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Casting the most natural allies of fascism as resistance against it is basically another expression of the American liberal's desperate holding out for the Reasonable Republican to ride over the hill to deliver them from terrible indecorous fascists and insurgent leftists.
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Sep 23, 2018 08:54
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Anniversary posted:I think, think, think I figured out my issue with its framing of the fictional fascist state. It's not, definitionally, fascist. It's totalitarian. I think this is a case where you're both putting in more thought and more well-informed on the topic than the writer was. It seems like the evil fascist regime might as well be COBRA. Hell, that'd be a better game.
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Sep 23, 2018 18:43
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Its one of those things where it originally referred to the weird tendency for a bunch of lovely white dudes to shout down (mostly) women and poc who had any kind of criticism of the Sanders campaign and other chair-throwing histronics, that over the course of the campaign morphed into the above assertion that all Bernie supporters were obnoxious white dudebros. I remember hearing that there's actually good chance that the majority of supposed 'bernie bro' harassment was literally Russian bots. I think the core issue with Sigmata is that it's a milquetoast centrist liberal fantasy of fighting fascists when it's become all too evidence that those people are utterly incapable of fighting fascists. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 05:20
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LuiCypher posted:On a related topic, it's part of why I really like King Arthur Pendragon - you can tell from the first 20 pages of the book that Greg Stafford knows his poo poo about Arthurian legends (like Chretien de Troyes' contributions to Lancelot and the overall concept of courtly love in the Medieval era) so you don't have to worry about him going completely off the rails when it comes to building the world, the systems, the rules, and how they all interact. That always felt like a bit of a double edged sword; while it's not much a problem for me because I'm crazy, at least one friend has felt Pendragon has a very specific idea of how it's supposed to be played by default and different ways of doing it come off as a bit begrudging. (but not half as bad as most other games for that, really)
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Sep 25, 2018 05:07
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IIRC the anime has a few points where you can probably tell they did a system change.
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Oct 19, 2018 11:14
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The hostility from OSR types is almost baffling. Like, as bad as the stereotypes are, even 90% of the groggiest old school video gamers will fall over themselves to introduce you to what they like if you show anything resembling interest. Hell, bring up non D&D based games and people will help you go through whatever hoops are required to give them a shot online, like with Battletech. The whole 'kids these days so coddled' thing kinda went out the window in the age of Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress. Everything they claim to like about the retroclones is and has always been crack to a certain audience segment, you just need to teach them.
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Oct 25, 2018 09:28
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The RPG industry could learn a thing or two by now about toxic customers.
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Oct 30, 2018 14:02
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Cessna posted:I'm not an Admin over there anymore - I'm retired. But in the past there were a LOT of problems with people asking to be banned, then asking to be unbanned later. It got ridiculous - "can you ban me for Finals week starting on Tuesday morning, then unban me on Friday afternoon at 4:30 PM?" Funny thing is you could probably do that here.
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Oct 30, 2018 15:01
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SA's really not one to talk on reputation because even if this place has cleaned up its act, the rest of the internet that still remembers it also remembers Helldump basically writing the original blueprints for organised online harassment, and being one of the only places left besides 4chan that actually cares about furries. (Read some good old goon hating on furries and tell me a lot of it doesn't come off as barely veiled hatred of queer people) I think the key SA's survival has been the moderation policy being explicitly 'We can ban and probate you for any reason we feel like'. It's not only a more honest version of basically every moderation policy in a nutshell, but that combined with bans and probations being public record and a pretty robust system for them that, combined with the paywall, gives moderators a lot of tools to work with and degrees of punishment. Moderation on most forums is something people don't like to talk about, and a frequently opaque process. On SA, the openness about it is downright shocking compared to pretty much any other platform. Where else on the internet do people line up bans for fun and bets?
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Nov 2, 2018 11:32
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Xelkelvos posted:The Sunshine Law but for Social Media and internet communities. It's more like putting a little signboard on the haft of the pike on which their severed head is displayed, or on a prisoner in the stocks. There was an interview or two about how hosed up modern social media is, and one directly with Lowtax was about how completely opaque moderation leads to a community going fully Lord of the Flies because as far as they're concerned being banned is the random wrath of God.
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Nov 2, 2018 17:25
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Warhammer Orks are the best Orks. Turns out one of the least problematic ways to show them is to go back to the well of them being artificially engineered super-soldiers.
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Nov 3, 2018 07:36
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JackMann posted:David Weber had something like that in his War God series (which was based on his homebrew D&D game). The orc equivalents, the hradani, have a real bad berserker rage problem. The less they like someone, the more formal and polite they get as a defense against going into their rage (or accidentally provoking the other hradani). Sounds like Australians. Be very wary when they're being polite to you.
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Nov 5, 2018 06:11
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Modern economics is soothsaying for the rich. I think people tend to buy physical RPG books when convenient to read through, but for actual play it's usually infinitely more convenient to use PDFs, pirated if necessary.
