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!

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Both editions of Mage are about revolutionary politics in the face of global capitalism. Awakening is better for a number of reasons, but people really sell Ascension short because they've failed the test it puts in front of them. On one side, you have the imperial west, which is objectively strangling humanity to death. On the other hand, you have a variety of factions united against the imperial west, some of them drawing from the past, some of them drawing from contemporary counterculture, all of them with a bunch of weird flaws and poor historical track records and so on. Are you with them or against them? Will you fight, or will you perish like a dog? There's no third option, because capitalism doesn't give you one; you can fight it or you can be devoured by it.

A lot of Mage fans were fooled by Guide to the Technocracy and similar books into thinking that capitalism is good. Awakening is a lot more blunt with its politics, so while you get a lot of genuine pro-Technocracy roleplayers who either don't realize or don't care that they're on the side of fascism, people who are pro-Seer of the Throne are mostly doing bits.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 08:02

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 00:18

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Ronwayne posted:

The Technocracy also has a theoretically salvageable 'SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!' faction, for that particular nerd fetish of musk-esque technoimperialism.

Nope! They're just the expansionist wing. All of it's gotta go.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

I guess this is where we have to agree to disagree, because I can't see a world in which the traditions "win" being much better for the common person than their current situation. Maybe if there were a faction styled after the YPG and PKK, but the Traditions themselves all organize into hierarchical structures wherein the "enlightened" dole out their knowledge to the masses, either based on religious organization or guru based personality. They didn't have the foresight to provide us with a Bone Gnawer or Children of Gaia faction who are concerned with the poor masses of "regular" people.

Like, what does the world look like if the Traditions win? A modified version of Torg? How does day to day life go by in a society where the Verbena control consensus, and how is its treatment of the poor and infirm that different from under the Technocracy? And how does that differ from the mindset of a guy who thinks that the world would be better if we just let the Catholic Church control everything, but with Catholic scratched off and Wicca written in? If one doesn't like life under the Order of Hermes, can one just walk one country over and try out the Sons of Ether for a bit? Who is feeding people if the Order of Hermes is in charge? Are there still farmers and miners to produce the raw materials that the magicians need to do their magic? Or do things like hungry and thirst magically disappear without Capitalism? Which Tradition "wins" in the end? Because many of them aren't peaceful live and let live type organizations, and it's difficult to picture the Celestial Chorus, the Euthanatoi or the Order of Hermes not attempting to convert and control the other Tradition's followers immediately when given the opportunity.

I understand the argument the game presents, but I don't find the answer it gives of anti-scientific libertarian anarcho-primitivism particularly compelling. It's similar to how I think racism is a genuine problem, but don't think that Tariq Nasheed or the Black Hammer Organization provide a workable solution to it.

First, lots of real-life leftist factions - and certainly the materially successful ones - are organized hierarchically. If you think the problem is "hierarchy" rather than capitalism you've already been fooled by liberal ideology.

Second and more importantly, the modern traditions aren't the ancient traditions, and couldn't be even if they tried. History has progressed too much. The Traditions, plural, are now an ecumenical organization dedicated to human liberation rather than to specifically the church of Rome or whatever. They contain two tech and one general grab-bag modern culture faction! Most if not all of the members of the actual old-fashioned wizard and druid traditions were, themselves, born in the modern era and have modern sensibilities. Turning back the clock isn't actually an option. Now - and this is good game design - every Tradition has a bunch of reactionary or at least counterproductive elements that make it more difficult for that Tradition to both work with others and defeat the Technocracy. A Mage storyline about actually freeing humanity is naturally going to involve internal struggle and rectification as well as involving external struggle against the enemy.

But if you're like "who is feeding people [after the end of capitalism]" they've already got you.

