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It might also be that existentially challenging god himself as creating an unjust world is less likely to rock the boat than challenging more terrestrial, realistic authority figures. I've heard that a lot more Japanese people practice their religion than actually believe in it, which is the inverse of America, where a lot of people don't bother to go to church but still report to believe in their god. Antitheism might be a lot less controversial over there. But there also seems to be a tendency for a lot of Japanese media to get really abstract at the end, which I guess creates a feeling of escalation and conveniently gives writers a way to wriggle out of any issues with resolving the plot, and if you're already planning to abstractly go through a higher plane of existence, why not go knock out god while you're at it?
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Sep 25, 2021 16:34
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I don't know anything from that module in particular, but my read on Paranoia is that it's a very silly, although very dark game. You're in a horrifying dystopia, players are given secret roles that may have them hunting eachother down for being secret traitors or mutants in between the party solving whatever problem they're meant to be dealing with. Each player has some amount of clones in storage to be used as extra lives for when they inevitably die, and the book I think encourages you to think just because that other player you killed was a traitor/mutant, their genetically identical duplicate that shares the same contiguous consciousness isn't necessarily another traitor/mutant. It's in the tagline.  There is a lot of resemblance to real-world authoritarian states, especially the aspect where all of you must be extremely loyal to Friend Computer, the doddering AI that commands you and you are encouraged to turn in your fellow players for disloyalty, but I'm not sure if there's enough details on the whole thing to make it really a commentary on anything specific.
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Oct 22, 2021 01:09
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I think the overall theme of bureaucratic incompetence or corruption is pretty broadly relatable and understandable even without being specifically representative of a bigger incident. There may be a number of catastrophic failures out in the world, but a lot of people will be familiar with smaller institutional or bureaucratic failings from their own personal lives. Most people have been through a number of big systems, and there's always room for things to fail.Disproportionation posted:Paranoia's interesting because a lot of it is very red scare dystopia specifically - the computer is specifically most paranoid about communists specifically more than any other secret society or other threat (though its knowledge on what communism actually is is extremely superficial and implied to be based on 1950s cold war propaganda that it had on file) that it assumes communism is all encompassing of those aforementioned threats - every traitor must be a communist, and any failures of the system must surely be due to communist sabotage. Maybe a little disappointing, but I can't say it's much of a shame that current America has gotten a bit less jingoistic so some of the old jokes don't quite work. For a little while a little red scare was almost starting to make a comeback with "cultural marxism" as the accusatory label, but for now that tactic seems to have just gone fallow. Although maybe some of the bureaucratic satire also might not click as well because of how much these days more of that bureaucracy has been digitized and put behind closed doors so that everybody has their own littler Friend Computers that they trust. Which isn't really how the metaphor was supposed to go.
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Oct 22, 2021 06:23
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I think you could read Friend Computer in Paranoia as possibly not even being truly sentient. A whole lot of sci-fi demands the inevitability of true AI, but there's no real reason to expect that every giant computer is going to be automatically sentient. Probably whatever specs that they would've conceived for a massive complex-spanning computer back in 1985 would be basically nothing these days anyways. And in that case, Friend Computer illustrates a very real principle of computer science that often gets forgotten about by nerds but is no less important today: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Basically it doesn't matter how fancy or complicated or perfect the system is, if its input isn't specifically calibrated to be as perfect as you want the output to be, your output is going to be as flawed as the input was. 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. At its most currently relevant level, it means every big fancy algorithm or machine learning system will innately have all the flaws involved in its initial dataset even before you get into the logic or systems around how all these systems are built. It's that makes these "learning AIs" out on the internet just spontaneously turn racist because it turns out that the internet has a lot of racism on it. It's what leads to all these algorithmic hiring systems automatically turning away minorities because it turns out pre-algorithm those companies already were heavily biased in their hiring practices (and depending on who you ask, maintaining the bias with the plausible deniability of it being the algorithm's fault might actually be point). It's what led to these social media services (in theory, without any specific human intention involved) going down the same sensationalist, outrage-dependent, heavily biased and radical tendencies that cable news went through when it was trying to maximize views. And in this context, it means that if you create a big ol' computer to run society after an apocalypse, it'll carry with it all of the biases and misconceptions of the people who built it, and it won't pragmatically adjust to how the world it's involved in changes. In theory, with how constantly changing and developing both society and social sciences are, it might not even be possible to create a system that can just work forever. And just because that system is inside of a fancy computer doesn't mean that computer will add any extra finesse or cover your mistakes or correct any problems. That's not what a computer is. That's not what a computer ever has been. It's just a very complicated system of tubes delivering one human's stupid to another.
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Oct 24, 2021 05:36
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So wait that article's big idea on how D&D could've avoided unfair business practices like not paying people fairly for their work, is that everyone should've chosen to not get paid for their work?
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Nov 5, 2021 18:04
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poll plane variant posted:I really take issue with the idea that it makes you like a reactionary to not accept the obvious mechanical superiority of 4E. I was not a big D&D guy beforehand and when I played some competently-DMed 4E and thought it was kind of flat and lifeless it's seen as politically suspect. My politically suspect RPG of choice is, of course, classic Deadlands. It doesn't, it's just that the worst fans will always be more visible in these big petty fights. There's plenty of room underneath the extremes to have your own legitimate opinions. Although there is a whole thing where often the worse of the worst fans will be on the side of fighting change and crushing the new or strange.
