Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Vulin posted:

Okay, I'll bite. What sort of crazy stuff did they write in that Gypsies book?

Gypsies are the greatest thing ever, and they are so cool and amazing, and they have magic powers and basically if you aren't one, you suck.

Their magic powers come from their bloodlines, which date back to some time in history where a lady and a vampire got together to try and recreate the biblical tree of knowledge. This split off into the Ravnos (vampire gypsies) and the Silent Striders (werewolf gypsies), while the real gypsies are totally blood pure and wonderful and don't you wish you were one of them?

It includes a parable that (supposedly) gypsies tell each others, about how when Jesus was being nailed to the cross, some little gypsy kid stole the nails they were going to nail him up with, and Jesus said "Hey, thanks kid, but give the nails back. Also, you and your descendants are exempted from the commandment about not stealing" which explains why it's totally cool that gypsies are thieves and stealing is okay when they do it.

The author, Teeuwynn Woodruff, was the kind of person who went by only her first name on the credits page, and in addition to working on most of the games you've heard of from the 90s, used to blog a lot about reality TV shows.

There's very little mention of the racism, exclusion, and horrible material conditions faced by the real life Roma. Closest analogy I can think of would be an unintentionally racist person trying to write about Wakanda

Edit: Here's a bit from the opening, in which they explain in no uncertain terms that they do not get it, and aren't going to get it

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jul 28, 2021

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 17:56

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:01

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Christ, this is worse than I remember

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jul 28, 2021

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 18:21

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

One story I remember is that during the development of some Changeling: the Dreaming (a game about fairies hiding in the real world, and who need people to be whimsical and childlike to survive) supplement, one of the co-authors brought in all their old toys from when they were a kid for everyone to play with. And no one had as good a time as they remembered pushing toy cars around and pretending to dress up dolls or whatever. The author cited this as evidence that the modern world was corrupt and fallen, and banality had taken away their ability to dream.

Which, uh... If you're in your 30s and still playing with children's toys the same way you did when you were a young child...

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 20:22

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

eviltastic posted:

Well, you can�t really expect children to paint their action figures before fighting pretend battles like the adults do.

Exactly. The irony of working for a company that publishes guidelines for playing make believe with your friends, while claiming no one can pretend or dream anymore was evidently lost on that author.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 20:41

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Ronwayne posted:

You go too far away from Vampire and you end up with Phil "Satyros" Brucato telling you its not bestiality as long as you're both wolves.

Yeah, Mage: the Ascension is a particularly weird thing combining the worst parts of "magick" and "what a lot of people think post-modernism is"

In the world of Mage, relativism is real.

Like, seriously. Reality is constructed via consensus, so the only reason science works, for example, is because enough people were convinced that water boils at 100 degrees or whatever and that two plus two is four, rather than five. There are no absolute truths and no concrete rules about things.

This manifests itself in strange ways throughout the game line, and the people writing it (as usual) don't seem to understand the implications that they've put into the setting.

So, the in game reason for the world being the way it is is that a group of mages called The Technocracy decided to "save" the world by removing all magic from it, and replace that magic with Science. Instead of the world being defined by a person imposing their will upon reality and changing it to how they want it to be, instead, there would be Science, which was "objective" and which everyone could do regardless of magical talent. Rather than killing two rabbits and smearing blood all over yourself, you could simply go to an ob-gyn and have a wand and gel put on your stomach to see if your baby is healthy during pregnancy. Rather than hoping that the food was edible because you prayed enough, you'd put it over the fire for a little while to remove the infection. Rather than hoping that the medicine man decides the tribe is worth enough for him to purify the stream so that the village doesn't die from waste contamination, we have sewage systems to separate drinking water from waste water.

The Technocracy are the bad guys of the setting.

Because they "fooled" the world into thinking Science was real, now the world is mundane and sad and lacks imagination. Things are predictable and dull and safe and gently caress you Dad you can't just tell me to do math homework I need to DREAM!

Mages are reality's losers. They are people with competing worldviews that lost, and/or didn't work out. The nine core Traditions, as they're called, are

The Akashic Brotherhood -- kung fu monks who are a m�lange of Buddhism and Taoism
The Celestial Chorus -- Christians
The Cult of Ecstasy -- Potheads
The Dream Speakers -- Native Americans
The Euthanatos -- an apocalyptic cult of Indian assassins who think that killing bad people is necessary to "turn the wheel" and start the next age of Man
The Order of Hermes -- Magicians ported over from Ars Magica
The Sons of Ether -- Steampunk anti-vax moms
The Verbena -- Witches
The Virtual Adepts -- Hackers

(Some were renamed in the 20th anniversary edition, but frankly, I don't care)

Now, an interesting game theoretically exists exploring the implications of the Overton Window and how historical evidence shapes our view of the past and how different people looking at the same pattern will find different things in it, but, uh, this game isn't it, and why is not particularly complicated.

In addition to being a sober and deep examination of the world's construction ala Eco's Foucalt's Pendulum or Baudilino, the game also wants to be the Burger King Kids Club vs the Men in Black. Like most White Wolf supernaturals, the combat capacities of every mage at through the roof, but, additionally, their reality warping capacities are through the roof. By 3 dots in whatever, you can control minds, blow up buildings, warp space around yourself, and basically play Doctor Manhattan. But, uh, people are dumb, and if you do this in front of them, they can just say "I don't believe in fairies" and if no one claps their hands to bring you back to life, you're boned. They won't believe their evidence of their own eyes, because science tells them that magic isn't real and people are sheep and won't make up to the truth and so on and so on.

So you end up with this convoluted system of rationalization, where "Oh no, I didn't throw a fireball to fry that guy, a gas pipe just coincidentally exploded underneath him (and *shh* I secretly made that happen with magic)" which, well, which is it? Did you really hadouken the fireball, or did you use fire magic to detonate the gas pipe? This is fine when it's all just fiction to describe why the fighter takes 2d6 damage and is moved back two squares, and it doesn't matter whether it's a fireball explosion or a Jedi force push or the thief doing complex acrobatics with a lot of daggers. But when that ambiguity is supposed to be a core theme of the game?

That's not so bad in and of itself, because the stakes are, frankly, action movie. When I was young, I liked the idea of folks who "really knew what the world was like" fighting against The Man.

But as I age, and I think more, other examples pop into my head which aren't so great. The Sons of Ether, for example, are practitioners of alternative science, and are your goggle and raygun types. In reality, these people do exist, just as much witches and magicians and traditional religious folks. They're the ones who got my uncle to kill himself via homeopathy and colloidal silver. And this has some uncomfortable implications: if the game logic is "real" then am I responsible for killing my uncle because I didn't believe in homeopathy enough? is it society's fault for not believing in the efficacy of homeopathy? or is it the practitioner's fault for not admitting that they lost the "Reality War", and clinging to outdated beliefs? And all of this could be handwaved as "dumb game stuff, don't think about it too hard", except that Satyros Brucato was genuinely worried about people casting spells accidentally while playing the game.

Going off his blog and my interactions with him, Brucato is a nice tolerant and liberal guy who is terminally 90s in his outlook. The idea that, for example, the "Q Shaman" is doing his own version of magickal consensus reality in which Trump is the rightful victor of the election and therefore god emperor, is intolerable to Brucato, even though, by his own system there is no way to determine what is real except via king mob.

_{A Verbena and a Dreamspeaker, from the 20th anniversary edition of Mage}

[url posted:

https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/time-to-leave-the-funhouse-part-ii-the-end-of-the-apprentice/[/url]]
Adding insult to a slew of injuries, the invaders dressed themselves as veritable cartoon characters, some with logos from Marvel Comics films and characters, others decked out in videogame drag. I�ve learned that at least one person photographed in the company of Q-Shaman-Boy and an rear end in a top hat bearing a Confederate battle flag was a member of the White Wolf LARP community. Another supposedly belonged to the medieval recreation society where I met my first wife. My outrage isn�t just political, it�s personal and professional as well. For a creator of fantasy media, such grotesque misuse of our vocation feels like a punch in the gut.

America, we need to stop this poo poo.

Our addiction to nonsense is literally killing us.

Neil Postman, in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, spotlighted America�s obsession with prefab mythology. That phrase, amusing ourselves to death, has been stuck in a groove inside my head these past few years. On Wednesday, four people literally did amuse themselves to death, took another person with them, and might have killed even more people if they�d had the chance. Any sane society would take what happened as a warning of our impending collapse. To many Americans, however, it was just another episode in this crazy TV show, and we�re all eager to see what the next installment brings. Personally, I love horror films� and that�s what this feels like: a horror film in real time, where we can�t look away, but we can�t stop watching either because hey � at least we�re not bored, amirite?

Then again, we don�t have to clean the blood off our clothing and stare at the empty place at our table or bed where a human being used to be.

tldr: Mage is a game where Meme Magic is real, even realer than it is in reality, and the people trying to keep the wheels on the bus and preventing us from going back to philosopher kings are the bad guys.

Very thorough write up here about everything wrong with Mage, of which I've barely scratched the surface: https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/latwpiat/mage-the-ascension-20th-anniversary-edition/

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jul 29, 2021

# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 16:34

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

MonsieurChoc posted:

Technocracy are the bad guys not because they believe in Science, but because they're Western Imperialism and Capitalism.

Sure, I can agree with that.

