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fr0id posted:I want to throw out some other questions about games where you literally play as reactionaries who are also entirely correct like delta green. I think part of it would be that as a society we're conditioned to see these people using their power as good, and even for people who can recognise that these people using their power is bad, actually, that conditioning doesn't really go away. Fantasy offers us an opportunity to indulge that conditioning in an environment where actual people don't get hurt. On some level, anyone raised in western society wants all the stuff we were told as kids about the police, the security services, being there to keep us safe to be true, even if we've had to punch that part of us down and supress it as we later realised the truth. Most of these games feature a deep secret that only the initiated know that justifies actions we'd see as evil in our world, but ironically the true fantasy here is basically the exact opposite. When we play something like Delta Green, on the surface we're playing a game where our actions as members of the authority are motivated by the dark secret of eldritch horror, but what we're really playing is a game where the actual real-world dark secret that the actions of members of the authority are motivated by capital, patriarchy and racial supremacy is untrue.
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Aug 4, 2021 10:20
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I think the traditional format for these sorts of games just frankly cannot give a critical picture of those systems. Maybe there's a genius way to do so, but at least in every one of these games I've seen, the goal is to win, and the way you win is by having the "best" colony/plantation/town/guild, and the fact is that things like slavery and colonialism happened because they were the "best" ways to extract maximum value from land and people, so players are going to engage in those systems. And the problem is that while colonialists may taken people and treated them as property, meeples and cubes really aren't real people, so no amount of trying to get players to consider the moral implications of their actions as colonisers is going to provoke actual deep reflection. To maybe put this more succinctly, I don't think you can make a game that adequately critiques colonialism while simultaneously having the player be the colonialist. What I think we need in that regard are games which more radically reimagine what a game about this period should be. A game which tries to make you think "what I'm doing here is really bad" isn't going to do the job. We need more games from the perspective of the oppressed, that aim to get the player to think "what's being done to me here is really bad", because its much more effective for a critique to get the player on side and emotionally invested in the plight of the victims and put them in the role of victimiser. It's easier to see a token representing an enslaved person as a person when that token represents the player themself, their friend or their family. I have no idea what form those games would take. It would be hard to do sensitively, since these are stories of loss, and you don't want to give some false impression that enslaved people or indigenous people could have "won" if they'd just tried hard enough. At the same time, while you could make a pretty depressing game that lays bare the evils of slavery and colonialism and have a great teaching tool on your hands, it's unlikely to be particularly fun to play, which is an objective we usually want in a conventional game. A game I'd really like to get a chance to play some time is Spirit Island, where the players are trying to expel a colonial power from their island. You draw an adversary Arkham Horror style that determines the monstrous entity you'll be battling against this game, with such foul names as "England" and "Spain". I'm not sure myself how well it handles the stuff I've mentioned, but heck, at least it's worth something to actually see a game where colonialism is the explicit enemy for a change. EDIT: I edited out an example of the game where you're a organising trains to death camps in the holocaust and said this was emblematic of a game that a player would dismiss as "not real", but I looked this up and it was more sophisticated than that. Train sounds like it might have actually been a rare exception by subverting traditional game design to make a more cogent point, though I do think it falls into the category of "worthy, educational, only play once" mentioned before. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 15:21
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fool of sound posted:Spirit island focuses more on the environmental message than the anti-colonialist one. Invaders, who are various European colonial powers as you said, are on the Island to extract resources and build industry, which causes environmental damage and thus kill the nature spirits that the players control. They also do attack natives who share space with them, but don't otherwise deliberately hunt them down or exploit them. Similarly, the natives don't actively resist the Invaders unless attacked first or a spirit urges them to do so. There are some effects that convert natives to invaders and vice-versa, but the native-colonizer relationship isn't really deeply examined. Ah, that's a shame I guess, but still, the environmental message is a good one, and if nothing else the mere act of representing the colonial powers as the adversaries rather than the protagonists is refreshing all the same. Also no idea why I called it a video game in the bit you quoted, since it's a board game, haha.