Archonex posted:

This in no way exonerates the mages that made up groups like the Order of Hermes, who would want to roll back the changes the Order of Reason had worked towards. Nor does it mean that science or technology is inherently bad as the way the world was before they showed up shows that inevitably you get some Seer-esque mages running things callously and gallivanting about while normal people die of dysentery in a ditch.

Ferrinus point is wrong not because of an obfuscated point he made (Which does exist.) but because he starts a line of reductive reasoning that when spun out to its end basically ends up with a Phil Brucato-esque conclusion that nature is inherently good and technology/science inherently equals capitalism or western society, which it decidedly does not.

And I should add that i've read a quote from Brucato himself who once said something to the tune that the traditions were not the good guys opposing capitalism or whatever but instead dangerous luddites and that a big part of the problem is that the Technocracy needs to get it's poo poo together and act right. It was quite some time ago that I read the quote but I also clearly recall he even he explicitly cited the point that the traditions way of thinking fucks over all of humanity by rewriting reality to a primitive standard that leaves them in a supreme position of power for their own gain. Which is a very Seers sort of thing to do, I should add.

Yeah, this is the actual thread relevant thing that you can take away from this ~~iteration of mage chat~~ particular branch away from the VtM political content stuff.

The Order of Hermes doesn't actually want to roll back the changes the Order of Reason worked towards. I mean, they definitely did many hundreds of years ago when the Order of Reason was a nascent power rather than a totally hegemonic Technocracy, but, again, the modern Traditions are whether they like it or not aspects of the modern world. If sick people get protective talismans rather than antibiotic pills they're still being cured.

Phil 'Satyros' Brucato doesn't have a good understanding of the setting they're letting him work on. That's why he's like "oh well the Technocracy and Traditions are both bad, that's why I'm going to make up some new hip faction of actually-good mages." There's going to be a Brucato II who comes along and says that faction is actually bad and who makes up Mary Sue faction #4 or whatever, it just betrays a fundamental unwillingness to engage.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

White Wolf in general has a problem of metaphor drift. Like, we already have a very workable metaphor for capitalism in Vampire: old, calcified systems of control that attempt to absorb everything underneath them, and which exist forever the way corporations do. We also have the comically over the top Captain Planet villain in Pentex, responsible for both world scale destruction of the environment and toys that literally make children depressed and teach them to be sexist and abusive. And so of course, when the Mage metaphor for capitalism comes up, well, it needs to be tied into the other two: the Syndicate's Special Projects Division works alongside Pentex, and there are probably Vampires working with Hall and Nash and the rest of the New World Order, and so on. But then the metaphors fight each other? How are we supposed to read the Technocracy blowing up the Ravnos antediluvian with the ghost of the Hiroshima nuke? Are the Vampires now the persecuted minorities, rather than calcified capital? Is this instead now a metaphor for Capitalism supplanting Feudalism? Or is this just a way to move the metaplot forward and erase some mistakes White Wolf made in the early 90s?

Individual parts of capitalism fighting each other tooth and claw is very realistic to capitalism, though. So is bloodsucking petty-bourgeoisie finding themselves proletarianized as they get ground beneath the gears of bigger and more advanced capitals. So is the inextricable link between wide-scale economic exploitation and sexism, ableism, racism, etc. It's our job to read the game and make conclusions; fantasy art needn't and shouldn't painstakingly set out one-to-one correspondences between imaginary and real events such that you open a corebook and find wizard George W. Bush leveraging rumors of wizard WMDs to invade wizard Iraq etc, and if any one of those elements is missing or even slightly different you just wave it off as a random story about nothing.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 16:40

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Toph Bei Fong posted:

[Citation needed]

The... entire line? Like, the Traditions are actually, factually an alliance of disparate religions (and non-religions). They're made up predominantly if not completely of modern-day people - even old traditionalists are old in the sense of being boomers, not old in the sense of being methuselahs. They're all live-and-let-live with each other, but the Technocracy is live-and-let-live with nobody, because capitalism abhors any time, space, or society that has not been assimilated into capitalism.

quote:

Worrying about and improving material conditions is a primary concern of leftist thought. Does hunger simply not exist without capitalism? Do material needs just get magicked away?

