Quote from: PrometheanVigil;909837Only sticking point was the whole trait limit thing with the Troll and Orc genotypes (but that's that archaic "black peolple savage orcs" shit from the tabletop cracking through its ugly head)

Yeah, not even close.  Metatype and ethnicity are not the same thing.

And the whole 'Orcs are the blacks' thing is complete bullshit anyway.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;909890And the whole 'Orcs are the blacks' thing is complete bullshit anyway.

Not in Shadowrun it isn't.  Ingentization has explicitly been about straight up Fantasy Racism since day one.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;909890Yeah, not even close.  Metatype and ethnicity are not the same thing.

And the whole 'Orcs are the blacks' thing is complete bullshit anyway.

In most RPG settings, you'd be correct. However, in Shadowrun the discrimination faced by Orks and Trolls was deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US. Early Shadowrun, with its focus on the gangs of Seattle, is very much a product of the 1980's inner city gang culture and how the rest of America reacted to it.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;909837I think Dragonfall was the first solid game in that series that pulled that off but I was even more impressed with Hong Kong which used almost every skill in dialog at least a few times. And that is exactly how skills should be used in CRPGs (and tabletop). I've completed all games playing a hybrid Shaman/Decker with maxed-out Charisma and Intelligence and it is highly satisfying that even if your character can't trash mobs, they can certainly mop up convos that net you way better rewards long-term. Only sticking point was the whole trait limit thing with the Troll and Orc genotypes (but that's that archaic "black peolple savage orcs" shit from the tabletop cracking through its ugly head)

SR: Hong Kong is, in my view, a gold standard for how developers of both PnP and Computer RPGs should design non violent problem solving in the future. The designated "diplomat" role on the tabletop is archaic and should be scrapped. All it does is create a character that is not fun to play in combat, and then monopolizes the game outside of it. Plus, I love how the best ending wasn't locked behind some arbitrary CHA check, as if some smooth talker could convince a god to step down on personality alone. It rewarded playing the entire game and allowed every character to outsmart the enemy.

QuoteI played a Half-Ogre who had maxed-out Charisma and Speech (you can probably tell what kind of characters I like playing...) I got the orcs unionized with the Half-Orc guy safe and sound and in power and I also got Caladon (?) into the UK with roughly equals powers as Tarant (?). Most everything else about that game was shit but the speech checks were awesome.

The ending was really shit. Its way too overhyped for what it is.

I personally liked the ending, with how it shook up how you viewed the world so much. Arcanum is the epitome for me of the "Obsidian" family of games (I know it wasn't done by Obsidian, but I use it as a nice catch all). The gameplay itself is crap, but the world and conversations are enough to make the slog through the bad gameplay worth it. Cutting the combat by 2/3's would have made it a lot more fun. In general, this is something a lot of RPG designers really should take note of. If you can't design good combat, then reduce it whenever possible. Padding games with trash mobs doesn't make them more fun. This definitely applies to PnP RPG design, where trash mobs mean a 30 minute to an hour investment, not 45 seconds-2 minutes of clicking and slaughter.

QuoteI don't really find it that hard to imagine what its like for a character to live in a given world. One of the most -- for me, at least -- evocative pieces of RPG artwork was in one of the WHRPG gamebooks. It depitcted a vicious, brutal firefight between gang members in a place where it looked violence was one of few ways of life. I imagine the screaming, gunfire, swearing, trashcan fires, motorcycle speeding, airplane low overhead, boots on rivetmetal galleys, all these sounds and I'm there.

One of the worst about Shadowrun (and most fiction in general that mentions Africa of Africanized regions) is the only thing of note is that Nigeria is a "ghoul kingdom". We have all this info on Asia or Europe or North America but none on the place most likely to be the most relevant in the 2070s.

What I like about games set in "our" world is that you can really play with how the person and character are going to react. It's a lot easier for someone to play a hyperviolent character in the world you described. If the setting is one of pure brutal violence, both player and character are going to have similar motivations and morality. Forcing someone from middle class America into a dark, corrupt and hyper violent setting that they would personally be aware of results in some really interesting roleplaying (yes, I am a swine, as my signature states.)