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Aug 6, 2021 16:03
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Triskelli posted:It may fail the definition of “Adequate” but John Company and An Infamous Traffic (by the designer of Root) make their satire/critique a little more obvious by talking a step backwards into colonialist societies. You’re not the invisible hand of Capital trying to do A Colonialism the best to get the most points: you’re a family patriarch trying to use the revenue from the colonies to throw opulent weddings & own the fanciest hats. I'll give both of them a look, I haven't played either, thanks! Archonex posted:Yeah, plenty of games adequately critique things from the perspective of the person doing harm. I'd argue that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, actually--the original game's option to socialise the economy means that, in the end, you're not playing (or at least, not only playing) as the people doing harm. Because if the conceit of the Landlord's Game is that you're all playing as Landlords, on what planet do Landlords vote to implement Georgist Socialism? As soon as the players do that, they're effectively taking the role of the common worker, the victims of the oppression you played in the game's first phase. The critique here works because the players are put in the shoes of the oppressed, and act to change the status quo. And when you strip that out...you have Parker Bros' ripoff Monopoly, where everyone is now explicitly playing only as the landlords. And nobody plays Monopoly and comes out the other end with a hatred of landlords or a newfound respect for socialism, the only critique Monopoly offers is a critique of the bastard who suggested you play it in the first place.
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Aug 6, 2021 20:06
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Archonex posted:I mean, originally you are the ones doing harm according to the first ruleset you have to play with. That's literally why monopoly is such a tedious ragefest for many people, since the unrestrained capitalist ruleset is designed to be extremely unfair and biased to the point of frustration and tediousness. But again, that supports the point I'm making. There's two games here, The Landlord's Game, which was the original, and Monopoly, which was the Parker Bros ripoff. In Monopoly, you play only as the unrestrained capitalists until one person wins. In The Landlord's Game, you may start out playing as the capitalists, but there are specific mechanics which allow and indeed encourage you as players to transition instead to playing as the working class. And of these two, only the one where you play as the working class is an adequate critique of landlordism, because it's the only one which supports play as the oppressed. The other one is just a poo poo game. I dunno, I guess my argument wasn't as clear as I thought it was because it's being taken as technically wrong because you do actually play as the landlords at the start of The Landlord's Game. But I thought my overarching point was fairly clear, that a better approach to critiquing these systems probably comes from playing as the oppressed group in these systems, and in that sense The Landlord's Game and Monopoly basically form a minimal pair exactly illustrating that: take a game which is a critique of landlordism and remove the very the thing I'm saying we need more of (games which have you play as the victims of the system being critiqued), and it stops being perceivable as a critique of the system and instead becomes the game everyone has in their house and devotes exactly zero critical thought to. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 21:40
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Archonex posted:Monopoly is literally a bastardized version of the Landlord's game. That's why I keep referring to the original ruleset. Monopoly is like half of the total original product. As part of the overall chat about Monopoly I was referring to the original Landlord's Game rules in my prior posts and why it has multiple intended and unintended politics, along with how Monopoly ended up being stolen to create an extra layer of (hosed up) implied politics behind it. I think we're definitely communicating poorly. I promise I am fully familiar with Monopoly and the Landlord's Game and the history between the two, and Elizabeth Magie, and Parker Bros, and all that. I thought providing the name the game had under those original rules unprompted would have been sufficient to indicate that I knew what you were talking about when you referred to "the original rules". I am 100% in agreement that the Landlord's Game shows you as one of the oppressed. That is exactly the point I'm making. It is the single relevant difference between the two games. And one of these games (The Landlord's Game) is a good critique of Landlordism, and the other one (Monopoly) is pretty much not a critique at all. Both games have you play as the oppressor, but the only one that works as a critique is the one which also has you play as the oppressed. And what I'm saying we need more of is games where you play as the oppressed. Like, my original point here was that games like Puerto Rico and such where you play as the governor of a colony or a plantation, or a wealthy merchant or whatever are essentially the default mode for games which have history or economics as their set dressing. And I think it's very hard to give a cogent critique of these systems that will be perceived, understood, and hopefully accepted by the players when the only perspective players get on the mechanics puts them in the shoes of the oppressors. In this sense, modern Monopoly is a good example: you play as a landlord, you roll some dice, maybe you get lucky, maybe you don't, you snowball a bit and the game drags out to its inevitable conclusion with one player winning all the money. And despite the fact that you could construct a critique of landlordism from it, virtually no one who plays Monopoly actually perceives that critique through play or learns anything of value. Now the original rules, despite being older, are actually more innovative by having a mechanics change halfway through which basically flips the economic system and the notional "people" the players embody on their heads. That's pretty unique. You don't start a revolt halfway through Puerto Rico and try to do the Haitian revolution. You don't switch to playing the Utility Worker's Union halfway through Power Grid. In that sense, The Landlord's Game is not a traditional sort of board game, because the entire point is that halfway through, the system you spent the game constructing comes down. And it's that break from convention (or if you like, the virtue of having been designed before the convention was established) that makes it possible to give a good critique. Is the fact that you start out playing as the oppressor vital to the game's message? Absolutely! But it's also not special, because it's what almost every conventional boardgame about history or economics does. What makes the game special is the inclusion of the second phase, and it's more convention defying stuff like that we need.