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Nov 7, 2021 05:53
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moths posted:More than once, in real life from actual people, I was told that 4e's attempted class balance was Socialism. People getting up in arms over the balance of class power is the weirdest complaint to me. Like I can understand people being upset about the texture of the classes all becoming the same and playing about the same, but people clinging to the way that magical power is supposed to grow exponentially faster than physical classes was very weird. It seems like a weird way of fantasizing about nerds overcoming jocks more than anything else. The whole system of differing rates of growth for the classes makes a whole lot of sense with Gygax's reported unique style of playing where he'd mix around a bunch of people dipping in and out of games or taking characters between games so there'd be a lot of people at different levels playing in the same game at once and even competing for XP. But a lot of the standard way of playing became a group of mostly the same people playing as a party at around the same levels, so in that case, making the classes grow at different rates and forcing some of the group to be sidelined and unimportant seems less fun, and even the system of tracking separate XP might seem like pointless busywork for some groups. It kind of makes sense that magic power could radically change the world in a way that makes the other medieval weapons of D&D irrelevant, much like how gunpowder did, but that's not how the setting seems to be written.
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Nov 7, 2021 19:40
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Yeah, they're called "races" but in fantasy worlds they're often supposed to be nearly separate species. Not just different cultures, but literal biological differences. Tieflings got horns, Dragonborn breathe fire, Warforged are literal robots. It's not supposed to analogous to skintone in the real world, and some later D&D actually made an effort to depict a range of features. A lot of fantasy doesn't really dig deep to examine what it means to live in a world with a bunch of wildly different forms of sentient life, but back in Lord of the Rings there was kind of a cosmological difference between elves and men (and hobbits) having to do with mortality and the fate of their souls, dwarves were some other god's weird project, Ents are a totally alien form of civilization, and then there's just sentient animals like the Eagles hanging around. But then there's stuff like "halflings get +2 to thievery" which is no good. People want to get a lot of mechanical bonuses and features from every step of character creation, and things get thrown in without thinking about it. And that's not even getting into the whole thing where some races have default alignments that can be extrapolated to unfortunate places.
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Nov 8, 2021 22:54
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The problem is that D&D races are inextricably linked with real-world peoples, nothing just popped up with no real-world analogue. They're really not. Like Tolkien may have been inspired by real-world Jews for dwarves, but that was mainly in things like being a diaspora spread across the world after the loss of their homeland, their naming system, their calendar, and their language having semitic phonemes and structure as well as being from a lineage outside of the languages of man and elf. Those are not the aspects that other fantasy works copied about dwarves. They copied the fact that they live in underground tunnels mining, which has no parallel in any earthly culture because there's no record of humans living underground long-term like that, that's just something that was made up about these fictional creatures in their fictional society. You could make an argument that the way dwarves are greedy could be analogous to negative stereotypes about Jews, except those stereotypes are about Jews being greedy for money because they're bankers, not lusting after raw metal because they're miners and smiths. That's pretty different, and comes more from Norse mythology. And outside of dwarves, the other only other Tolkien race that seems to be inspired directly by anything is Hobbits (who technically by the taxonomy of Lord of the Rings, aren't a separate species like dwarves or elves, they're just a form of short man with the same cosmological fate, so I guess that's more like a real-world "race"). Hobbits are supposed to be like a certain sort of English culture, obsessed with appearances and wrapped up in their own little isolated corner of the world, but then D&D riffed off of that to make Halflings sneaky and rambunctious instead of lazy Englishmen. The Artificial Kid posted:Are you saying it's better to have individuals' traits heavily determined by their race, instead of allowing all beings to be "people"? The base premise of having a separate sentient species that is physically wildly different in more than just appearance basically requires that there be some kind of differences beyond the differences between human groups. Otherwise, the stories would be about just disparate groups of humans (which a number of fantasy stories do go that route). In some ways, the idea of cultures that are inextricably different in big ways can be a way of exploring multiculturalism, what it's like for wildly different peoples to live together or interact, and how one culture's values and way of living may not necessarily be viable for other groups. Although often people just get bogged down into diving into weird stories about how differently these different societies are built without really thinking all that critically about it because a lot of fantasy and sci-fi is just about getting to explore these wildly different places and things. And from there sometimes they end up losing track of things and reinventing racism, but this time with tangible in-world justifications, which can get really weird.
