Eifert Posting posted:The government run by the Nazis is probably one of the most dysfunctional governments in world history. If you're curious Dietrich Orlow's "The Nazi Party 1919 to 1945." It's the dryest thing I've ever read but does a great job explaining how a bunch of dysfunctional assholes attempted to create a government on chudly self interest, with predictable results. As for the corruption, that was probably some of the point. I would not be shocked if some of the purpose of inefficient designs was to try to generate revenues for whoever built the Panther and so on.
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# ¿ Apr 30, 2019 23:59 |
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# ¿ May 18, 2024 21:24 |
Cessna posted:The Nazis didn't anticipate a drat thing. They had the war economy of an addict, lurching from from looting one country to the next.
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# ¿ May 1, 2019 01:19 |
Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Oh and the bolded part there? That's why people use "fascist-adjacent" to refer to sexists, racists, religious bigots, homophobes, etc. Because all that poo poo comes from the the same place of categorising people into groups (races, genders, national origin, religion, disability, etc) and placing those groups in a rigid hierarchy such that you are at or near the very top, then dissonantly claiming (even if it's only to yourself) that you deserve to be there not because of the circumstance of your birth giving you the in-group race/gender/nationality/etc but because you struggled your way to a personal greatness that is deserved by you because it's 100% your own achievement and also it's unattainable by inferior race/gender/nationality/etc because they're just not capable of the same kind of personal greatness you are. golden bubble posted:Exactly. Just look how wargames try to model tank reliability. One way is to increase costs for unreliable tanks. But that means players can easily plan around poor reliability, since they know exactly how many extra points were spent in every game. Adding random rolls for reliability is a more realistic way to show how poor reliability regularly ruined tactical plans. But it is not fun to lose a match because of totally random reliability rolls before the game even starts, and it isn't good game design either.
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# ¿ May 1, 2019 03:41 |
PoptartsNinja posted:The Draconis Combine now has a New Avalon prefecture and I am 100% onboard with the Draconis Combine and Federated Suns merging because they are basically the same nation with only your preference as to whether you prefer a Samurai or Cowboy aesthetic. Samurai Cowboys are inherently superior to both.
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# ¿ May 3, 2019 01:50 |
evol262 posted:No, they didn't.
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# ¿ May 5, 2019 22:23 |
I actually got so much Howard Zinn I got sick of the guy, and I was in Texas schools most of the time. (Urban G&T programs in Houston, mind you, I'm sure the standard curriculum in Arlen would have been very different.) I think the main issue is that a lot of this stuff gets written as a "corrective" or "what THEY got WRONG" and so forth and nobody sits down and writes, for instance, a non-shithead textbook to sell or distribute freely. Perhaps this wouldn't pay, perhaps it wouldn't be the best way to do it, but that is my own perspective on a lot of history classes.
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# ¿ May 7, 2019 22:02 |
moths posted:Unless it's changed since I last heard, textbooks are written to appeal to Texas. However in high school yeah Zinn came out. It was probably because it was a G&T program in Houston, which by sheer scale/diversity alone was probably somewhat less than purestrain chud at the Deaf Smith Confederate Memorial County High School. Zinn's book was also in (pretty much literally) every college course that touched on history that I took, with the exception of the two courses on Irish history since 1600 (for obvious reasons). There were staple textbooks and I had wished that Zinn's content or its equivalent was better integrated into the core text, because I think that would have both improved the quality and breadth of the content, AND ALSO, I would'nt have had to buy four loving copies of Zinn's book (and got two free copies, along the way) during my college career. Like it ain't that Zinn is bad, it's that he sure the gently caress wasn't Marx or Plato or something. Update the core book, don't make me keep buying supplements!
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# ¿ May 7, 2019 23:54 |
evol262 posted:They honestly should have just made you get Zinn's sources, which are available in a single (cheap) companion volume, at least in college.
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# ¿ May 8, 2019 02:03 |
Yeah, Iron Kingdoms had juvenile poo poo in it but it seemed much less thud and blunder than WH40k ever was. Some of this might just be that they were #2, of course.