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Aug 6, 2021 22:43
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Another important factor in early D&D was the notion of the Party Leader, or (at even stricter tables) the Caller. At many tables (maybe most), there was an implicit understanding that someone in the party would be doing most of the talking to the DM, whether that was making the final decision on what the party was going to do in the dungeon, or being the face of the party to NPCs. In both cases this job would tend to go to the fighter player--as the front liner they'd the the one literally leading the way through the dungeon, and when it came to interactions with NPCs, the Fighter was both a normal man and effectively a noble-in-waiting making him a natural choice to do the talking to the innkeeper, farmer or local baron, who were the ones giving you most of the quests. That gave you quite a bit to do as a fighter in either situation, and it also gave you a certain level of investment in the rest of the party such that their power was also partly your power. But with the advent of bluff and diplomacy checks in 3e, it was much more in your interest to have your highest charisma player doing the talking, which would almost certainly not be the Fighter.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:47
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Arivia posted:It’s really unclear. There’s an offhand mention in the Avatar Series book 4 or 5 that the “current” system of the afterlife was created around when Myrkul (your Reaper) came to power, but specifically who did it or why isn’t stated. What is clear is that trying to undo it like Kelemvor (your overworked Death) makes everything break, really really quick. Apparently though, while he publically backed down and toed the line, he seems to have sent a letter to Ao's luminous manager who backed him up a few editions later: SCAG Errata posted:[NEW] The Afterlife (p. 20). In the second paragraph, the last sentence [describing the Wall of the Faithless] has been deleted. Of course technically they haven't actually said it's gone, but I don't see them ever referring to it as a thing that exists in future based on that. If there's no way to find out it exists without going out of your way to read previous edition content, for all practical purposes it doesn't exist any more, since any players who don't have a lore nerd proclivity or a pre-5e experience of the setting will never know it exists. I've never been much convinced by the idea that the wall is necessary somehow, since the fact it was created when Myrkul came to power cements that relatively speaking the wall is fairly new, less than two millenia old, and it was seemingly not necessary for the vast majority of all of existence. Insofar as it is necessary, it is only so because Ao has willed it so, and Ao could just, y'know, will something else. It also creates some kind of weird conflicts with the religions in Kara-Tur, Zakhara and Maztica. If my players ever do decide to go crusading, I have a few ideas lying about on how to kill Kelemvor, how to disable or bypass the fugue plane and so on, that they can pursue. Then Ao can decide if he wants to directly step in and for a change actually personally interact with some mortals who are blowing up his precious wall, or he can come up with a new system that's not so monstrously evil. But until then the Wall stays up, at least at my table. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 00:41
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Eh, I'm not talking about power level specifically. I am more saying that an atheist in a fantasy world wouldn't be a guy not believing the gods literally exist. It'd be the guy watching jesus turn water to wine and saying "eh, so what?". But in this case, what distinguishes a fantasy atheist from a fantasy theist? Like, even if you take out some intrinsic spark of divinity, the general characteristics of what makes something a god in a polytheistic setting is that they have a domain over which they have particular and significant control; prayer to them, or lack thereof is believed to bring either blessings or curses (and in a fantasy world potentially actually does); and generally they have some degree or influence over or interaction with the afterlife or process of rebirth. If we take this as our definition of what a god is, it seems fairly clear that the entities referred to as gods in fantasy stories usually are, in fact, gods. If our fantasy atheist’s response to this is to see this as “just one more magic thing in a world where their house pet might have a magical ability”, the theist is the guy watching the atheist make that argument and saying “eh, so what?” Yeah sure Umberlee, goddess of the sea, is “just” a particularly powerful magical being. Doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t say a prayer and do a sacrifice before you get on a ship she might use that magic to drown you.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's the same question as what makes magic magic. Like why is real electricity not magic but a fantasy fireball spell is? They both just follow known physical rules of the world they exist in. There is plenty of fantasy wizards that decide magic is just a science and stop treating it as something other than that. I think the problem with this is it relies on a very specific understanding of what it means to be a theist that I don't think is necessarily reflected in either historical polytheism or in fantasy RPGs. Like, if we look at ancient mesopotamia, you could literally kidnap another city's gods and hold them hostage by stealing their statues, which to me does not suggest that they believed their gods to be a different and wholly apart from the world thing. Polytheistic myths frequently see their gods manifest in the world, they have emotions, flaws, they can have children with mortals. The Egyptian Book of the Dead includes handy tips on how to beat the system after you die. The Buddhist concept of the Six Realms supposes that it is possible for a human to be reborn as a god. Mesoamerican religion believed that the gods literally needed blood sacrifice to keep the universe functioning. All this says to me that the default assumption we're running with here that the gods are somehow distinct from the world is drawing a hard line that I don't think actual polytheists would. In my estimation, the sort of person being described here as a fantasy atheist seems to have rather similar beliefs to a Neoplatonist, rather than a Christian. And a neoplatonist in a wholly polytheistic world isn't really analagous to an atheist, they're a theologian. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 14:16
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And all the other examples?
