Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1120682Does that mean every work by every shrimp eater must be discarded due to guilt by association?

No, it means we write an RPG about eating steak in direct homage to a shrimp-eater's steak-eating book, but tell everyone that while we enjoy their steak recipes, we don't like shrimp eaters and shrimp-eaters are bad even though we're monitizing ourselves using the work of a shrimp-eater. Enjoy our steak!

In any case, good post.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1120682This. To pile on, there's also something exhausting, depressing, and fundamentally destructive about this constant dredging up people's flaws and disavowing of them as a result. Especially when they are long gone and there is nothing they can do about it anymore -- which makes it even more likely that whatever the flaw was a product of their time and not an egregious error on their part.

It reduces everyone to the worst aspects of their character, always. So why try? Judgment will always be based on the worst thing about you, rather than anything you ever accomplished, even as people examine and try to be inspired by the best of your work...

These are the habits of people that know that their own character is a piece of shit.  They'll do almost anything to keep from facing up to that.  Yelling about someone else doing something different is how they handle avoiding their own problems.  It's also why they are so sure that everyone else should be full of guilt for everything that bothers them.  The particularly cowardly ones pick on dead people, because they can't fight back.

Quote from: Antiquation!;1120611Fred Hicks is a fucking cunt. I will be making myself a drink to celebrate the day his company finally croaks for good.

You know I never realised just how problematic Evil Hat's webpages are. Let's unpack this.

Nevermind a grinning hat resembling a fedora (a common symbol in relation to alt-right neo-nazi ['incels'). Two white dudes (ugh), one white woman a strong and beautiful troll... woman... thing and- wow, just wow, a somewhat intelligent gorilla in a fighting stance? I was literally crying when I realised the extremely offensive implications of that image in relation to a lack of other visible Persons of Colour. That's not even getting into the colour palette. Black, red and white? What other symbol of a fascist state used that combination?

If this is what companies like Evil Hat and Fred Hicks think they can get away with in Drumpf's America I've never been more scared in my life.

Quote from: Snark Knight;1120753You know I never realised just how problematic Evil Hat's webpages are. Let's unpack this.

Nevermind a grinning hat resembling a fedora (a common symbol in relation to alt-right neo-nazi ['incels'). Two white dudes (ugh), one white woman a strong and beautiful troll... woman... thing and- wow, just wow, a somewhat intelligent gorilla in a fighting stance? I was literally crying when I realised the extremely offensive implications of that image in relation to a lack of other visible Persons of Colour. That's not even getting into the colour palette. Black, red and white? What other symbol of a fascist state used that combination?

If this is what companies like Evil Hat and Fred Hicks think they can get away with in Drumpf's America I've never been more scared in my life.

LMAO! Good eye! This would have been a great response to their "don't buy our products" tweet.

Quote from: Brendan;1120563One of the main weapons used in political rhetoric is what I call "Motte and Bailey by Assumption".  In a traditional Motte and Bailey fallacy, the speaker puts forward a controversial position and, when challenged, retreats to a far milder similar position which he pretends is the same position.  Likely he will swap them back later in the discussion when it serves his purpose.  (This needs to be distinguished from just clarifying where the speaker may have stated things wrongly in the first place and is trying to offer a genuine clarification.)

In the more sophisticated form, the position holder is careful to not state their actual claim openly.  They will instead use commonly accepted terms in uncommon ways, relying on the fact that the listener not initiated into the particular usages of their ideology will assume a more charitable position than they really hold.  I believe that is what's happening here.   I don't think when today's terminally woke say "colonialism" or "decolonizing" they mean the same thing as the simple act of sending out colonies, or even something as blatant as conquest or occupation.  I think they mean something more than this - something like a "mental decolonization" which is to say, a rejection of Western civilization as such.

eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoloniality
http://projectechoes.eu/decolonizing/

"Decolonization" in today's parlance isn't about fighting for self-determination against outright aggression in game, it's about an out of game ideology seeking to co-opt gaming.  

