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!

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

I think it's telling that the Vagabond wasn't part of Cole's initial design and had the weakest link to the political/power thematic elements.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2022 06:10

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 07:43

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

The Woodland Alliance are the closest Root has to a "good" faction since the commentary focuses more on their methodology (and internal dysfunction) than their ideology.

Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Jun 15, 2022

# ¿ Jun 15, 2022 14:50

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Josef bugman posted:

Yeah this is more how I saw the Vagabond. From reading this thread, which has been my only exposure to Root, they seem more to be "gently caress all of you"

This isn't entirely accurate in two ways.

The Vagabond can made mutually beneficial trades with all of the other factions, one of the few instances in the game of a mechanism that explicitly allows for the possibility of a positive sum interaction. In some respects it's the inverse of fighting the Vagabond, since if everyone trades with the Vagabond the Vagabond will be in the strongest position.

Rarely but more interestingly the Vagabond can permanently ally with a faction, opening up the possibility of a combined win. This won't happen in most games but it's an unusual alternate victory condition for them.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2022 16:47

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Rappaport posted:

Twilight Struggle literally makes the world a board with marker chits for you and the opponent, and as a Finn I must say we are woefully underrepresented!, but I'm not sure it's so much a political statement for mister Kissinger as it is trying to make the idea of global thermonuclear war a tangible, game-play reality. Which is what the thread has been discussing. Things like the Vietnam and Korean wars are, essentially, abstracted away into points one side or the other can gain as "gently caress you" moves. This does not represent the reality of these conflicts.

That said, the way their abstraction is portrayed still makes it clear that these are Bad Things you, the player, are doing, but the game mechanics force you into. Which simulates the I suppose Randian view of the Cold War. It is a game of dealing with one crisis after another, and trying to make the best of it. It's easier to win it in the early war with the Soviets by taking over the world with wars of aggression. I don't mean it is a portrayal of world politics as they were, or how they "should have been", just that it makes it clear to the player that it is annihilation by a nuclear storm that is at stake, and the player as the agent should perform accordingly. And it encapsulates that sense of complete, absolute dread and how each turn ticking down makes the player more desperate.

I suppose at its heart it is a game meant to make you hate your opponent, but the same could be said of chess.

The Designer's Notes for Twilight Struggle are worth a read.

quote:

Twilight Struggle does not reach beyond its means. Wherever there were compromises to make between realism and playability, we sided with playability. We want to evoke the feel of the Cold War, we hope people get a few insights they didn�t possess, but we have no pretensions that a game of this scope or length could pretend to be a simulation.

Also important for players to understand is that the game has a very definite point of view. Twilight Struggle basically accepts all of the internal logic of the Cold War as true�even those parts of it that are demonstrably false. Therefore, the only relationships that matter in this game are those between a nation and the superpowers. The world provides a convenient chess board for US and Soviet ambitions, but all other nations are mere pawns (with perhaps the occasional bishop) in that game. Even China is abstracted down to a card that is passed between the two countries. Furthermore, not only does the domino theory work, it is a prerequisite for extending influence into a region. Historians would rightly dispute all of these assumptions, but in keeping with the design philosophy, we think they make a better game.

One very notable difference between Twilight Struggle and other Cold War games is that we assume nuclear war would be a bad thing. Many other designs make the whole idea of letting the nuclear genie out the bottle irresistible. From our vantage point of hindsight, nuclear war was unthinkable, and that is why it did not happen. Yes, we came close, but we believe that rational actors would veer away from the button. Once the button was pushed, nuclear war would have taken on a grim logic of its own, and human extinction might have been the result.

There's more in there but that's probably the most relevant part for this.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2022 10:56

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Shrecknet posted:

There's a bunch of philosophical choices being made at every level when writing an RPG, because it all started as a wargaming simulation and those games were all about simulating all the minutiae down to Italian units using more water because they had to boil their pasta (not a joke)

The pasta rule isn't a joke (in that it is in a game) but it is a joke (in that the game isn't meant to be taken seriously).

Wargames have changed a lot since the 70s too.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 14:58

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Bags give you some of the advance of cards (eg finer control over the distribution of results) while being easier to randomise. They have downsides (eg component cost, speed of generating lots of results) but are still a useful tool in design.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 03:46

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

With Cats it can sometimes feel like the objective is to lose slowly enough to win. It's strange.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2023 03:57

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

Yeah the designer's notes in the rulebook make it clear that it's a depiction of a worldview and not an endorsement

The whole thing is relevant and worth reading but this is the key passage.

quote:

Also important for players to understand is that the game has a very definite point of view. Twilight Struggle basically accepts all of the internal logic of the Cold War as true�even those parts of it that are demonstrably false. Therefore, the only relationships that matter in this game are those between a nation and the superpowers. The world provides a convenient chess board for US and Soviet ambitions, but all other nations are mere pawns (with perhaps the occasional bishop) in that game. Even China is abstracted down to a card that is passed between the two countries. Furthermore, not only does the domino theory work, it is a prerequisite for extending influence into a region. Historians would rightly dispute all of these assumptions, but in keeping with the design philosophy, we think they make a better game.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 14:53

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

JMBosch posted:

Spirit Island does that too, except that you're spirits of nature instead of native people, so unless the island is truly uninhabited, I guess it still sorta kinda strips agency away from whoever was already living there.

Yeah it's an issue with the game that the designer has talked about. The full post also goes into different options that were explored for the native Dahan people and why various mechanical and thematic choices were made.

Eric Reuss posted:

I did - twice - take a hard look at reworking the game as Dahan-only, because in a co-op, only player-run positions have true agency, and I don�t like that the Dahan lack that. I'm hoping that Spirit Island will prove successful enough to support expansions, as I have some notions for making the Dahan a playable position, which I think would be awesome - playing them alongside the Spirits gets around many of the difficulties above, and could result in an interestingly different type of play.

The big Dahan-centric expansion is in the works though it's still a few years away.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 02:31

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 07:43

Doctor Spaceman: Jul 6, 2010; "Everyone's entitled to their point of view, but that's seriously a weird one."

SlothfulCobra posted:

I think the whole Scottish thing just came from taking the palette of British accents to use a different voice for a different people. I'm not sure it even really predates Peter Jackson's movie. It's not like Rankin-Bass felt the need to make the dwarves scottish for their movie.

Warcraft 2 (from 1995) has Scottish dwarves and (as was mentioned upthread) you can find examples from earlier.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2023 23:25

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