Hunger definitely existed before capitalism, such that the development of the Order of Reason and of capitalism generally was a historical necessity. Don't get me wrong - I don't think it's bizarre or regrettable or something that the Craftsmasons developed how they did, or an actual problem that thanks to the development of productivity and technology etc. we now live in a single globalized world or whatever. But, a few points:

First, one of the reasons hunger existed before capitalism is that the disparate magical Orders whose descendants would eventually become "The Traditions" simply didn't care about normies. People like to talk about the Traditionalists ruling as sorcerer-despots, but the actual history was more like they ignored people and did nothing to protect them. So of course they were going to lose to a magical faction that actually satisfied the material needs of regular people and was able to marshall popular power behind itself.

Second, yes, material needs get magicked away. Like, literally, that is the Order of Reason's claim to fame: they actually used magic (which is to say, a combination of ideological training and the deployment of specialized knowledge) to solve such things as hunger, pestilence, attack by predators, etc. Nowadays, of course, it's the opposite: why is there world hunger, despite us producing more than enough food to feed everyone? Capitalism! Why is there an ongoing pandemic, despite the measures that we would've needed to prevent its spread having been widely known at its very outset? Capitalism! Etc. So the Technocracy has long since outgrown its usefulness, and is now a blight on humanity rather than its savior. As a mirror of this, the Traditions have become our way forward even though they used to suck and indeed still contain many lovely elements. To quote a famous political theorist, you go to war with the army you have.

Sinteres posted:

You're forcing a reading where Technocracy = Capitalism but the NWO was explicitly involved in the Soviet Union too, and their whole deal is basically being the bad kind of hierarchy. If you want the Technocracy to just be Capitalism in your games, that's fine, but it's not textual (or else the entire Union would be the Syndicate), and I think any kind of end of history triumphalism, whether ML or liberal, fits pretty well with a Technocratic idea of progress. With communism they just make sure nothing ever gets past the vanguard stage, which conveniently matches up with real life.

The NWO was certainly "involved" in the Soviet Union, but, notably, the Soviet Union fell and fractured into a bunch of capitalist states all under the Technocracy's watch. It's important to understand, though, that as a literary element the Technocracy isn't an illuminati conspiracy that likes really-existing capitalism and so works behind the scenes to protect really-existing capitalism. It is capitalism, or rather a metaphorical stand-in for it. It does the stuff capitalism does, it has problems akin to capitalism's, it has a history akin to capitalism's, etc.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 17:25

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Toph Bei Fong posted:

I like your vision of the game as an optimistic enlightened Marxist revolution much better than the one that was printed by White Wolf.

edit: to expand on this a bit, an analogy: I like X-Men comics. I think they're a fun and interesting and flexible idea. I could name off many runs and writers that I really enjoyed. But, also, I could talk about runs which didn't get it, were made by old writers returning to material they had aged out of, and ones which are downright offensive.

So, if I were to speak about X-Men being good in any sort of long form sense, it would be in a qualified way. "My" X-Men are like this, which involves ignoring these comics which, while published, I think are very bad and don't get at the core concepts that make X-Men good. But it does introduce problems like when someone brings up the salient point "What if the X-Men are a really good analogy for the police, rather than minorities?" and I have to say "Well, yeah, I can see that reading, but I don't like those X-Men runs by writer XYZ and I don't think they understood the concept very well".

I sympathize with your position and probably would've said the same thing years ago, but if we're going to read Mage as a text - rather than just shrugging at it because it's had lots of different writers, etc - we do need to think deeply on it and synthesize it into something coherent, because that's our responsibility as readers and as political thinkers. And that's just dialectics, right? Everything has internal contradictions, and develops as a result of how those contradictions collide and transform.

