths posted:This was also a spectacular way to integrate popular media and gave players an opportunity to use background they already had to dive right in. People still love archetypes, and I think they're still an underappreciated entryway for new players.
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Jul 23, 2023 20:22
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HidaO-Win posted:To quote someone on this topic. Yeah, this is why nuWerewolf never landed for me. The other metaphor that's really compelling in 1e is the puberty one - werewolf's a game about realising you're becoming surly, moody, sprouting hair in strange places, and taking a step through a mysterious door into a wider world of adulthood. And the betrayal of discovering the real nature of that promised land - that really effectively drives the rage the rest of the game revolves around, because everyone's been through that in real life.
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Jul 23, 2023 21:05
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DalaranJ posted:I wonder if OWoD provided some of the inspiration for the factions in D&D's Planescape. Planescape is absolutely a wod splat, right down to the enforced dictionary of setting slang
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Jul 23, 2023 21:47
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Mister Olympus posted:Planescape is absolutely a wod splat, right down to the enforced dictionary of setting slang To me, the slang always read as copying Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. It certainly has the pretensions of a WOD book, no argument there
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Jul 23, 2023 21:53
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It's possible Cyberpunk was the first one, or at least that seems like the earliest one I can think of that might have had an in-setting slang glossary. It had some use for WoD, of course, because these were Proper Nouns that were referring to entirely fictional things, while Cyberpunk's would have been about telling your choom about the preem chrome he got and so on.
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Jul 23, 2023 22:28
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Berkshire Hunts posted:I’ve never really been sure what the draw of owod over nwod is anyway so I have no trouble believing it’s the racism They've very different tones. oWoD is "The World Is Dark. We're Princes of the Universe, fighting for survival in a world with the darkest power. We've come to be the rulers of you all". nWoD is "The world is dark and we're supernatural people fighting for survival." Of the major lines:
Planescape was pretty obviously oWoD inspired.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:14
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Just gonna note, Forsaken 2e is incredibly good, focusing on the idea of the werewolf pack as a social unit and the idea of protecting and defending your pack, even if they're mortal humans who have no idea what you are, alongside the driving need to hunt. Werewolves in this are not cops in the slightest - they're hunters and defenders of community.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:35
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yeah I feel like nWolf, especially in its second edition, has much more texture than oWolf. It sells the idea that this is a people with their own distinct culture and ideologies based around their big secret mission, far more than oWolf did with the whole thing where your tribe is mostly your literal genetic ancestry and you have to fall in line with those stereotypes or get kicked out. That said, the nature of the 'big secret mission' itself being changed from "kill the polluters and save the planet" to "save the planet but not in any concrete or visible way that normal humans can actually see or comprehend" is a downgrade, though it's one that falls in line with a lot of the other Old to New changes; it puts much more pressure on the GM to make the stakes real and the integration into the human world visible. Just like the byzantine politics of the old vampire setting are largely handed to you pre-written, with the factions and their conflicts set, where the new vampire setting is a lot of multi-purpose tools for the GM to built their own political hellpit.
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Jul 23, 2023 23:40
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I'm not entirely sure why "nwod sucks in these in part wildly factually incorrect ways" is a response to "I don't get why people like oWoD but I bet it's the racism."
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Jul 23, 2023 23:43
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Mors Rattus posted:Just gonna note, Forsaken 2e is incredibly good, focusing on the idea of the werewolf pack as a social unit and the idea of protecting and defending your pack, even if they're mortal humans who have no idea what you are, alongside the driving need to hunt. Werewolves in this are not cops in the slightest - they're hunters and defenders of community. So in your reading not cops but community based vigilantes and violent Citizen's Councils?
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Jul 24, 2023 00:16
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neonchameleon posted:So in your reading not cops but community based vigilantes and violent Citizen's Councils? Yes, with 2e actively having the players design the community they are part of, why they care about it, and so on. And then a lot of your conflict is that violence is your easy tool but it can’t solve a pack age’s home being foreclosed, or similar.
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Jul 24, 2023 00:20
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HidaO-Win posted:To quote someone on this topic. I’d argue that the frustrated eco-warrior RPG is already here… in the form of Deviant. Seriously; Deviant captures all of that rage and the satisfaction of righteous vengeance. But you can play something that’s not a werewolf. Even if you want to, it lets you play a werewolf that isn’t constrained by all the ugly misappropriated cultural baggage and sometimes eco-fascist tendencies of W:tA. It makes the stakes far more personal, as well. The corporations ruining the world are also the same ones that made you the monster that you are. Not only are you driven mechanically to ruin the lives of those responsible, you’re rewarded for it. You are explicitly given the tools to represent the bastards ruining the world and to make them pay. tl;dr, Deviant is a better version of Werewolf than either game called Werewolf Gatto Grigio fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 00:58
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Mage the Awakening 1e definitely had a very... 'meh' focus compared to people coming from Ascension. If you went purely off the corebook, its lore, and the fiction in it, you'd come away with the impression that Mages mostly spent their time looking into ancient stuff; and they occasionally fell into conflict with each other about it or fell to the Dark Side and did Abyssal stuff. Mage the Awakening 2e is much better, both as a game and as a corebook that's self-contained. The magic rules are actually consistent and useable, more or less! 1e said "Exarchs might exist, those weird Seer folk seem to like them", but 2e takes from late 1e and says "yes, the Exarchs are the big baddies, that's what's holding down humanity and enforcing all the cruelties of the world that you'd think we should've been able to get past with our magic". It's totally reasonable for an Ascension fan to have looked in on Awakening 1e, gone "eh, that's not what I'm about" and then not have bothered to see 2e's improvements. Awakening 2e is also a much more thematically consistent game than Ascension, and some Ascension fans would tell you that arguing about Ascension's themes is really half of the fun.
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Jul 24, 2023 01:16
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