Quote from: Ratman_tf;1104885Did you miss the posts where people who have bought product are commenting? I, for one, did buy Deadlands. Twice. Plus sourcebooks.

/raises hand.

Present and accounted for. I like Blue Rose too. Does that count?

Quote from: tenbones;1104890/raises hand.

Yeah. I used to own Deadlands (forget the edition, 2nd I think). I still have my copy of GURPS Deadlands lying around somewhere too, and a couple supplements. I've toyed with the notion of running a game using GURPS 4th, but I don't know how interested any of my players would be in the setting.

As I said earlier, I'm not particularly miffed about the setting change, silly as I think it is. Like tenbones supposing I got the new edition (unlikely; not because of the setting change but a simple lack of interest) I would just alter it to taste, and frankly my GURPS Deadlands stuff isn't flying out the window or anything.

I can say with confidence I know absolutely nothing about Blue Rose and really couldn't possibly care less about that, although the complaint referenced by Stephen earlier makes it sound a little odd.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1104885Did you miss the posts where people who have bought product are commenting? I, for one, did buy Deadlands. Twice. Plus sourcebooks.

Commenting? Yes. Complaining? Rarely.

Also, buying the book isn't the same as actually playing the game. Those that buy a game and never play it are unlikely to buy a new edition anyways.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1104899Those that buy a game and never play it are unlikely to buy a new edition anyways.

I know this to be false.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1104873Right, but the people complaining are very similar, just opposing viewpoints.

The opinion itself has never been a problem but the antics are annoying.

Just stop with this BS argument. No one on this thread is saying Shane can't make the change. No one is demanding Shane change it back. The "antics" in question are nothing alike.

1) I'm not, never will say Shane can't make whatever changes he wants.
2) I'm not going to ever ask/wish Shane change it "back" - the changes he's proposing literally has very little effect to what was already established.

3) The Antics - This is the issue. While I'm totally taking Shane at his word... the perception of it, as Shane acknowledges is coming from people largely LARPing in their own misbegotten minds that anything in this setting is actually "bad" outside the context of the game and their tastes. To the point they're willing to brigade it.

And yes... this will not suffice for those people on the Left. It never suffices for reasons, like this fake outrage, has *nothing* to do with the game or the setting. That's what I wish people that created content and consumed content understood first and foremost before voting with their dollars.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1104611To be fair, they're not saying you can't have Nazis in a game about WW2. They're just saying that presenting an alternate history where the Nazi regime is depicted as still being around after 1945 as a viable government would constitute an intolerable apologia for the Nazis' platform.

No, I don't get it either.

I always thought the Deadlands 'intolerable apologia' was that the South would abolish slavery yet keep on fighting for independence. I guess they really cared about those cotton export tariffs!

Conversely I'm fine with a war-drags-on scenario, especially with supernatural evil influence. Heck I'd even be ok with the supernatural evil influence making the CSA more Nazi-like, for those who get their history from Quentin Tarantino*. Supernatural evil influence making the South Nicer, OTOH...

*Or John Oliver.
[video=youtube;gIqxBn1oLAY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIqxBn1oLAY[/youtube]

Quote from: S'mon;1104910I always thought the Deadlands 'intolerable apologia' was that the South would abolish slavery yet keep on fighting for independence. I guess they really cared about those cotton export tariffs!

  I don't buy the abolitionism happening without serious internal disruptions throughout the Confederacy, to the point of an even further breakup (which was a danger the Confederacy faced in real-world history), but if they somehow get past that, I actually can believe they'd still maintain the struggle for independence due to a resentment of Northern attempts to forcibly keep them in the Union.

In my mind - I would have simply rationalized it to be that the South got a lot of Ghostrock, this allowed them to catch up to manufacturing power of the Union. That plus the supernatural reality made slavery non-profitable. They have goddamn steam-mechs in Deadlands. What do you need slaves for?

I'd also have taken a page from Shadowrun and created some magic-styles specific to the native African/West-Indies cultures and did something more with that to give the emancipated slaves a core "thing" to make it useful for gaming content. Much like they did with the Native American tribes.

Lots of ways to split that hair and re-create the South into something cool without sacrificing their intents.

Hank Williams Jr. sang, "if the south would've won, we'd of had it made".

"This game I bought once or never played and just let sit on my shelf and collect dust is changing! Grr those SJW's they ruined something I didn't have much interest in to begin with, but I see all potential progressive changes as bad no matter what!"

Yeah, The arguments I'm seeing against the change basically boil down to this. Either people who never played Deadlands.. or people who bought the Corebook and maybe a supplement and haven't touched it in years. I've got tons of RPG books I've bought, that I either never played, or are just collecting dust on my shelf or Drive thru rpg library. I'm seeing a lot of looking for excuses to get angry against the SJW's from people who don't even have a dog in the race.

I got banned from RPG net years ago for not touting the party line, I'm certainly not an SJW. But the complaints I'm seeing here seem to boil down to the other side equivalent of Virtue Signaling.

