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!

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Bottom Liner posted:

I think it�s worth noting that Twilight Struggle is serious in tone but overtly satirical in design, which is a delicate balance but I think it pulls it off really well.

Yeah, TS's whole thing is that it's the Cold War as imagined by the RAND Corporation (and George Kennan and NSC-68 and Henry Kissinger and etc.). Only two players of importance, a perfectly zero-sum contest, constant need to demonstrate toughness, the domino effect is real - it pretty much tries to embody the thinking of the Cold War into its design (and does it brilliantly).

Labyrinth tried to do the same thing except using Thomas Friedman's NYT op-eds about bringing good governance to Islamic countries (at gunpoint, if necessary) as its base modeling assumption and that was much less successful.

A Cold War game built around contemporary Soviet assumptions about what they were doing and why would be incredibly interesting.

FMguru fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jul 2, 2022

# ¿ Jul 2, 2022 19:14

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 05:29

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I thought they came from early pre-D&D miniature games like Chainmail/Swords & Spells, where Law/Chaos/Neutral made up the factions and limited what kinds of monsters/characters you could build your army out of.

The alignment languages were there to explain how basilisks, orcs, and wraiths could fight as a single, cohesive army.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2022 19:57

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

RuneQuest/Glorantha has the best treatment of Common tongue - it is literally an invention/blessing of the god of trade and communication, designed to accommodate basic mercantile activity and simple traveler's needs. Called "Tradetalk", it's magically easy to learn or pick up by osmosis, is the same across all of the world, but isn't very good at communicating ideas more complex than "how much for this dagger?" or "where is the nearest inn?".

If anyone points out that some feature of it is unrealistic, the response is "well, duh, it's not a normally developed language, it's a literal magical gift from the God Of Trade (hail Issaries)."

# ¿ Jul 5, 2022 20:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Carbolic posted:

Shortly after 9/11, at the height of anti-Muslim prejudice in the Western world, Battletech developers decided to name their big world-shattering pseudo-holy war event the "Jihad".

The early 2000s BattleTech developers were shithead right-wingers (and one of them, who had an in-game character named after him, was a child molester).

MilSF. MilSF never changes.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2022 21:03

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

That seems like a common side effect of settings where wargames are set. You need lots and lots of conflict (because the entire raison d'etre of the setting is as a place where there are lots of possible battles) and you need reasons for every faction to fight with every other faction (or even itself), so these sort of settings always tend to be hellworld dystopias of never-ending conflict.

My favorite example of the former is the Star Fleet Battles universe, a licensed offshoot of Star Trek where the galaxy is involved in an 18-year long General War of all-against-all. The writers freely acknowledge that this isn't particularly in the spirit of Star Trek, but a wargame setting by definition needs a bunch of wars.

My favorite example of the latter is the Warmachine setting, where there are four main factions (Fantasy Russia, Fantasy Britain, Fantasy Islam, Evil Undeads) who all have reason to fight each other and reasons to fight within themselves (civil wars, power plays, etc.). Because it's a miniatures game and you need to have an in-setting reason for any two armies that people bring to the table to fight. The reason Warmachine stuck out in my mind was because they really bent over backwards to try and come up with a reason why the Fantasy Russians in far frozen north would get into large scale fights with the Fantasy Jihadists in far southern desert, despite being separated by thousands of miles (and several other kingdoms).

# ¿ Dec 11, 2022 20:41

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Speaking of the intersection between tabletop games and politics, here is a quote for Republican Rep George Santos who was exposed the other day by the NYT as having fabricated pretty much his entire biography (and published after the election; thanks, NYT).

https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1604978812038443008

# ¿ Dec 20, 2022 05:08

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Xand_Man posted:

It's loving wild how many professional-looking products there were back in the day that had clearly not gotten any real play-testing

One of the reasons those early meatgrinder classic D&D modules have had such staying power is that they were (unlike seemingly 90% of pre-made scenarios) actually played through multiple times (when they were first used as convention tournament modules) and had their balances tweaked and their gaps in player engagement figured out.

God, so many of the D20 shovelware era products read like they were written in a single sitting with zero playthrough, like panicking college freshmen realizing their term papers were due tomorrow. Hard to imagine that AD&D C2 Ghost Tower Of Inverness actually represents some kind of peak in the quality of published adventures despite forty years of alleged progress, but it kind of does.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 22:59

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 05:29

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Yeah the designer's notes in the rulebook make it clear that it's a depiction of a worldview and not an endorsement

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.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 17:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Tabletop Games Have Weird Politics: If the players bring about Jesus' death, great!