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Those are really problems with Lysenkoism that China inherited because of complicated diplomacy with the USSR as part of getting aid during the Civil War. Like, very not defending the PRC, they did terrible things during the Cultural Revolution, but that’s a really shallow critique. Also it really predates the Cultural Revolution, that’s really more social policy and the disaster that was Four Olds. I don’t know that scenario, but I know China pretty okay.
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Oct 22, 2021 04:16
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Yeah uh. None of that has really anything to do with the history of China and especially not the Cultural Revolution except as a pastiche of American stereotypes about China that are reheated ones about the USSR (that I also don’t think have any truth to them but I don’t know that history as well). Like, don’t get me wrong, the PRC did absolutely terrible, horrible things but they weren’t cutesy vignettes of silly foreigners acting like robots going does not compute zzzp zzzzp bork zzzp. Like take the example of Lysenkoism. It was some truly hilariously bad “science”, but as I said China didn’t invent it and adopted it as part of a very complicated trade deal amongst a lot of poo poo. Some people bought into it and some didn’t, the exact proportions of which are up for debate because of how authoritarian regimes do. But this wasn’t a philosophical debate about best farming practices, it just turned into a giant catastrophe with terrible famine and a lot of people starved to death, were shot or got eaten. And, really again, can’t emphasize this enough, this wasn’t the Cultural Revolution that is a distinct, other bad thing Chinese history has plenty of awful poo poo going on, so you don’t need to accuse it of really weird other crimes.
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Oct 22, 2021 05:06
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:This is from a few pages back, but I was wondering if anyone was knowledgeable about both this Paranoia module and modern Chinese history to comment on whether it's a fair allegory or not? Dr. Arbitrary posted:I think I've been pretty clear that I don't think it's a uniquely Chinese or Communist thing. Rather than it being weird or alien, it's much more human than some of the atrocities committed by European nations. You asked for someone who knows stuff about modern Chinese history to comment on if it's a fair allegory. I said that I knew modern Chinese history pretty okay, told you that it wasn't a fair allegory. Or at least, not one specifically Chinese, but you brought them up. Now you don't understand why I'm talking about the PRC when you asked the question. What kind of elaborate miscommmunication is going on here.
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Oct 22, 2021 15:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The poster isn't making a random parallel. Ah, okay, that totally explains it. Thanks. Yeah so barring some more specifics, the adventure might be good, but it hosed up in that it's as much a reference to any bureaucratic fuckery in human history as much as it is to the PRC from late Mao to Deng Xiaoping. Also, just gonna keep banging the drum that The Cultural Revolution and The Great Leap Forward are distinct, different things. These are not interchangeable. They are not words for the same thing. They were separate events.
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Oct 22, 2021 16:18
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like nerds that play d&d like caster supremacy because they are more likely to identify with the power fantasy of having power by being good at school and smart than the power fantasy of being the ultimate jock. This is a sad but often accurate generalization. Many will even argue that it’s “realistic” for the nerd to be more powerful than “some stupid jock.” These people are of course wrong because it isn’t and even if it were it wouldn’t matter. My favorite D&D character of all time was a giant half orc who didn’t even carry a weapon he was so swole, just choke-slamming hydras and pile-driving ogres while screaming, “Oh YEAH!” Many problems were solved via the creative application of flexing. His name was Oolong Grey and his life goal was to become an Earl.
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Nov 7, 2021 22:58
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Enh not really but I left out any parts about him being a well-rounded person for the sake of humor. My bad. The point was that he was doing all the same bullshit wizard narrative effects but instead of the reason being “magic” it was “he’s just that strong”.
