Historical Games Round 75

[bear_necessities]

@farfalla I’m admittedly not explaining myself the well but I agree with what @KarmaBum said below and pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter. Although just to add some clarity, I’m not saying these things shouldn’t affect your character or that it shouldn’t be an important part of their background, but it also doesn’t have to be the focal point of the story? Like I don’t need to be fighting monsters while also actively treating another PC like shit because of <insert -ism here>.

Hopefully that makes sense. Words are hard.

[farfalla]

@KarmaBum said in New Concept:

Honest question: does the fact that it’s historical and not modern have an impact?

Why would you call me out like this omg. I honestly don’t know! I think the answer is yes, but I don’t know why. Scale maybe? I typed up some answers but I think they get too political for poor @BloodAngel’s post about the cthulu game lol. But it’s definitely easier for me to ignore covid than, like, slavery.

@bear_necessities said in New Concept:

Although just to add some clarity, I’m not saying these things shouldn’t affect your character or that it shouldn’t be an important part of their background, but it also doesn’t have to be the focal point of the story?

I wasn’t arguing with you, sorry if it came across that way! Your post just made me think about it. I very much understand this position, in the same way that I understand people who can’t BAT. I was just interested in my own reaction, which is that I don’t want to have it inform my character I just want to kiss ladies, but ignoring it feels weird.

My thoughts are probably also informed by the fact that I’ve never played a historical game, in part because I couldn’t get past this hurdle and in part because there just aren’t that many. And I’ve only played two contemporary games - I’m mostly in fantasy land, tbh, where I appreciate not having to deal with the modern day oppressions.

I do definitely think it’s just a random person to person preference with no right answer, in the same way that grid vs no grid or logging vs not logging or an infinite number of other preferences are.

[Pavel]

@farfalla said in New Concept:

logging vs not logging

I draw a line in the sand here. People who don’t log are weird and wrong and should be ashamed of themselves. It’s unnatural.

[bear_necessities]

@farfalla I didn’t think you are arguing at all, no need to apologize! I am just not great with words anymore these days so I wanted to make my point a little clearer lol

[KarmaBum]

@farfalla said in New Concept:

Why would you call me out like this omg.

Because we don’t RP anywhere and haven’t in years SO THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE I ENGAGE WITH YOU OK?!

Also because I genuinely care about your opinion! You’re a good RPer who just has a totally different set of preferences from mine. And I know (or at least hope!) that you can talk across the divide without taking it personally.

@farfalla said in New Concept:

I’m mostly in fantasy land, tbh, where I appreciate not having to deal with the modern day oppressions.

And this is kinda what I thought. I remember you didn’t even play that long, so I was wondering if that was part of what factored into it - that the real world just ain’t yo thang.

[farfalla]

@KarmaBum I definitely didn’t take it personally, don’t worry!

I’d like to play on a modern game there just hasn’t been one that worked for me for various other reasons.

[Faraday]

@KarmaBum said in New Concept:

We do this all the time in modern settings. I believe Keys and Network both have a “no COVID” take on things, no? So is it harder to put out of mind because it’s historical?

No, if your game is set in 2023, I would have the same same uncanny valley problem. What exactly does a 2020 without covid look like? What happened instead? What didn’t happen?

@Testament said in New Concept:

“I’m never going to make a character or a player feel like that.”

I respect that compassion immensely. I too want people to feel safe, and do worry about toxic people inflicting distress under the banner of “but history!” I’m not sure I would ever run another open historical game for that reason. I think about doing a sci fi western sometimes to have a similar “lawless frontier” feel without the baggage, but it’s a lot of work to define something original.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in New Concept:

I think about doing a sci fi western sometimes to have a similar “lawless frontier” feel without the baggage, but it’s a lot of work to define something original.

Firefly could work as a setting, if you were of a mind.

[Gashlycrumb]

Huh.

I don’t see why anything should stop you from removing the bigotry, with no explanation and no lampshade. As ‘Bridgerton’ has done. It is a historical fantasy and we don’t really have to worry about, or even ask, why some English aristocrats are Black in 1813. We can enjoy a show about romance and social manipulations and pretend the period had no racism and that the classism wasn’t really relevant. We can even watch ‘Harlots’ the next night and enjoy characters battling very highly relevant racism, classism and sexism without it ruining ‘Bridgerton’ or getting confused and thinking it’s the same fictional reality.

Nobody wants really accurate historicals, it’s too much reading and you get somebody like me saying, “No, you don’t have a Golden Retriever, they didn’t exist until 1908, no, there is no chocolate in medieval Italy and you don’t have an oven either, no, your pirate ship is not called ‘Aces Wild’ because we predate poker by over 200 years,” and so on.

Speaking of ships: CoC on an ocean-liner, with nods to shit like those Bermuda Triangle X-Files episodes and such.

Edited to Add: Not that I lack sympathy for those who do hate these inaccuracies and find they interfere with suspension of disbelief. I had to put (Sexy) Rome on pause to swear for several minutes about how there are so many parrots in that show and every single one of them is S. American or Australian, when the Old World has plenty of parrots that Romans really would have.

[Third Eye]

@Gashlycrumb said in New Concept:

Nobody wants really accurate historicals,

Eh. Back in the day I played straight-up historical MUs with no supernatural or alt-history adaptation, and I did enjoy them (I do not think I RP’d anything particularly horrific, either). I think the audience for them is niche and small, and there’s a large swathe of players who need to self-select out of them for various reasons, but folks who want to play Band of Brothers or Downton Abbey do exist. Whether those games could exist now in the same way they did 15 years ago, IDK, and that makes me a bit bummed. Still something I could see playing in a closed group and enjoying, though.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Third-Eye I love them, but they were very niche even when the hobby was larger. And I actually did tell people stuff like “Golden Retrievers don’t exist yet”, and had to learn to STFU about these details, or at least make it abundantly clear that I was saying it because it’s interesting, not 'cause I think it’s bad to ‘cast’ a Golden in an 1865 setting.

