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Owlofcreamcheese posted:A god in d&d can’t really do anything a guy can’t do. It feels like it’d be really hard to have real religious faith when Jesus is just some kind of high level guy just like they guy that killed the rats in your yard a few months ago. Like gods exist but who cares? As a rule, D&D gods seem to be huge jerks. So it follows that if they're just guys, they'd be the type to come round your house every Friday night and take a drunken dump in your mailbox. Ostensibly this could be avoided by donating at your local temple a little. 'Deities are the Mob' isn't exactly the height of social commentary, but on the other hand, as capitalism keeps limping towards a fail state,  seems more and more apt, so why not!
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Mar 12, 2022 01:19
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CommieGIR posted:Endless War is now Endless Infrastructure Week. You ever notice in Sim City 2000 that churches pop up on (I want to say) residential zoned tiles, but if you go and demolish the church, the land underneath is no longer zoned? It's been crazy christians all along, friends 
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Mar 31, 2022 16:24
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Josef bugman posted:It also makes the whole argument that "power corrupts" which is something I disagree with. Power doesn't corrupt it reveals, and the fact that people with power refuse to use it well reflects poorly on them. Not on wishing to have and use power. It provides a view of power that is only ever used by the various different levels of bastard who have power in our systems. Right, but ultimately anyone wielding power in a human society is still a human being. Adolf Hitler famously shot Adolf Hitler to death, and Berija (possibly) poisoned Josif Stalin. There's a handy chart somewhere about causes of death among Roman emperors, and "stabbing" pretty high up there, old age less so. The point is that Superman, whose origin story is that he has super powers from childhood on, is that they never have to experience human frailty the same way the rest of us do. They fundamentally don't play on the same playing field. "Power corrupts" is a saying about human beings, who tend to abuse or at least sometimes use selfishly power given to them by other human beings. This is not the case with Superman. If he wants to, he can eye-laser San Fransisco to the ground, or whatever other monstrosity you could think of, and there is absolutely nothing you could do to stop him. (In Superman's case there's kryptonite, but we can cite other fiction where there is no such contrivance.) Imagine a 5-year-old having a sugar high temper tantrum, and now imagine they could destroy everything in their path without opposition. Destroy as in raze a few blocks to the ground. A better comparison than "power corrupts" is that twilight zone episode about the kid who "sends people into the corn". You know how the family around the kid acts, right? Now imagine that's the whole of humanity, all the freaking time.
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Jun 15, 2022 23:38
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Harold Fjord posted:Superman has to be born that way because no one is trying to turn themselves into a supergod who isn't already an rear end in a top hat. 
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Jun 15, 2022 23:54
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Magnetic North posted:Quoting myself from the Board Games thread, I wonder if this thread would be interested in this sort of topic. I don't think board games (or other games for that matter) that engage with a horrible topic need to be about misinformation, although they can be. But look at a game like Twilight Struggle. Some of the effects of the cards (in the game you play with cards that feature historical events and people) don't necessarily make historical sense, but in the grander scheme of the game itself, you as the player are constantly afraid of triggering a nuclear war, which seems like a good lesson to learn. On the whole, it falls on the shoulders of the game designer to be at least somewhat faithful to history and the events they are trying to portray. I'm vaguely aware that, for a counter-example of sorts, there's a contingent of Warhammer players who think the "Imperium of Man" is actually really super cool and wicked awesome, where it is obviously a fascist murder regime ruled by a dead? god-emperor. Warhammer is fiction, but I don't know if you can entirely avoid, say, wargamers who will think that the Wehrmacht was pretty awesome at making war and don't think too hard about the war crimes and crimes against humanity aspect. Of course it is easier in a sense to just make your wargame about furry forest creatures and avoid this whole debacle, but you as the game designer are still making an entertainment product about mass murder. Or mass death, if we don't consider killing owls and rabbits as murder in the technical sense.
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Jul 2, 2022 08:06
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Nazi "esoteric science" seems like an area where it's really easy for the Wehraboos to just slap a swastika on Germany, give them a +5 modifier in science and a research tree that is mechanically easier to deal with than, say, the Soviets. It's video games, not table top, sorry, but the Wolfenstein games at least tried to show off "weird Nazi science and occultism poo poo" and make the player think this was all really bad and evil. Say what you will about the game-play of Half-Life one 2 decades after its launch, but that feels like a good example of a game showing, not telling, through the game-play that the US military-industrial complex is really, really messed up and horrible.
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Jul 2, 2022 16:37
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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.
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Jul 2, 2022 21:03
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Look, Helm can take a steaming dump into the nearest heap and watch (get it) me not giving a poo poo (get it?). The deities in FR don't make any sense at all.
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Jul 3, 2022 22:48
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 Tabletop Games: Axes Have Some Weird Politics
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Aug 12, 2022 15:10
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Halloween Jack posted:I think that's part and parcel of 80s-90s cyberpunk. I've noticed near-future dystopias tend to fall into one of two extremes: either The Government takes over everything and creates a totalitarian state with a single hierarchy, or governments dissolve in favour of Megacorporations, who create privatized dystopias while the spaces between them become a free-for-all. The Forbin Project reflected the fears of the Cold War, but surely its point was that regardless of the system, it was the cold logic of the war itself that dictated the actions of all players?
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Dec 14, 2022 21:06
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Milo and POTUS posted:This is a big thread and the only one I've really read on tabletop games, was there some game or setting that took place in the cthulhu mythos after humans were extinct and the surviving factions were predictably horrible? I've tried ctrl+fing lovecraft but I haven't found it You might like A Colder War, though it still features humans. But it all goes horrible for everyone involved!
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Jan 26, 2023 04:00
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Tiler Kiwi posted:his name is a reference to the kabbalah, that has to count for something My fellow poster in Cthulhu, have you heard of Wizardry 4?
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Aug 2, 2023 17:13
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Apparently Wizardries are pretty popular in Japan, I wonder which way the Kabbalah influences went. Although by the LP, getting the Kabbalah references in Wizardry 4 is a humongous pain in the rear end.
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Aug 2, 2023 18:45
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Constant infighting and bickering, forming
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Aug 10, 2023 08:26
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Would Twilight Struggle fit into this category? It's a horrifying experience, but extremely well designed for it. And there is politics, sort of.
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Oct 6, 2023 17:58
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Maybe this is reductionist, but don't basically all 4X games feature an "are we the baddies" moment, because the inherent game mechanics force you into war crimes? Even with "diplomacy" solutions the player usually has to commit genocide. I have the Civ 5 cheevo of playing as Gandhi with minimal cities, but still.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:08
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I don't mean to start an argument, but one of the titular four exes does stand for unpleasant things. I will admit to having a bias against the Meklar, but in spite of that, the other races seem to want to be aggressive against me. And more to the point, the more peaceful resolutions to Civ-type games tend to involve dealing with competitors who have a population advantage. Which sounds about as pleasant as you'd think.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:45
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SlothfulCobra posted: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. Does the book about the spiders and SHODAN count as modern? I recently read the sequel about octopi and they were certainly alien too, but it didn't really capture the wondersense of the spiders. If we're permitted to go non-modern, there's always Stanislaw Lem.
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Oct 19, 2023 04:21
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