But Mage needs to provide an alternative that isn't anarcho-primitivism until the rule of Randian superpeople who create reality according their whims, or anti-scientific libertarian utopianism in which each person is the ruler of their own dream reality pocket, in order to make them not look so appealing.

From LatwPIAT's F&F write up:

quote:

I think Brian Campbell [in the 20th anniversary edition] does a very good job of explaining why a lot of readers ultimately feel the Technocracy is a better option than the Traditions:

M20 posted:
Consider, though, the horrors of a world truly without enforced boundaries. Imagine, if you will, a freeway without speed limits � the high-octane chaos of metal and momentum. Wouldn�t you want a police officer to pull over that reckless driver who�s speeding in the wrong direction, weaving in and out of traffic and probably headed straight toward you? And what would happen if a driver�s license weren�t required� or insurance� or knowledge of the law? Even with all of these restrictions, speed kills and humans complain endlessly about everyone else�s actions. That�s human nature, after all. But human nature demands authority, both to comfort its hurts and to control its extremes.

And that�s especially true when it comes to magick.

Campbell further likens it to gun control and careless words. It is a very topical way of posing the question, and I think these two last ones are especially cogent ways of presenting the conflict between the Traditions and the Technocracy; the Traditions are spun from the philosophical argument that individuals should be free to do as they please - freedom of speech, freedom to own potentially hazardous items, freedom to cast potentially hazardous spells; the Technocracy is the counter-argument that for the good of all of us, some sacrifices must be made; restrictions on speech that can harm others, restrictions on items that can harm others, restrictions on spells that can harm others. It's easy to see then, why some people would fall on the side of free speech, gun ownership, drug legalization, and freedom of choice, while other people would fall on the side of hate speech laws, gun control, prohibition, and freedom from harm.

Given the history of very heated online debates, though, Campbell should perhaps have chosen a less sarcastic tone:

M20 posted:
For over a century and counting, the Technocracy has accepted that challenge. Despite popular misconceptions, they�re the good guys in a world gone mad.

Oh, it�s true that they�ve been known to breed monsters. Cyborgs, HIT Marks, clone warriors and bat-winged Chihuahuas occasionally make the rounds when the Union goes to war. But then, war is always ugly, and every veteran gets his or her hands bloody doing things that would give nightmares to the folks back home.

It makes the whole thing difficult to read; am I supposed to take the passages about the Technocracy ultimately being run by compassionate human beings trying to do their best as police officers of the world seriously? When it talks about the need to impose order for the greater through force, is that an unfortunate consequence, or am I supposed to read it as a convenient lie Technocrats tell themselves to justify their brutal oppression? When it talks about how the Technocracy wants to Ascend everyone into a state free of suffering, fear, hate, and ignorance, should I believe it? It's very hard to tell what's the intent here; it may well be that it's up for interpretation. It certainly does not help that the Traditions are not a viable alternative to the Technocracy's goals ; it would be easier to read Campbell's descriptions as tongue-in-cheek if there was an obvious, non-Technocracy-solution to all the problems the TU claims to attempt solving. In the absence of other workable solutions, the Technocracy's methods seem justified - yet at the same time the way it negatively affects its victims is emphasized hard. It's a hard question, and in some ways I appreciate that Campbell does not try to provide an easy solution.

edit: For a more concrete example, Mage cannot explain to me why life under John of God would be much better than life as it currently is, if you aren't John of God.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jul 29, 2021

# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 17:34

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Randalor posted:

If it's not outside the scope of the thread, could i ask for some details on the bolded part? I know that the beta? document had some 1488 numbers crop up (I'm assuming that's what you mean by the signaling to neo nazis), but... what's this about causing international incidents?

So, first this happened:
https://rainbo.co.uk/article/169

quote:

White Wolf Uses Violence In Chechnya as an Islamic Vampire Sub-Plot

Despite the ongoing humanitarian crisis affecting gay people in Chechnya, WhiteWolf saw fit to use their suffering as a sub-plot in their latest table-top RPG supplement.

Tabletop RPG Vampire the Masquerade (5th ed.) has recently released The Camarilla - a sourcebook (supplement) which introduces new lore into the setting. The book contains a rather alarming section regarding the persecution of queer people in Chechnya, which is still going on today.

The book describes Chechnya as being dominated by Islamic fundamentalist vampires called the "Abrek", who has taken over Chechnya and turned it into "undead refuge and homeland for Kindred". Setting aside the gross implications of that, WhiteWolf makes it worse by turning the imprisonment of queer people in literal death camps into what is described as a "clever media manipulation".

The Camarilla posted:
The recurring international controversy over the persecution of homosexuals is a clever media manipulation designed to keep the focus on Sharia law, away from the true inner workings of the republic. While homosexuals are indeed held in detention facilities for days, and humiliated, starved, tortured, and eventually fed upon and killed, this is not the point. The point is to distract from the truth of what Chechnya has become. That said, even among the Kindred any kind of �homosexual behavior� is punished harshly.

The only word to describe this is vile. Using real life tragedy affecting gay people that is still on-going today as a subplot for an islamophobic vampire back-story. WhiteWolf has fallen from grace since it was bought by CCP Games in 2006 - CCP axed the staff from WhiteWolf, then sold the WhiteWolf and Work of Darkness IP on to Paradox in 2015.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was a video game based in the universe of the World of Darkness, released in 2004. It has gained cult-like status since then for being an example of how RPG should be. There has not been a game since which captures the same feel and atmosphere of the game. It's a shame that this timeless classic of video gaming history is now associated with this.

Which is pretty hosed up and bad.

Then this happened:
https://archive.is/Zyyws

quote:

Chechen authorities demand satisfaction because of game about vampires in Chechnya

The Swedish company apologized for the �Sultan Ramzan� and the Caucasian army of the undead in the game, but the republic is waiting for monetary compensation.

The Chechen Minister for National Policy and External Relations, Jambulat Umarov, demanded satisfaction from the Swedish company Paradox Interactive which released a board game with Chechen vampires and their sultan named Ramzan.

Vampire: The Masquerade was considered a �grave insult,� and the apologies of the game developers were taken as mockery, TASS reports.

�I would like to hear the colleagues, what satisfaction will be, if they are going to bring it at all, what specific monetary equivalent are we talking about, how we will live with it,� said Umarov.

In the game, Sultan Ramzan reigns over the army of the undead on the territory of Chechnya, and the media sells fictions about persecution of gays in order to distract the public from the true essence of the power elite. The company promised to remove this episode from the game.

The people making this complaint are well-armed reactionaries that are very bad people

More info here: https://sputniknews.com/world/201811171069893129-chechnya-anti-gay-vampires/

# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 21:30

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Wanderer posted:

One of the things I thought was interesting about how Mage was developing over the course of its second edition was that its overall metaplot was moving in a direction that made the Technocracy much less cartoon-villain.

In the original edition, it was very much magic antiheroes vs. The Man, with the Technocracy as basically every information-suppressing villain from '90s pop culture rolled into one. The introduction even has a newbie mage show up with a katana hidden under his trenchcoat. They knew what they were about.

The second edition filed some of the rough edges off of that, however, up to the point where they released a book about how to run an all-Technocracy game. They were increasingly depicted as a powerful but flawed faction, much like the mystic Traditions, where their philosophy had some obvious weaknesses but they did have a series of increasingly valid points. The 2nd edition Technocracy might be the closest thing in the old World of Darkness to a faction that is unequivocally on the side of basic humanity.

Then third edition came along and threw most of that in the gutter. It was a pretty sharp change in creative direction; now the Technocracy had just outright won, partially due to a phenomena that blocked off the spirit world from Earth, and anyone who wasn't a Technocrat was just playing out the string.

I don't disagree with comments about the general philosophical flaws of Mage--I'm trying to be objective about it, since I really like the game and have a lot of good memories attached to it--but one of the biggest problems is that philosophical incoherence was slowly being addressed in 2nd, and then 3rd blew it up in favor of doing Orwellian Cyber-Wizards.

This is a very fair assessment and summary.

I want to still like Mage. I own most of the books, I spent a ton of high school memorizing the lore, and I have fond memories of playing the games my friends and I made out of it and other White Wolf stuff.

But when I look back on it, and what happened with it, and all the parts of it that I ignored or couldn't afford to buy or that just went beyond me, it's just not the game that existed in my head 20 years ago.

And that's okay. I've made peace with it. In the meantime, I can play Esoterrorists to scratch that itch

# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 23:10

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Gulping Again posted:

It's worth noting that we have not yet truly entered the poo poo dimension when it comes to either incarnation of the World of Darkness.

I know this because nobody has posted word one about Beast: The Primordial, the worst WoD splat ever made by anyone.

Beast? What's that? Some sort of fan project or something? There's no WoD game named Beast, I assure you!

(But for real, Beast is pretty :psyduck:

if you think about it even a little bit, and even moreso when you read about the abuser who wrote it. Learning more about it will not make you happy. Read the above link only if you want to be upset.)

Wanderer posted:

Slightly off-topic, but you may also like a comic that's running right now called The Department of Truth, which feels like a Mage game with its serial numbers filed off.