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Nov 7, 2018 11:25
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NinjaDebugger posted:It's one of the easiest and biggest sins of urban fantasy, making real atrocities be actually the fault of whatever baddie you want to pump up. It's cheap heat, but all it does in the end is look like you're trying to make humans look less like monsters than they really are. I remember an old joke that Hitler was the only real human in charge of anything in the OWoD.
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Nov 12, 2018 09:43
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A ton of the cishet white men who keep going on about how terrible cishet white men are have turned out to be various flavours of woke sex creeps or covering for them as well. It's a toxic attitude all around, and probably a perfect case of how guilt and self-loathing can just be an expression of narcissism.
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Nov 13, 2018 09:45
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People seem to miss a lot of Lovecraft stories also had themes of familial corruption and madness, probably not unrelated to how both of his parents died in insane asylums. Pretty much every indication is he had hereditary mental illness issues, as well as being generally sickly (he seperated from his wife because of financial issues and died in poverty, albeit apparently he kept spending his money on writing supplies instead of food or medicine). He apparently grew up in a wealthy family that lost all their money when he was pretty young and was raised by his aunts, if we're getting into backstory. We're basically looking at borderline outsider art. And a lot of Lovecraft stories strongly imply even anglo-saxon white men are just curious enough to get themselves into trouble dealing with poo poo that 'lesser' races know to leave well enough alone. While apparently Robert E. Howard lived with his mother all of his life, and committed suicide shortly after she died. I also heard Lovecraft is a bit better about women than most of his contemporaries, which is probably a low bar. Most of his protagonists are author-inserts. (funnily enough, what's considered one of his best stories, The Colour Out Of Space, unusually has the POV character for almost all of it be a rural guy)
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Dec 7, 2018 05:02
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And the crazy part is Lovecraft married a Jew, and had to be reminded mid-rant who he was sharing a bed with.
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Dec 7, 2018 15:11
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Lovecraft's whole thing was being ridiculously old-fashioned. He'd sometimes date his letters in the previous century.
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Dec 7, 2018 16:42
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I'm pretty sure nonwhite people are fairly aware that when it comes to racism with classic authors it's only matter of degree and how well they've been whitewashed, because otherwise you'd have to toss out over half an English lit course. Pulp is particularly bad about this. What happens when sheltered white dudes are the ones who get to write nearly everything (or at least get published) until pretty recently.
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Dec 8, 2018 05:58
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Conspiracy theories are basically science fiction slash mythology, they do make great fantasy ideas.
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Dec 11, 2018 00:14
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I do wonder how likely they are to walk back or spin off Age of Sigmar. It seems like people have come around on some of the new factions but all the new names for things are stupid and forgettable.
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Dec 11, 2018 15:08
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Maxwell Lord posted:Also even if Disney loses the copyright on Mickey Mouse, they’ll have the trademark as long as they keep it active, and that’s all they need to make money. After all most of their Princesses are based on characters in the public domain, but that doesn’t stop their Ariel and Belle and Snow White from selling merch. They control those precise likenesses and certain materials relating to the movies and that’s what people care about. It's not even like Mickey Mouse is one of their major moneymakers anymore since they haven't done anything really notable with him in years besides the occasional half-decent cartoon short on YouTube.
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Dec 12, 2018 03:15
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:
I need to see that movie. Kinda cool how they made the animals look aged and weathered. Also reminds me of Detective Pikachu all of a sudden.
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Dec 13, 2018 16:33
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IIRC it's not so much Chaos-tainted Tau as Tau starting to sound and act a lot more like 40k humans with paranoia and xenophobia, implied that an unshielded Warp journey caused all their allies to get possessed by demons and go all Event Horizon on them.
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Dec 18, 2018 06:23
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Humans living in Tau Space believe in the Greater Good so hard that they accidentally create a Chaos God of the Greater Good. Warhammer kinda does the funny thing where humans are probably the most actively and diversely religious sentient race.
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Dec 18, 2018 13:42
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I like to have worlds where it's clear other things are going on with or without the PCs. Also, if you dawdle too long on the quest then a rival adventuring party might get it done instead and get all the gold and glory.
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Dec 20, 2018 11:22
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Just make Warlord the standard martial PC.
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Dec 21, 2018 16:43
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Warlord was such a fun class. I loved screaming at my friends not to be on fire anymore. You can still find the cracked version of the standalone char creator that with some mods has not only the rest of 4e's content but is actually pretty easy to add custom content to, and has a few rebalance patches that have been developed.
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Dec 22, 2018 05:26
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Zurui posted:With all the buried treasure, fallen empires and warring gods this is basically how you'd have to read any early edition of D&D. IIRC, the default lore of 4e is basicaly loosely a post-fall-of-Rome situation where there's scattered points of civilization and tons of wasteland and ruins because the world's great empires warred themselves into ruin and are shadows of their former selves. My own D&D 4e setting is basically Fallout with more magic and Lovecraft in place of technology and radiation, it is pretty much absolutely ideal for running D&D as presented.
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Dec 23, 2018 10:34
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Just label everything like Friends or Always Sunny episodes.