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Nov 7, 2021 23:22
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Xander77 posted:
Very briefly because I don't want to turn it into a giant edition war thing, but the two biggest criticisms are : 1) The head of the project, one poo poo bird named Mike Mearls, got into bed with some egregiously heinous people. Like one of the contributors is an overt misogynist neo-Nazi, and he's not the one that most people complain about because another one is worse. 2) The rules barely exist. They're a paper-thin coating of some numbers over a flowchart that says, "How does this work? =====> The DM will have to figure something out, we don't have an answer." And not in a cool, rules-lite way either. I could make a pretty solid argument that PbtA games have way more mechanical heft and crunch, plus they're better thought out. 5e has a poo poo-ton of rules that don't help you at all and can often get in the way : they're like wearing a blindfold to make you better at baking. I'm cool with just playing pretend, but fuuuuuuck spending $150 on books that actively hinder my ability to tell a story. But its debut coincided with a lot of media attention and the rise of a bunch of actual play series that got a bunch of people into the hobby who have latched onto 5e and god are they willing to paper over a lot of cracks. And these new players have also done a good job at pulling the design crew kicking and screaming into a place where they have to at least appear to be more socially progressive and accepting than earlier. And some of them have genuinely great experiences despite the system, although the classic things seem to be happening where people are trying to shove D&D rules into playing Ocean's 11 and being shocked it doesn't work, or assuming houserules they made up apply to everything or the exact same dumb jokes from whenever you last played. So basically that part is business as usual but there's a lot more people so it's a net win.
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Nov 9, 2021 08:01
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Many animals are monogamous but have no concept of property, so this doesn’t even pass my sniff test of “can I think of counter examples while even reading the idea”. And vague analogs of “ownership” like territory defence don’t seem to correlate to monogamy in animals either, e.g. eagles mate for life but are relatively willing to share (they’ll guard their nests, of course, but stop caring once they’re done using them) and penguins care enough about “ownership” to have a currency-adjacent function for nesting rocks, but that’s most commonly observed in the cases of what is de facto bird prostitution. I don’t think you thought this through.
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Nov 9, 2021 22:38
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You're postulating biological determinism, you goober. Then I'm pointing out that your idea of biological determinism affecting other parts of a species falls apart if you look at animal models. Do you not know how the concept of correlation itself works? Also, the fact that you posted this weird idea and everyone is responding, "What? No, that's weird," should probably be some kind of clue that it's at least not intuitive.
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Nov 10, 2021 01:55
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Roadie posted:My point is that if they don't understand what personal property is, they shouldn't be capable of automatically making excuses centering on the idea of personal property. "You must have dropped it" only makes any sense in a context where I'm not supposed to have it and I know I'm not supposed to have it... but kender don't understand why they're not supposed to have stuff. The quoted bit says they do have a concept of theft sort of, at least enough of one to know what a thief is and identify as not that. So technically the writers thought about it, but only enough to say, "Uh yeah but it's not a problem because ummm. look over there!"
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Nov 10, 2021 06:59
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TheCenturion posted:Again, I fail to see how 'animal models' have anything to do with a completely fictional construct explicitly created by magic, not by biology or evolution. ? TheCenturion posted:Interesting attempt at modeling what actual Garden of Eden style 'innocence' would look like, without actually thinking it through to it's logical conclusion. For example, if Kender have no concept of 'ownership,' how would that affect their sexual relationships? Are all Kender inherently non-monogamous? How do they deal with issues of consent? TheCenturion posted:If you believe anything you see, that you want, is free to take and use as you see fit, how do you see and relate to people you are sexually interested in? You posited that the concept of possession and the concept of monogamy are related for unspecified reasons. I started showing counter examples to illustrate that them being related is at least not the null hypothesis, because we have other examples in the real world of the behaviors of monogamy and ownership. I used animals because they tend to have more sex than rocks or clusters of argon.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:10
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An irrational cult that worships a prelapsarian past and the idea of heroic death and sacrifice for the good of a racial cause that feels itself above other races/communities, obsessed with plots, machismo and over-complicated superweapons to be used to enslave and genocide persecuted others, all of this fueled by intense internal conflict pitting equals against each other in order to rise to the top. And they talk funny. Exactly how much more explicit do you need your Nazi comparisons, guys? Do they have to twist their tails into little swastikas? loving yeah, the Skaven are Rats-ional Socialists.