This looks pretty cool! Thanks for the recommendation

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 05:42

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Ferrinus posted:

Both editions of Mage are about revolutionary politics in the face of global capitalism. Awakening is better for a number of reasons, but people really sell Ascension short because they've failed the test it puts in front of them. On one side, you have the imperial west, which is objectively strangling humanity to death. On the other hand, you have a variety of factions united against the imperial west, some of them drawing from the past, some of them drawing from contemporary counterculture, all of them with a bunch of weird flaws and poor historical track records and so on. Are you with them or against them? Will you fight, or will you perish like a dog? There's no third option, because capitalism doesn't give you one; you can fight it or you can be devoured by it.

A lot of Mage fans were fooled by Guide to the Technocracy and similar books into thinking that capitalism is good. Awakening is a lot more blunt with its politics, so while you get a lot of genuine pro-Technocracy roleplayers who either don't realize or don't care that they're on the side of fascism, people who are pro-Seer of the Throne are mostly doing bits.

I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people.

Like, what does the world look like if the Traditions win? A modified version of Torg? How does day to day life go by in a society where the Verbena control consensus, and how is its treatment of the poor and infirm that different from under the Technocracy? And how does that differ from the mindset of a guy who thinks that the world would be better if we just let the Catholic Church control everything, but with Catholic scratched off and Wicca written in? If one doesn't like life under the Order of Hermes, can one just walk one country over and try out the Sons of Ether for a bit? Who is feeding people if the Order of Hermes is in charge? Are there still farmers and miners to produce the raw materials that the magicians need to do their magic? Or do things like hungry and thirst magically disappear without Capitalism? Which Tradition "wins" in the end? Because many of them aren't peaceful live and let live type organizations, and it's difficult to picture the Celestial Chorus, the Euthanatoi or the Order of Hermes not attempting to convert and control the other Tradition's followers immediately when given the opportunity.

I understand the argument the game presents, but I don't find the answer it gives of anti-scientific libertarian anarcho-primitivism particularly compelling. It's similar to how I think racism is a genuine problem, but don't think that Tariq Nasheed or the Black Hammer Organization provide a workable solution to it.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 15:00

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Digital Osmosis posted:

See, this is what I mean about the metaphysics of the setting muddling the discourse in oMage and obfuscating Ferrinus' point. Like, I think these are valid objections, but also that Ferrinus' read is correct, and I think that the reason both of these can be true is because the oMage metaphysics are incoherent and unworkable. In oMage the villains really are capitalism, and also the hero's plans really are "destroy the germ theory of disease." nMage's politics are clearer, sure, but that's not the only reason the discussion is different. It's not just blunter political metaphors in nMage, it's also a metaphysical framework that doesn't make a victory for Mages something that's easy to imagine as utterly terrifying.

This is very well put.

White Wolf in general has a problem of metaphor drift. Like, we already have a very workable metaphor for capitalism in Vampire: old, calcified systems of control that attempt to absorb everything underneath them, and which exist forever the way corporations do. We also have the comically over the top Captain Planet villain in Pentex, responsible for both world scale destruction of the environment and toys that literally make children depressed and teach them to be sexist and abusive. And so of course, when the Mage metaphor for capitalism comes up, well, it needs to be tied into the other two: the Syndicate's Special Projects Division works alongside Pentex, and there are probably Vampires working with Hall and Nash and the rest of the New World Order, and so on. But then the metaphors fight each other? How are we supposed to read the Technocracy blowing up the Ravnos antediluvian with the ghost of the Hiroshima nuke? Are the Vampires now the persecuted minorities, rather than calcified capital? Is this instead now a metaphor for Capitalism supplanting Feudalism? Or is this just a way to move the metaplot forward and erase some mistakes White Wolf made in the early 90s?

So, with most oWoD games, you end up with this strange mixture of "philosophical musings on the nature of trust, belief, and control" with "Doctor Blight and her computer sidekick MAL are hacking into the environmental agency's database to turn parks into legal dumping sites for Sly Sludge" and the reach of the former generally exceeding the grasp of the latter.

Mark Fisher's Capitalism Realism hits on this very well: it's difficult to imagine a world not run on capitalist principles. In order to present a "reality war" one needs to provide a coherent and appealing vision of what that alternative world looks like and how it functions. oMage doesn't do that very well, in my opinion. nMage does.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 16:11

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

fool of sound posted:

Honestly I find that old mage better reflects the tendency for real world occult and pagan revivalists to imagine themselves as ideologically superior to existing systems of power when there isn't actually any reason to believe that they're not just a different flavor of the same basic thing

I agree.

The differences between Silver RavenWolf, Rhonda Byrne, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and Joyce Meyer are mainly ones of aesthetics.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 16:37

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Ferrinus posted:

The Traditions, plural, are now an ecumenical organization dedicated to human liberation rather than to specifically the church of Rome or whatever.

[Citation needed]

quote:

But if you're like "who is feeding people [after the end of capitalism]" they've already got you.

Worrying about and improving material conditions is a primary concern of leftist thought. Does hunger simply not exist without capitalism? Do material needs just get magicked away?

quote:

Phil 'Satyros' Brucato doesn't have a good understanding of the setting they're letting him work on.

Brucato was the primary designer in charge of 2e, Revised, and M20. Who is "they"? Stewart and Stephen Wieck? Chris Early? Chris Hind? Mark Rein�Hagen?

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 17:08

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Ferrinus posted:

[Snip]

I like your vision of the game as an optimistic enlightened Marxist revolution much better than the one that was printed by White Wolf.

edit: to expand on this a bit, an analogy: I like X-Men comics. I think they're a fun and interesting and flexible idea. I could name off many runs and writers that I really enjoyed. But, also, I could talk about runs which didn't get it, were made by old writers returning to material they had aged out of, and ones which are downright offensive.

So, if I were to speak about X-Men being good in any sort of long form sense, it would be in a qualified way. "My" X-Men are like this, which involves ignoring these comics which, while published, I think are very bad and don't get at the core concepts that make X-Men good. But it does introduce problems like when someone brings up the salient point "What if the X-Men are a really good analogy for the police, rather than minorities?" and I have to say "Well, yeah, I can see that reading, but I don't like those X-Men runs by writer XYZ and I don't think they understood the concept very well".

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jul 30, 2021

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 17:42

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Geisladisk posted:

I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage.

Honestly, I feel like blending the two does a disservice to both, because it just makes so many things inconsistent and trivializes so many things.

Example: The Ventrue's whole deal is that they are a shadowy cabal of evil immortal businessmen who hold the reins of the world economy in secret. But... uh turns out that no actually another shadowy cabal of plutocrats controls the entire world economy, and that is just one department out of many. So which one is it, guys?

It also trivializes the vampires hugely. Who cares about a bunch of petty immoral jerks and their fiefdoms when in the background you have people fighting over the nature of reality?

This is a problem that was taken to parodic levels in The Chaos Factor, a crossover adventure starring the villainous Samuel Haight, a kinfolk skindancer/ghoul who also has a magic pumpkin branch (The Staff of the World Tree) that gives him mage powers, who is coming to Mexico City to gain the blood of a extremely powerful vampire (who he believes to be a Antediluvian, but is really "only" the 4th generation methuselah Huitzilopochtli, a Baali who has been in torpor under Mexico City ever since the heroic Lasombra travelling with the conquistadors freed the Aztecs from his rule (Yes, the conquistadors are welcomed heroes believed by the natives to be Quetzalcoatl, liberating the Aztecs from their evil "god" in this setting), and who is using Samuel Haight to cause chaos in the heralding of his awakening and planning to sacrifice the 400 residents of Para�so Vista to Baal. Haight believes that Huitzilopochtli's blood will make him an even more powerful Mary Sue.

According to interviews with the designers, the character was supposed to be a joke about the dumb powergamers who wanted to play vampire-werewolf-mages, but for a joke, he certainly was a focus of the metaplot for a long time.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2021 14:25

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

# ¿ Jul 31, 2021 18:25

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

One product line's politics that I find fascinating is Hunter: the Reckoning.

The result of a couple interesting ideas crashing into the "facts" about the setting, Hunter was released in 1999 as part of the "Year of Reckoning" that saw a bunch of other revised releases, and a big red star appearing in the sky to warn us all about impending doom.

Now, before I talk about Hunter's politics and their problems, I need to set some ideas up, so please bear with me.

Most fictional stories involve people with agency, people who do things. While there have been some very interesting novels about inaction and stasis (Stoner by John Williams and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace come to mind), the vast majority of fiction involves people who do things, who have their world changed, and who subsequently take some action. Even a play like Hamlet, which features a lot of vacillation on the part of the protagonist as to what he should do, eventually has him take action and then deal with the consequences.

Speaking in the broadest of broad strokes, this has meant that fiction typically dealt with elites, with people who had the means and the opportunity to act. Our oldest stories are about Gods and Kings; meditations on the joys of an uneventful life as a peasant farmer were reserved for poetry. This eventually expands to include not just King, Gods, and their offspring, but their more distant offspring, the knights and heroes. Action and choice are reserved for the elite, and the preterite were left to be the NPCs of stories.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow posted:

Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows.

We do better now, with a vast array of stories featuring all sorts of people from all walks of life, but stories still tend towards people with agency: billionaires, geniuses, special soldiers, etc. or at least people who are temporarily experiencing agency: divorcees on vacation to find a new partner, kids in college, a bakery owner who just witnessed a murder and is the only one who can help the local sheriff...

Games are no exception to this: very few of us choose to pretend to be ourselves as we exist currently. We choose to be heroic knights and wizards, or powerful scheming vampires, or giant robot pilots, or post-apocalyptic saviors. Part of the fun of a game is doing something you cannot do in real life, be that help the unfortunate and bring about genuine lasting social change or set one's self up as a world controlling dictator with a vast harem.