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Nov 10, 2021 17:35
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I guess one of the reasons I usually prefer sci-fi over fantasy is that sci-fi more often feels the need to distinguish its own worldbuilding as original even if it copies a bunch of aspects, while so much fantasy gets in a rut of copying other fantasy and struggling to assert the ways in which it's different. Which with role-playing games, sometimes the whole point is to be able to play crude copies of famous works with the serial numbers shaved off, but it's harder with other forms of media. But sometimes it goes circular where fantasy works get born out of somebody's game experiences. Sodomy Hussein posted:"Tolkien Dwarves aren't Jews later on in other works, just simplified versions of Tolkien Dwarves for brevity" isn't really much of a functional difference, especially when most of these games and stories involving dwarves start coloring them in with Tolkien tropes as soon as what they're doing and how they're doing it comes into play. For example, virtually every dwarf thing involves a semi-secret runic alphabet and some sort of diaspora culture. They are also always war-like in the Tolkien sense and without this they basically cease to be dwarves. Tolkien's dwarves aren't warlike, they have actually have a tendency of sitting out the big conflicts. The Dwarven expeditions to the Lonely Mountain and Moria pale in comparison to Gondor's long fight with Mordor, and the wars the Elves got into in earlier ages were literally earth-shattering. Runes may be taken from Tolkien's dwarves, but those are specifically not-Jewish inspired. They're literally anglo-saxon runes that have been mixed around a little. Written Hebrew tends to be more caligraphy rather than patterns that could more easily be engraved in stone.   So from that it sounds like you're saying that later incarnations of dwarves are taking more from the non-semitic aspects of Tolkien's dwarves. I dunno what other works you're talking about where dwarves have become a diaspora, most of the other stuff I've seen them in seems to focus more on them living in their great underground cities.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:10
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dingo with a joint posted:For Root, it was discovering the existence of the Underground Monarchy. I have a life-long love of moles, and the art and flavour for the moles in Root utterly delighted me. I mean basically, any game where you can play a mole, I play a mole, but in very few games do I get that opportunity. I love the Duchy to bits, and am now after my own set. (I was going to buy the Steam game until I discovered that it didn't have the Underground Duchy. And, like, no mole, no moolah. If you can, it's worth looking at the Tabletop Simulator mod, which includes all the expansions. It also worth checking out some of the fan factions, which are still interesting even if they may lack some of the depth of thought put into them. Sure, maybe the newspaper reporter frog faction or the charitable monastic order faction may have some kind of worthwhile commentary, but other factions just get carried away with their concept, like Fangus Khan, the giant snake that eats other faction's pawns, or Old Man Tinker, the vagabond who apparently traveled back in time from an apocalyptic future from when the forest has been turned into a blasted wasteland, and now he needs to right the wrongs of the original timeline with his robots (they even made a custom map of that apocalyptic wasteland forest with water rationing mechanics). The way that the original game makers support Print and Play really inspired a lot of people to make their own stuff.
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Dec 5, 2021 19:05
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Most stories, once they establish the physical realism of gods (and often a lack of further transcendentalism), there's not a lot of mysticism you can really do after that. Some stories get around that by replacing atheists who doubt the supernatural with antitheists who actively acknowledge gods and the supernatural and instead want to physically kill and destroy them, which doesn't quite work, but it's the best you can do. I guess Glorantha is one that manages to do an interesting job of maintaining the abstractness and confusion over religion, since it's not like the gods aren't exactly physically real in like a newtonian sense, they're in an alternate plane of existence where they can't actually directly affect the world, but there are a bunch of weird roundabout ways they make their influence, and people can sort of interact with the gods through weird rituals, but then it's still weird and abstract and indirect. But then you could also try bypassing the more mystical and abstract religion bits to powergame the rituals and seek some truer level of reality and make the cosmology of the universe into your plaything, and then you'll screw up and start breaking reality in your attempts to master it, and all the forces of the world and heavens join against you to destroy you and your entire culture just to stop you.
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Mar 12, 2022 07:16
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Triskelli posted:And apparently the Godlearner’s belief system was pretty close to totally correct, as they had a ridiculous amount of power, nearly manifested a mechanical Clanking God, and had to be destroyed by an alliance of pantheons. The God Learners were close to correct, close enough to get a lot of stuff done, probably the most correct out of any comprehensive theory of reality in Glorantha (not a lot of competition for that), but still far enough away that some of their mucking around really damaged a lot. The Goddess switch didn't really work out, I think there were other big issues their mucking about caused, but I don't remember. I think something went wrong with Zistor, their project for creating an artificial god. They also aren't the only "atheists" (although I guess they count as deists) in Glorantha. The Mostali, Glorantha's dwarves, believe in the world machine, Mostal (that other people characterize as a god, but the dwarves would disagree). It is the Mostali's duty to spend their lives fixing the world machine, and by maintaining their faith and keeping on working, they cease to age, becoming immortal. The Mostali also consider it their duty to maintain a monopoly on technology, so they were a big part of the forces that attacked and destroyed the God Learners to take their stuff on top of stopping their messing around. I think the Lunar Empire is kind of like Glorantha's version of Christianity where they have one god above and before all other gods, and there's a whole thing about their god dying and being reborn, I don't remember the whole deal. They're associated with chaos, which is a force of evil to most of the other pantheons, especially the Orlanthi, so that adds a whole extra spiritual dimension to their imperialism, and it also means that there's a political dimension to the Orlanthi contemporary to the Lunar Empire doing their rituals celebrating (and reinforcing?) how their gods and ancestors fought the ancient enemy of chaos, which circles back to some aspects of jews and early christians under the Roman Empire, just also there's a giant bat demon in the mix. It's a whole mess of influences.
