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The pitch for Humanis Policlub, Shadowrun's equivalent of the KKK, is that all races must band together to kill the orks and trolls and elves and dwarves.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:57
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well, they have different stat bonuses
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Mar 14, 2024 16:58
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I suppose it gives me, local herbivore, another reason to prefer Cyberpunk over Shadowrun. It does seem to just import the assumptions of D&D into a vaguely-credible cyberpunk setting (or milieu if you prefer). It doesn't seem to say anything different, it just slaps a skin over the same ol' D&D poo poo (if, hilariously, retaining Cyberpunk's rocket tag dynamics). I would have to see if I can find the book or get a PDF, but I recall even GURPS Cthulhupunk addressed this topic more clearly if in less ringing terms than the opening of Scion's Mythos book. 'Lovecraft was very racist, and we have opted to ignore this to the greatest extent possible.' Of course, GURPS has its own ability score breakdown issues, but ST/DX/IQ/HT was at least meaningfully different, as was the granularity of how you could stack up your reaction roll modifiers!
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Mar 14, 2024 17:12
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Nessus posted:I suppose it gives me, local herbivore, another reason to prefer Cyberpunk over Shadowrun. It does seem to just import the assumptions of D&D into a vaguely-credible cyberpunk setting (or milieu if you prefer). It doesn't seem to say anything different, it just slaps a skin over the same ol' D&D poo poo (if, hilariously, retaining Cyberpunk's rocket tag dynamics). It can be very much “you enter a 10’ x 10’ office room, an ork is guarding a workstation”, yes.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:18
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Parkreiner posted:It can be very much “you enter a 10’ x 10’ office room, an ork is guarding a workstation”, yes.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:20
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SkyeAuroline posted:I'm pretty sure the obvious read was "there's no difference between races, as in real world races, but there is a difference between the metatypes", which is still not any better given how racially coded the metatypes get. But it's a hell of a lot better of a reading than you going out of your way and twisting words to portray hyphz as a racist, dude. A major theme of the earlier books were ethnicities forming around the newly emerged metahumans and how they interacted with each other (not well, this IS a dystopia). The earlier editions had some pretty good writing in that regard. Once Catalyst Game Labs got ahold of it... Hoo-boy. If it's any compensation, the writers of "The Complete Trog" didn't get paid what they were owed, because Catalyst Game Labs.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:26
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That's not giving Shadowrun credit for how weird it is. The age of magick kicks off with Native Americans seceding from the US and defeating the government by doing a Great Ghost Dance to make volcanoes erupt. Mexico is run by wannabe Aztec necromancers. There's a Neo-Confederacy stretching from Virginia to Florida to Texas. Oregon is ruled by elf ren-faire nerds. Metatypes simply existing is the least problematic thing going on.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:27
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Q: has anyone written an essay about how roleplaying games, where rules like attributes break down under scrutiny, really parallel the real world, where simple rules about like biology and physics have all sorts of complications and edge cases? Feels like an area where someone way smarter than me has written something good.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:42
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Halloween Jack posted:That's not giving Shadowrun credit for how weird it is. Everything with Bug City, Chicago Containment Zone, and the Universal Brotherhood always seemed super cool to me. I also really liked the variety you'd get with HMHVV so there were all these different varieties of vampires. Like how dwarves became goblins in 4e who were immune to fire and fed on bones if I recall correctly. There is a ton of cool stuff throughout Shadowrun even if there is also a bunch of dumb stuff.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:49
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Halloween Jack posted:I've seen well-considered systems that had more than the classic 6 (splitting up DEX is popular) and fewer (combining STR and CON is popular) but never that exact 6. I prefer Size as a few discrete tags rather than a dedicated scale personally. "Being huge" or "being short" falling under the same category as "can fly" allows for a lot more flexibility and means you can relatively easily differentiate between "This Giant is Large" vs "This Giant Centipede is Long"
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Mar 14, 2024 17:52
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Nessus posted:I draw my monomolecular longsword and hew the ork! What treasures does the workstation contain...
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Mar 14, 2024 17:56
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ohhyeah posted:Q: has anyone written an essay about how roleplaying games, where rules like attributes break down under scrutiny, really parallel the real world, where simple rules about like biology and physics have all sorts of complications and edge cases? Feels like an area where someone way smarter than me has written something good. I think this is the other reason to remove this stuff from character generation. Even if we say that trolls are a completely different species, and it is objectively true that on average they’re not so smart, that’s not to say that YOUR troll can’t be the one-in-a-million genius. PCs are meant to stand out, after all. I think PF2e’s remaster got this right by making the ancestry modifiers optional.
