Rules Discussion

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Black Leaf said:
That was another odd thing about it.

It was a narrative game, but without the rules lightness I've come to expect from that genre. I'm sure there's a market for "heavy crunch narrative" but I can't imagine it's large.
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Yeah. It's one of the few RPG's someone could point at and say "it's a board game" and I'd... kinda be able to see their point. There's plenty of instructions to narrate how you get advantages from particular things, but it still all reads as being a bit mechanistic.

I'd actually love to see 00's era Ron Edwards take on it, because it sits at a weird intersection of G, N, and S.
 
Bunch said:
I have a modest proposal. We ban all game discussion.
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Currently, I think the Pub is comfortably able to chase trolls off if they do appear, and the mods and majority of the regulars know a political troll when they see one. We don't need blacklists of games, or any hard and fast rules while the mods can exercise sound judgement. Rules like that are for mod staff that you don't necessarily trust - and one can look at the dumpster fire that Monicagate left of the Stackexchange mod community to see what happens when you get into that situation.

The Pub still has a good community, and that community is its biggest strength. Keep the community fed and watered and it will be naturally resistant to trolls and bad-faith actors. At the same time, try not to create a monoculture - Diversity is the most effective strategy to prevent groupthink and echo-chamber dynamics.
 
Baulderstone said:
Yes. Once we start banning discussion of games for political content, the whole house falls in.
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At that point, the moderation staff is morally obligated to permit the discussion of the overt political messaging in Dungeons & Dragons.

And isn't that the exact reason that we don't allow political discussions here?
 
FaerieGodfather said:
At that point, the moderation staff is morally obligated to permit the discussion of the overt political messaging in Dungeons & Dragons.

And isn't that the exact reason that we don't allow political discussions here?
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I don't think so. I take this as we cant ban discussion of a game soley because it has overt political messages, but we can still ban discussion of those messages.

There is NO moral obligation from anyone to speak of anything. Nor is there any moral obligation to allow or force such discussions on a private forum.

In short... no one ever owes anyone an argument.
 
I think this post pretty much sums up some reasonable guidelines. Apart from Dumarest memes which are never acceptable.

Raleel said:
On a more serious note, my opinion (and I don't think it counts for a lot here) using Sigmata as an example
  • Sigmata is anti-fascist - ok, the game itself claims to be
  • The author says you make society less fascist by playing it - not ok. mostly why do we care. he's could be insane, who knows, it's not really about the game
  • Sigmata isn't really anti-fascist because it doesn't believe in this credo - not ok (personal opinion of what fascism is, not really about the game)
  • Sigmata has worse mechanics than myfarog - ok, assuming it actually discusses the virtues of each mechanic
  • The writer of myfarog and sigmata should have a cage match - ok, as long as it is on ppv and in the other media thread
  • Sigmata author and myfarog author duked out politics on another board - not ok (we don't need to be gossipy old biddies)
  • dumarest posting memes in the i can haz cherezeburger thread - always ok, and one reason i pay money to be here.
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AsenRG said:
And that is a great argument to ban Sigmata, Myfarog and Rahowa from ever being discussed:thumbsup:. It always starts with "it's not politics", and turns to "everything is politics".
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But as said, if you actually read the game, no matter what the author has said in interviews and such, it doesn't read as anything but alternate history.

Black Leaf said:
That was part of mty issue with it. It's being pitched as a game of complex and morally grey unlikely alliances and then apparently I'm fighting the Coalition States from Rifts. Also found it massively overwitten and badly in need of an editor.

My main issue though is that I can't find anything in it that a Wild Talents setting wouldn't do better.
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Actually, I mostly use it for ideas. The system, as you said, is meh. But the ideas behind some of it are really good material in another system.
 