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Nov 12, 2021 03:17
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MadDogMike posted:Heh, not surprising really. Although the bit about TSR claiming intelligent magic items having no gender intrigues me; trying to recall if there's any exceptions in real world legends/mythology/fantasy fiction to that. Only talking blade that jumped to my mind immediately was Turin's sword, which I'm pretty sure only identified as bloodthirsty. Durendal and oliphant are masculine, in the sense that the poem is in French so they kind of have to be gendered. You could probably make a decent argument that’s just a language quirk. Hindu mythical weapons are frequently gendered, but they’re also overtly people who can like walk around and do stuff, so that could sort of be the opposite of the French examples. Anything Chinese written before the Baihua movement could be as gendered as all hell and we’d never know because there was no grammatical markers for it* and the modern “he”, “she”, “it” distinctions hadn’t been made up yet. Actually, now that I’m mentally running through it, I can’t think of another language that does that kind of nonsense that English does. I know Arabic can have verbal agreement with feminine referents (like actually are women, not like German or French where we pretend hats are dudes), so that might be a natural place to check. *Important note : gender in the linguistic sense isn’t gender as in the common use most of the time : it’s another reflex of the same root as “genre” and just means a group of nouns that pattern the same in terms of the grammar. The name is confusing because some European languages (e.g. Spanish) have ones like masculine and feminine. Chinese has gender too, it’s just that the groups are things like “is a flat object”, “is an animal” or “is a handheld object”. As a German speaker, I promise you we don’t think bridges are girls : it would be very silly to do so because girls actually have neuter gender. :
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Dec 9, 2021 02:13
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O poo poo, you brought up Glorantha. Cue 3 pages of God LARP chat and whole paragraphs that contain "Gbadji", "Arkhat" and "superheroes". I'll get it started with the best thing in the whole setting :  Behold, the walktapus!
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Mar 12, 2022 07:28
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I think we have some competing definitions of atheist going on here. Reveilled is being very specific and consistent about meaning the former for this conversation. Also I want to see the translation notes for anyone bringing up something from another language that says “god”, full stop, we can’t proceed until then. I know how loaded that is in any languages I speak and I’m wary of it in others.
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Mar 12, 2022 21:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I'm saying, a level 2 wizard with a rope and a pinch of powdered corn can create a pocket universe. That saps a lot of the transmundane out of meeting the guy that created the universe. A whole universe is a big spell, but not too different in kind. A fantasy world atheist would see a title like god as needless puffery. Like the aliens from stargate, they really existed, they were far more powerful than the Egyptians, they just weren't capital G "Gods", they were just guys saying they were gods to make themselves feel special and exploit people easier. The "fire god" granting a cleric level 9 spells might not seem so special to the warlock that gets the same thing by owning a particularly evil sword or having met a genie once. And what the hell does this have to do with Buddhism?
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Mar 13, 2022 02:15
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Buddhism is a real world religion that has people that see gods as existent but just as just another type of guy This is like 5 [citation needed]s in a trenchcoat trying to sneak into an adult argument. Buddhism is a complicated belief system with multiple, mutually incompatible sub-groups just in the culture I'm familiar with, and you've provided no evidence that this is the case. I really only know the history of Buddhism in China enough to talk about it with any degree of authority, but I can tell you that you're straight up wrong there. You're keying off the fact that some words are translated as "god" and taking that as evidence, when it's at best an unreliable translation of a complicated cultural ideal. You're taking a Wikipedia summary of a bad translation of an entire loving religion as evidence and it's really hosed up.
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Mar 13, 2022 18:00
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What, I think you have this totally backwards. What word in what language do you think you’re talking about when you say “god” in a Buddhist context? It’s like trying to talk about Scoville heat units per pound per square inch : you’re using a technical word for one thing in a totally different context and expecting it to work. Buddhism has its own cosmologies that interact with other parts of culture(s), so you can’t do this 1 to 1, find-replace bullshit.