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Mar 14, 2024 18:19
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LeisureSuit Canary posted:
like the rules in the later editions  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_szmwfkvqRk
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Mar 14, 2024 18:27
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Parkreiner posted:I assume he’s not considering them “races” in that Goblinization meant you could have Black trolls and Caucasian trolls, etc, but in practice they are very much treated as ethnic/cultural groups. The child of a troll is also a troll. I don’t think Goblinization even happens after the initial return of magic. Didn’t it comment on this via Earthdawn before the great separation of IPs?
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Mar 14, 2024 18:36
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The Deleter posted:Because I sure hope you don't mean "it's okay to describe these fictional races as culturally or genetically stupider because we used a different word instead of race" and I'm missing some facetiousness in your text or something Is it your position that all fictional creatures must be exactly as intelligent as one another, and anything else is a moral failing on someone's part?
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Mar 14, 2024 18:40
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Splicer posted:They can't just have a strength bonus for being a troll because mental stats exist, so there's an implicit assumption that if they get +2 strength someone else may get +2 int, which is just trolls getting -2 int with extra steps. I agree for the most part. But it's also true that you could just not do that. You could have trolls be bigger and therefore stronger but not necessarily more athletic, and then just not have a species that is more intelligent. Intelligence has its own issues which is that unlike strength, which is basically a real thing that D&D implements badly, intelligence isn't even real- at least not the way D&D thinks it is. Which sort of gets to Kestral's question... in what way would the fantasy creature be more or less intelligent and how would that manifest? In the real world, are orcas more or less intelligent than us and how can we tell for sure? (Answer: we don't know for sure and don't even know how to find out. All we have are suspicions and suppositions.) An "education" stat would functionally be closer to the way D&D actually works. Being broadly educated makes further education easier. Just like practicing a broad range of athletic skills makes learning new athletic skills easier. I'm absolutely a DTAS diehard, at least in the context of D&D, but if you were going to have a set of broad things that act as the roots for specific skills, I think that Education, Athleticism, and something like Sociability would be a good starting point: they are traits that people genuinely can have; they are derived from practicing specific skills and spending time in that area; they make it easier to learn similar new skills; they improve performance on tasks the possessor has never tried before. But they are manifestly acquired traits. Calling it education instead of intelligence makes that crystal clear. It would be obviously stupid to say that an elf is born with more education than a troll.
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Mar 14, 2024 19:09
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Human intelligence is an infinitely complex thing and pretty much any system is going to have trouble matching the depth of it, but i don't think that's a reason not to really try. (Traveller, for what it's worth has both Education and Intelligence, and they're both really useful.)
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Mar 14, 2024 19:21
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"Intelligence" stats are particularly fraught, because as far as I know, nobody has tried to justify genocide with "they're all clumsy."
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Mar 14, 2024 19:26
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Halloween Jack posted:"Intelligence" stats are particularly fraught, because as far as I know, nobody has tried to justify genocide with "they're all clumsy." And, from the other direction, there's no better way to rationalize being the beneficiary of racism.
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Mar 14, 2024 19:39
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Kestral posted:Is it your position that all fictional creatures must be exactly as intelligent as one another, and anything else is a moral failing on someone's part? I would be inclined to say that all organisms who are meant to be human peers do not have different "raw intelligence" values. You could give unique powers to various creature-types, but I'd want to encourage looking closely at them to avoid a case where a particular one gets a value to Agriculture and Peasant-labor, while another gets a bonus to Administration and Moral Superiority. (You would also ideally be giving one to the Humans as well, and equal-in-general to everyone else's.) If you are writing a very specific fictional setting you can break this rule, but any fictional setting that makes huge statements about different creature-types having different "innate intelligences" is already throwing some red flags on the field.
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Mar 14, 2024 19:51
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Like "humans have an innate cleverness advantage" is a lot more problematic than "humans get +1 on long-duration Endurance checks."