Let's say you are faced with a decision: do I bribe a policeman or kill him. More than likely, the policeman is just as poor as you, isn't receiving a salary, has a family to feed, ect. In a hyper violent fictional setting, the choice to kill him is a lot easier. You don't have a conflict between in and out of character knowledge, as the world is presented as your character would see it (grimdark evil Judge Dredd clones cracking down on everyone.) Whereas in a real world setting, you have a stronger conflict between your character's viewpoint and your viewpoint, as the story is presenting the world as your character sees it, while you bring your own knowledge to the table.

This is something I feel that a lot of Shadowrun games fail to really mess around with. The folks in Knight Errant gear are people trying to make a living, just like you. It's a fundamentally relatable situation, "I need food and I'm good with a gun, where do I go?", yet too many games treats them as mooks. Some small touches of humanizing would do wonders to reign in the appeal of pink mohawk style games where you just slaughter people. It's a theme I try to drive home in my Africa-punk setting (which I will be posting soon-ish.)

Quote from: IskandarKebab;909905However, in Shadowrun the discrimination faced by Orks and Trolls was deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US. Early Shadowrun, with its focus on the gangs of Seattle, is very much a product of the 1980's inner city gang culture and how the rest of America reacted to it.

Oh for fuck's sake.
Shadowrun is a dystopia of discrimination on just about every front possible, even the Orks kicked the Dwarves out of the Seattle Underground.

How the hell do you get "deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US" unless by "mirror" you mean "they face discrimination too" in which case you may as well say it was deliberately designed to mirror the challenges of 1800's Irish immigrants, Tamil in India, or the Roma.  Poverty, crime, discrimination, what makes it black and hispanic, because it's in a city as opposed to Appalachia?

Quote from: CRKrueger;910036How the hell do you get "deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US"

...because the designers said that it was?

I mean, if Word of God isn't enough for you that's cool and all, but I kind of take them at their word on this one.

There's a difference between a Star Trek like "He's black on the right side, I'm black on the left" kind of obvious "See how stupid racism is" metaphor, and a deliberate mirroring of a specific minority's experience as political commentary.  Human beings literally turned into Orcs and Trolls overnight.  When Fred was a human yesterday, calling him no longer human today seems as asinine as the lampshaded aliens in Star Trek.

Also, if it was meant to be a deliberately constructed mirroring of the Black and Hispanic experience, it's an idiotic one.  There's no history of Slavery or Immigration issues with Orks and Trolls.  Also, if it is meant to be a deliberate analogue, it's one Stormfront would use because Orks and Trolls do have very large physical differences, unlike any other form of human racism.

You may as well say that Shadowrun was making a seer-like prediction of the future of religious terrorism in that Catholicism welcomed metahumans with open arms, while Islam declares them abominations and persecutes them.

Shadowrun hits the dystopian themes of Cyberpunk HARD, but that doesn't mean it's scalpel-like with it's specific targets.  It's not even remotely focused that clearly.

"Calling out modern racism" isn't "deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US".

Quote from: CRKrueger;910060Also, if it was meant to be a deliberately constructed mirroring of the Black and Hispanic experience, it's an idiotic one.  There's no history of Slavery or Immigration issues with Orks and Trolls.  Also, if it is meant to be a deliberate analogue, it's one Stormfront would use because Orks and Trolls do have very large physical differences, unlike any other form of human racism.

"Calling out modern racism" isn't "deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US".

There are games which use orks and trolls to call out modern racism, but much like the Orcs in Arcanum, who represent the British lower class in the industrial age, Orks and Trolls are deliberately modeled on specific American groups.

Orks are stereotyped by the rest of "acceptable" society as brutes with too many children who are short lived, inherently lazy, violent and drawn to lives of crime, are strongly associated with living in inner city slums and being parts of street gangs. There are Ork "Posers" who pretend to be Orks, dress as them, use their culture, who are viewed with mild irritation to outright hostility. (Yes, elves have the same thing, but Ork posers are deliberately based on "wigger" culture.) At a certain point there might as well have had an in-universe act called "Goblins With Attitude" and their hit song called "Straight out of Redmond".

Trolls are torn between two stereotypes, both being lumped in with the Orks by some, and as dim witted, but hard-working manual laborers by others. They fit into the twin American stereotypes of Latino immigrants, both the inner city gang banger and the hard working manual laborer "model immigrant."