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chuckdee said:
But as said, if you actually read the game, no matter what the author has said in interviews and such, it doesn't read as anything but alternate history.
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Eh, I have actually read the game now, and it doesn't read as just alternate history. There are an awful lot of hysterical screeds about how you just don't get how evil fascists are and how bad dispriviliged people have it and YOU NEED TO LEARN!!! They aren't central to the game per se, but it's pretty clear - and stated explicitly at points - that the game is meant to be morally educational, which is to say, it's meant to teach you how completely and irrefutably right the author's beliefs are and that you should feel guilty for ever doubting them. :tongue:

That said, comparing it to RAHOWA is indeed unfair. There is an actual playable game here, for one thing. :tongue: And while Sigmata is equally brimming with hate, the group it hates is "fascists and neo-nazis," who I think are fair game in the same way that "criminals" are fair game - I mean, if a game dwelled on how very bad and wrong and evil crime was to the extent that Sigmata dwells on the badness and wrongness and evil of fascism, I think it'd make me a little uncomfortable too, but I am not in and of itself morally opposed to a game about beating up fascists to stop them from doing fascist things. The Price of Freedom (being all about beating up communists to stop them from doing communist things) is probably a better comparison, and no one complained about there being a thread to discuss that one.
 
chuckdee said:
But as said, if you actually read the game, no matter what the author has said in interviews and such, it doesn't read as anything but alternate history.
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I've read the game. It reads about as apolitical as "Mein Kampf".
 
No, there's nothing controversial about Nazis being bad. It just takes a particular skill at manoeuvering one's head up their own ass to believe they're the first one to figure that out, and there's some call for them to educate the naive populace. But, well, that's life these days.

Boy gotta flex.
Gotta flex, flex, flex.
'Cause when you've got no personality, replace it with a codex
 
TristramEvans said:
I'm ruminating on an overall reply to this topic still, but one thing I've seen crop up that I'd like to put a stop to is the pernicious idea that there are Two Sides here - there are hundreds of sides, and each poster here at the Pub is an individual with their own opinions, and not under any obligation to or should be assumed to hold the stereotypical or extremist positions of a group because they either share one opinion with that group or disagree with one position of an opposing group. I really just don't want there to be this unspoken division formed on The Pub that casts our posters into a dualistic tribal framework. We're all Pubbers.
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Yeah, this, I have views that offend all sides and everyone. Trying to tie me down to one of two sides is just stifling my inner curmudgeon.

Zounds! This thread sure blew up while I wasn't looking. It had deteriorated into jokes and memes and I guess I wandered off.

Some years ago I was writing a gonzo post apocalyptic world on the sjgames GURPS forum. I put in what was essentially the starship Enterprise from an alternate future where the Nazis won World War II and white washed history. So you have this awkward moment where the Nazis show up all smiling and helpful with the resources and fire power to fix things. Except they're Nazis and they've never even heard of black people and Jews because they no longer exist in their timeline. I don't think you could do that without drawing fire today.

Goodwin's law used to be a joke. Monty Python have a sketch where a political panel is asked what they would do if they were Hitler. "Well Alex, I think I'd annex the Sudatenland."

These days it seems like both sides are acting like Hitler while denouncing the other side as being like Hitler. And they take themselves totally seriously. when they do it. It's weird.
 
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Baeraad said:
Eh, I have actually read the game now, and it doesn't read as just alternate history. There are an awful lot of hysterical screeds about how you just don't get how evil fascists are and how bad dispriviliged people have it and YOU NEED TO LEARN!!! They aren't central to the game per se, but it's pretty clear - and stated explicitly at points - that the game is meant to be morally educational, which is to say, it's meant to teach you how completely and irrefutably right the author's beliefs are and that you should feel guilty for ever doubting them. :tongue:
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Yeah, that's a reasonable analysis. Most of the polemical stuff is frontloaded into the intro and easy to skip but not all.

That said, comparing it to RAHOWA is indeed unfair. There is an actual playable game here, for one thing. :tongue: And while Sigmata is equally brimming with hate, the group it hates is "fascists and neo-nazis," who I think are fair game in the same way that "criminals" are fair game - I mean, if a game dwelled on how very bad and wrong and evil crime was to the extent that Sigmata dwells on the badness and wrongness and evil of fascism, I think it'd make me a little uncomfortable too, but I am not in and of itself morally opposed to a game about beating up fascists to stop them from doing fascist things. The Price of Freedom (being all about beating up communists to stop them from doing communist things) is probably a better comparison, and no one complained about there being a thread to discuss that one.
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Price of Freedom is an odd one because it's at least partly satirical. The more I think about it the more I think the best comparison is the Christian RPGs we talked about. Proper RPGs with actual developed settings, but a definite evangelical aim. And it does seem odd that people that think that it's impossible to discuss Sigmata with no political undertones had seeminly no issue with discussing games where the express purpose is to covert people to Christianity