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Mar 12, 2022 18:43
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I've often felt some kind of discomfort about fantasy race systems, especially when they're used allegorically, since allegories and metaphors for real-world human peoples kinda go awry when there's actually severe differences in the fantasy race's anatomy and capabilities. Not that effective allegory can't be done, just it can get very weird. Lord of the Rings largely just does its own weird and un-allegorical thing with its races. If anything, it'd be more allegorical for real-world religion than real-world race or nationality. And then of course, it doesn't feel right for an entire group of people to just all be innately bad and evil and savage, mainly because if anyone thinks of real-world peoples like that, it's very bad. Not too hard for actual racists to co-opt that kind of thing. Although there's a whole weirder thing specifically with Russia and Mordor, because aside from being run by an evil dictator, there's a whole weird thing where some Russians do somehow sympathize with Sauron and Mordor, which is probably the result of a popular Russian fanfic, The Last Ringbearer, that portrayed Tolkien's books as elven propaganda and depicted Mordor as a rapidly industrializing state that wanted to destroy the shackles that magic chained the world in. There was even a plan to erect an eye of Sauron over a Moscow skyscraper back in 2014, the year of the annexation of Crimea. It was only stopped by religious leaders complaining. https://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/eye-sauron-moscow-revenge-orcs/ Pop culture can take really weird turns as it crosses national lines. There's an even weirder thing with a Russian cult worshipping an American cartoon mouse, but I have no idea how to dig into that.
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Mar 28, 2022 07:25
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I think it makes sense as to how you'd end up in a a casually racist situation like that when scaling down a wargame and wanting to do a bunch of combat encounters with minimal storytelling to keep them together. The main mechanic in the game is to fight and kill things, encounters against creatures that you're meant to fight without having to explain a lot of circumstances streamlines the process. Other tabletop roleplaying games ended up focusing a lot more on the explaining why things need to be fought, but D&D seems more firmly built around the combat system rather than the lore. I think there's also a bit of a saving grace with how a lot of D&D's designated evil races eventually had big stories made about antiheroes striving against type and demonstrating that maybe it's not all that simple. When you see a work of fiction that does that sort of portrayal without the gameplay providing the framework, it feels a lot different. The Goblin Slayer series is all about how goblins are iredeemably evil horrible rapist vermin, and it just feels really gross.
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Mar 29, 2022 17:56
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With fantasy and sci-fi, it's common for writers to want to add in weird elements for the sake of the weird idea, even if there's no greater philosophical purpose meant to be expressed. That's often the dominant purpose of the genre, in fact. Just to have wild fantastical concepts. Even when the weird things are meant to be metaphor or allegory, they can easily drift away from the original intention to just be weird things standing on their own. In 40k, when one of the factions is literally a fungal infection and a scourge upon the galaxy, that still leaves them on par with most of the other factions; probably better than most, the Orks are fun guys. There was a whole thing during the War of the Beast where Orkz developed into high enough concentrations that they started turning into a complex state with diplomats even. Maybe the orkz could develop beyond being just a scourge on the galaxy someday. But probably not.
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Mar 30, 2022 07:57
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Archonex posted:You know, you use that emote, but it's shocking how many people really, really, really don't get the joke. Well, it's not really consistently told as a joke. Like definitely earlier on in 40k's conception, there's a lot of jokes happening and it's easier to take it as just something silly, but over time as the franchise goes on, there's a lot that gets played straight rather than as a parody. They sort of carve out a territory within all that weird parody to be serious about things because that way they can tell straightforward stories to just keep people interested in the setting and even be able to feel like their army that they bought and painted are actually cool and good somehow or another. I think the main avenues they give to the players to feel good about various armies and characters are:
Archonex posted:The Orks are pretty bad too, FWIW. Orks don't usually steal, because the technology they rely on works on their own weird psychic field to make it work. Except for squigs, which they stole from Tyranids because they looked orky enough for them. Okay, also they do slavery, but that doesn't come up much.
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Mar 30, 2022 19:05
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40k just a different kind of tabletop game. Although it does make me think of how the Halo books went out of their way to establish Earth as fascist to explain how they had such a developed space military to fight the Covenant with. (but also the fascism of Earth was justified by the anti-earth rebels doing a 9/11). The games didn't have anything about Earth being fascist and were just straightforward space army fights the bad and corrupt aliens until the game series switched developers.
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Mar 31, 2022 16:19
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NikkolasKing posted:My understanding is that, at the time of their birth, Slaanesh was the strongest due to glutting themselves on a hedonistic race of super psychic space elves. I think it's outright stated that Slaanesh was one of the weakest after both Nurgle and Khorne beat up Slaanesh to take their pick of the Eldar gods.
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Mar 31, 2022 19:54
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In RDR you actually have the option to capture Javier Escuella alive. Bill Williamson will get shot whether or not John pulls the trigger, and Dutch falls of the cliff. To John's perspective it could've seemed legit, but the government men don't seem like they'll be too worried about providing a fair trial. The game ends with them sending waves of men to charge you at the ranch shooting to kill, not asking for any kind of surrender. There's no legality to the whole thing. The game makes pretty light of causing chaos in Mexico, which honestly John Marston as one totally unofficial agent could probably go entirely unnoticed at the time because during the game's timeframe the Mexican Revolution was happening, which had a lot of complicated twists and turns and later down the line led to the US marines invading Mexico, Pancho Villa leading his revolutionaries to attack the US, and the US army invading to find Pancho Villa.