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Mar 12, 2022 14:45
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Who knows, I’m saying there is examples of real people saying they are atheists that also think a bunch of entities exist. It’s not an unknown or modern only idea in the real world. Okay, could you give a few examples of pre-modern buddhists believing in these entities and describing themselves as atheists?
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Mar 12, 2022 16:40
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:....... Siddhattha Gotama Cool, could you cite where he called himself an atheist.
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Mar 12, 2022 17:07
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:He was born thousands of years before that word existed. Exactly. So your claim that he was a pre-modern buddhist who described himself as an atheist is false, isn't it? I understand what the buddhist viewpoint on the gods is. What I'm disputing is your contention that, pre-modernity, this would have been recognised by its adherents as a form of atheism. And remember that the key point here is that we're hypothesising what it would make sense for an individual in a fantasy setting with a polytheistic faith who self-describes as an atheist to believe, and what positions they would hold that would distinguish them from a theist in such a setting. If you take someone with beliefs like this: And drop them in a standard fantasy setting, this individual is a theist. Your average denizen of Rome or Waterdeep is going to recognise this as a novel but entirely valid theistic viewpoint. And if they wouldn't treat it as atheism, and the adherents wouldn't consider it atheism, it's not really a good model for what our hypothetical fantasy atheist would believe.
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Mar 12, 2022 20:15
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I think we have some competing definitions of atheist going on here. I think both of those definitions make sense as atheism, but the understanding I have of owlofcreamcheese's "atheism" is that it's neither of these, it's "Thinks the gods are merely particularly powerful magical beings", and my objection isn't that this is a silly position for an atheist to take, it's that it is not a particularly controversial position for a theist to hold. Like, it's an objection to the gods that comes across as a complete non-sequitur, since you don't need to believe that a god is "special" or "different" from merely being a particularly powerful magical being to do sacrifice to get blessings or ward curses, and you don't need to believe Lathander has some ephemeral spark of divinity (even if, as it happens, he does) to hope that he takes you into his service in the afterlife.
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Mar 12, 2022 21:37
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Arivia posted:Lathander is on the list of 10 or so deities that definitely demonstrably has a divine spark hes’s been hosed with so much. Poor guy. The various heresies surrounding Lathander and Amaunator are one of the go-to things I use to explain why I like FR as a setting, how FR religion is weird and overlapping and messy in a way that feels very realistic for a setting which have actual gods vying for influence over varying domains and mortals who only kinda sorta understand what's going on above their heads.
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Mar 12, 2022 22:22
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm saying, a level 2 wizard with a rope and a pinch of powdered corn can create a pocket universe. That saps a lot of the transmundane out of meeting the guy that created the universe. A whole universe is a big spell, but not too different in kind. A fantasy world atheist would see a title like god as needless puffery. Like the aliens from stargate, they really existed, they were far more powerful than the Egyptians, they just weren't capital G "Gods", they were just guys saying they were gods to make themselves feel special and exploit people easier. The "fire god" granting a cleric level 9 spells might not seem so special to the warlock that gets the same thing by owning a particularly evil sword or having met a genie once. Why though? What makes the title "god" puffery? That point of view only makes sense if you're coming from a world where the default meaning of god is like, the abrahamic god. Absent that context, it's just a name for the particular class of supernatural entity that these beings fall into. It's like saying that the title "ghost" is puffery. I think the fact that you reach for "the guy that created the universe" is telling--that's how monotheists understand the idea of god, but it's not how polytheists would understand the term. Like, just consider Deverra, Roman goddess of midwives and brooms. I don't think anyone's expected to be impressed by Deverra, goddess of brooms. If these entities are not gods to this hypothetical atheist, what is a god? How has the atheist arrived at this definition, within the context of this universe?