And WoD was no exception. The Vampires, Werewolves, Mages, etc. are the elite of the world. What they did mattered. They were special and powerful and "regular" people stood no chance against them. Not even taking into account roleplaying situations, these characters just have more dice they can roll and more abilities they can access which make them demonstrably more powerful than others. The "mechanics" of the universe set them up as superior.

And again, this is fine. It's a fantasy. It's healthy to pretend and get out of one's own head for a while. It's a game and it's meant to be fun.

This brings us back around to Hunter. Hunter was about playing a "mere mortal" imbued with divine(?) power in a moment of crisis and given the opportunity to fight back against the forces of darkness that corrupt and descend the world. Perfectly good hook, and something that a lot of people would find very appealing. Finally, a game that will let us punch that smug vampire rear end in a top hat through his face, and let him know that for all his plans and machinations across the centuries, he's no match for someone who is Fed Up and Not Going To Take It Anymore.

Unfortunately, the game can't make up its mind, and the writers seem so enamored of all the precious elites they've spent a decade lovingly crafting, that the text is constantly undercutting itself. A Hunter's magic powers don't work at the GM's discretion, depending on the strength of the supernatural entity. A Hunter, mechanically, has no way to access the full suite of combat powers that vampires and werewolves and mages have: no extra actions, no die pool buffs, no innate defense or regeneration. The art shows normal people killing werewolves with spoons and shotgunning vampires into paste, but the words constantly admonish the player against wanting to do all the cool things in the art with that hoary old cliche about not becoming a monster one's self, as if there's some sort of moral equivalence between being, for example, a super-powered sexual predator, and being the person who stops that predator. The game wants you to be cunning and clever, rather than using brute force, but it has no way to support this mechanically.

The writers simply cannot help themselves from siding with the elite. They don't want their precious NPCs to be bothered by some common people. They don't want their time and space warping metaplot to be derailed by some weirdos who get magic powers from voices. Those are the important people! Not these jamokes! And this is even in a supplement where those "mortals" are being blessed with supernatural power; the text extols the virtues of collective action on one side, and then turns around and says that the "regular" masses are a bunch of losers, cowards, and impotent fools who will only get in the way. Some parts are written in a heroic "What will you do when you life is ripped away from you and you decide to fight back?" style, but the rest of it answers "Die like a dog, because the monsters are quantitatively better than you". They want to do the Lovecraftian horror of being pulled into an unknown and unfriendly world, but seem to have forgotten the part where Cthulhu gets beaten by ramming a boat into him.

The whole game line reminds me of an infamous module for Paranoia, a game about paranoid bureaucracy in an underground bunker. In this story, The Computer, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided to change the food tanks from a circular shape to a square one. This will accommodate a slightly larger amount of food in the same space, and is thus a net good. The Computer has not calculated, however, that the spinning blades in the vat move in a circle, not a square, so the tanks all get gunked up in the corners and have rotten food trapped there, spoiling the entire batch. But Friend Computer is never wrong; it making a mistake is impossible, so the PCs have to deal with their society slowly starving to death regardless of whatever impotent action they take, often being executed by their peers for daring to question The Computer. It's meant to be a slow, sad game about inevitability and failure, with some very black humor thrown in, and the module states that outright at the beginning that there is no way for the PCs to "win". Regardless of their actions, everyone dies because of The Computer's decision. The PCs can only keep prolonging the inevitable.

The differences is that Paranoia has a very different tone, and going in, the PCs know that character death will be frequent, brutish, and often funny, in the style of Vonnegut or Heller. Hunter's tone is all over the place, and the system as written doesn't make the PCs able to succeed, or even make much of an impact.

There's an idea of a good game here, but the way it's presented both fictionally and mechanically is so antithetical to the proposal that it just doesn't play very well without serious adjustments to the mechanics. As written, it doesn't allow for the agency of the other product lines. It's not very fun, because the very writing in the book often seems to hate the players and hate the idea of them achieving anything. And these days, at that point, why not just play Monster of the Week instead?

# ¿ Aug 1, 2021 05:36

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

One of the most infamously gross supplements produced by White Wolf was Freak Legion: a Guide to the Fomori. This was published under their "mature" imprint, Black Dog Game Factory, which started as an inside joke and self-parody in the Werewolf games, and then became a thing in the real world that produced exactly the kind of edgelord stuff the parody was making fun of.

_{From the first edition Book of the Wyrm}

A Fomori, for those not familiar, is a human who has been corrupted and transformed, through a combination of evil spirits, "Science", and magic, into a monster. They are often unwilling participants in an experiment, people trying to improve themselves, or just those unlucky enough to eat fast food. They are generally created by Pentex, a corporation that controls basically all industry, and is devoted to the Wyrm, the spirit of corruption and depravity that Werewolves spend their existence fighting. Basically, take any random Captain Planet episode, but filter it through White Wolf's gothic-punk sensibilities, and you'll get the idea.

_{This, but they're also all Werewolves}

Now, as with a lot of Werewolf products, this one rocks back and forth pretty severely between "Just describing the world as it is" (gas and petrochemical company with a reputation for irresponsibility "Endron", for example) and "Bizarre parody that reveals a lot about the author's insecurities". Freak Legion is steeped in a particularly 90s fear of anything "unnatural" or "chemical", and nowhere does this come out better than in the section "Recruitment." This chapter details the various organizations and groups that help turn normal people into Fomori.

Unfortunately, because of the game's fetishization of "natural", the examples it chooses are... interesting. There are eight total example groups:

Action Bill Tattoos! -- In a genuinely clever piece of writing, one of the ways that Pentex pursues its goals is by vilifying the Werewolves through a GI Joe style TV show. Action Bill and his friends Atom Sargent, Hero Worm, and their mascot Wolf Skynner battle against the evil werewolf forces of W.O.L.F. These temporary tattoos featuring the characters each contain a bane fragment and will corrupt the kid.

Conceptual Services LTD -- a fertility clinic that will turn the mother into Mia Farrow from Rosemary's Baby, and she'll give birth to Macaulay Culkin from The Good Son

Dr. Viridian's Workout Program -- a fitness organization selling supplements that will transform a 90 lbs weakling into a muscular, attractive rear end in a top hat with a magnetic personality. Eventually, they will end up in a "throwback" state of degeneration, but this hasn't happened much yet. Until then, Dr. Viridian "continues to rake in the bucks and crank out an army of muscle-bound fuckheads". Notably, his products don't work well on women.

The Fellowship -- An evil orphanage that raises kids to obey authority without question, consider themselves stupid and worthless, and then places them in abusive households as they transform into monsters.

Homogeneity Incorporated -- a genuinely terrifying gay conversion therapy group.

But, of course, because it's the 90s, they're led by Ed Buck

Registered Artists Worldwide -- a talent agency that produces cheap and disposable artists, who are generally discovered making fetish pornography, and then proceed to get addicted to fame, producing bad music and movies.

The writer of this section apparently had a bone to pick with Quentin Tarantino:

Realm of Deceit -- an evil MUD. Corrupts it's users by getting them to play video games for too long, desensitizing them to violence (in a text based game?), and then persuades them to kill five other players in order to advance to the highest level.

Smoker's Bane -- an anti-smoking organization, which delivers an evil spirit via the group's weekly grape juice toast to self-control, which proceeds to possess people's lungs and make them evil.

A common thread running through each of these is that the unnatural or artificial is bad. Artists should come up naturally through their own talents, not be chosen by corporations. Gay people should be allowed to be gay. TV and games shouldn't promote violence or hatred. Those are pretty tame examples that anyone could agree with. But the pernicious ones are things like vilifying a fertility clinic and an adoption agency. Is this an endorsement of "natural" birth and parenthood over the other forms that exist? Is it wrong to work out and improve one's body? Is it evil to seek help for quitting an addiction? Are those really on par with the others?

I'd normally try to be charitable, and say that they're doing that thing where you take something special and good, and twist it to create a sense of horror, but the way the entries are written, be it the "jocks vs nerds" of Viridian, or the "jerks who want to feel good and have friends as they work on an addiction problem" of Smoker's Bane, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. The writers seem to understand this on some level, but the unexamined politics behind their choices, and their underlying belief that there's no hope for jocks except to be put down by werewolves, are pretty bad.

In the real world, corruption is a choice. The horror, for me, comes from having the ability to do otherwise, but not doing so because of personal gain. Something like "evil orphanage that transforms little kids into demons" doesn't really work for me for the same reason that "Orcs are all born evil, and their evil society produces evil people who do evil things" doesn't really work. When something is predestined, it becomes as interesting as shooting Hitler Youth in a WWII game. The idea of a moral quandary is there, but the sort of game about teaching a racist kid not to be racist is very different from a game about shooting people and getting the (thing) to the (place). Notably, there's no mechanical aspect of the game about curing or de-possessing fomori. It is mentioned in passing towards the end as something hard to find and even more difficult to follow, but, as with Hunter, the game world sets up your hopeless death pretty much immediately -- it doesn't want you playing Battle Angel Alita, even though that would likely be a deeper game than "Gantz, but everyone is into it due to the evil spirits in their heads".