TristramEvans said:
No, there's nothing controversial about Nazis being bad. It just takes a particular skill at manoeuvering one's head up their own ass to believe they're the first one to figure that out, and there's some call for them to educate the naive populace. But, well, that's life these days.
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Made even moreso by the fact that Nazis are a standard pop culture villain no. I've run a game that involved punching Nazis. But it also involved shooting T Rexs with your service revolver and negotiating with the molemen kingdom. I don't think anyone would seriously claim that was a political campaign.
 
AsenRG said:
I'm still sorry:shade:! Those aren't the discussions I joined the Pub for.

Yeah, I know. We just differ in some details of what is "extreme".

I can agree with those two, though I didn't know that part about Zweihander. I know the author's political leanings are left, I just never bothered to read...is that from his Twitter or something?

Those two I'd agree with (unlike the "anything published by PIG" suggestion, for the reason CRK outlined - though I'd make an exception for SJWs Must Die if there was such a publisher)...but I'd prefer an "author is dead" approach where we only judge the text in the game, and possibly the one you'd read right before getting the game (from Drivethru/Itch.io/Lulu). Because any other text is, as stated above, something I'm probably not interested in. And I've likely missed it.
And a rule where a lot of us could credibly claim innocence for breaking...ain't much of a rule at all.

This might still get Eclipse Phase on the list, though...

Eclipse Phase is far beyond the border, IME. Doesn't mean we didn't turn it on its head and play a game where all the anarchist habitats were bound to have...issues:shade:.
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The only problem with Death of the Author arguments is that Mein Kampf then becomes just an autobiography. (Yeah I Godwinned, but it’s the simplest and most effective Death of the Author argument).

If we decided No Politics meant No RPGs as Political Treatise, we’d get a few.
If we decided No Politics meant No RPGs that use Political Virtue Signaling as marketing, we’d lose half the market.
If we decided No Politics meant No RPGs that include Politics as a theme or satire, we’d lose another quarter.

Hmm, which one of the categories is not like the others...the one with 2-4 members maybe out of the many thousands of RPGs?

It’s blindingly obvious that one is a completely different class of politics to me. It’s frankly mind-boggling to see the argument that it’s not. If it was someone other than A Fiery Flying Roll Black Leaf I’d think he had an agenda that explained it and was arguing disingenuously. But, that’s the kind of thinking that is making the world worse, so I’m just gonna knock the little devil off my shoulder and say we disagree.

A Fiery Flying Roll Black Leaf and Ladybird Ladybird think it is a difference of degree and not of kind. I think the difference is so great that to say it’s not of kind is a category error.

The mods have come down on the side of it IS a political treatise, but that doesn’t matter, as long as we don’t talk about it as such.

Personally, I see the possibility for a slippery slope here, just as I did with accepting one side’s definitions of language. Frankly, I don’t see Right Wingers overtly and publicly creating art as political message outside of Stormfront-like recruiting shit. It’s extreme nutjobs making stuff no person wants to play anyway. Left Wingers are creating art as politics everywhere, and declaring it as political action everywhere you look.

So, such RPGs as Political Treatise will become more and more prevalent, and with their overt messages not violating No Politics, it creates a politically skewed forum culture just as if only one sides’ definition of buzzwords was considered valid.

I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again, Purple did not go from being one of the coolest sites in existence to LARPing 1984 overnight. It took years. Trust and belief in the mods has nothing to do with it. Overton windows shift, and they shift without people realising it.

It’s fine 99.99% of the time to be cool and chill, but with forum rules, sometimes you have to be a hardass if you want that rule to mean anything.

I was done, but then Black Leaf talked about marketing again, so I wanted to close that one out from my side.
Anyway, now I’m done, so feel free to PM me if you have a question.
 
BTW, actual discussion of Sigmata’s mechanics outside of it’s status as Politics don’t belong here, we should make a thread for it.
 
CRKrueger said:
BTW, actual discussion of Sigmata’s mechanics outside of it’s status as Politics don’t belong here, we should make a thread for it.
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Good idea. It could be a new thread, or the mechanical discussion could just go back to the thread where this began.

