Quote from: Old GeezerONE BIG UNION!

I've been a Teamster and worked security for a company during a United Auto Worker's Strike. I don't have enough alcohol in the apartment to unboggle my mind after the thought of a Tabletop Gamer's Union.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineAnything beyond that is probably specious, and just a misperception based on inadequate data.

People on the INTarweb speculating wildly based on inadequate data?

Say it ain't so!!:eek:

oH geez! ,....Mr. Analytical just got banned for a month for stuff posted in that thread on the Big Purple  that you guys are referring to ...

Here: http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=8112471&postcount=96

and here:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=365993


- Ed C.

Quote from: KoltaroH geez! ,....Mr. Analytical just got banned for a month for stuff posted in that thread on the Big Purple  that you guys are referring to ...

Here: http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=8112471&postcount=96

and here:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=365993


- Ed C.

And we should give a crap for what reason?

Seriously, if I want to know what's going on at RPGnet, I'll go look.  Why do you continue with this highschool "Look what they did!  Neener neener neener they're a bunch of poopyheads!" bullshit?

Quote from: Old GeezerAnd we should give a crap for what reason?

Seriously, if I want to know what's going on at RPGnet, I'll go look.  Why do you continue with this highschool "Look what they did!  Neener neener neener they're a bunch of poopyheads!" bullshit?

Thats how this thread got started in the first place - if you go back and read the first 3 or 4 posts.


- Ed C.

Quote from: KoltarThats how this thread got started in the first place - if you go back and read the first 3 or 4 posts.


- Ed C.

Nope, man.  Go read them yourself... it starts with Punny talking about political agendas.  Nowhere in the first 4 posts is RPGnet even mentioned.

Seriously, Ed, you don't NEED to keep trashing RPGnet over here.  This site stands perfectly well on its own.  It just makes you seem petty.

Koltar, I took a look at the thread and Mr Analytical's posts which earned him the banning. I think the mods on RPGnet made a good call based on the evidence. Mr Analytical was out of line and being deliberately offensive with his comments about the US Military.

We have a habit here of beating up on RPGnet, sometimes its deserved and sometimes its not. So if we are going to denounce them when they make a bad call, we have to also praise them when they make a good call. Its only fair.

There is never such thing as a "good call" in regards to banning people.

From which crypt(o) did you come from?

Quote from: SettembriniThere is never such thing as a "good call" in regards to banning people.

From which crypt(o) did you come from?

One which thinks for itself?

Quote from: SettembriniThere is never such thing as a "good call" in regards to banning people.

Actually, TBP had a poster one time who wanted to talk about how much he hated Faerun.  He made some excellent points.  I really liked him, but of course he got shouted down by the echo chamber and eventually he asked to be banned.

The mods granted his request.  

That was a good call.  People who ask to be banned should be banned.  It shows respect to their wishes.

Conversely, when I requested a ban, I didn't get one.  That was a bad call, because they should have seen my superior enlightenment and changed their pre-existing policy to fit it.

Asking to be banned?  That's stupid.  Just stop going there.  If you have no willpower, delete your account.

Edit:  Not picking on your riprock -- I just don't get it.

Quote from: jeff37923Koltar, I took a look at the thread and Mr Analytical's posts which earned him the banning. I think the mods on RPGnet made a good call based on the evidence. Mr Analytical was out of line and being deliberately offensive with his comments about the US Military.

We have a habit here of beating up on RPGnet, sometimes its deserved and sometimes its not. So if we are going to denounce them when they make a bad call, we have to also praise them when they make a good call. Its only fair.

Oh I AGREE with you - everyone assumes I was complaining . Quite the op[posite.
 But I think I confused this thread (the one we're in here) with another similiar thread that started off with a more direct connection to that thread or similiar one like it on rpg.net.

 Only did the link to show heated that thread has gotten over there, and also surprise that i'm still able to view it ...because they haven't moved it to Tangency yet .


 Somehow "Tangency" seems like an internet version of going "into the closet" with a topic.


- Ed C.


Oh yeah , Capitalism is Great!!! Woo-hoo!!

This is a topic close to my heart, I've done a lot of thinking about it... What you have to look at is the point of view expressed by the game.

Traveller is a great example, not because it's clearly libertarian, conservative or liberal, but because it actually has a lot of different elements.

The (default) heroes of Traveller are regular folks, they're not the heads of state or elites.  It's a working class game, with all that implies (potentially unfairly administrated debt, the randomness of the market ruining you through no fault of your own, no safety net for health or retirement or disability, no political power, etc.)  However, it is also, as previously noted, a "frontier myth" game, emphasizing a roving group of rootless wanderers solving problems by working for their own benefit.