Here's some more Captain Planet:

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Aug 4, 2021

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 16:25

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

To think of it in movie terms, a lot of GMs say they want their game to be Schindler's List, a ponderous examination of horror and the human condition and someone doing the right thing in the face of impossible odds and with a sense of futility that makes them wonder if they could have done more?

What a lot players actually want to play, though, is Inglourious Basterds. Speaking personally, if I wanted to feel sad and powerless, I could just live my regular life.

Counter-intuitively, it's pretty easy to come up with scenarios where sad things happen and nothing matters. It's fairly difficult to write a convincing story where the "horror" is defeated, often because that requires advocating for a particular solution or worldview, as opposed to simply bemoaning the current state of things.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2021 20:05

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

SlothfulCobra posted:

At its most basic, it's like how a math equation where you stick in the wrong number on one end, it'll produce the wrong answer. At more complicated levels, it means that you can't really enhance digital audio or image quality more than they were recorded to be. [...] It's just a very complicated system of tubes delivering one human's stupid to another.

"Computer... Enhance!"

In other news, there was a very interesting article in Jacobin about the commercialization of D&D, while reviewing the new book Game Wizards about the early days of TSR

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/dd-ttrpgs-gygax-arneson-peterson-games-capitalism

quote:

Dungeons & Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
BY
LEONARD PIERCE

The story of Dungeons & Dragons isn�t just about nerds creating a wildly popular game and then losing control of it. It�s also about how the dictates of the free market inevitably end up stripping even our leisure activities of joy.

Review of Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs, to insufferable nerds like myself) are suddenly a hot commodity. For those of us who have been fans of the hobby for many decades, it�s hard to believe that the thing that got us ridiculed in high school is suddenly a mainstream success. There are podcasts and web series about TTRPGs! There are blockbuster movies about TTRPGs! Celebrities play them! What was once a small, marginalized corner of an already obscure hobby is now . . . well, still pretty small, but growing. And you can�t talk about TTRPGs without talking about the granddaddy of them all, the first and the biggest role-playing game: Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).

D&D is the hobby�s 800-pound gorilla (or, in game terms, its seven-headed hydra). But it�s not just because it was the first role-playing game � most fans would argue that it isn�t the best. A big part of D&D�s fame is the history of the game as a business. The unexpected success of D&D, the financial struggles that deepened as it grew bigger, and the loss and alienation of its two cocreators make for a narrative as compelling as any crafted in the game itself � and show the perils of putting profit before purpose in any artistic medium.

Following the death of D&D�s creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, in 2008 and 2009 respectively, there has been a surge of interest in the origins of TTRPG, particularly as the game�s fanbase has expanded during COVID-19. Enter Jon Peterson�s Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons. Peterson focuses on the business end of D&D, examining a period of roughly a dozen years from the game�s creation in the mid-�70s to Gygax�s loss of control of TSR, Inc., its publisher and the company he founded. It�s a surprising, fascinating, and often depressing look at the legal wrangling, corporate warfare, and bitter personal recriminations that followed the game�s path from an amusement for a tiny group of like-minded enthusiasts to an international business.

The Rise and Fall of TSR, Inc.

Peterson is a good choice to write Game Wizards, the first in a proposed series about the history and culture of games from MIT Press. He�s enthusiastic about the hobby without being an uncritical fanboy, and his knowledge of TTRPGs (and D&D in particular) is broad and deep. His writing style is unflashy but compelling, and he constructs the story of TSR�s rise and fall soundly and cleverly. He keeps the bigger picture at the forefront but provides enough detail to keep readers engaged, and the book is as well-documented as any academic work � something of a miracle given the often contradictory and ever changing stories told about TSR by its principals over the years.

But why should anyone outside the realm of TTRPG hobbyists care about Game Wizards? In a general sense, the hobby has a lot of appeal to us socialists, who look at the state of the world and wish that we could construct an alternate one where life is more just and people are more willing to stand up to tyranny. Like any hobby, TTRPGs have gone through social and political revolutions. While D&D�s original players were largely Midwesterners with a libertarian bent, the hobby soon became influenced by a wave of �70s psychedelia as it traveled west, and has been pulled in every other possible direction, from neofascist to old-school socialist.

But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavors to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity. Just as television puts the goals of its creators behind the demands of advertisers, and movies are more answerable to accountants and marketers than to audiences and filmmakers, role-playing games bend the knee to owners who care more about the bottom line than the needs of play and story.

Peterson notes early on that D&D was an unlikely success. Although Gygax left behind a comfortable living in insurance to pursue his gaming hobby, he likely never expected to make more than a modest income. A big reason why is that D&D was never actually meant to be a product. He wasn�t initially interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today; he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up. He wanted this because that�s exactly what he had done as a game player and creator himself, folding J.R.R. Tolkien�style fantasy into his passion for wargaming.

Role-playing games bend the knee to owners who care more about the bottom line than the needs of play and story.
It was only when the rules caught a unique moment in the cultural zeitgeist and became more successful than he and Arneson had anticipated that the TTRPG changed from a hobby to an industry, and TSR, Inc. shifted from, as Peterson puts it, �a club to a company.�

To grow, the company had to expand. To expand, it had to acquire capital and take on debt. And to pay off debt, it had to expand even further. As TSR�s stockholders began to think the company�s financial expansion was more important than paying its authors, artists, and designers a fair price for their work, the workers � not just the company�s employees, but the founders themselves � felt the familiar sting of alienation from their labor.

Arneson, who always found the creative end of things more enjoyable, wanted to pursue other TTRPG projects, but TSR denied him credit for his work, triggering years of lawsuits. Their conclusion guaranteed him a lifelong income but left him bitter at the feeling he was underappreciated for the creative work that made D&D a reality. Gygax, meanwhile, overestimated his own head for business and eventually found himself marginalized and ultimately forced out of his own company. He lost control of the phenomenon he created and worked on less prestigious projects; the company continued to grow but had a number of rocky years of declining reputation, poor leadership, and financial chaos until it was finally swallowed up by a bigger company with more money to spend.

Evil Wins in the End

Peterson recounts this story in Game Wizards, but while the book ends in 1985, the full story of D&D does not. TSR, Inc. would eventually undergo spells of mismanagement, creative lulls, and unprofitability even as it faced competition from younger, leaner companies who took the ideas Gygax and Arneson had created in new directions.

In 1997, TSR was acquired by a Seattle company called Wizards of the Coast, and a few years later, that company was snatched up by gaming giant Hasbro, becoming another revenue-generating machine in their huge corporate portfolio. The results have been predictable. D&D may be more popular than ever, but it�s just another profit-making entity in a company flush with them, and the company will surely abandon the title the moment it starts to make a downturn, to be bought by another company more interested in the value of the name than the worth of the game.

It�s already undergone reworkings designed more to sell products than to improve the game; its flagship website, D&D Beyond, has introduced a suite of high-tech innovations to the game to bring it into the internet era, but it�s also become notorious for extracting as much money from consumers as possible through usurious licensing and constant upselling. Users pay nearly as much for digital versions of the core game books as they do hard copies, and gimmicky items like thematic dice and spin-off products for kids and teens are cranked out while the main game itself remains largely moribund.

What�s more, the behind-the-scenes corporate drama that powers the narrative of Game Wizards continues well past the sale of TSR, Inc. and its D&D-related properties to Hasbro. Gygax�s widow, Gail, has carried on an ugly and very public feud with investors, relatives, and other claimants to his legacy, while over the past year, no less than three groups have emerged to present themselves as the �new� TSR, Inc., including one fronted by Gygax�s son Ernie, who quickly distinguished his with absurd, overblown claims and racist and transphobic statements. (Like father, like son: Gygax himself didn�t think TTRPGs would or should appeal to women because of a �difference in brain function�). It�s a grim story about fallen heroes where evil wins in the end, and it�s not getting any better.

The hell of it is, it didn�t have to be this way.

The Open Game License

Gygax never anticipated making D&D into a corporate behemoth. He just wanted to make it easier for other people to join in his favorite hobby. It wasn�t until the profit-driven logic of capitalism began to dictate the direction of the game that everything started to fall apart.

It would have been easy enough to release the basic structure of D&D, freed from the litigious claws of copyright enforcement, to the general public to do with it whatever they wanted. �Home brews� � campaigns, settings, and even rule sets derived from D&D�s mechanics but tailored toward the creative desires of small groups and individuals � have always been a big part of the TTRPG hobby. Some of the biggest innovations and most creative expressions came from creators who took the original framework of the game and created their own worlds in which to play, including some (the wildly successful Eberron setting, for example, and the gothic-horror Ravenloft) that TSR made part of its official licensing.

Some of the most enjoyable moments of my life have been spent around a table, rolling funny-looking dice and pretending to be a wizard.
This was codified during the Wizards of the Coast years when, recognizing the popularity of home brews, the endless knockoffs of their intellectual property, and the difficulty of enforcing their copyright, TSR released the Open Game License (OGL). This allowed other publishers and creators to release products, within defined limits, using the D&D framework but not bound by the company�s IP restrictions. While it eventually became just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro, the OGL pointed out a direction that could have freed the entire TTRPG hobby from capital�s clutches.