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Apr 3, 2022 21:51
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I really haven't played many Rockstar games, but usually they seem to orbit around this kinda generically edgy tone where they're criticizing everything at once, but not really saying anything meaningful in the process. Red Dead Redemption is an exception where they have a pretty sentimental story in the middle of things that it ends with, but to get to that, you still have to wade through edgy stuff like a crazed necrophiliac treasure hunter and a faux-intellectual hopped up on the fancy new drugs of the time. So many of the sidequests end with punchlines like the people involved dying in the end or whoops looks like you made the world a worse place. It's meant to let you feel heroic if you hunt down some outlaws but not feel bad if you rob a bank or tie up a lady and throw her onto the railroad tracks like an old timey villain. That's how Rockstar's sandbox do. The only thing it really makes a coherent statement on is how native americans got a bad deal, but there's really no native characters, they just ended up throwing in with John Marston's crazed father figure in some ridiculous scheme. The tone works best in Bully where the edginess is being communicated through angsty adolescents so the tone fits completely and instead of people getting murdered, it's kids getting wedgies. It feels more playful to cause chaos by throwing stinkbombs instead of killing hookers. I think the edgiest it gets is a mission where it starts trying to make you think that Jimmy is going to be delivering meth, but the twist at the end is that it's hair growth formula for bald men.
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Apr 6, 2022 16:09
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I've heard a lot of explanations of what fascism is or isn't or could be over the last few years, and one of the big things I've taken from it is that there's some element of mystery and the unknown to most cases of the rise of fascism. The specifics may get studied to death so that people can understand how it happened, but fascism doesn't crest into a major force on its own without people in large numbers underestimating whatever its initiating elements were. Of course, after coming into being, whatever secret force it harnessed to come into being doesn't give it some extra acuity for broader appeal after the fact. I've heard it described as an un-ideology, because it's not just irrational, it can seem totally incoherent if you don't really share the underlying sentiments. Although I think you could also interpret the Lord of the Hundreds more broadly to various forces that come from somehow outside the traditional power structures, either overlooked from within or coming from without. There's plenty of examples of that throughout history, even without "proper" fascism being a factor. Not being hooked into any other power structures and being unconcerned with bureaucracy or also makes them more reliant on their leader (and possibly you could cast some of the forces being apparently recruited from the void as routed troops finding their way back to the main force). Even the best leaders, if too much goes through them directly, will end up showing the capriciousness of their basic humanity. Most people aren't the best leaders either. Either way, they're what you get when you're unconcerned with bureaucracy or aristocracy or popular opinion and have a group that just has one guy in charge that they follow.
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May 20, 2022 05:19
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Scratch Monkey posted:How complicated is it? I like to buy anew board game very summer to play on vacation with my kids ages 12-16. Is it a pain to learn and play? I think it's more complicated than a lot of games, and it's probably more complicated to figure out how to win than it is to learn how to play. Competitive players may get frustrated at not having clear paths to victory, and uncompetitive players might screw with the game balance? If you can get them interested, you'll certainly have a time discovering all about how the game works when playing at least. But also with many board games, you can look up the rules online to figure out for yourself how you feel about how easy it would be figure out to play. Leder Games is actually pretty generous about that. I think they've even officially released Print and Play documents for Root, but I can't find a good link. I only really played the game once, and I think I messed up playing the Vagabond because I never wanted to declare full war on another player, but I think that's the best way to generate points as the Vagabond, because that's when you can use your power to fight off hordes of enemies? It's weird. That's a problem I personally have with a lot of strategy games, just lacking the killer instinct to pull the trigger on attacking and making an enemy. There's a lot of board games that have ways of mitigating that by making lasting friendships and rivalries unprofitable, or even forcing players to attack, but the Vagabond has a big ol' part of its faction board dedicated to showing your relationship with other factions, and when you decide to be hostile, you can't easily take it back. For people who are intrigued by the political theories but don't actually like cute animals, you could go check out a game that Cole Wehrle made before Root: Pax Pamir. It has the players playing as local tribes of Afghanistan maneuvering around the decaying Durrani Empire and the expanding Russian and British Empires. I don't know how good it is, but it definitely is a Great Game.
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May 28, 2022 20:38
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Khanates are a whole 'nother kettle of worms, and tend to be characterised as ruthless but pragmatic, specifically making use of knowledge and experts that they find even though they're from illiterate cultures, being culturally and religiously tolerant as long as you pay fealty and your taxes, and even adopting culture and lifestyles that suit them. To the point of occasionally being fully absorbed into the cultures they conquer after the Khan dies and the empire splits up. Not really uncommon a lot of invading peoples. Just ask the Franks, Lombards, and Goths. With Genghis Khan specifically, he came to power within Mongol society by cutting through a lot of the aristocratic old order and tribal norms of the steppe nomads and running some kind of very adaptive meritocracy that absorbed other tribes to become the continent-spanning empire that it became. Didn't exactly last, lacked foundations, but it was a hell of a thing. I think Attila the Hun might've had a similar deal. Maybe you could even say similar things about the early days of Islam when they came out of the desert to smash one of the biggest empires of their day, but it's hard to say how much they absorbed the previous culture and how much unique flavor they had from the start that is still around. They got nasty reputations from the other powers that were around who were deathly afraid of the strange new unknown from out of nowhere, but aside from the wars, not bad for the time.
