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Historical Games Round 75
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@KarmaBum said in New Concept:
Tired of scrolling. I guess I thought we were all engaging on the same terms. (“You don’t like this? Weird, tell me more.” “You DO like this? Weird, tell ME more!”)
You quoted a number of the folks engaging in constructive discussion, which is great. I appreciate them, and this isn’t directed at them (or you).
But there have also been a number of comments like (paraphrased): “No one wants accuracy…” or “I can’t fathom why anyone would want accuracy…” or “If you can suspend your disbelief for this but not that maybe you should think about that…” or “I don’t see what the big deal is…”
These come across as kind of dismissive when several of us have tried–patiently and repeatedly–to explain why handwaving away discrimination is problematic for us.
In contrast, no one (that I recall) is saying “Wow, I can’t fathom why anyone would want to nope out of RPing in a bigoted world…”
@Third-Eye said in New Concept:
[Historical MUs with some measure of historical accuracy] did exist. They were not hot-beds of racism or sexism or homophobia from my experience. Some of my most interesting RP experiences were…
Heh, I actually thought of your Sikh guy before you even mentioned him. That was a cool character.
But you summed it up well. I played on a lot of historical games, and almost everyone I know had to head-canon far more discrimination (from NPCs) against our characters than ever came up on-camera.
That said, I can understand how even imagining your character inhabiting a world where NPCs wouldn’t accept them can be triggering or unpleasant or exhausting. I think that’s part of the rub that no amount of “you can nope out of that RP” can overcome.
And to be fair, there are always people who take things too far. Even if you deal with them perfectly, that doesn’t take away the unpleasantness they leave in their wake. Much as I love historical fiction, for open games I’ll probably stick to sci-fi.
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@Faraday lol I thought about it but I don’t like to interfere unless requested. Will do!
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Referenced by
Tez
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@Faraday Good points. Some people WANT there to be stuffy old racists around that can be shown up.
Some people want terrible adversity for their PCs to overcome.
I deal with this every day in WoD. Some people want gritty harsh defeat and misery. Some people want shiny spaceships and rayguns.
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@Polk said in Historical Games Round 75:
I deal with this every day in WoD. Some people want gritty harsh defeat and misery. Some people want shiny spaceships and rayguns.
I’m sorry, WoD has spaceships?!
she/they
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I just don’t take seriously any of the trappings of a setting that is fantastic. All the dragons, unicorns, magic, strange races etc does not interest me in the slightest unless the depiction of those things in some way relates back to the political and socioeconomic state of the setting.
Dragons? Meh. Dragons secretly manipulating the political fabric of the peninsula to keep the city-states from organizing a larger state that could actually pose a meaningful threat to their existence? Better.
Cast Fireball? Yawn. Cast Lead to Gold to trick the burgher buying the shipment of grain so that once the spell ends they are left in such significant debt that the Shadow Cartels can capitalize on the ensuing series of economic power shifts and insinuate their front operation into the legitimate structure? Dope.
If it doesn’t groove in some way on the human condition I’m not interested.
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@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:
@Polk said in Historical Games Round 75:
I deal with this every day in WoD. Some people want gritty harsh defeat and misery. Some people want shiny spaceships and rayguns.
I’m sorry, WoD has spaceships?!
Yeah, in Mage the wizards who are actually mad scientists have spaceships. I distrust them (spaceships, not those mages) in MU* environments for reasons that would derail the thread.
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@Tez Void Engineers. Ethernauts.
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@shit-piss-love I’m literally running a story right now, where a person acquiring a warehouse wants to get rid of some wanna-be meth cooks.
By giving them counterfeit Krugerrands that will TEMPORARILY be turned to gold.
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Yeah.
What interests me about historical settings is the same thing that interests me about fantasy or sci-fi settings - inhabiting a world that has interesting conflicts and tensions and feels notably different from the ‘real’ world. With historical games, I’m interested in the tensions that already exist - if I want to play in that time, it doesn’t mean I just want to have a character who tosses on a flapper dress and dances the Charleston to some jazz. I want a character who is a flapper because of the changing mores around women’s presence in society and the wider acceptance of birth control, who dances the Charleston because newspaper and radios are spreading ideas and ‘pop culture’ faster than ever before and urban spaces are simultaneously being glamourized and demonized, and listens to jazz without necessarily being fully aware of the ways oppression has shaped the development of Black music (and its appropriation and acceptance by White culture) but who may end up realizing that she might dance with people of color at the speakeasy she goes to, but when she goes to the ‘respectable’ dance hall, all those people - including the musicians who wrote and play the music - don’t get to walk in the front door.
I think the greater societal pressures are meaningful for historical play. Your character and your game don’t have to be FOCUSED on it, but for myself, I absolutely do want to have a character who engages with those societal forces in some way, even if it’s just as things that led up to THIS moment, or this part of the time.
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Just re: feeling dismissed in this thread, I do feel like it’s important to point out that any time you have several people who feel deeply passionate about a topic but are diametrically opposed in their opinion, you’re going to feel a little dismissed regardless of intent of the other party.
IMO, you’ve got several elaborate, well-reasoned, and very personal justifications for either opinion in this thread that are just inherently dismissive of the opposite view in the way they are written because that’s the internal logic of the conclusion the author came to, otherwise they would feel differently about the topic.
It doesn’t mean anybody here is dismissive about the people who hold the opposite view, it’s just a topic that is going to singe some fingers because it’s something we all obviously care about a lot and, as always, it’s devastatingly hard not to take it personally when someone disagrees with you about something very personal you feel very passionate about, whether you want to admit that or not, lol.