Like I said earlier, I'm a huuuuge Awakening partisan and was much happier to just write Ascension off as nonsense back in the day, but increasing historical and political knowledge really improves both games for the reader and player. Here's a funny story about Awakening: the original plan for M:tAw was that there would actually be a magical war between "The Traditions" and "The Technocracy", but as players increased in their Gnosis and peeled back layers of secrets they'd learn that the real players were the Pentacle and the Seers. Magic vs. science was just a proxy war for domination vs. liberation.

...but that's actually true of Ascension either way, and nowhere do they make it as clear in the actual ToJ "Ascension" book itself.

Archonex posted:

But that's the thing. It's not what was printed by White Wolf. I mean, if we're talking about homebrew lore and such that's fine but that's not solely what's there in the actual produced product. And I don't know how to say this without potentially catching a probe, Ferrinus, but it's obvious you take an incredibly narrow view of Mage and it's backstory, despite also having a very passionate interest in it.

Like, you say poo poo like this on the regular:

And it's obvious you're impressing your own personal political views onto the setting. Which is fine! Part of what makes the OWoD games is that they are so open to many different interpretations. But that doesn't change the fact that the actual work we're discussing is a bit more nuanced than it simply just being a work-wide metaphor for the glorious revolution against capitalism and the righteous downfall of the liberal ideology.

This doesn't mean that I disagree with your posts that the game would be interesting if that's how it was. But I have to question just what you're trying to accomplish by arguing with people (and the statements of a foundational dev going all the way up to M20!) by insisting that that's the only interpretation? I mean, you're more likely to drive people away from posting in the thread by doing that than anything else.

You're also impressing your own personal political views onto the setting, specifically a mealy-mouthed liberal third campism. The question is, whose politics are better represented such that they make for a more coherent reading of the game as a work of art? The answer is, mine.

If you don't think the Technocracy is a proxy for capitalist hegemony as such, if you think the Traditions are actually just as bad or bad enough that there's really a no clear good guy or bad guy, if you think the Pentacle is actually bad enough that there's not a clear good guy or bad guy in Awakening, well, you should be able to make the argument. But you don't seem to be doing that. Instead, you're complaining that here, in this forum, things are being debated and discussed.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 19:10

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

eviltastic posted:

this would be the part where I don't follow. I mean, the text quite pointedly says that their current goals are (1) control of everything, and (2) equality, even if it means cutting down those at the top. It then specifically describes their ideals as a warped form of communism, with the contradiction being that elites have to be there to impose that equality, drawing a comparison to the Soviet Union.

The much more natural read of it to me is as a libertarian-ish spin on evil manipulative big government, with the bad guys being a pastiche of different flavors of The Man. If there's stuff in other books where they demonstrate systemic contradictions analogous to capitalism, hey, cool, I don't know a lot about the setting. But I don't think it's fair to say I "failed the test" the book puts before me if I read the side it calls communists to be something other than a representation of capitalism.

e: if this is a "the author actually made a point way different from their apparent intent" kinda take, okay, but I didn't read you to be making that argument.

Some others for sure ended up making a point different than they intended, because Mage has had a lot of writers and been given a lot of spins over the course of its life. Like, the Technocracy is just chock full of what, when you get down to it, is antisemitism - they literally, actually try to control you by putting fluoride in the drinking water and all the other Alex Jones poo poo. Obviously, really-existing capitalism doesn't involve mind control rays.

...on the other hand, it does involve 24/7 advertising and propaganda broadcasts. So all this stuff loops back around. For better or worse, the Technocracy is hegemonic western modernity, and that's totally inseparable from the capitalist mode of production. All the crazy conspiracy theories and equivalences drawn by prisoners or victims of capitalism appear "for real" in the Technocracy, but it's for the same reason that they appear in real life as content on Youtube and Twitter. This nonsense is just automatically and spontaneously generated by the world we live in and that world is riveted by iron chains to production for exchange-value rather than for use-value.