Without the market�s demands and the accompanying dictates that stifle creativity in favor of profitability, TTRPGs could have been part of the public domain, with gamers free to build and expand on whatever ideas they wanted, either their own or ones drawn from other sources. The games could have been like baseball. While Major League Baseball (MLB), for example, enjoys a vastly profitable and government-supported monopoly on the professional game, no one owns baseball itself, and outside the confines of MLB�s multibillion-dollar marketing machine, millions of people watch and play baseball, compete in tournaments, and enjoy it as a rich and malleable hobby that belongs to the people. There�s no reason other than greed that TTRPGs can�t do the same thing.

Profit First, Art Second

I�ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was twelve. At that time, the TTRPG hobby had grown from a marginal one to a national phenomenon; over the years, I�ve been both alarmed and gratified to see it expand ever further and accommodate an ever widening range of visions, ideas, and styles of play, and to welcome in a more diverse body of players than I thought possible back then. D&D has never been a perfect game, but it�s one that a lot of people remember the same way they do their first love. It was a formative experience for us. Some of the most enjoyable moments of my life have been spent around a table, rolling funny-looking dice and pretending to be a wizard.

But Marvel�s and DC�s growth from small companies making comics for kids to corporate juggernauts churning out content for billions has made the love many of its fans once had for the characters turn to dust. Crafts were once an in-home leisure activity passed on from parents to children; now it�s a megabillion-dollar industry whose major players are both greedy and politically toxic. Disney�s gatekeeping of their products to maximize profit has made them vast amounts of money, but it�s torn out the heart and soul that once marked those products.

This is more than just hipster disdain for the sudden popularity of what once was enjoyed by a select few; it�s a recognition that capitalism will always put profit first and art second � or last. It�s naive to think the same thing won�t happen with TTRPGs. These are all specific problems of capitalism: comics, movies, hobbies, and games exist in formerly self-described socialist states, but were considered the property of the people, not just commodities controlled by already wealthy investors.

Game Wizards is not just a captivating story about how one man lost control of his dream. It�s also an object lesson in the way capitalism invariably strips even our leisure activities of their communal joy.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2021 16:16

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Xand_Man posted:

Shreknet you might have thinking of The Book of Erotic Fantasy? It came out near the tail end of the 3.5 days and became a lightning rod for criticism, both out of concern it would cause another moral panic and because make-believe BDSM raises some pretty thorny consent issues. (It was published by White Wolf's d20 imprint)

The author, Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel, was a writer for some very well received 3.5 projects (Races of Eberron, Planar Handbook, Races of the Dragon, Underdark), and, IIRC, it was her PC who was the inspiration for the 4th edition core setting god The Raven Queen. I believe she was a playtester for 4e as well, but don't quote me on that

# ¿ Nov 6, 2021 20:56

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Charlz Guybon posted:

Feel like some of you guys should read these blog posts on how polytheism actually worked.

https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/

This is a really good read on the different mindset. "Faith" in the modern sense was not in question really, back then.

"Should we sacrifice to have a good harvest?" wasn't a question like "Should I go to Midnight Mass on Christmas?" and more like "Do I thread the plumbers tape on clockwise or counterclockwise when installing a new trap on my faucet?" or "If I don't pay my tax bill correctly, will the IRS audit me and slam me with penalties for non-payment?"

quote:

For players that do select a deity, that selection is usually tied to an �alignment� (as with D&D 3.5 Paladins, or most deity selection in the Pathfinder system) which in turn often corresponds to a system of ethics or a way of life. Paladins in Pillars of Eternity receive bonuses to the degree to which their statements and actions match the ethics of their orders, for instance. But while there is a big emphasis on following the ethics or worldview of the god, there is functionally no emphasis on ritual, and even less on the kinds of ritualized exchanges that dominate actual ancient polytheistic practice.

This, to put it kindly, is not how these sorts of religion work.

So how do they work?

Polytheism at Work
The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge. Let�s start with an analogy:

Let�s say you are the leader of a small country, surrounded by a bunch � let�s say five � large neighbor countries, which never, ever change. Each of these big neighbors has their own culture and customs. Do you decide which one is morally best and side with that one? That might be nice for your new ally, but it will be bad for you � isolated and opposed by your other larger neighbors. Picking a side might work if you were a big country, but you�re not; getting in the middle is likely to get you crushed.

No. You will need to maintain the friendship of all of the countries at once (the somewhat amusing term for this in actual foreign policy is �Finlandization� � the art of bowing to the east without mooning the west, in Kari Suomalainen�s words). And that means mastering their customs. When you go to County B, you will speak their language, you wear their customary dress, and if they expect visiting dignitaries to bow five times and then do a dance, well then you bow five times and do a dance. And if Country C expects you to give a speech instead, then you arrive with the speech, drafted and printed. You do these things because these countries are powerful and will destroy you if you do not humor whatever their strange customs happen to be.

(I should add that, over time, these customs won�t seem so strange anymore. Humans have a tendency to assume that whatever the customs � for instance, for diplomacy � are in our time, that this is just the right and normal way to do things. But diplomatic customs vary wildly by time and culture and are essentially arbitrary.)

Ah, but how will you know what kind of speech to write or what dance to do? Well, your country will learn by experience. You�ll have folks in your state department who were around the last time you visited County B, who can tell you what worked, and what didn�t. And if something works reliably, you should recreate that approach, exactly and without changing anything at all. Sure, there might be another method that works � maybe you dance a jig, but the small country on the other side of them dances the salsa, but why take the risk, why rock the boat? Stick with the proven method.

But whatever it is that these countries want, you need to do it. No matter how strange, how uncomfortable, how inconvenient, because they have the ability to absolutely ruin everything for you. So these displays of friendship or obedience � these rituals � must take place and they must be taken seriously and you must do them for all of these neighbors, without neglecting any (yes even that one you don�t like).

This is how these religions work. Not based on moral belief, but on practical knowledge (I should point out, this is not my novel formulation, but rather is rephrasing the central idea of Clifford Ando�s The Matter of the Gods (2008), but it is also everywhere in the ancient sources if you read them and know to look). Let�s break that down, starting with the concept of�

Knowledge
For the Roman (or most any ancient polytheist) there is never much question of if the gods exist. True atheism was extremely rare in the pre-modern world � the closest ancient philosophy gets to is Epicureanism, which posits that the gods absolutely do exist, but they simply do not care about you (the fancy theological term here is immanence (the state of being manifest in the material world). Epicureans believed the gods existed, but were not immanent, that they did not care about and were little involved with the daily functioning of the world we inhabit). But the existence of the gods was self-evident in the natural phenomena of the world. Belief was never at issue.

(This is, as an aside, much the world-view we might expect from a universe � as is often the case in speculative fiction or high fantasy � where divine beings are not merely immanent, but obviously so, intervening in major, visibly supernatural ways. The point at which this or that supernatural, divine being brings someone back to life, grants them eternal youth or makes swords light on fire ought to be a pretty substantial theological awakening for everyone there. Even for other polytheists, such displays demand the institution of cult and ritual.)

This, of course, loops back to one of my favorite points about history: it is generally safe to assume that people in the past believed their own religion. Which is to say that polytheists genuinely believe there are many gods and that those gods have power over their lives, and act accordingly.

In many ways, polytheistic religions, both ancient and modern (by modern polytheisms, I mean long-standing traditional religious structures like Hinduism and Shinto, rather than various �New Age� or �Neo-pagan� systems, which often do not follow these principles), fall out quite logically from this conclusion. If the world is full of gods who possess great power, then it is necessary to be on their good side � quite regardless of it they are morally good, have appropriate life philosophies, or anything else. After all, such powerful beings can do you or your community great good or great harm, so it is necessary to be in their good graces or at the very least to not anger them.

Consequently, it does not matter if you do not particularly like one god or other. The Greeks quite clearly did not like Ares (the Romans were much more comfortable with Mars), but that doesn�t mean he stopped being powerful and thus needing to be appeased.

So if these polytheistic religions are about knowledge, then what do you need to know? There are two big things: first you need to know what gods exist who pertain to you, and second you need to know what those gods want.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2022 15:49

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Reveilled posted:

Cool, could you cite where he called himself an atheist.

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/buddha-god-human/

quote:

Buddhism is famous in the West as an �atheistic religion,� in the sense that, unlike the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it does not recognize a single creator deity. However, one should not assume from this that Buddhism has no gods. It has not one, but many.

In traditional Buddhist cosmology, the gods�or deva in Sanskrit, a cognate of �divinity��are distributed among 27 heavens (svarga): six are located in the sensuous realm (kamadhatu) along the slopes, at the summit, and in the air above Mount Sumeru, the mountain at the center of the world; 17 in the meditation heavens of the realm of subtle materiality (rupadhatu); and four are in the immaterial realm (arupyadhatu), where there is no form, only consciousness. Because each of these heavens is located within samsara, the realm of rebirth, none of these heavens is a permanent abode of the gods who live there, and none of the gods is eternal.

Rebirth as a god is based on virtuous actions performed in a previous life, and when the god�s lifespan is over, the being is reborn some place else. Thus, no god in Buddhism has the omniscience, the omnipotence, or the omnipresence of God in the Abrahamic religions. This does not mean, however, that gods have no powers. They have powers far beyond those of humans. And over the long history of Buddhism, Buddhists, including monks and nuns, have propitiated various gods for blessings and boons. A substantial part of tantric practice, for example, is devoted to inviting gods into one�s presence, making offerings to them, and then requesting the bestowal of various powers (siddhi).