Take the situation of a small human polis threatened by an aggressive horde of savage monsters (orcs, trolls, cannibal barbarians, whatever). If my understanding is correct this would NOT count as an example of "decolonization" or "anti-colonization".  Rather the advocates for decolonization would lament that the very structure of this scenario is ITSELF an example of colonization and "white-supremacy".

This is entirely correct.

At my work we've been told to "Decolonise the Curriculum", which means removing white/European authors and replace them with non-white/non-European authors. This is regardless of what we're teaching.

Re actual games about Decolonisation, the only one that comes to mind is The Price of Freedom. I do think there are remarkably few RPGs about playing the underdog, considering it is such a common fictional trope. The new Star Wars films have tried to push a Decolonisation type agenda in the SJW sense I guess; especially The Last Jedi.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1120568For a good RPG setting on this theme, imagine a tribute province of a declining Empire finally being released to its own rule as the legionnaires pull out (cf. the Romans leaving proto-Arthurian Britain). On the one hand, freedom, yay! On the other hand, however hard the Imperials try to organize their departure, there's going to be a power vacuum: the internal politics of exactly who gets to take over (why not your PCs?), the external threats of outlanders and monsters seeing the removal of the previous protective force (time to teach those orcs to fear our banners, not the Empire's!), the personal drama of families and friends being separated by the politics of both issues (no, your tribune won't let you resign to marry your local sweetheart, you've still got two years on your term of service, bucko!), and the profit opportunities for the unscrupulous trying to commandeer whatever the Imperials leave behind (do you know how much gold they're paying for leftover alchemical supplies?!), all would make for a great campaign.

A Decolonisation campaign set in 5th century Britannia does sound a lot of fun. I'm guessing from a SJW perspective it's White Supremacy All the Way Down since Romans, Britons and Saxons can all be baddies if you squint hard enough, due to being 'white'. Or go the BBC route and make the Britons look as Diverse as modern London.

Quote from: Antiquation!;1120524Decolonization successful! "How Tabletop RPGs Are Being Reclaimed From Bigots And Jerks!"

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3mw5b/how-tabletop-rpgs-are-being-reclaimed-from-bigots-and-jerks?utm_source=reddit.com

I'm so grateful that Evil Hat is saving this hobby!

"Evil Hat Productions recently told me they felt it was important to create distance between themselves and Lovecraft!" By... publishing a new CoC game? Huh. Anyway, I certainly can't wait for all you evil fascists to be forcibly purged.

For those of you non-fascists, grab your BDSM checklists boys and girls!

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1120675Evil Hat's fairly well established, the TBP thread was long but has fallen on to the third page, and as of right now, Fate of Cthulhu's #23 on the DTRPG bestseller list. It's not going to be the equal of, say, CoC 7E or even Sandy Petersen's guides to Cthulhu for Pathfinder or 5E, but it has a presence.

  Personally, I don't much care for Lovecraft as a person or a writer any more, but part of that's because I think the TTRPG field has hit the point of saturation and then some when it comes to Cthulhu and ilk. But an analogy:

  Gene Roddenberry was an inveterate philanderer and adulterer, at times a shady businessman, and thoroughly anti-religious--and those elements of his character arguably show up in his work about as much as Lovecraft's racism. Despite that, I can still enjoy Star Trek. Yet if I were to write a Star Trek work, calling those parts of Roddenberry's character out front and center in the introduction would probably seem tacky, ungrateful and hypocritical.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1120682This. To pile on, there's also something exhausting, depressing, and fundamentally destructive about this constant dredging up people's flaws and disavowing of them as a result. Especially when they are long gone and there is nothing they can do about it anymore -- which makes it even more likely that whatever the flaw was a product of their time and not an egregious error on their part.

It reduces everyone to the worst aspects of their character, always. So why try? Judgment will always be based on the worst thing about you, rather than anything you ever accomplished, even as people examine and try to be inspired by the best of your work.

It strips context and intentions and judges people by an unknowable standard. What hope does anyone have to ever accomplish anything in a society that attacks people this way, if doing one's best in spite of incomplete information and the inevitable flaws of humanity isn't enough to earn any credit at all?