And I'd also say that discussion of how political the book is really isn't worth delving into here or in another thread. We aren't going to preemptively ban discussion of games because they contain politics, so whether or not there are politics in the book isn't relevant. The discussion does nothing but open a window for politics.
 
CRKrueger said:
[ . . . ]
Personally, I see the possibility for a slippery slope here, just as I did with accepting one side’s definitions of language. Frankly, I don’t see Right Wingers overtly and publicly creating art as political message outside of Stormfront-like recruiting shit.
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Matt Furie might disagree with that. He's been playing whack-a-mole with alt-righters ripping Pepe The Frog off for years. However, it mostly takes place within their own echo chambers so you don't see the majority of it, although plenty of it leaks out onto the interwebs at large.
 
CRKrueger said:
The mods have come down on the side of it IS a political treatise, but that doesn’t matter, as long as we don’t talk about it as such.
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Honestly, I havent read it and have no intention of doing so. I hadn't heard about it until that thread, and glanced at the KS page which was...explicit...enough, so I'm taking the word of the posters. But I have come across worse on KS and Drive-Thru...RPGs that are blatantly manifestos rather than actual playable games (I'm not going to name them, because I dont want to introduce them into the discussion), this one at least seems to have a playable system and a setting that sounds not much different than PK Dick's Man in the High Castle with superheroes.

I kinda assume it's a novelty item - I really don't expect it to be the subject of much discussion here, in the long run. But I'd rather deal with an issue when it becomes one rather than pre-emptivelly add a rule and thus start down this road where mods are tasked with vetting what games are OK to bring up here.
 
Baeraad said:
I mean, if a game dwelled on how very bad and wrong and evil crime was to the extent that Sigmata dwells on the badness and wrongness and evil of fascism, I think it'd make me a little uncomfortable too
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This hypothetical game sounds to me like the making of a The Shadow RPG, and that would be awesome. "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit! Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows!"
 
Well, now I'm tempted to write a McGruff The Crime Dog RPG...
 
CRKrueger said:
So, such RPGs as Political Treatise will become more and more prevalent, and with their overt messages not violating No Politics, it creates a politically skewed forum culture just as if only one sides’ definition of buzzwords was considered valid.

I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again, Purple did not go from being one of the coolest sites in existence to LARPing 1984 overnight. It took years. Trust and belief in the mods has nothing to do with it. Overton windows shift, and they shift without people realising it.
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The basic idea then is to formally ban discussion of RPGs written as political treatise, even a purely mechanical discussion, as given the likely trajectory of American culture this will lead to a unbalanced amount of explicitly political RPGs on one side of the American divide being discussed here and thus give the forum a political slant.

Is that the basic idea?
 
Séadna said:
The basic idea then is to formally ban discussion of RPGs written as political treatise, even a purely mechanical discussion, as given the likely trajectory of American culture this will lead to a unbalanced amount of explicitly political RPGs on one side of the American divide being discussed here and thus give the forum a political slant.

Is that the basic idea?
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We could just ban Americans.
 
Endless Flight said:
If we categorize RPGs based on a political spectrum, they (whoever that is) have already won. I’m not doing that.
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Also... how do you decide. Some people claim a political agenda in D&D, but others call that poppycock. Could you imagine the argument in that if someone declared it one way or the other?

Im a centrist myself so my views are not going to be strictly left or right but my work will inevitably reflect elements or representation of both. So then judging something like that could have arguments both ways which will always refllect the deciders own bias more than my own.

At that point, the very act of categorizing the game beomes itself, a political topic.
 
Faylar said:
Also... how do you decide. Some people claim a political agenda in D&D, but others call that poppycock. Could you imagine the argument in that if someone declared it one way or the other?

Im a centrist myself so my views are not going to be strictly left or right but my work will inevitably reflect elements or representation of both. So then judging something like that could have arguments both ways which will always refllect the deciders own bias more than my own.

At that point, the very act of categorizing the game beomes itself, a political topic.
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Everyone should be warned: if there's ever a rule here preemptively banning games that advocate a political view, the first thing I will do is start a thread about 1st ed. AD&D, followed with several hours a day arguing about ... :hehe::hehe::hehe:
 
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