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May 29, 2022 22:41
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I'd also say about the Otters, that they are not the manifestation of all capitalism in the forest. The deck of cards that represents the common people of the forest beneath the level of the player factions demonstrates that; there's shops and even banks among the common people of the forest (and also tax collectors that the players can make use of, as is their right as the rulers). The Otters are just one company. And a company strong enough to contend with the other prospective rulers of the forest, so that adds more verisimilitude to if the rest of the players despise the specifics about the Otters, as merchants daring to hold power and influence without having fully bought it in blood like you're "supposed" to do. I guess you could say that they're teetering on the edge between being just a part of the economy and holding direct political power over territory. Like they have enough people on their payroll that they can hold territory on their own, and may need to in order to pursue their goals, but that's not their main focus. They want to engage with the other factions to keep trade going (and if people refuse to engage with them, they will have no recourse but to try brute-forcing control over areas and going through the trouble of sabotaging other factions' attempts to rule because they've already invested in mercenaries that gotta get used somehow, and also that's the nature of the game of Root). I think you can even interpret the fact that they have riverboats as underlying the nature of the faction as engaging in trade. It's very common for states in history to have a lot of trouble getting their military over the water because ships are a major investment, but if you're already invested in moving goods from place to place, you'll have plenty of ships to repurpose for military ends. Most powerful naval states like England, Athens, or Portugal start out with investing into ships for more commercial purposes before getting into conquest. I think Venice might be the best parallel to the Otters, even if their name evokes more the East India Company, because Venice was constantly in business relations with other states even as it ended up managing their own territory.
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Jun 5, 2022 22:39
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It's not just how there's only one winner to the game, even in much of the moment-to-moment gameplay, for one player to benefit, another player must suffer. That's how a lot of wargames work. You need to be aggressive and confrontational to play them right. There's often a dichotomy with boardgames between wargames where all players are in constant friction and with more economic engine-building "Eurogames" where none of the players really interact and more just play adjacently to eachother on their own boards, and only indirectly interacting. I'd like to talk about another game that takes a third route.  Sidereal Confluence is a game about trading. Like Root, it's a heavily asymmetric game. Each player is a different alien society.  Unlike Root, I don't think there's much political philosophy or ideology represented in the specific different factions, although I do kinda love the idea of an "adhocracy". There isn't really a single map, and all the names on the cards tend to be weird abstruse high-concept sci-fi things.    How the game works is that all these cards the players have are "converters". You put the required resources in, and it outputs resources on the other end. Basically it represents industry. Planets also output resources on their own, but you can spend resources to upgrade them. Resources come in the flavors of small cubes (white, green, brown), large cubes (black, blue, yellow), and hexagonal prisms. There are specific things that they're supposed to represent, but even then, that's not the strength of the game.   What the game is about is how all the players need different things and produce different things, so they all need to trade with everybody else to get what they need. The game illustrates the principle of comparative advantage. Players need to figure out what the other players need and are best able to produce in order to squeeze the most they can out of trades. The trading phase of the game gets pretty crazy with players shouting out what they need, what they're willing to give away. It's like the game Pit but more complicated. Most of the factions' special abilities play into that. Players are encouraged to make deals to overcome their shortcomings, and trade away everything they have access to, even parts of their playerboard. There are even rules for dealing with players that promise future payouts for current deals that will be enforced by the game system. When technologies are developed by individual players, everyone else in the game gets access to the benefits. It is a game about using trade to get more than you put into it, which is possible because of how differently players value different things. A positive-sum game. Even if at the end of the game every player's points and cubes get counted up so there's just the one winner, every turn you have more than you did the last. Even if there's a lot of tough negotiating over the deal, players will still get something that they wanted at the end of it. The design diary about how the game was created is interesting, since the game started out as one of those 8-hour-long behemoths like Twilight Imperium or Eclipse, but with bits pared down and shaved off until it was a two hour game with no map. That's also why the various factions are less clearly allegorical about their gimmicks, since in that process, they needed to be trimmed and simplified and redefined as the mechanics through which their nature was expressed were eliminated. I can try doing a rundown of the specific factions later. Or maybe this was just another defense of the Otters.
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Jun 13, 2022 21:49
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Comstar posted:There's all this hate for the Root Vagabond but I am absolutely terrible at diplomacy, trading, backstabbing and if you give me a side that ignores all that and lets me kill Dragons in not-Skyrim I would rather do that. You don't so much kill Dragons as you need to massacre your friend's armies.