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Dec 24, 2018 05:09
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Heliotrope posted:Not really. It's possible the GM reads "This is a powerful ability, so the GM should not let you off easy" and accidentally makes it hard in an unfun way - because the power says to not let them off easily. If there's advice on how to handle that then that's good and less likely to lead to that result, but if there isn't then the GM is being told to make something difficult without any guidelines on what that might entail and might make a mistake. This is starting to remind me of a Paladin's Code situation.
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Dec 25, 2018 06:42
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To be honest I'd consider it a bullet dodged to leave a company that tries to go all-in on selling out and doesn't even manage it.
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Dec 26, 2018 06:38
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Xelkelvos posted:There's a bunch of fantasy dramas now in China that have been getting licensed by Prime and Netflix so I can assume there's a not insignificant audience for that sort of audience in China. Doesn't hurt there's a considerable history of Chinese pirates. They actually got a minor appearance in the third PotC movie. Not sure if they're romanticised to the same extent, but still. Mors Rattus posted:It's more that Chinese firms have recently begin investing in Western movies as loss leaders for some kind of weird money laundering/tax scheme. China's got a ton of new money that wants to get money out of China by any means necessary since you can't buy land there and their economy is kind of a giant bubble. (it has grown massively but has been incredibly overstated by both Chinese and Western sources. Basically Japan all over again)
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Dec 27, 2018 05:00
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Terrible Opinions posted:Having half your houses unoccupied is still on par with failed American suburbs in terms of unnerving lack of habitation. Or Toronto apartments.
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Dec 27, 2018 09:59
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Mortal Engines from what I've read of it seems to basically be a brutal satire of capitalism with cities crawling across a post-apocalyptic wasteland eating each other even after there's barely any 'prey' towns left and sifting through relics of ancient capitalism, including the occasional superweapon. Also there's Terminators. It was pretty drat grim as YA fiction goes, to an almost absurd degree at times.
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Dec 27, 2018 14:12
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Plutonis posted:Dwarven word for hair and beard are the same. There you go. I'm reminded of how in Japanese there's no seperate word for 'beard' from other facial hair, leading to some confusion in One Piece where Whitebeard doesn't actually have a beard (but does have a nice stache). Also Blackbeard didn't have a beard at all to start with. theironjef posted:No see it's cool to be a trans or NB character as long as you're a joke I've been hearing since the 80s. "What?" I exclaimed, "That bearded dwarf is ordering a white wine spritzer! That's the drink of a lady!" Then i guffawed like Paul F. Tompkins. Representation! Discworld got weird about that, yeah. Though there was the implication that the burgeoning openly female dwarf movement gets a lot of their ideas about femininity from humans, which has its own kettle of worms. (one woman does say that a lot of human women wouldn't mind doing things the dwarf way) Cross-cultural pollination ends up in some wacky places. Bruceski posted:I feel like I've been saying this a lot recently: it's possible to hurt people without meaning to hurt. It's possible to think you're helping without realizing who you've trod on along the way. Recognize, apologize, and do better next time. People are fallible and the bar of being better than nothing is absurdly low. A bit of humility can take care of not even passing that. I think a lot of people get defensive because they assume modern social criticism is basically the same as the religious right's bad-faith misreadings and paranoia, which RPG designers are justifiably touchy about, and assume it's quickly going to turn into demands for book bannings and book burnings unless they cut it off at the pass. Doesn't help that you already have cases of the religious right using the language of feminism and modern social criticism to demand what amounts to the same old censorship. (IIRC there was a big kerfuffle on Steam with Morality in Media shortly before they gave up and opened the porngates, with people only realising it was fundies in disguise when they started calling for censorship of LBGT media in the same terms)
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Dec 29, 2018 06:35
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Impermanent posted:I don't actually think it's that justifiable that rpg writers are sensitive about criticism. They got called satanic once in the 80s. Have you seen what churches have called satanic in the interim? It strikes me as nerd siege mentality more than anything else. Books were literally burned, they literally altered the games to take anything that could be seen as a religious reference out of them, and if anything in the age of Facebook propaganda you probably still get people freaking out when hearing their kids play a dice game with dungeons and dragons. The religious right backing off media is a very recent thing and mostly because the corporate right finds it more trouble than its worth, at the grassroots it's still there. You can't expect to skate on 'But you see, the difference is this time we're right'.
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Dec 29, 2018 07:51
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Thing is the controversies around those products didn't impede their popularity for the most part, while a very niche hobby is far more likely to feel under genuine threat as an easy target for moral panics.
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Dec 29, 2018 08:10
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The word 'hermaphrodite' literally comes from mythology describing a god that was a combination of male and female in the first place. For most people, the whole spectrum of non-binary sexuality is completely new to them, and even for those who are, the terminology and norms do not even seem to be settled. Not surprised the authors feel like they're being jumped on for breaking arbitrary rules they literally had no idea existed.
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Dec 29, 2018 15:27
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Okay, I didn't know the details on that end so I see the point. The rules are definitely different when it comes to touting something as representation rather than just briefly featuring or alluding to the concept.
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Dec 29, 2018 15:54
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