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Mar 14, 2022 15:26
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think you are very angrily agreeing with me. No because I know enough to not make the comparison. Define your terms.
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Mar 14, 2022 15:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Define your terms. Why would a buddhist think of Lorth as a "god" It’s your assertion that Buddhism has anything to do with this fantasy bullshit. You’re making a claim. Slow day at work?
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Mar 14, 2022 16:43
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Every tabletop RPG I've ever played has the GM considering what would be fun instead of simply executing a perfect cold simulation. Every battle is some "this is what the wolves would do to have a good fight" instead of "it is maximally optimum for wolves to always use their best attack on the healer" or a simulation of "this is what real wolves would do" RPG wolves fight in a varied and interesting way that is generally a terrible and suboptimal idea for the wolves That’s a much newer play and design ethos that isn’t what Arivia is talking about. She’s talking about old school RPG’s where the GM is explicitly there to gently caress the players over in an adversarial way from an authorial/game design perspective and then is supposed to run the game in a “fair” way that is internally consistent even if it’s emulating genre conventions and not necessarily strict physical reality with perfectly researched wolf behavior or whatever. Part of the point is for players to overcome these challenges by thinking outside the box.
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Mar 15, 2022 20:28
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Eh, older games had lots more instant death mechanics but they were still games meant to be played. The GM is always in on it being a game. It's not like you'd be like "oh wow, he must be the best GM!" if you heard about a guy where no player ever got to play past their first battle at level one because the GM always wins. Hey hoss, it’s not my gaming philosophy, I play hippy story games, but that is a play style and people love it. And that’s what is being discussed. Do you just make poo poo up about topics you don’t know about recreationally? Is that your weird hobby?
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Mar 15, 2022 23:52
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KingKalamari posted:"If you could present me with some actual facts that this man who wrote an alternate history novel about the descendants of heroic SS officers overthrowing the Jewish controlled police state and published it through an established, Neo-Nazi publisher who also served on the Editorial Advisory Committee of a Holocaust Denial publication then I would like to see it!" Dawg, you got so wrapped up in your nested clauses that you forgot to give the matrix clause a predicate.
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Mar 24, 2022 19:10
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By popular demand posted:Even the most deranged masochistic troops would not appreciate being whipped quite so often. This is the exact line of reasoning that leads to you getting orc-whipped.
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Mar 28, 2022 18:02
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Yeah, that sounds like they were basically handed that the year had to be 148X, where X is greater than 4, so unless someone has secretly been playing a very, very long game, that's been locked in since at least the decision to move on from 4e. (It could theoretically be longer but would involve so many moving parts to be ridiculous and I'm dismissing it out of hand.) So we're left with kind of the strongest version of the hypothesis being something to the tune of it having been originally planned to be 1487 and someone tilting the pinball table to spit out the Nazi number by adding 1. But that has the equally possible course of events be that they randomly wound up setting it at 1488DR before someone a bit more savvy suggested adding 1 to the year in the PHB specifically to avoid an accidental Nazi shoutout and what we're seeing is the suspicious hole left by dodging it. Speaking as someone who is constantly on the lookout for even the appearance of Nazi bullshit, this is getting up to "mildly suspicious, remember in case more evidence comes to light" at most on the ol' Nazi index. Exactly the same as if I randomly found a 38.57"x38.57" table or something.
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Mar 29, 2022 05:50
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Drakyn posted:Including a substantial portion of the people making the setting. I mean, however satirical someone intended it to be at some point, let's not pretend the most common portrayal of Warhammer 40k's Space Marines - fan, corporate, or otherwise - is anywhere close to that of an evil fascist fundamentalist lunatic stormtrooper who any sane audience member eagerly watches die in a hilariously pathetic way due to his hypocritical blinkeredness rather than say, the protagonist who does badass cool stuff and alas has tragic flaws with blind spots and like the bad guys are his old buddies who've gone evil and poo poo woaaaaah cor. I mean I think it was this thread like 4-5 months ago where I was arguing with people who seriously thought the Skaven weren’t Nazis so uh, keep that in mind.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:43
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radmonger posted:The W40K Empire is written to to be about 9 parts Victorian British Empire to one part Nazi. See, for example, how Cain is a more or direct port of Flashman. Did you like read my post at all?