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Jun 14, 2022 16:53
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Xiahou Dun posted:Besides the Glorantha method of having the setting being self-reinforcing? Having a world where the laws of physics just don't work is a pretty good way to prevent modernization, yeah. I've seen one thing where a trash plane of existence made out of a bunch of shards of other planes of existence normally has people just powering through with magic, but one scientist had to figure out how to deal with the shifting laws of physics in order to compete.
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Jul 4, 2022 05:36
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I think 13th Age is one of my favorite takes on alignment with their Icon system. Basically instead of alignment, there are 13 characters or factions as part of the game's setting, and instead of defining your character in absolute moral/philosophical/ideological/metaphysical terms, you spend points during character creation to define your character's relationship with those factions in numeric terms. You choose either a positive, negative, or conflicted relationship with each Icon, and the exact mechanic for dealing with that is that at the start of every play session, for each point you have with that icon, you roll one die, and for every 6 you get, there will be some kind of benefit to the player ingame from their relationship in the session, used at the discretion of either the player or the DM. For every 5, the player gets a benefit with some kind of downside attached. They put a little chart in the book defining the icons in good/lawful/evil/chaotic terms for players who care about that, as well as rules relating to which factions are heroic/neutral/villainous, but there's a lot of icons that straddle quadrants or leave interpretation to the players and DM. It seems very unlike how a lot of classic RPG handbooks are since the handbook for 13th age talks a lot about how a lot of the game will be at the discretion of players and DM or how to take the systems of 13th Age and repurposing them for using with other settings, a lot about just playing the game rather than going on and on about the weird specific lore. Some players will want to play without complicated moral quandaries and they're just good versus evil, others want to muddle their way through more complicated morals. It's also baking naturally opposed nations/factions/countries into the fiber of the game that don't fully line up with the playable races, so you're a bit less likely to default to the weird national race-essentialism that some fantasy RPG players blunder into, often through no fault of their own except lack of creativity.
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Jul 5, 2022 23:43
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There is a whole thing where big arguments about whatever can eventually drift into arguments about whatever the people involved are most passionate or angry about (their politics), but that doesn't always add up to creating a long-term link between issues. (much like how many pragmatically aligned political groups end up not caring about eachothers' issues despite how long they're together) I have feelings about 4E because it's the only D&D I played, even if only for a brief time. I kinda fell in love with the character creation program for a little bit.
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Aug 5, 2022 17:03
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Oh right, I remember this. They were trying to put out a new version of an RPG made by the original TSR, which they obviously didn't have any rights to because the original TSR was bought by WOTC and the new TSR is just a new, unrelated company involving Ernest Gygax that took advantage of WOTC not renewing their trademark to the name. And then the game's rules were pretty explicitly racist. https://twitter.com/NoHateInGaming/status/1549479240390901760 But the most crazy thing is that apparently in the files being distributed for testing the new space racist game, there was an excel file outlining the company's perceived enemies, as well as some plans for fighting against them, including other members of the Gygax family. https://twitter.com/NoHateInGaming/status/1550463011604791298 Xiahou Dun posted:He quoted a 19th general justifying killing native children, "Nits make lice" in a discussion on why it's cool and good to kill orc babies. While it's definitely not great to make that quote, one lovely quote as an old man, long after he wasn't very relevant does not make for "notoriously lovely". It wasn't like a long screed, it was posts in a forum interview, which those can go awry in weird ways, and far as I can dig up as well, it wasn't actually even in reference to any orc babies at all, it was about a paladin killing a surrendered ogre. Not saying it was good, just that hearsay stories can balloon out of control. And since it was online, here it is. https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=11762&start=60 It's still a weird thing to say in response to a fairly weird question (which was actually posing a scenario where the paladin just did that and a dwarf kills the paladin's horse in retaliation, and Gygax's first response was to say he'd DM a combat between the dwarf and the paladin), and I think that at the heart of D&D, the game was conceived more to be about no-strings-attached killing, not complex moral considerations.
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Sep 15, 2022 15:34
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I'd say that being anti-corporate only really matters as a "political" position so long as there's some meaningful non-corp governmental power out there to juxtapose against. Because if it's the only thing out there, who cares? It's the world you live in, and you only have the choice to engage with the world or not.