What then is the status of the Buddha? Technically, he is a human, among the five other rebirth destinies (sadgati) in samsara: gods, demigods, animals, ghosts, and denizens of hell. But he is unlike any other human, both in his relation to the gods and in his physical and mental qualities.

In his penultimate lifetime, the Buddha-to-be was a god, abiding, where all future buddhas abide, in the Tushita heaven. It was from there that he surveyed the world, and chose the place of his final birth, his caste, his clan, and his parents. After his enlightenment, the Buddha spent 49 days in contemplation in the vicinity of the Bodhi Tree, concluding, the story goes, that what he had understood was too profound for others to understand, and thus futile to try to teach to anyone.

The most powerful of the gods, Brahma, descended from his heaven to implore the Buddha to teach, arguing that although many might not be able to understand, there were some with �little dust in their eyes� who would. This is an important moment because it makes clear that the Buddha knew something that the gods did not, and that the gods had been waiting for a new buddha to appear in the world to teach them the path to freedom from rebirth, even from rebirth in heaven. For this reason, one of the epithets of the Buddha is devatideva��god above the gods.�

Although a human, the Buddha has a body unlike any other. It is adorned with the 32 marks of a superman (mahapurusalaksana), such as images of wheels on the palms of his hands and soles of his feet, a bump on the top of his head, 40 teeth, and a circle of hair between his eyes that emits beams of light. Some of the marks are characteristics found in animals rather than humans: webbed fingers and toes like a duck�s, arms that extend below the knees like an ape�s, and a penis that retracts into body like a horse�s. His mind knows all of his past lives and the past lives of all beings in the universe. In fact, he is omniscient (although the various Buddhist schools have different ideas about exactly what this means).

Even in the early tradition, it is said that he can live for an eon or until the end of the eon, if he is asked to do so. And in the Lotus Sutra it says that his lifespan is immeasurable. He can go anywhere in the universe. He can perform all manner of miracles.

Did he create the universe? No. Is he omniscient? Yes. Is he omnipotent? It depends on what you mean. Is he eternal? Sort of. Is he God? You decide.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2022 19:05

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

I think we have some competing definitions of atheist going on here.

Atheist as in "Does not believe in the existence of gods" vs "Does not worship the gods, regardless of their existence"

The former is a rather modern understanding of religion, and something foolish to do in settings where the evidence of one's own eyes would prove the existence of multiple gods who regularly perform miracles and give their servants tremendous powers in exchange for worship.

The latter makes more sense in many games, as one can easily imagine a character who refuses to worship out of some personal motivation (i.e. anger, spite, jealously). See, for example, Hrafnkels saga

# ¿ Mar 12, 2022 20:58

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Is it this bit? (Name of the Rose is a must read, IMHO)

Chapter Terce posted:

But now Bertrand del Poggetto was inviting William to expound the theses of the imperial theologians. William rose, reluctantly: he was realizing that the meeting was of no utility, and in any case he was in a hurry to leave, for the mysterious book was now more urgent for him, than the results of the meeting. But it was clear he could not evade his duty.

He began speaking then, with many �eh�s and �oh�s, perhaps more than usual and more than proper, as if to make it clear he was absolutely unsure about the things he was going to say, and he opened by affirming that he understood perfectly the viewpoint of those who had spoken before him, and for that matter what others called the �doctrine� of the imperial theologians was no more than some scattered observations that did not claim to be established articles of faith.

He said, further, that, given the immense goodness that God had displayed in creating the race of His sons, loving them all without distinction, recalling those pages of Genesis in which there was yet no mention of priests and kings, considering also that the Lord had given to Adam and to his descendants power over the things of this earth, provided they obeyed the divine laws, we might infer that the Lord also was not averse to the idea that in earthly things the people should be legislator and effective first cause of the law. By the term �people,� he said, it would be best to signify all citizens, but since among citizens children must be included, as well as idiots, malefactors, and women, perhaps it would be possible to arrive reasonably at a definition of the people as the better part of the citizens, though he himself at the moment did not consider it opportune to assert who actually belonged to that part.

He cleared his throat, apologized to his listeners, remarking that the atmosphere was certainly very damp, and suggested that the way in which the people could express its will might be an elective general assembly. He said that to him it seemed sensible for such an assembly to be empowered to interpret, change, or suspend the law, because if the law is made by one man alone, he could do harm through ignorance or malice, and William added that it was unnecessary to remind those present of numerous recent instances. I noticed that the listeners, rather puzzled by his previous words, could only assent to these last ones, because each was obviously thinking of a different person, and each considered very bad the person of whom he was thinking.

Well, then, William continued, if one man can make laws badly, will not many men be better? Naturally, he underlined, he was speaking of earthly laws, regarding the management of civil things. God had told Adam not to eat of the tree of good and evil, and that was divine law; but then He had authorized, or, rather, encouraged, Adam to give things names, and on that score He had allowed His terrestrial subject free rein. In fact, though some in our times say that nomina sunt consequentia rerum, the book of Genesis is actually quite explicit on this point: God brought all the animals unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And though surely the first man had been clever enough to call, in his Adamic language, every thing and animal according to its nature, nevertheless he was exercising a kind of sovereign right in imagining the name that in his opinion best corresponded to that nature. Because, in fact, it is now known that men impose different names to designate concepts, though only the concepts, signs of things, are the same for all. So that surely the word �nomen� comes from �nomos,� that is to say �law,� since nomina are given by men ad placitum, in other words by free and collective accord. The listeners did not dare contest this learned demonstration.

Whereby, William concluded, is it clear that legislation over the things of this earth, and therefore over the things of the cities and kingdoms, has nothing to do with the custody and administration of the divine word, an unalienable privilege of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Unhappy indeed, William said, are the infidels, who have no similar authority to interpret for them the divine word (and all felt sorry for the infidels). But does this perhaps entitle us to say that the infidels do not have the tendency to make laws and administer their affairs through governments, kings, emperors, or sultans, caliphs, or however you chose to call them? And could it be denied that many Roman emperors�Trajan, for instance�had exercised their temporal power with wisdom? And who gave the pagans and the infidels this natural capacity to legislate and live in political communities? Was it perhaps their false divinities, who necessarily do not exist (or do not exist necessarily, however you understand the negation of this modality)? Certainly not. It could only have been conferred by the God of hosts, the God of Israel, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. ... Wondrous proof of the divine goodness that conferred the capacity for judging political things also on those who deny the authority of the Roman Pontiff and do not profess the same sacred, sweet, and terrible mysteries of the Christian people! But what finer demonstration than this of the fact that temporal rule and secular jurisdiction have nothing to do with the church and with the law of Jesus Christ and were ordained by God beyond all ecclesiastical confirmation and even before our holy religion was founded?

He coughed again, but this time he was not alone. Many of those present were wriggling on their benches and clearing their throats. I saw the cardinal run his tongue over his lips and make a gesture, anxious but polite, to urge William to get to the point. And William now grappled with what seemed to all, even to those who did not share them, the perhaps unpleasant conclusions of his incontrovertible reasoning. William said that his deductions seemed to him supported by the very example of Christ, who did not come into this world to command, but to be subject to the conditions he found in the world, at least as far as the laws of Caesar were concerned. He did not want the apostles to have command and dominion, and therefore it seemed a wise thing that the successors of the apostles should be relieved of any worldly or coercive power. If the pope, the bishops, and the priests were not subject to the worldly and coercive power of the prince, the authority of the prince would be challenged, and thus, with it, an order would be challenged that, as had been demonstrated previously, had been decreed by God. To be sure, some delicate cases must be considered�William said�like those of the heretics, on whose heresy only the church, custodian of the truth, can pronounce, though only the secular arm can act. When the church identifies some heretics she must surely point them out to the prince, who must rightly be informed of the conditions of his citizens. But what should the prince do with a heretic? Condemn him in the name of that divine truth of which he is not the custodian? The prince can and must condemn the heretic if his action harms the community, that is, if the heretic, in declaring his heresy, kills or impedes those who do not share it. But at that point the power of the prince ends, because no one on this earth can be forced through torture to follow the precepts of the Gospel: otherwise what would become of that free will on the exercising of which each of us will be judged in the next world? The church can and must warn the heretic that he is abandoning the community of the faithful, but she cannot judge him on earth and force him against his will. If Christ had wanted his priests to obtain coercive power, he would have laid down specific precepts as Moses did in the ancient law. He did not do it; therefore he did not wish it. Or does someone want to suggest the idea that he did wish it but lacked the time or the ability to say so in three years of preaching? But it was right that he should not wish it, because if he had wished it, then the pope would be able to impose his will on the king, and Christianity would no longer be a law of freedom, but one of intolerable slavery.