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Mar 14, 2024 19:53
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Kestral posted:Is it your position that all fictional creatures must be exactly as intelligent as one another, and anything else is a moral failing on someone's part? No and I don't know how you got that from my post but considering your other posts on this topic im not exactly interested in engaging with whatever take you have about orcs having -2 to int or whatever because it probably sucks rear end
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Mar 14, 2024 20:03
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Nessus posted:I would be inclined to say that all organisms who are meant to be human peers do not have different "raw intelligence" values. One potential issue here is that organisms not originally intended as human peers can become player character options if they’re popular enough and the system/setting gets enough splatbooks.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:08
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You were all groaning at my poo poo earlier but this is why I'm so quick to reference Mao on metaphysical vs. dialectical thinking. A lot of reactionary thought, and bad game design, but I repeat myself, rests on the assumption that a contingent historical accident and/or deliberately-constructed status quo is in fact the organic and inevitable result of eternal cosmic truths. "Well, they're all like that, it's just their nature," is what gives us +2 STR -2 INT.
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 20:15
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NEXT-GEN GAME DESIGNER(WOKE): my game's orcs get +4 STR +0 INT 😌
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Mar 14, 2024 20:18
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Silver2195 posted:One potential issue here is that organisms not originally intended as human peers can become player character options if they’re popular enough and the system/setting gets enough splatbooks. Assuming you have a "smart guy" score at all, which you might not.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:26
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I played a dog once.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:28
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YggdrasilTM posted:I played a dog once.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:29
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The campaign used a fan made GURPS module for JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, and It was set by our GM in the middle ages. It was really loving strange.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:36
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YggdrasilTM posted:The campaign used a fan made GURPS module for JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, and It was set by our GM in the middle ages. It was really loving strange. So you were Iggy’s ancestor? Also, do you have a link to the GURPS JoJo rules?
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Mar 14, 2024 20:39
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YggdrasilTM posted:The campaign used a fan made GURPS module for JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, and It was set by our GM in the middle ages. It was really loving strange. It should be strange.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:40
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Bizzare, even!
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Mar 14, 2024 20:44
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Ferrinus posted:You were all groaning at my poo poo earlier but this is why I'm so quick to reference Mao on metaphysical vs. dialectical thinking. A lot of reactionary thought, and bad game design, but I repeat myself, rests on the assumption that a contingent historical accident and/or deliberately-constructed status quo is in fact the organic and inevitable result of eternal cosmic truths.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:46
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Halloween Jack posted:STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA, they are all manifestations of liberalism. The six olds.
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Mar 14, 2024 20:47
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The Deleter posted:No and I don't know how you got that from my post but considering your other posts on this topic im not exactly interested in engaging with whatever take you have about orcs having -2 to int or whatever because it probably sucks rear end Since I’m clearly misunderstanding, would you like to explain your actual position for the class?
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Mar 14, 2024 20:49
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The Internet is Highlander and when I catch someone doing something bad they go away forever as I absorb all of their power
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Mar 14, 2024 20:49
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Halloween Jack posted:The Internet is Highlander and when I catch someone doing something bad they go away forever as I absorb all of their power
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Mar 14, 2024 20:55
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Halloween Jack posted:STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA, they are all manifestations of liberalism. Just now occurring to me that Into the Odd uses renames of con, den, and cha specifically because it’s classless, so why would you need the scores that are only for prime requisites?
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Mar 14, 2024 20:57
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The Deleter posted:Because I sure hope you don't mean "it's okay to describe these fictional races as culturally or genetically stupider because we used a different word instead of race" and I'm missing some facetiousness in your text or something Shadowrun is set ostensibly in the real world awakened to magic and there are "races" as we know them and there are "metatypes," as in types of metahuman, which map to classic fantasy races. So it is possible to be a Latina elf, a white orc, a black dwarf, an Asian troll, etc. This is because in Shadowrun's world, people were already categorized into these groups before magic reemerged and changed large swathes of them into different forms. Though it is also quite possible to have people in D&D whose features map to these combinations, if you play Baldur's Gate 3 for example the real world genetic clades that get mapped to "races" in real life aren't identified as such because presumably Faerun lacks the context that would create such distinctions, and instead uses "race" to refer to what Shadowrun would call metatype. Runa fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Mar 14, 2024 |
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Mar 14, 2024 20:59
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This pretty much just comes down to, have you ever played Shadowrun before. I've never actually played Shadowrun on tabletop but I've played a ton of the videogames across different generations and I've read Ice Phisherman's Blake Island CYOA/web serial on these forums. It's a good read, though I fell off after he said some things that weirded me out during the height of the pandemic. Stuff has calmed down now but things cannot really be the same after that.
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Mar 14, 2024 21:10
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