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Dec 15, 2022 06:40
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I think the idea of slicing off perfectly functional parts of yourself to replace them with unfeeling, unhealing metal is still kinda gross, and it's easy to see how things could go wrong, or how cyborg bodyparts that give you some superhuman functionality would have tradeoffs and mean giving up some of the human experience. Can't really eat a sandwich with an arm you replaced with a backhoe. In the world of prosthetic organs you have a mixed bag. One company that provided artificial eyes to the blind has gone out of business meaning those people with artificial eyes in their skulls are no longer technically supported, which could be hazardous when they run into future issues. There's also one of the last users of an iron lung who a little while back made some desperate internet pleas because he could no longer find replacement parts for the machine he needs to live (since polio has largely been eradicated in the US, there haven't been much call for iron lungs in recent days, so there's no production). But also you have some people who hacked their own insulin pump implants to be power-users and better service their needs. But also also, organ implants with wireless access introduce hacking vulnerability into your own body, which isn't good. There's plenty of ways new technology can go wrong, especially without oversight or regulation. I think Ghost in the Shell might be one of my favorite cyberpunk things, and it can be fairly neutral and maybe more often than not positive perspective on the technology itself although it showcases many of the ways they go wrong.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:39
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Clarste posted:Yeah, which is why the corporations owning the stuff is still a problem (and patents and right to repair and whatnot making it impossible for anyone else to fix it). It's not about patents or proprietary rules about repairs, it's about just straight-up there aren't the technicians or doctors who know how to safely deal with it. You want to mess with it, you gotta do it by yourself from scratch. And if you want an MRI, it's anyone's guess how you go about that. Telsa Cola posted:Wait so what's the like alternative for the whole iron lung thing, because my understanding is it was somewhat of a last resort so people wouldn't die. For the most part, the main option is Don't Get Polio, and it's because we got rid of the disease that the machine has gone largely obsolete and there are no longer many experts and technicians left for working on the few machines left. The way Polio worked is that it could cause cases of paralysis in parts of the body or in organs, so when the lungs got paralyzed, all you could do was try to artificially keep pumping air. After the disease passes, parts of the paralysis can go away, but sometimes they don't, so if your lungs don't heal back up, well you're stuck using it. Modern medicine does have more options for some other things that iron lungs were used for, and it's more common to use "positive pressure ventilators" (as opposed to the iron lung being a negative pressure ventilator) to solve some of the other things that iron lungs were used for, and they're much more common and easier for doctors to use, but they also cover up the mouth, so using it long-term means you can't use your mouth for anything else, which can be a problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gplA6pq9cOs https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1047691984/decades-after-polio-martha-is-among-the-last-to-still-rely-on-an-iron-lung-to-br
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Dec 19, 2022 18:38
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NikkolasKing posted:As a lifelong JRPG player, I've never understood this supposed cliche in JRPGs. Final Fantasy is surely the premium name in JRPGs and while certain bosses end up with godlike power by the end, it's almost always just some dude or maybe a lady that one time. The only god/abstract entity final bosses I can think of are Cloud of Darkness, Necron, and Orphan. Oh and Bhunivelze if we count sequels/spinoffs. A lot of JRPGs sure do like specifically borrowing and evoking judeo-christian symbology for its final bosses, and then the JRPGs that don't will still doing something where the villain at the end apparently has some kind of god aspects. And of course, if there is an established organized religion in the world, that will normally end up being an evil conspiracy. Especially if it has catholic trappings. Japanese fiction is pretty heavily anti-papist. But most of that is just borrowing christianity for aesthetic purposes. A lot of japanese fiction in general will also make some kind of abstract break when the ending rolls around, maybe get existentialist about things. I think that a big part of that might just be covering for not having a particular plan for how things would end and it's just an easy way to escalate things.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:42
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FMguru posted:They tried the same trick with the follow-up game (Labyrinth) about the GW Bush-era War On Terror, with much less success. Turns out that Kissinger/Kennan/RAND/NSC-68 was a much stronger base to build a game on than the op-ed columns of Thomas Friedman. Is that the game that came with a balaclava for the terrorist player? At least that's funny if nothing else.
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Oct 8, 2023 00:39
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Ultimately most of that dated adventure fiction was about the idea of going to far off lands full of different people in different societies, and while this media is ultimately highlighting the differences, that is often in the service of trying to create the image of a cosmopolitan society. Exoticism enhances the underlying moral if the people can ultimately get along. Maybe there's still stories where people explore their racist feelings with the names for things crossed out, but there are at least as many, if not more stories that are all allegories for how ultimately it's fine for people to be different. I feel like some more modern attempts at fantasy and sci-fi end up feeling somewhat flat when they don't try to create differences between people, and they all feel like they're the aggressively the same despite having different appearances. These are concepts designed to explore the human experience through allegory, and something is lost when people try not to engage with the fact that people are different.
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Oct 18, 2023 22:55
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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.Edgar Allen Ho posted:Dwarves are ashkenazim. My dude JRR Tolkien literally wrote in his letters "the dwarves are jews. I based their language on hebrew. They love gold and hiding away from regular society, because they are the jews." Also the fact that most dwarves don't have proper last names, the use of the 'kh' sound, the dwarven holidays that are disconnected from the standard Middle Earth calendar so they have to be calculated separately, and the fact that most dwarves throughout Middle Earth are scattered in a diaspora after the demise of their former lands, having to live embedded within a foreign culture but still preserving their own linguistic traditions.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:39
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The whole real-world aspect of Tolkien's fantasy races gets a lot blurrier when you poke deeper into the lore, and there's all this stuff about individual peoples and clans within the "races". There's tons of differentiated branches of Elves and Men and Dwarves, and histories of them moving about and often even developing into new groups in the process. Occasionally there's physical traits noted, but more often than not, there aren't. Sometimes there's stuff about groups of people where it refers to all the people living in an area, but like with real history, there's a lot more focus on ruling classes. There are often explicitly times when groups kinda just show up and the lore about them is "nobody really knows when they came about, here's a couple ideas". A lot of the lore in Lord of the Rings about groups of people is just about Tolkien using fiction to toy around with his academic ideas about how groups of people moving around work.
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Oct 29, 2023 21:09
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