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Mar 13, 2022 02:37
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It doesn't sound like you are disagreeing, Devas being extremely godlike but not "Gods" is exactly what I'm saying. They are very powerful and a buddhist may believe they exist, but can still say they don't believe in "gods". Some do say they believe in gods, or say specific beings are different than the others and some are Gods, but I think it's rare to see buddhism generally described as polytheistic, it has lots of supernatural entities, but few or no Gods. But again, this relies on the idea that theists in the setting our atheist wizard inhabits would see this viewpoint as wrong. And the examples I provided speak to the fact that no, this is a viewpoint that's essentially consistent with "standard" historical polytheistic viewpoints. This is how a theist wizard could see the universe.
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Mar 14, 2022 15:38
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Tiler Kiwi posted:I think the problem with a lot of the "superman turns BAD oh no" stories is just that the only real 'fix' undercuts the entire premise - you have the superhero lose to some other superhero or get talked down, which doesn't really address the fundamental problem, or you have them lose to mundane forces, in which case they weren't really 'super' in the sense of being able to essentially veto the entire political apparatus at any time with their sheer power. Plus the problem isnt the superhero going 'evil' at all, rather just the problem being the unaddressed question of 'what if the political dimension was entirely replaced by superhero fiat'. The one comic series that I know of that sort of went into it was Fist of the North Star, where the states of post-apocalyptic world are basically just cults organized around people who can explode people with their fists. Its not a great world to live in if you can't do that. There was The Authority, which was a comic book series with the rough premise of "The Justice League, but willing to use their powers on politicians". Memorable events in the series included "brainwash the leaders of israel and palestine to resolve the peace process" and "overthrow the US government in response to the US continuing forbidden interdimensional experiments that almost destroyed the planet in a previous arc".
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Jun 16, 2022 02:52
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As I recall, it's never actually implied in the ending of the game that you actually assume rulership over the independent Mojave. Getting the ending does involve you carrying out Benny's plan to topple House and take over, but I'm not sure you ever actually get the opportunity to affirm at any point that taking over is what you are intending to do. You can certainly infer that, since you probably have command over a vast securitron army, that your character does take over, but the game is strangely uninterested in having the player character articulate what "an independent Mojave" actually means to them. So you get this weird thing where the ending recognises you as "responsible for independence" but that's it. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 17:16
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Schwarzwald posted:"Law and Chaos" have been used as distinct godly political factions of no overt moral bearing in fantasy for quite a while. This was actually how they were originally presented in D&D. I don't think that's really true to be honest, the latter bit. The original rules referred to Law and Chaos as the two alignment extremes, but the creatures listed as being on the side of "law" were things folklore and fantasy associates with goodness and virtue like unicorns, pegasi and treants, while creatures on the side of "chaos" were things Ghouls, Vampires, Medusae, and tellingly, Evil High Priests. I think there's a fairly clear moral implication there. As to alignment languages, I believe Gygax mentioned somewhere that he viewed these as liturgial languages, things like Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic and Hebrew. Things you might not speak in in everyday speech with those close to you, but if you were a traveller from Spain in Poland you could maybe ask for food by reciting the part of the Lord's Prayer that goes "Give us this day our daily bread" in Latin. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 19:29
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Dwarves as fantasy Scots is a bit of a weird one for me as a Scot because I don’t really see “stereotype of Scottish people” in your stereotypical dwarf. They’re commonly portrayed with Scottish accents and sometimes have Scottish names and occasionally have a bagpipe joke thrown in, sure, but that’s kind of it? Like, your stereotypical Dwarf is short, strong, drinks a lot of beer, lives underground and is obsessed with gold. The only parts of that that really fit a Scottish stereotype are “drinks a lot” and “obsessed with gold” and tbh that’s almost quaint because Scots being misers is some 18th century poo poo I don’t think anyone considers stereotypical of Scots any more, and if you were reaching for a stereotype of modern Scots, implying we’re stereotypical for drinking beer again misses the mark so hard it’s kind of cute. Basically, if you switch out the accents and tone down the Scottishness of the names there’s very little that culturally connects dwarves to Scotland, I think.
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Oct 22, 2023 11:40
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