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# ¿ May 8, 2019 09:03 |
Loxbourne posted:PP was funny about this, especially in the first edition. The 1st ed rulebook stopped the rules text in several places to discuss how AWESOME and DYNAMICALLY POSED Privateer miniatures were, and BADASS their weapons etc looked. Someone in the writers' room had a thing about "daintily painted toys" and went out of their way to try and sell Warmachine's models as uniquely manly and cool.
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# ¿ May 8, 2019 11:37 |
LatwPIAT posted:Weimar Germany In Space! is generally more fertile ground for roleplaying games than Nazi Germany In Space!. (And you get to beat up both Nazis and Stalinists!) Eifert Posting posted:my high school dedicated a yearbook to Francisco Franco.
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# ¿ May 12, 2019 04:55 |
SteelMentor posted:The original intent of SJW is straight up dead, there's no reclaiming it at all at this point. It's lost all meaning even among those who use it, a 5 seconds on Twitter will show they'll slap it on anything that mildly erks them. See also: Political Correctness and Virtue Signalling, genuinely useful terms drowned in poo poo.
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# ¿ May 13, 2019 12:21 |
As best as I can tell the best sign someone has of being a fascist or fascist-adjacent is "existing" and "posting on the Internet," at this point. The categories may be a little broad. Are Feats fascist? What about at-will powers?
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# ¿ May 17, 2019 03:23 |
Tekopo posted:The rest of the catalogue is pretty standard to other board wargames naming conventions, but those two titles really stand out as being especially bad (and yeah, I guess the colonialism one as well). The only game I own is Crusade and Revolution which is an alright take on the Spanish Civil War. Anyway here is a good Sartre quote which will probably be familiar to everyone, from "the Anti-Semite and the Jew": quote:The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."
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# ¿ May 18, 2019 00:22 |
Madurai posted:What the poo poo is that Me-163 doing down there? Are they positing a ground attack version of a rocket plane?
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# ¿ May 18, 2019 02:03 |
JBP posted:The outside elements are actually evil like it says on the box though and they're not allegories for foreign irl human nations/ethnicities. Like, I'm a human. I'd want the imperium to win if I lived in it and think space marines were the loving best.
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# ¿ May 18, 2019 02:28 |
Dawgstar posted:It's Forge World, but they even released female heads for simple headswap conversions of Stormcast. Almost makes me want to play them. tallkidwithglasses posted:On a very related note, I think it would be cool to hear about community building tactics- especially because people often get into these games as a teen when theyre pretty susceptible to political extremism. I think a lot of posters currently have nice communities of people that dont suck to play against, but it would be neat to think about how to keep communities vibrant and how to expand them- both to marginalized people and how to handle things if you end up with a wannabe Hitler youth showing up.
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# ¿ May 21, 2019 23:46 |
tallkidwithglasses posted:Yeah I think the other discussion that goes hand in hand with establishing inclusiveness is how to self-police. I think the case of “weird thirtysomething getting really friendly with a 17 year old and counting down til her birthday” is a clear place where you yell at him to gently caress off and go away, but at least personally I’d be a little more hesitant to just totally cancel a high schooler or even college kid who regurgitates some dumb chan poo poo. Maybe I’m overthinking it and things are obvious in context. Like in the latter case the proof is when you say "Hey, that poo poo is rude, cut it out," possibly with a short explanation. If the reply is some variation on "ah hell I'm sorry, I didn't know" or a conversation, then the raw material is good. If the answer is "lol triggered?" then you get the ban running.
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# ¿ May 22, 2019 02:48 |
Kai Tave posted:As someone who spent a year moderating RPGnet, which does have a rather extensive list of rules and guidelines for users, this is 10000% correct. Trying to nail down what constitutes acceptable behavior in a social space with a specific set of itemized rules is begging to have every dickhead in existence try to game them as hard as humanly possible. The end result is you wind up throwing them out anyway (hopefully) but then you have to answer a bunch of other peoples' questions about "why did user gasthejews1488 get banned, they didn't violate rules 1, 3, or 17 that I can see." It is vastly superior, in my opinion, to have a short and simple set of rules first and foremost of which is "don't be a bigoted rear end in a top hat, or even a garden variety rear end in a top hat to the point that you're making GBS threads the place up." Hell I was a mod on a game once and I told a repeat offender, "Listen, this is our third chat, I'm not gonna give you some itemized list of specifics about you being a dickhead again." His reply was "I wish you wouldn't take me so seriously " which told me: Yeah, this guy's doing it on purpose. Out he goes.