All this, William added with a cheerful expression, is no limitation of the powers of the supreme Pontiff, but, rather, an exaltation of his mission: because the servant of the servants of God is on this earth to serve and not to be served. And, finally, it would be odd, to say the least, if the Pope had jurisdiction over the things of the Roman Empire� but not over the other kingdoms of the earth. As everyone knows, what the Pope says on divine questions is as valid for the subjects of the King of France as it is for those of the King of England, but it must be valid also for the subjects of the Great Khan or the Sultan of the infidels, who are called infidels precisely because they are not faithful to this beautiful truth. And so if the Pope were to assume he had temporal jurisdiction�as pope�only over the affairs of the empire, that might justify the suspicion that, identifying temporal jurisdiction with the spiritual, by that same token he would have no spiritual jurisdiction over not only the Saracens or the Tartars, but also over the French and the English�which would be a criminal blasphemy. And this was the reason, my master concluded, why it seemed right to him to suggest that the church of Avignon was injuring all mankind by asserting the right to approve or suspend him who had been elected emperor of the Romans. The Pope does not have greater rights over the empire than over other kingdoms, and since neither the King of France nor the Sultan is subject to the Pope�s approval, there seems to be no good reason why the Emperor of the Germans and Italians should be subject to it. Such subjection is not a matter of divine right, because Scripture does not speak of it. Nor is it sanctioned by the rights of peoples, for the reasons already expounded. As for the connection with the dispute about poverty, William added, his own humble opinions, developed in the form of conversational suggestions by him and by some others such as Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, led to the following conclusions: if the Franciscans wanted to remain poor, the Pope could not and should not oppose such a virtuous wish. To be sure, if the hypothesis of Christ�s poverty were to be proved, this would not only help the Minorites but also strengthen the idea that Jesus had not wished any earthly jurisdiction. But that morning he, William, had heard very wise people assert that it could not be proved that Christ had been poor. Whence it seemed to him more fitting to reverse the demonstration. Since nobody had asserted, or could assert, that Jesus had sought any earthly jurisdiction for himself or for his disciples, this detachment of Jesus from temporal things seemed sufficient evidence to suggest the belief, without sinning, that Jesus, on the contrary, preferred poverty.

William had spoken in such a meek tone, he had expressed his certainties in such a hesitant way, that none of those present was able to stand up, and rebut. This does not mean that all were convinced of what he had said. The Avignonese were now writhing, frowning, and muttering comments among themselves, and even the abbot seemed unfavorably impressed by those words, as if he were thinking this was not the relationship he had desired between his order and the empire. And as for the Minorites, Michael of Cesena was puzzled, Jerome aghast, Ubertino pensive.

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Mar 18, 2022

# ¿ Mar 18, 2022 15:39

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Xander77 posted:

Ok, so it's not the idea of a republic (which was very well known to any educated medieval person), but rather a medievalist foundation for religious freedom (not familiar enough with the theology of the time to see if it actually makes sense).

(As an aside, how do I get that Ukraine thread tag?)

There's a bit in an early Discworld novel (Light Fantastic?) where Pratchett describe a character's outfit as "a diving suit designed by men who have never seen the sea" which has stuck with me whenever trying to consider "What ideas is this character aware of? What things couldn't they know given their circumstances? Even if they want something that I, too, want, what ideas and language would they have to express that idea?"

There's a similar bit in HBO's Rome, talking about the stars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erPu_t7tgQ4

# ¿ Mar 18, 2022 19:05

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Absurd Alhazred posted:

And yet endless war is the premise of the game about endless battles for which you should buy and paint miniatures/run various RPG campaigns.

quote:

This is my argument against people that hate the ending of Red Dead Redemption. Spoilers if you haven't played it...John Marston, the main character, gets a thousand bullet holes in him because the feds turn on him. You are placed in the Kobayashi Maru scenario and you can't do anything but watch the guy you've played as for hours upon hours get butchered.

Then you wake up through the eyes of his now-grown-up son Jack. Your sole purpose for playing story missions as Jack is to Hunt Down the people that killed your father and get payback.

I very much hold to the fact that this is tragic. John spends the entire game trying to save his son from just this fate, and despite all the work he does and all the effort put in, Jack becomes an outlaw and a murderous gunfighter just like his father feared. Something about when I gunned down the retired fed and saw the word REDEMPTION fill the screen, it felt empty.

Now, the reason why I hold that it's *tragic* is that the player straight up chooses to do this. Jack is unaware of John's intentions, but the player has just spent a dozen hours in the eyes of a man trying to save his son. The player then chooses to pursue the path of revenge, the player gets several chances to veer off and explore the open world, but is compelled the FINISH THE STORY. Well the story ends with murdering someone in a gunfight in the name of cold-hearted revenge. Congrats, human player, you undid everything you worked for.

People refute that the game doesn't give you a choice. It does. Stop playing. No one is making you go on the story quests. Sure, there are cut scenes to watch and voice acting to hear, and we're driven by the curiosity of what comes next. But we still have a choice. And our choice leads us to committing to everything we spent the entire game trying to prevent.

I might really like that game, if you can't tell.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2022 20:37

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Halloween Jack posted:

I would agree that there's an element of moral responsibility in storytelling, but playing through different paths in a video game doesn't make you a storyteller in that sense. It's categorically different from tabletop RPGs.

I agree with your broader point, but there's also definitely a Mother Night "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" type perspective as well.

Like, take Dogs in the Vineyard: in this setting, the players are not-Mormon Cowboys who are tasked with resolving problems throughout the not-Wild West, using conversations, guns, and magic powers, and their words are those literally of God and their interpretations are literally correct and divinely inspired. The games notes explicitly that the setting is quite conservative (for example, women keeping their arms covered down to the wrist, unless they're baking or washing or something and would get their sleeves dirty), and filled with all manner of nasty things like homophobia and patriarchy, which, you, the player are tasked with interpreting and enforcing in all of it's contradictory ways. Pride, enacted, creates Injustice which leads to Sin, allowing Demonic Attacks which lead to False Doctrine, manifest as Corrupt Worship which grows into False Priesthood, a Sorcerous cult which leads to Hate and Murder and the destruction of both the social order and functional status quo.

quote:

Remember how, at the end of character creation, you went �mmhmm� like the good doctor? Here�s where you angle the game to hit those issues. In the town just past, what were the characters about? What positions did they take? Which sinners did they judge harshly, and which did they show mercy? What did they say, I mean really say, about themselves and others?

Your goal in the next town is to take the characters� judgments and push them a little bit further. Say that in this past town, one of the characters came down clearly on the side of �every sinner deserves another chance.� In the next town, you�ll want to reply with �even this one? Even this sinner?� Or say that another character demonstrated the position that �love is worth breaking the rules for.� You can reply with �is this love worth breaking the rules for too? Is love worth breaking this rule for?�

But Dogs isn�t abstract or academic! This love, this sinner, this law� those are real people, real characters I mean, in real concrete situations. Create the people and the situations, don�t pose the question in some sort of theoretical way.

Most importantly, don�t have an answer already in mind. GMing Dogs is a different thing from playing it. Your job as the GM is to present an interesting social situation and provoke the players into judging it. You don�t want to hobble their judgments by arguing with them about what�s right and wrong, nor by creating situations where right and wrong are obvious. You want to hear your players� opinions, not to present your own.

It's a difficult game to run well, given the amount of buy-in needed from the players and GM to explore some rather heavy moral issues. This is a setting where thinking you should be married to your friend's wife because you'd do a better job as husband can lead to literal demonic attacks on your town. You're playing in an expressly homophobic and patriarchal world, where the PCs are expected to enforce this status quo, but also have divine authority on their side to interpret doctrine. It's a game one plays to have uncomfortable moral discussions about ethical and religious issues and tell heavy stories where bad things happen because of how the dice mechanics escalates conflicts.

Given what Baker said in one interview about it,

quote:

I grew up Mormon. My main inspiration was the body of family stories and history that came down to me, and my own research into the religion�s history. My goal was to create a game that took my Mormon ancestors and their lives and faith seriously, while also taking seriously my own experience leaving the faith.

it makes sense that the tension between "God and society says do this" while "But I know this is actually right" is at the forefront of the game's moral discussions.

But it would also be simple to alter the morals of the world and simply accommodate same sex relationships or whatever. Certain issues don't have to be explored, and it's a game where one ought to clear up what topics should and should not get brought up in game. Just as you can have an arachnophobic player and thus choose not include Shelob the Primordial Spider as a BBEG at the end of the dungeon, one can easily say "Yeah, I want this game to be about greed, murder, and adultery, not homophobia" and it'll run just fine. The point is to have an enforced status quo and for the players to deal with deviations from that status quo and their implications. Folks have done hacks set in Judge Dredd's Mega City One and with Jedi in the Star Wars universe, for example.

Baker himself has said more recently of the game:

quote:

Basically, Westerns can go to hell, Utah history can go to hell, and unless i extricate Dogs in the Vineyard, it can go to hell too.

I have half a plan for a new edition and half a plan for a sequel. I think the sequel's more likely at this point, but neither are underway.

-Vincent

Because, understandably, Baker in 2018 is not the Baker of 2004, and a game about divinely inspired settlers solving moral conflicts in the territory they've conquered through the Power of God, which doesn't also interrogate the background assumptions of the Western genre, settlement by colonists, the treatment of displaced Native Americans, etc. is a pretty huge oversight, and also rather difficult to write a game about.

He's let the game go out of print, and hasn't spoken much about it in the four years since, so it seems unlikely that this sequel will actually happen. However, a full authorized by Baker, setting agnostic clone of the game mechanics, DOGS, is available: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274623/Dogs

Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 2, 2022

# ¿ Apr 2, 2022 20:26

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:01

Toph Bei Fong: Feb 29, 2008

Schwarzwald posted:

It's not that the political dimension is replaced by superhero fiat, but rather that superhero fiat is an analogy for the political dimension.

Like, ultra powerful entities that we sort of have to work around with ritual and contracts in order to survive in this world already exist. That's any given bureaucracy.

From Miracleman # 16

# ¿ Jul 2, 2022 19:16

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!