Yes, there are other cultural subgroups to whom some of those stereotypes may apply. But inner city gang culture was very much an American phenomenon starting in the early 80's. You take that into conjunction with how fucking America centered FASA was, the word of god mentioned above, and it's damn clear who Orks and Trolls are supposed to represent.

I'm sure a lot of political messages are very "clear" to you.

"Word of God" needs a citation BTW, and as I said, calling out american racism, or even 80's fear of gangs, doesn't translate to "deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US".

The Orc Posers you're talking about are Orxploitation due to the Orc Rapper Crimetime, deep into 3rd Edition and the reign of Rob "Transhumanist Wannabe" Boyle, one year before 4th Edition.

Seeing as how the Ork and Troll situation was created fifteen years earlier in 1989, I think you're putting your own political bullshit onto the game just a tad...like maybe 100% worth.

A simple example of how full of shit you are - all those stereotypes leveled against orcs and trolls that are supposed to mirror blacks and hispanics are the same exact stereotypes the Know-Nothings used against European Catholic Immigrants, and the entire WASP establishment used against the Irish specifically.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910084A simple example of how full of shit you are - all those stereotypes leveled against orcs and trolls that are supposed to mirror blacks and hispanics are the same exact stereotypes the Know-Nothings used against European Catholic Immigrants, and the entire WASP establishment used against the Irish specifically.

In a sense, those are our recyclable stereotypes, used every time we start a new age of immigration.  Aliens from Zeta Reticuli who try to immigrate will probably be denigrated as drunk and lazy.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910084I'm sure a lot of political messages are very "clear" to you.

And I'm sure a lot of those messages go right over your head.

Quote"Word of God" needs a citation BTW, and as I said, calling out american racism, or even 80's fear of gangs, doesn't translate to "deliberately designed to mirror the challenges faced by Hispanics and African Americans in the US".

Except for the whole part where the fear of gangs in the 1980's was a fear of black and latino gangs. And the fact that AMERICAN RACISM IS SPECIFICALLY AIMED AT BLACK AND LATINO PEOPLE. There is of course, room to argue the applicability of Asian stereotypes (which bleed a bit into the negative/quasi positive stereotypes people in the Shadowrun universe have towards Dwarfs), but Donald Trump isn't talking about Asians, he's talking about Blacks and Latinos. If Shadowrun were a reflection of American society in the 1950's, then yeah, the inference would be a lot harder to make because you'd have all sorts of involvement with hell's angels and your normal greaser shit. But Shadowrun is a product of 1980's America, based on 1980's America, and 1980's America was afraid of black and latino gangs.

QuoteThe Orc Posers you're talking about are Orxploitation due to the Orc Rapper Crimetime, deep into 3rd Edition and the reign of Rob "Transhumanist Wannabe" Boyle, one year before 4th Edition.

Seeing as how the Ork and Troll situation was created fifteen years earlier in 1989, I think you're putting your own political bullshit onto the game just a tad...like maybe 100% worth.

That's because Black Poser culture really emerged in the early 2000's. In fact, this actually supports my argument, because the developers decided to deliberately incorporate developments in how the majority culture interacted with black culture in the US into how the majority culture interacted with Ork culture in Shadowrun. Orxsploitation is a deliberate send off on Blaxsploitation. If Ork culture was more of a blend of other groups and what they faced, you might have something to go on. For example, had the developers decided to incorporate the experiences of the Hmong, or Irish southies.

And I find your charge of "political bullshit" interesting, as if anything we do is free of that "political bullshit." No matter how hard we try, the settings and fiction we create are going to be a reflection of the environment in which we grew up in. You can see this in Tolkien's portrayal of industry vs nature, Gibson's obsession with the rise of the big holding company and blindness to the rise of small, incredibly profitable, single niche organizations. Shadowrun's obsession with Japanese urban life of the 1980's is a classic example of this. GRRM writes post Cold-War fantasy, there's no longer this existential battle between good and evil that dominates our "real" world, so what does that mean for how we view our fictional worlds? And let's not even get into Conan the Barbarian or HP Fucking Lovecraft. Fantasy as we know it is built on a ton of "political bullshit" and part of what makes it so fascinating a genre is seeing how authors of their time reflected their views of the real world in the fake worlds they created and we still interact with today.