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Mar 30, 2022 19:03
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SirPhoebos posted:On the topic of 40K (but also sci-fi/fantasy in general) I've always found the the conceit of "these space racist humans aren't prejudice against ethnicities because they're too busy being space racist towards aliens" to be rather dubious (even if totally understandable from a marketing perspective). This is a fair point and not untrue, but down this dark path lies the evolution of the screenplay for Bright.
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Apr 1, 2022 02:48
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SimonChris posted:In case there are still people wondering if M.A.R. Barker was merely pretending to be a nazi, people have been looking through the old Tekumel mailing lists: When I think of a culture completely uninterested in the past, it’s definitely the Jews.
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Apr 2, 2022 02:39
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Is that the rules themselves are super complex, or is it just that asymmetric design means there are X times as many rules where X is the number of factions? Those are both complex but they have totally different implications for teaching, e.g. the latter means only the teaching player needs to have the full hurdle. (I’m also in a similar situation and the former would be much harder than the latter.)
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May 28, 2022 16:10
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Magnetic North posted:It's a little bit of both, but primarily the latter. The rules are moderately complex. There is a difference between a pawn and a warrior, there is a difference between a building and a token. Also, many cards will have two suits shown on them, and those suits might not match, one being the actual suit of the card when using it for something other than its own effect, the other is the requirement to craft the card for its own effect. Also, there is card crafting but there is also a subset of card crafting which is item crafting which you also need to keep distinct for certain other rules. Also, there is a rule called Rule which is fairly intuitive but has a vital exception. They aren't too bad once you get your feet under you, and these rules apply to all or at least most factions equally. That sounds not too bad ; I taught the same people Gloomhaven so I’m not too worried. There’s disparity in how into the rules some people are where some like just jumping head first and some want to fiddle with mechanics, so I wind up doing weirdness to make sure everyone is happy and things don’t get horrifically unbalanced. This looks like it might be a good fit. Shukran.
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May 28, 2022 20:41
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Magnetic North posted:Ah, well, yes. If you'd said, "We've played Gloomhaven" I woulda just said, "yer fine" Yeah in retrospect, I might be underestimating my group by asking seeing as how I was looking for something to tide us over until Frosthaven is done printing and shipping. 
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May 29, 2022 02:03
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So in Root as a metaphor for politics, the Vagabond is that rear end in a top hat dressed up like the Joker that inexplicably is at 99% of all political rallies. Got it.
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May 29, 2022 05:45
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Tiler Kiwi posted:Its a contradiction that I think is the biggest weakness in game theory - when there are multiple actors at play (and even in some situations with only two), being too rational can leave you very vulnerable to the fanatically stupid. Its a common problem in Diplomacy - the usual advice given is 'find a new table', but real life politics don't let you do that, generally. This is more than a bit unfair to game theory, and a personal pet peeve. Game theory is a field of mathematics and not psychology/sociology, so of course it can't make predictive statements about the behavior of people. It's explicitly not designed to do anything of the kind and that's specifically orthogonal to the kinds of questions game theory is trying to answer. This would be like looking at a banana and saying its biggest flaw is that it's not a bicycle.
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Jun 14, 2022 03:58
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Dawg do you mean “the Yojimbo route”? Rashomon route sounds fascinating but impractical.
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Jun 15, 2022 22:48
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SirPhoebos posted:One thing that I always thought was pretty hosed up was in HoI4 (don't know if this is true in the current version) if played the USSR and deliberately avoided doing the purges and curbed/replaced Stalin, then right when Germany was about to declare war on you, Trotskyist launch an armed coup. Giving the implication that Stalin was right to do the purges. "HoI4... let's see... Lead Designer, Jeff Stalin?!??!"
