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MonsieurChoc posted:Technocracy are the bad guys not because they believe in Science, but because they're Western Imperialism and Capitalism. You kind of screwed up your games subtext when you have vampires, demons and occult secret societies, but imperialism and capitalism has nothing to do with them. Instead those things are the direct fault of scientists (free pass to team good guy granted to mad scientists). If I recall previous internet discussions, they had to add some text somewhere saying ‘vaccines don’t work the way you would logically expect them to given the rest of the setting, they are actually a good thing and definitely not an excuse for the Technocracy to microchip the masses’.
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Jul 30, 2021 01:07
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think when it comes to racism almost all table top RPGs share the trait of being as weird as possible about asians. I was considering writing something to praise the Runequest approach to fantasy races/species, but Land of Ninja exists, so fair enough.
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Nov 8, 2021 23:53
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Xiahou Dun posted: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. 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. The Empire is the status quo, not an upstart threat. Its actually good at war; it’s military achievements are genuinely impressive and long lasting, not solely a result of surprise attacks on the unprepared. While it is clearly structurally bad, above and beyond the individual decisions of bad actors, it is so for non-obvious complex reasons. See you can write semi-sympathetic characters who honestly think it is better than the alternatives, and that merely getting rid of that one bad Commisar/inquisitor/Emperor will solve half its issues. It doesn’t really make any internal sense to give it the specifically Nazi characteristics that made them so distinctively bad at war; that’s more a Skaven thing.
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Mar 30, 2022 18:48
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One interesting thing about Root is it is not actually inherently zero sum. Each faction earns points for doing more of the thing they want to do. Each faction can end with a lot of points, or only a few. A 4 faction game could end with anything between 30 and 119 points on the table. Some pairs of factions do have a zero-sum struggle between them (a building space cannot contains both an eyrie and a sawmill), but overall things are positive sum. You can perfectly play the game in the euro style, where what matters is your point score, and winning/losing is meaningless. Choosing to play in the American style, where winning is all and there is no distinction between 2nd, place and last is a choice. One the (American, but euro-loving) designer anticipated and planned for, but still a choice. In the game world, a faction that scores 29 points and can expect to score 10 the next turn has met all almost the aspirations of its people, and the restate in sight. Any political leader who delivered that for his people would be lauded as a hero to be emulated, not forgotten as a loser.
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Jun 10, 2022 10:13
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Tiler Kiwi posted:i don't think it would work great in euro style since scoring windows are very different between factions, especially depending on the board state. cats, eyrie, and lizards can be at 25+ points and be completely incapable of winning in two turns, woodland alliance can be at 12 points or so and be one turn away from an absolutely certain victory. it'd really mess with game balance as well, since a lot of lategame play would fall apart if people prioritized securing a higher, but still losing personal score rather than being willing to pile on the frontrunner, and you can absolutely blow both your feet clean off scoring too early with a lot of factions. That’s pretty normal in euros, which are often a race between scoring points now and gaining the ability to score more points soon. The ability to double your score the turn after the game ends is worth rather less than a blue vote in California. I’m not saying the game should be different, or should be played differently. Just that if you are using it for political metaphors, be aware that the strictly-zero sum ‘one winner’ is not actually in the part of the game that has any kind of intentional real-world mapping.
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Jun 13, 2022 16:29
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Tiler Kiwi posted:This is sort of registering with me with the same effect as claiming Diplomacy's mechanics aren't zero sum just cuz you can reliably get "second place" by being a loyal, ineffectual patsy - you can, but the idea it makes you higher on the pile than anyone that actually tried to win is not going to be well regarded. That’s a very good example. Under the rules, explicit and implicit, of Diplomacy, something like NATO or the EU would be impossible and/or undesirable. You can’t live in peace without war; what would be the fun in that? How would you even know who won? I think it is fairly clear that certain real world political actors genuinely do think that way. They would take an outside chance of marginal victory, at horrifying cost, over a near- certainty of peace and prosperity. There are no doubt plenty of Nazis who, if brought forward in history and shown modern Germany, would take the lesson ‘ok, we needed more tanks’. But if you create a game about a time and place where a majority of people _do_ think differently, then the rules need to have a different structure. To represent the Euro, you need a euro.
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Jun 13, 2022 18:58
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Josef bugman posted:I was going to say, from the description the only thing I can think about the Vagabond is "good". Like, I'm not going to lie here, every single one of the various animal empire seems like dicks, and kicking them in the face repeatedly seems like a great time. By the political theming of Root, the Vagabond is full capitalism, in contrast to the otters mercantilism. individualistic, contributing to the economic development of the forest by increasing the number of building spaces available, doing positive sum trades with everyone, doing opportunistic violence sometimes but never holding territory. And destined to win the current era by Marx’s universal law of history.
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Jun 15, 2022 10:46
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Magnetic North posted:This comment makes me think it might be cool to have a game where the modules controlled by the classes can change between players. So, the ownership class starts with the Factories board among other things, but the state could nationalize them and take control of them, or the working class could seize them, etc. Moving around like a company charter in an 18XX game. Hegemony does actually have this. A central mechanic is that there are a varying number of state-owned firms. If they exist, they satisfy most of the demand for, say, health care, meaning that isn’t a profitable sector to invest in. A smart capitalist will sell off their holdings, unless they foresee it being privatised soon. Whether those firms exist is determined by a semi-random vote that can be influenced by certain capitalist or state-owned firms. The 4 main resources in the game are education, health care, food and luxuries. One concession the game makes to the playability of the capitulate is that there are no state-owned producers of luxuries, so they always have a hinterland to retreat to. As the capitalist player has access to a random world market, the game can reasonably end up in a state resembling an idealised 1980s East Germany. Everyone is fed, educated and healthy, but people are smuggling in Levi’s. No luxury Space Communism here.
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Oct 9, 2023 09:50
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