As to (2), even that's characteristic of liberal capitalist hegemony, which, on the one hand, is a powerfully rationalizing and flattening force that dissolves all distinctions and identities and will supposedly bring about a world of perfect liberty and freedom from want (this is also claimed by anarchism, communism, and other ideologies so there's nothing that special about it) but at the same time is a powerfully striating and tiering force that produces and reproduces gender, race, etc. Of course, history never actually ends, so the Technocrats can asymptotically approach their utopia but their internal contradictions will never let them reach it.

I would only accuse you of having "failed the test" if you took a look at Mage and were like, "well, these Technocrats and these Traditionalists, they're not so different, who knows who's in the right, really."

# ¿ Jul 30, 2021 22:28

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Geisladisk posted:

I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage.

Honestly, I feel like blending the two does a disservice to both, because it just makes so many things inconsistent and trivializes so many things.

Example: The Ventrue's whole deal is that they are a shadowy cabal of evil immortal businessmen who hold the reins of the world economy in secret. But... uh turns out that no actually another shadowy cabal of plutocrats controls the entire world economy, and that is just one department out of many. So which one is it, guys?

It also trivializes the vampires hugely. Who cares about a bunch of petty immoral jerks and their fiefdoms when in the background you have people fighting over the nature of reality?

The "old" World of Darkness lines were similar enough to each other that you could technically cross them over, but formally took place in their own settings. That is, in Vampire, the god of Abraham really did exist and really had cursed you, and any wizards that you happened to run into were just, you know, wizards, probably having obtained their powers by making deals with the devil or something. In Mage, the god of Abraham was but one of many paradigmatic explanations that humans had come up with to explain natural phenomena, and the cosmological constants of the world included things like the "avatar" attached to most human souls, the umbra, the tetrad of dynamic/pattern/primordial/questing essences etc. So these kinds of nyeh nyeh my thing is more important than your thing slapfights were popular to have but formally invalid.

In the "new" World of Darkness, now called Chronicles of Darkness, all the various game lines do by default exist in the same setting and are metaphysically compatible (although it's obviously up to the players of any given game which element to keep or discard, what to emphasize, etc - there's a "toolkit" design ethos), but mostly care about different things and have mythologies which either align very sloppily or even seem to contradict. Like, there are several different things in Chronicles that you could call "demons" or "fae" or whatever and it's fun but not necessarily important to figure out if and how they're related (and that answer will vary from game to game).

Since all these games are in one way or another about modernity, and therefore about capitalism, they're ultimately different takes on how to survive within capitalism, or how to carve out oases of self-determination within capitalism, or in the most ambitious ones - generally Mage, but sometimes Werewolf and Demon - how to destroy capitalism.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2021 18:04

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Secret Hitler is, itself, a fascist game. It's about rooting out the lizardmen who hide among us and are the only reason our society's going bad.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 04:42

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Sinteres posted:

Is this SuperMechagodzilla thing a new bit, or something you've been working on for a while?

Dude you get dealt cards at the beginning of the game and they look like this:

Did the actual Hitler get into power through subterfuge such that no one realized they were electing a fascist? Am I taking crazy pills here??

# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 05:27

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 00:18

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

I don't think that e.g. Mafia or Avalon are fascist games but if the thing you're protecting is liberalism, and the danger is that the government keeps passing bad policies, and the culprits are lizardmen who lurk secretly among you and can only take power through deceit, there's really no other way to go. It's not just about there being subversive elements that need to be rooted out; it's about taking an obvious problem staring you in the face and pretending that it is, instead, a subversive element corrupting society from within.

Like, for god's sake, secret Trump. Secret Trump. Secret Trump. Yeah, that guy really snuck up on us! If only we'd been more vigilant against the seemingly-human fiends¹ who lurk among us even now!

_{1. slavs}

# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 05:49

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