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Jul 3, 2022 00:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:while i'm not inclined to give John Wick in particular the benefit of the doubt, how would you best implement a game where the players are supposed to be people "of their era" in some genuinely uncomfortable context and discourage players from trying to pseudo-isekai their way to modernity, at least as a default state of play? like, we've obviously seen the bad way, what's the good one? Besides the Glorantha method of having the setting being self-reinforcing?
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Jul 3, 2022 20:45
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citybeatnik posted:The undead elf that rules over the Sundered Hand in the Icewind Dale game was specifically an elven "not-lich" and was kept about by divine fiat until he learned his lesson. Then you have Crypt Things, neutral grave guardians that go "RETURN THE SLAB" if you fiddle about in there. Just fyi "a pidgin" is a kind of reduced language with a specific history and certain qualities, it's not actually a language. And confusingly, because pidgins are rarely stable, most languages with "pidgin" in their names are not actually pidgins and have since evolved out of that stage.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:05
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Phonetic spelling is your friend, yo.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:16
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exmachina posted:What do you do about dialects and accents? I guarantee that your phonetic spelling will be different to mine, and now we have lost mutual intelligibility. That's a language standardization issue and emphatically not an orthographic one. It's not like having inconsistent spellings is somehow friendlier for native speakers of a non-standard variety. And in fact, having consistent orthography often can lead to greater representation for speakers of non-standard varieties. Look at German. Standard German is almost entirely* an artificial construct in order to be vaguely similar to everyone's home dialect and allow written communication for purposes of things like government administration, literature, increased socialization, etc. Almost nobody* actually speaks Standard German at home, and is instead diglossic ("two tongues", capable of speaking more than one variety) between their home form(s) and the standardized form they learned in school. But since everyone uses the same basic phonetic units, you can quite rapidly pick up how someone is writing because it's very similar to understanding speech. Because everyone can do this, there is a robust and active literature in non-standard varieties and they're well represented. I have stacks of books in my home variety, there are dialect dictionaries and a thriving amateur linguistic community because there's local pride in the home language as a means of culture : people hang out and share particularly niche and rare forms and try to keep them alive just because they can and it's fun. They even do this cute thing in Asterix and Obelix comics (mandatory European cultural artifact) where the Romans all speak Standard German and the heroic Gauls speak the home variety both to show a little bit of language pride and it distinguishes diegetically whether the characters are speaking Latin or Gaulish. As someone who only learned to write his native language in his 20's, as in I was in an airpot at 25 when I learned "to wait" had an 'r' in it, I can tell you that going from non-standard German to Standard German writing was basically identical to learning the standard form. Keeping in mind I've been phonetically writing with family and friends in the regional form since I was 6 with out issue ; yeah, one uncle spells "work" 'owit' and another spells it 'abit', but that's also just the difference between talking to Mannfred vs. Bertie. This is true in a lot of languages, of course, but I don't speak those and I don't have gads of lived experience about them so it'd be more hollow. *For sociological and political, rather than linguistic, reasons, some people have had to compromise more than others. Since my native variety is one of the more "divergent" ones, I can totally appreciate that this isn't ideal on the ground, but that's because the dudes who made it were rich Protestant fuckers from the other side of the country and even then they still gave us something. Absurd Alhazred posted:It can actually be a lot of fun to have communications issues be an important adventure point. You can leverage that to, say, make one or more of your characters matter because you're the only ones who can mediate between two hostile factions who otherwise have no way of communicating with each other. As King Language Nerd of the forums who's played for years exclusively with fellow post-grad language nerds : NO. Lol no, gently caress no. Nothing about that is fun. Lmao. I already do that in real life and it's called "gently caress you brother in law I'm tired of translating for you at Christmas learn some loving German".
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Jul 5, 2022 22:13
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