[Roz]

@Gashlycrumb said in New Concept:

Huh.

I don’t see why anything should stop you from removing the bigotry, with no explanation and no lampshade. As ‘Bridgerton’ has done. It is a historical fantasy and we don’t really have to worry about, or even ask, why some English aristocrats are Black in 1813.

I wish that was what Bridgerton had done – just made it entirely a historical fantasy, a more or less colorblind setting, where these things didn’t matter at all. Except they didn’t, really, because they suddenly inserted a very flimsy in-universe reason for it, and it seemed to come down “racism has been deleted from society over the past couple decades because the King married a black woman,” which was such a weird call for them to make. It removed it from the world of historical fantasy and gave it an explanation and lampshade.

[Tez]

@Gashlycrumb said in New Concept:

Huh.

I don’t see why anything should stop you from removing the bigotry, with no explanation and no lampshade. As ‘Bridgerton’ has done.

I don’t think that’s a perfect example, as Bridgerton actually did try to explain it – largely by gesturing to the Queen. Historians, don’t come after me, but I understand that she historically may have been biracial, and they used that to say that she helped break down social barriers. It’s even briefly referenced here and there: Lady Dansbury comments on it. A quick google of ‘Bridgerton’ and ‘race’ will show that there are people even on the liberal side who weren’t happy with that, for many of the reasons that we’ve actually touched on in this thread.

That said, we also get Kate and Edwina, so Bridgerton is basically perfect and haters can go watch something else.

Nobody wants really accurate historicals, it’s too much reading and you get somebody like me saying, “No, you don’t have a Golden Retriever, they didn’t exist until 1908, no, there is no chocolate in medieval Italy and you don’t have an oven either, no, your pirate ship is not called ‘Aces Wild’ because we predate poker by over 200 years,” and so on.

Speaking as someone who spent a whole lot of time googling what kind of racing horses there were in the American colonies and what kind of dogs were common on ranches on the frontier, RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE. There is a lot of room for lovely texture in these small details, and I think that on the whole people are more likely to engage in it when it is put before them.

Sorry about the chocolate, though. Bummer.

[Tez]

@Roz WHY ARE YOU FASTER

Mine had a gif tho.

[shit-piss-love]

Just weird to me people coming in here still like “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to play a historically accurate setting” when there’s been multiple people in this thread explaining why in detail. Not a single one of us has said anything remotely like we think playing sanitized settings is dumb or wrongfun. Would be hella cool if we could get the same respect back.

[KarmaBum]

@shit-piss-love said in New Concept:

Not a single one of us has said anything remotely like we think playing sanitized settings is dumb or wrongfun.

…did someone say that historically accurate is dumb/wrong and I missed it?? Been refreshing like a boss today and even did a ctrl+f for “dumb” and “wrong” and admittedly the way this software paginates shit sucks but didn’t find any except your post…

[hellfrog]

@KarmaBum ok but for real there have been a couple posts being real dismissive of any desire to play Historical Accuracy, come on now

[Roz]

@KarmaBum said in New Concept:

@shit-piss-love said in New Concept:

Not a single one of us has said anything remotely like we think playing sanitized settings is dumb or wrongfun.

…did someone say that historically accurate is dumb/wrong and I missed it?? Been refreshing like a boss today and even did a ctrl+f for “dumb” and “wrong” and admittedly the way this software paginates shit sucks but didn’t find any except your post…

I think probably this:

@Gashlycrumb said in New Concept:

I don’t see why anything should stop you from removing the bigotry, with no explanation and no lampshade.

And this:

Nobody wants really accurate historicals

[Third Eye]

@hellfrog said in New Concept:

@KarmaBum ok but for real there have been a couple posts being real dismissive of any desire to play Historical Accuracy, come on now

And the thing is THAT’S FINE. Historical MUs were never super-popular. They are not and were not for everyone. But they did exist. They were not hot-beds of racism or sexism or homophobia from my experience. Some of my most interesting RP experiences were finding roles to RP a female character in WW2 or a POC character in WW1 (these people absolutely did exist and you can find plenty of RL figures to base them on!). With the understanding that these people faced societal prejudices that weren’t reflected in RP, in part just because it’s not fun to be the bad guy, but also because in a foxhole different kinds of relationships and viewpoints develop between individuals that can be genuinely interesting to explore.

TBH my Sikh sergeant on WW1 The Greatest Generation (still one of my favorite characters even tho he died violently due to code) probably encountered the same amount of IC prejudice my prodigal knight did on Arx, and I had to back-feed a similar amount of ‘I guess NPCs are mean to me in XYZ’ ways into my head-canon.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Roz I guess I missed that. Damn.

I took it as a rather lovely theatre-major’s joke: This is a dumb modernized regency romance and we’re gonna cast like we’re doin’ Shakespeare.

@Tez said in New Concept:

Speaking as someone who spent a whole lot of time googling what kind of racing horses there were in the American colonies and what kind of dogs were common on ranches on the frontier, RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE. There is a lot of room for lovely texture in these small details, and I think that on the whole people are more likely to engage in it when it is put before them.

Sorry about the chocolate, though. Bummer.

I love you for that. And love to do that, too.

And do want to play accurate historicals myself.

So, guys, sheesh, yeah, the nobody was hyperbole. On historical games, it’s often hard to keep accurate in the strictest or even the Patrick O’Brian level without policing people for it more than I feel is comfortable.