What's interesting about Traveller (at least the original black books) to me is how neutrally authority is presented. Nobody tells you whether the Imperium is, as the name implies, a callous, distant government demanding ever more ridiculous levels of obedience and tribute, or whether it rules through salutary neglect and focuses its attention primarily on military defense and exploration.  The game is so wide-open, a GM can select whatever political view they want to put forward with respect to the relationship between power, elites, and the population.

When Malcolm Sheppard said on rpg.net (long before his banning) that the Forgotten Realms is Mythic Canada, he summarized it so well that I really don't have anything more to add to it.  Furthermore, this was why, although I love the Forgotten Realms as a gaming setting, I never really felt like it was truly what D&D was "about." I came up on Basic/Advanced/Expert D&D and even when I was in the 7th grade, I knew that D&D was a Western.  Roaming heroes defend civilization while standing outside it, from a terrible world full of unknown danger. By the time I was in high school, I knew what the cultural and political point of view of the "Western story" was: the conservative myth of the frontier.  D&D is a fundamentally politically conservative game and the community-oriented aspects of the Forgotten Realms did not fit well in that framework.  Once I figured this out, it made me like both D&D and Forgotten Realms more. That is also  why I like seeing D&D in other forms (Planescape) and in other tones (Ravenloft), because I like looking at the "Western story" both to celebrate it and deconstruct it.  

One of the more interesting political aspects of games that I came across was when I was running a Gotham City comic book game.  Gotham City is a hyperconservative dark fantasy world.  Criminals run rampant, they hide behind "their lawyers" (meaning the Constitution), and only the Strong People who work Outside The Law can save civilization, which hangs on by a thread over a boiling cauldron of madness and violence stoked by the deformed and insane.  When I ran Gotham City, I played this to the hilt, with snivelling criminals wailing for "their rights" and cackling mass murderers hamstringing the authorities so that only force could be used.  This despite the whole concept being completely anathema to me and my experience with law enforcement. It's not just that the premise is exaggerated, or even ludicrously exaggerated, it's that the whole premise is, in my view, wrong. I flat don't agree with the politics of the setting, but I had a grand time shovelling it out there in massive piles.  It's not that I was unaware of the politics, or agreed with it, so what was I doing? Lying? I have no idea.

When a game does make some connection between power and justice, usually it is a conservative statement (those chosen few with sufficient power can reliably create justice). There are very few games that are about giving power to the powerless, organizing the powerless to overcome their circumstances, or engaging in any kind of community.  Certainly there are few games about addressing racial, social or gender inequality, though many recognize it there's not many that are about fighting it.

I should point out that @ctiv8, a pdf game, is explicitly about social change from a grassroots perspective, Dogs in the Vineyard does not work without community design and rarely occurs without political statements from the players, the whole cyberpunk genre doesn't exist without LOLbertarianism (and race-based fears of a Japan-centric future) and every superspy game out there reinforces the conservative worldview of violence as the primary mechanism of international relations, maybe I will post a bit more about them later.

America's current political climate is artificially exaggerated, most of the conservatives out there think I should be murdered for supporting the rights of the accused and free expression, so there is not much political debate I engage in these days.    When one side wants, overwhelmingly, to kill you, there is nothing really to debate. What's interesting to me, though, is that I have a great time playing games with highly conservative or libertarian points of view, it doesn't bother me in the least.

Hope this helps.

Quote from: JDCorleymost of the conservatives out there think I should be murdered for supporting the rights of the accused and free expression, so there is not much political debate I engage in these days.    When one side wants, overwhelmingly, to kill you, there is nothing really to debate.

You had me at 'D&D is a western' and completely utterly lost me here.

It's difficult for a game designer to really strongly impose their personal politics on a game without being especially heavy handed, either in the text of the rules or in their description of the setting.

Specifically, GMs and players can always reinterpret ambiguous parts of your setting to fit their own political outlook; if you don't specify that the Confederacy of Blarg is very very very evil and bad capitalists, people can happily run games where the Blargites are bold champions of free enterprise without stretching themselves too much. You really have to impress your personal politics on the game to the extent where it actually becomes work for the players and GM to remove them. (For example, if in your "canonical" supplements the Confederacy is bad and the group wants to run a game where the Confederacy is good, they have to go back through the timeline and either come up with reasons why a particular Confederate atrocity wasn't an atrocity after all, or airbrush them out of the timeline altogether. This often results in a slightly wonky setting, in my experience.)