Quote from: S'mon;1104910I always thought the Deadlands 'intolerable apologia' was that the South would abolish slavery yet keep on fighting for independence. I guess they really cared about those cotton export tariffs!

To a certain extent the wealth of "King Cotton" was the only reason the southern states thought they could make secession viable at all, so slavery being the only way to maintain cotton production at the necessary levels, no, it seems highly unlikely they would have freely abandoned it had they managed even to hold their own against the North. There was a point near the end of the historical war where the Confederacy was considering arming their slaves to make up for their manpower losses, but I think by the time they were desperate enough to actually follow through, it wouldn't have made any difference. Conceivably, a new battlefront against a genuinely inhuman and objectively evil supernatural threat might have changed their perspective enough to do that, but such foes not existing in real life, that's never going to be more than a plausible inference.

(I do remember a quote I read, attributed to a Confederate official, which if true may explain some of the conflict. This man apparently said, during the arguments about whether slaves should be armed or not, "If slaves make good soldiers, then our entire theory of slavery is wrong." Which is a telling insight into how people who thought of themselves as decent honourable Christian gentlefolk could nonetheless countenance slavery, and why holding onto it became such a core point: it wasn't just about rejecting the supposed Federal overreach of the anti-slavery administration, but about preserving their own sense of identity, about holding onto a justification without which their culture couldn't survive either economically or psychologically. Human beings will quite frequently let themselves lose literally everything else before they will willingly admit to being, not just wrong, but in the wrong.)

Quote from: Orphan81;1104916The arguments I'm seeing against the change basically boil down to this.

I'll plead an admittedly narrow distinguo here: A criticism of the change isn't the same as an argument against it.

As a specific instance of property rebooting, I, and I suspect most of my fellow critics, freely grant the right of the designer to do what he wants with the property and freely concede that it makes no direct personal difference to most of us either way. Likewise, if Hensley's right about how little difference this will make to actual gameplay in practice, then it may be one of the few examples of managing to "Woken" a property without cutting into its bottom line. But the fundamental error in philosophy behind the change -- the idea that the right and moral thing to do with art is to continually revise it to match the pieties of the day, so as to escape condemnation -- is one that I think is still worth publicly calling out and objecting to, as it is reinforced every time another creator does this.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1104918To a certain extent the wealth of "King Cotton" was the only reason the southern states thought they could make secession viable at all, so slavery being the only way to maintain cotton production at the necessary levels, no, it seems highly unlikely they would have freely abandoned it had they managed even to hold their own against the North. There was a point near the end of the historical war where the Confederacy was considering arming their slaves to make up for their manpower losses, but I think by the time they were desperate enough to actually follow through, it wouldn't have made any difference. Conceivably, a new battlefront against a genuinely inhuman and objectively evil supernatural threat might have changed their perspective enough to do that, but such foes not existing in real life, that's never going to be more than a plausible inference.

(I do remember a quote I read, attributed to a Confederate official, which if true may explain some of the conflict. This man apparently said, during the arguments about whether slaves should be armed or not, "If slaves make good soldiers, then our entire theory of slavery is wrong." Which is a telling insight into how people who thought of themselves as decent honourable Christian gentlefolk could nonetheless countenance slavery, and why holding onto it became such a core point: it wasn't just about rejecting the supposed Federal overreach of the anti-slavery administration, but about preserving their own sense of identity, about holding onto a justification without which their culture couldn't survive either economically or psychologically. Human beings will quite frequently let themselves lose literally everything else before they will willingly admit to being, not just wrong, but in the wrong.)

Good post! Yes, I have a similar perspective.

On a side note, I think a Wild West setting works best when it accords most closely to historical reality. Maybe history + magic. My objection to Deadlands' alt-history meant I never got to play the game - my friend Judith offered but I turned it down once I realised the setup. This new history sounds a bit more plausible & for me more playable.

So, er, Yaay for Social Justice?!

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1104862But, as already noted in this thread, people are being made to care. The neutral space for "live and let live" is shrinking every day.

Not shrinking here. On WOTC they kicked me off their message boards for refusing to bow to the awokened. All they did with this for themselves by instituting a policy of repression was to lose a customer for allowing my first amendment rights to free speech be violated on their message boards. The woke crowds can't do that here. Even though they are welcome to post here as well, and participate in the discussions here, they will not be allowed or permitted to censor me. I say live and let live, and we have room for that on this message board, and that's the way it is.

...Also have to say I find your sig interesting.

"Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document (His handwritten biography) he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It's completely at odds with the impression most people have of him," says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain's Other Woman.

"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."

Even before writing his biography He used to write poisonous hateful letters to celebrities, business leaders, editors of his time, and to his creditors. His wife Olivia would sneak out to the mailbox, grab the letters before the postman could take them, and destroy the letters. She successfully kept this a secret, and didn't tell anyone while she was alive.

Mark Twain's real biography
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting-for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html