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# ¿ May 22, 2019 03:38 |
tallkidwithglasses posted:I would think that skewing towards inclusivity of marginalized communities and ostracizing of toxic predatory assholes is long-term good for business. Judging by the conscious steps the major industry players (Wizards of the Coast, post-Kirby GW) have been making towards inclusivity and increasing visual representation I wouldn’t be surprised if market research bears that hunch out. To be explicit this is in addition to the many other virtues of inclusivity. tallkidwithglasses posted:The phenomenon where nerds in power defend sexual predators is really weirdly prevalent. Im not a sociologist or anything but there seems to be a pattern.
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# ¿ May 22, 2019 04:26 |
All these groups have humans in them and humans have many flaws, which we could count until the Battle Cattle come home. And yet, it is generally held we can choose to do better. Perfection may never be reached, but we can be like a ratchet, and make all our motion go in one direction - a good one.
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# ¿ May 22, 2019 06:02 |
tallkidwithglasses posted:I think it shows an interesting facet of patriarchy and serves as a kind of compass as to how toxic masculinity functions. I’m not sure I’m good at articulating what I’m thinking about but it’s something along the lines of when you remove the obvious “alpha male” types you see how male power structures form and reflexively perpetuate some nasty stuff. Meanwhile, while nuances and details differ, there were doubtless plenty of sportsplayers and sexhavers who grew up to be decent people and were even at the time not actually doing anything particularly toxic.
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# ¿ May 22, 2019 07:02 |
Geisladisk posted:Children need clear and consistent boundaries. That conflict should never be resolved with violence except in certain edge cases is just confusing for a young child.
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# ¿ May 23, 2019 00:02 |
smug jeebus posted:Italy was the Meatwad of the Axis Powers, I think seeing them being played them is more embarrassing to fascists than anything else.
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# ¿ May 26, 2019 07:50 |
Yeah I figured bad gaming < no gaming was more about being in a dragging lovely campaign you don't care about, or playing Pathfinder when you hate Pathfinder because it's the only thing played locally, etc. If these people have some dude barking racist bullshit that is a different order of problem.
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# ¿ May 27, 2019 11:23 |
My headcanon when I was in 40k poo poo was that Space Marines are gonna look like that after they integrate their stupid alien power-up glands even if they started out as ladies.
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# ¿ May 28, 2019 12:54 |
FactsAreUseless posted:It is, and I mean this sincerely, an astonishingly bad idea. Something Awful is not a country or a society, the principles of democratic governance don't apply here. In fact, neither do most of the principles of good governance. If we ran SA like a real government it would collapse almost immediately.
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# ¿ May 31, 2019 05:01 |
Cat Face Joe posted:my non political take is that this dude sounds like an enormous dumbass This is not so. Just about everything will have politics in it, beyond perhaps extremely basic stories. I think it is fair to say, "When I wrote XYZ, my intention was not to discuss Issue ABC," as a creator, and it is also fair to enjoy and draw value from works that do not agree with your politics-- and this does not mean that you do not actually hold those politics, either. This issue I suppose is that in American discourse (which is unfortunately fairly hegemonic) "political" used casually means "is about the issues of the day or about the left/right dichotomy broadly defined by the Republican party and its agents, and to a lesser extent by the Democratic party and those affiliated with it." But this is parochial. Kreia makes many political statements. (For instance, she is against organized religion, which is not very controversial in the game's audience, and is also against a particular aspect of the supernatural, which is a pretty heavy statement.) I think one big challenge everyone in these fields is facing now is that if you skillfully write a character with a reprehensible opinion or attitude, some fraction of the audience will love it, and celebrate it, and take it as validation. This is probably not a hole you can dig out of with additional layers of satire and cynicism.
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 22:53 |
TheDiceMustRoll posted:I thought we were going to avoid discussing Warhammer
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# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 23:06 |
That game is gross and I'd say running its equivalent at home among consenting players would also be gross. On the topic of shock tactics to recruit among the little Hitlers, I wonder if the real thing they end up searching for is people who are easily bullied as much as people who are going to be enthusiastic about Bedford Forrest-chan's Night Lolitas. They need people to boss around, obviously; otherwise where's the fun?
