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Carbolic posted:The original factions in some ways were rich and interesting and in other ways suffered from a painful lack of imagination. It's the 1980s so who are the future powers? Space America, Space West Germany, Space China-Russia, Space Japan and Space Democracy-Doesn't-Work. India and the rest of the global South? Nah. Who are the bad guys? The evil, incompetent communists and the barbaric Japanese. But at the macro level of the story, everyone is just Space Feudalism led by a noble house leader. If you're going to have Space Communists, why not actually have them be Communists? . I mean, you’re basically complaining that the politics of the 1980s were the politics of the 1980s. No one cared about India and the rest of the global South then, and Japanese and the Commies were the bad guys, and Commies never did anything Communist. That’s all bog standard 1980s trope, so yeah, completely defined by their times.
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Dec 4, 2022 22:43
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Oh dear me posted:That was rightwing in the 1980s too. In the sense that all media was right-wing in the 1980s, sure Carbolic posted:So we agree that it lacked imagination, but your argument is that that's good? I’m not making any argument, just pointing out that it was parroting the political thinking of the 1980s, if that’s what you mean by ‘lacking imagination’, then sure, we agree
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Dec 4, 2022 23:45
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I’ll say that I thought 4e was a better system and I absolutely wanted to run campaigns with it, but WotC decided that selling books wasn’t making enough money and subscription services were the more of the future, and what actually killed my ability to get games of it going was the need to pay $10 a month for access to on-line character generation and management tools. Stuff that had been free and extensive for 3.5e was all paywalled for 4 and free versions were actively hit with cease & desists. So capitalism ruins everything yet again, there’s your weird tabletop politics
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Dec 14, 2022 08:17
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Halloween Jack posted:Imagine if we were sentenced to run the systems we own ::looks in trepidation at the copy of HōL on his shelf::
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Dec 21, 2022 05:59
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Some of that “more complex = better than” is an artifact of D&D being the first RPG to really make it big. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be complex, because: * the original designers were largely wargamers, and the emphasis on realism and simulation in wargames led to an inherent preference and respect for complexity; * game design was still an unrefined, amateur process, and amateurs doing something tend to create unplanned and novel systems which tend to be more complex; * many of the original designers believed in an adversarial system relationship between GM and players, which prevents simpler collaborative answers, and instead pushes for even more complexity as mastery of the rule set becomes another avenue for competition. There was a big section in the front of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide that basically told all new DMs to embrace complexity and system mastery, because the system wasn’t going to get any simpler, and a lot of gamers took that as gospel. I think we’ve seen a huge movement away from that in the last twenty years as the community has changed and gotten broader.
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Dec 21, 2022 19:05
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I believe the latest version of Agricola suggests that in the case of a tie, everyone should play again to determine a new winner.
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Dec 23, 2022 19:07
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Magnetic North posted:I guess what I mean is there are 3 forms of "politics" in board games. I would throw in a fourth, which is "inherent politics". Consider it "unintentionally politically minded games". A lot of games offer up an uncritical or even romantic view of colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, capitalism, etc. Puerto Rico, for example, with the boat that shows up to drop off "workers" that are all little dark brown disks. A bunch of games about colonizing the New World and driving away natives (New World, Age of Empires III The Board Game, etc.) where doing so is presented as necessary to get points.
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Oct 7, 2023 03:50
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I mean, what do you consider "genocide" in a civ game or civ-like? You never have to declare war or conquer opponents in order to win unless you've decided to play on an extremely high difficulty level where it's the only way to stop the massive resource advantages the computer opponents get. I play plenty of Civ 5 and 6 games where I've never even been part of a war, let alone doing 'war crimes'. But if you assume that the vast empty space around your civilization at the start of the game contains indigenous civilizations you're assimilating and conquering when you lay down a new city, then potentially there's an argument that inherent play of the game is genocide, though then I'd argue you're stretching the use of the term 'genocide' to include things such as Rome uniting the Italian penninsula and replacing Etruscan culture, or the Greek city states replacing Mycenean Greece.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:37
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I’m running a campaign set in an alt-history Europe and my dwarves - cantankerous, money-obsessed, and concerned with lineage, status, and beard-grooming are clearly Dutch. I made the Scots elves because angry elves with bagpipes amuses the hell out of me
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Oct 22, 2023 20:39
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