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@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:
I think the greater societal pressures are meaningful for historical play. Your character and your game don’t have to be FOCUSED on it, but for myself, I absolutely do want to have a character who engages with those societal forces in some way, even if it’s just as things that led up to THIS moment, or this part of the time.
The engagement is a big thing for me and I’ve come to realize a major thread in why I lose interest in most MU*s these days. If it’s a L&L game for instance I have a very short list of characters I’m willing to play:
- Anti-establishment commoner fighting against class oppression
- Noble who sees no problem with the system who I make sure constantly demonstrates the problem indirectly through open cluelessness (“isn’t this opulent dress so cool, it cost more money than it would take to feed this whole city!”)
- Noble who has class consciousness and actively works to maintain the status quo (in which case I consider myself to be a villain and what I want is for people to see it that way and try to stop me)
My experience however is that each of these are essentially non-starters without significant GM investment in support. The anti-establishment commoner’s goals are essentially PvP in a L&L game. The clueless noble’s RP tends to look so very similar to the norm that the parody is lost. The noble villain probably should be a NPC but also their actions in-game are probably very similar to others who actively represent their characters as heroes. There’s actually some potential fun RP to be explored in that dichotomy but my experience is that trying to engage in it gets little IC traction and provokes an OOC response like “yo I’m just trying to play medieval dress up and tell fun stories about knights fighting brigands over here”.
It’s that last bit that keeps me from even trying these games at this point because it is totally valid that people may want to just be a knight fighting brigands and not engage in deep philosophical evaluation of the darkness of the age and how it mirrors contemporary issues. That’s not Wrongfun, do you. I wish there were an option for a game where this sort of RP were part of the main theme. I started designing one but I have a kid now instead of time.
tldr; I want a game that’s not a Power Fantasy, but an Empowered Fantasy.
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@Wizz said in Historical Games Round 75:
IMO, you’ve got several elaborate, well-reasoned, and very personal justifications for either opinion in this thread that are just inherently dismissive of the opposite view in the way they are written because that’s the internal logic of the conclusion the author came to, otherwise they would feel differently about the topic.
I think those of us who were stumping for our preference of historical verisimilitude have been super careful to make sure we’re talking about these things as our personal preferences and to explicitly call out that we think not wanting to be subject to the darker side of the human condition is totally valid. Conversely, I had someone suggest my thinking was rigid because I lack the imagination to conceive a world without bigotry. Most specifically, it’s frustrating to have someone say “I can’t imagine why someone would think this way” in a thread where people took time to write out why they think that way. You can’t imagine it? You don’t have to we wrote it down.
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That was one person who apologized right away when someone else went “hey not cool,” for what it’s worth, and it seemed to me like a sort of snappy generalization rather than directed at anybody here. There certainly are people in the hobby who don’t take nearly the same level of care as you and others here have to make it clear their views are personal and make them more of a demand for accuracy, and it’s easy to me to see why they’d have formed that response as their go-to.
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@Wizz said in Historical Games Round 75:
That was one person who apologized right away when someone else went “hey not cool,” for what it’s worth, and it seemed to me like a sort of snappy generalization rather than directed at anybody here. There certainly are people in the hobby who don’t take nearly the same level of care as you and others here have to make it clear their views are personal and make them more of a demand for accuracy, and it’s easy to me to see why they’d have formed that response as their go-to.
I’m not trying you clash with you here but I need to be clear that it wasn’t just one person. I know this because it happened a few times over the course of a couple days of discussion and I kept letting it roll off until I got fed up and said something.
Very specifically, what made me feel dismissed is that there were continued statements like “I don’t understand how someone could prefer this”. We wrote words to try to be understood. If others still don’t understand, we’ve signaled our desire to engage in the discourse and provided material they can question. To not engage with that is explicitly dismissive. “How about those people that think this. IDGI, right?” when those people are standing right there is rough.
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I’m actually trying really hard here to find where the post is where someone was totally dismissive of another person’s opinion on this matter, but I honestly can’t see what the problem is?
That being said, I often say “I can’t understand why anybody <XYZ thing>” not because I mean I literally cannot understand even if you explain. Like I don’t think anyone is actively trying to be insulting here but anyway if I was the one who said “I don’t understand how someone could prefer this” I didn’t mean it literally just meant that it doesn’t match what I feel and I can’t imagine myself feeling that way I guess?
I don’t think this is constructive to the conversation though and I think this is probably the most polite conversation a forum’s had on this topic so carry on. I want a Western cowboys game so please somebody make it but add evil werewolves
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@bear_necessities said in Historical Games Round 75:
I’m actually trying really hard here to find where the post is where someone was totally dismissive of another person’s opinion on this matter, but I honestly can’t see what the problem is?
I definitely don’t want to go scour a thread so I can post direct confrontations about shit that bothered me in aggregate so I will just drop it.
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@Wizz said in Historical Games Round 75:
Just re: feeling dismissed in this thread, I do feel like it’s important to point out that any time you have several people who feel deeply passionate about a topic but are diametrically opposed in their opinion, you’re going to feel a little dismissed regardless of intent of the other party.
To be clear, I am not feeling this way because someone disagrees. There have been a number of people (among them the ones KarmaBum quoted) who have argued the opposing position quite kindly. Other comments, especially taken together, have made at least two of us feel dismissed. But as @shit-piss-love says, I’m not interested in scouring the thread and pointing fingers at specific comments. The point has been made, and folks can either keep it in mind when posting disagreements or not.