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# ¿ Jun 3, 2019 21:49 |
Deified Data posted:Makes the questionable choice of casting their opponents as the more badass faction that is 100% gonna win, which is odd? Basically if the Evil Hordes aren't within hailing distance of victory AT LEAST, nothing they do makes any sense, there's no need for a fuhrer, etc. You even notice this in their discourse, it's never "We have a great many people crossing the border; we need to spend more money on monitoring and barriers," it's "illegal disaster crisis invasion WALL".
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# ¿ Jun 4, 2019 01:06 |
If you're having a normal one over fear that you somehow "can't" have a militaristic culture or source of recurring humanoid foes for your adventurers, don't be. Just make it clear these are the imperial soldiers or bandits or something rather than Ye Orcs, Who Are Tainted by the Touch of Sin and Bear the Skin of Ham.
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# ¿ Jun 5, 2019 04:25 |
alansmithee posted:I'm wondering, do people also ban certain spells? Like fireball, cloudkill, phantasmal killer/weird, incendiary cloud, etc? Are PCs made to always use non-lethal violence? I mean the central conceit of DnD (which the article was about) is running around murdering stuff to increase in power while looting whatever your enemies had. Like I understand if you're gaming with Ted Bundy or something and he's going into loving detail about how he captures someone/something and starts slicing pieces off, but I guess I'm not seeing the big controversy of "someone drop a zone of truth, I'll make an intimidate roll". Like I think most people who play DnD understand it's a game and a lot of things that are allowed there would not be good in reality. I'm genuinely trying to understand the mindstate where this is an issue for people, because I don't think I've ever encountered anything similar in any of the games I've ran/participated in. Contextually torture is also, like, a thing you do to someone who you have already captured. By the time you have a guy in a position to be tortured, you could also just hit that guy with a coup de grace and they would be dead. This feels morally different to me than firing a fireball at a platoon of bandits. Even if you have a grotesque power disparity the other party is not "in your power" already.
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# ¿ Jun 9, 2019 22:22 |
Ultiville posted:I was thinking it seemed extremely strong, but I haven’t played much 5e. Did they somehow make it so that battles don’t snowball as people go down? I guess it doesn’t stop save-or-suck stuff, but not being able to get defeated in detail seems important.
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# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 12:29 |
Admiral Joeslop posted:I'm not sure if this is the right thread but it sure feels right, even if the discussion has probably been had before.
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# ¿ Jul 17, 2019 11:17 |
The Gate posted:This is a fairly tangentially related thing, but since YouTube recommendations are being discussed, people interested might want to listen to the podcast Behind the Bastards, episode 67. It goes into some of the stuff that's been discovered about how the recommendation algorithm works (spoiler: it's super not good!) and why you tend to see awful things show up in your recommendations no matter what.
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# ¿ Jul 17, 2019 21:27 |
Yeah the thing people (deliberately, to some extent) ignore is: The way most of these guys stop being the fash is to stop heiling at the game table, apologize if they were lovely to people, and then go do something else. You CAN stop, though there will likely be long term social consequences proportionate to how hard you were heiling.
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# ¿ Jul 23, 2019 02:32 |
Kai Tave posted:Oh sure, I agree that the lovely things anti-vaxxers do to their kids is pretty terrible, especially the whole "making my kids drink bleach to cure their autism" type thing, but it's more that you can't rationally debate an anti-vaxxer into going "oh wow you're right, I've totally been abusing my kid and vaccines are helpful." I don't know how precisely you (the general, societal you) address that issue in an effective way, but I know it doesn't involve trying to meet some sort of rhetorical middle ground with the people feeding their kids bleach.
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# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 04:29 |
Liquid Communism posted:Disease is not vulnerable to the Stone Cold Stunner.
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# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 05:14 |
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# ¿ May 18, 2024 21:24 |
90s Cringe Rock posted:I don't want to go through the 100-page hellthread again, but it was the one about wanting to rape another user and hear them pray. Apparently the quote doesn't appear anywhere in the database, which includes deleted posts and edits? Christ! You start spraying right wing bigotry and everyone crawls over themselves to suck your genitals.
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# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 13:00 |