QuoteA simple example of how full of shit you are - all those stereotypes leveled against orcs and trolls that are supposed to mirror blacks and hispanics are the same exact stereotypes the Know-Nothings used against European Catholic Immigrants, and the entire WASP establishment used against the Irish specifically.

Yes, because Shadowrun was clearly parodying racism against the Irish. As That Chris Guy mentioned, these are recycled stereotypes. However, at the time the stereotypes were used (1989), the targets were Blacks and Latinos. It's a bit like saying that a race negatively stereotyped as good with money, greedy, and overly clannish in an urban European environment, from a setting created in the 1950's, isn't meant to be a direct reflection of Jewish people. Yes, that also applies to Armenians during the Ottoman Empire, or the fucking Uighurs during the early days of the Mongolian empire. But add in just a smidgen of paying attention to the setting and the times it was created in, and it becomes clear to a 5th grader that it is meant to reflect how people viewed Jews.

I am not saying "Shadowrun is racist because of Orks and Trolls." This is not an argument about Dnd orcs, or Tolkien and his swarthy evil men. In the Shadowrun universe, these stereotypes are consistently shown as bad, wrongfully placed and often push Orks to fulfill what they feel society has forced them to be. However, this does not mean that Orks and Trolls aren't meant to be allegories, a natural product of the times Shadowrun originates from.

Quote from: IskandarKebab;910110However, this does not mean that Orks and Trolls aren't meant to be allegories, a natural product of the times Shadowrun originates from.

Yeah, allegories of Racism, not allegories of Urban US Blacks circa 1980-1990.  Which ones are supposed to be Latinos again?  Neither Orks nor Trolls are really blamed for taking anyone's jobs.  If Trolls are Latinos and Orcs are Blacks, why do Orcs have the higher birth rate?  If Ghouls are meant to be the fear of AIDS, why is it Orks who call humans "Breeders"?  Are Dwarves the Jews, or Elves?  Elves the European Elite Economic Class or is that the Dragons?  Who are the Native Americans?  Oh, the real Native Americans, but they're not really a repressed minority anymore because they took their land back and are a world power.  So the UCAS is now the Native Americans, or are they the South and the Amerindians the North?

For all your love of thinking yourself a sophisticated social academic, you have all the nuance of a 2-year old with a paint-by-numbers coloring book.

Pick a Cyberpunk dystopian theme, and Shadowrun hits it...hard.  Pick a social ill, and Shadowrun hits it...hard.  But it's addressing the conditions of humanity and society not focused social criticism.  Renraku is not Mitsubishi, Damien Knight is not {insert corporate raider of choice} and Orks ain't Niggaz.  Shadowrun describes the awakening of a brand new world (or the reemergence of a very old one) but despite the Magic, the Technology, the advancements of what metahumanity can do, humans are still humans, with the same old hates and the same old flaws, making the same old mistakes, as well as a whole slate of new ones.

It's a mirror, not of Compton, but of humanity.

BTW: Not sure why you said you want to avoid bringing in Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft, it's obvious you want to talk about it, really, REALLY want to talk about it. :rolleyes:

Maybe we'll finally get someone now who can explain Stormbringer's "Dark Side of the Hobby" to us.

On the other hand, I am kind of interested in how Nigeria is going to become center-stage in 2070.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910155Maybe we'll finally get someone now who can explain Stormbringer's "Dark Side of the Hobby" to us.

Is that a thing?

Quote from: CRKrueger;910161On the other hand, I am kind of interested in how Nigeria is going to become center-stage in 2070.

I like running Rifts / Cyberpunk / Shadowrun in Africa. The big conceit I've used is the fight for resources, or the rise of Africa after in a cyber dystopia after a limited nuke war left the usual suspects (Russia, China, USA) in shambles.

Quote from: Spinachcat;910162Is that a thing?

It was to him, but he never had the balls to actually put words to it (it was in the orkist-colonialism thread, so you can probably guess).

The Usual Suspects are always talking about The Dark Side of the Hobby, ie. Gamers are some special flavor of -ist.