Historical Games Round 75
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@Faraday I think these war stories are profoundly important to relay, because it’s pretty easy to discuss approaches in abstract, but when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.
That heat fades after a while and people may forget the details. We don’t need to wonder too much when there are actual cases. Players can have good experiences, but staff might be sitting there shell-shocked about it, and that should be a factor considering we generally need staff to run games.
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@Faraday Yeah, we are talking about the same PC-couple. I either forgot the magnitude of the kerfluffle or wasn’t aware of it. I know my scheme to hide the origins of the mixed-race baby never came to fruition. I didn’t think the lynch-mob talk was serious at all – not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”
Heh. That might have been fun RP if it wasn’t freaking people out. (Though if things went then as they’ve gone the last few years, I’d have asked them to schedule their lynching attempt so I could be there, since my PC would be on guard 'cause he lived there, had 'em say “sure,” and then logged in to find that it happened exactly when I said I couldn’t be there but that they’d acknowledged my PCs presence by RPing that he just sat there doing nothing, and then framed me as the bad actor for remarking that that’s kinda shitty.)
I remember the discomfort with the issues regarding indigenous people, but not any actual indigenous characters.
@Yam is right – well, certainly your perspective as gamerunner was of a much less OOC-peaceful game than mine as a player.
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@Yam said in Historical Games Round 75:
when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.
Yeah I highlighted a couple instances that stick out in my mind, but it’s been almost 15 years and a lot is hazy. What I remember above all was coming away from the experience thinking: “I love historical settings, but I am NEVER doing this again.”
So I can totally understand the folks who don’t want to deal with that stuff in their pretendy funtime games. I just also have trouble with the idea of sanitizing history. Apart from it breaking my brain because of how interwoven oppression is, it feels dismissive somehow to the oppressed.
@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”
Oh, no, they 100% were going to do it. Two things stopped it - one was me saying that I wouldn’t stop them trying, but I would not allow them to succeed. I wasn’t going to do anything bad to them, but their efforts would be thwarted. It was just a bridge too far for me. The other was that the players involved got so upset over the situation that they wrote the PCs out of the game, so it became kinda moot.
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@Faraday I remember them leaving, but not the why.
I would respond just the way you did.
ETA: + telling them that while maybe I wouldn’t do anything bad to them, if other PCs tried to, well, I wouldn’t stop them and the universe would be on their side if it came to that kind of call.
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I avoid this consistently. Because no matter how many guardrails you put in place someone, somewhere, at sometime is always going to cross someone’s line. Because everyone has different tolerances for different things, it is impossible to know what’s okay for everyone. And someone will end up feeling a way they shouldn’t have to feel.
At least, in my experience.
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i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.
I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.