I'll give a hypothetical example, so that we can consider the time period starting now and going forward, with apologies to Futurama: let's say in 10 years we discover that ocean shrimp are actually hyperintelligent aliens with a well-organized society and we've been murdering them en masse for culinary entertainment for hundreds of years. A protracted human-on-shrimp holocaust, where humanity has committed unspeakable atrocity, due to unspeakable, unforgivable ignorance. We were big, dumb, brutish, hungry, and they were delicious but unable to fight back. Is every historical shrimp-eater ever now worse than Hitler? Does that mean every work by every shrimp eater must be discarded due to guilt by association?

And finally, if human accomplishment stands on the shoulders of giants, who is ever going to try to learn from the past and use that to build something better if they are instantly shot down because the shoulders they chose are problematic? And because of our attempts to always do better, there will always be valid criticism of anyone we choose. The question is fundamentally whether we try to pick the best things and do better, or constantly attack each other, ourselves, and our past for every mistake flawed humanity ever committed.

It seems like this culture  is pushing towards the latter, but I have no idea how anyone achieves anything under that scheme. It looks like a fast track to paralysis and misery.

And no, I don't like Lovecraft or his writing myself, either.

Quote from: Antiquation!;1120685No, it means we write an RPG about eating steak in direct homage to a shrimp-eater's steak-eating book, but tell everyone that while we enjoy their steak recipes, we don't like shrimp eaters and shrimp-eaters are bad even though we're monitizing ourselves using the work of a shrimp-eater. Enjoy our steak!

In any case, good post.

There is a blatant irony in continuing to publish CoC games while disavowing Lovecraft. What do they hope to accomplish by doing this? The CoC games are still promoting Lovecraft's racist views by regurgitating the same stereotypes of degenerate cults, savage non-white peoples, white trash, etc.

Previously I mentioned that "The Litany of Earth" is a landmark for depicting deep ones as a persecuted minority a la The Shape of Water. The irony is that the RPG leftists have utterly failed to recognize that message. They still treat deep ones as evil savages who must be killed, while demonizing Lovecraft for being racist and writing the deep ones as a miscegenation metaphor.

This is hypocrisy.

Quote from: S'mon;1120836A Decolonisation campaign set in 5th century Britannia does sound a lot of fun. I'm guessing from a SJW perspective it's White Supremacy All the Way Down since Romans, Britons and Saxons can all be baddies if you squint hard enough, due to being 'white'. Or go the BBC route and make the Britons look as Diverse as modern London.

Alternately, if you're lucky enough to have the material, an Empire of the Petal Throne game about the Tsolyani Empire having to cut a border province loose would let you hit all the same themes while dodging the anti-Western issues entirely.

Quote from: Stephen TannhauserFor a good RPG setting on this theme, imagine a tribute province of a declining Empire finally being released to its own rule as the legionnaires pull out (cf. the Romans leaving proto-Arthurian Britain). On the one hand, freedom, yay! On the other hand, however hard the Imperials try to organize their departure, there's going to be a power vacuum: the internal politics of exactly who gets to take over (why not your PCs?), the external threats of outlanders and monsters seeing the removal of the previous protective force (time to teach those orcs to fear our banners, not the Empire's!), the personal drama of families and friends being separated by the politics of both issues (no, your tribune won't let you resign to marry your local sweetheart, you've still got two years on your term of service, bucko!), and the profit opportunities for the unscrupulous trying to commandeer whatever the Imperials leave behind (do you know how much gold they're paying for leftover alchemical supplies?!), all would make for a great campaign.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1120847Alternately, if you're lucky enough to have the material, an Empire of the Petal Throne game about the Tsolyani Empire having to cut a border province loose would let you hit all the same themes while dodging the anti-Western issues entirely.

Both of those sound cool - though I think the 5th century Britannia is more appealing to me. For me, the resonance of real-world cultures is a positive point. A long time ago in grad school, I played in a fantasy game where we fought against a version of the Roman empire, but my first character was strongly pro-Roman. (He was a elf who aspired to be a Roman citizen and had taken a Roman name.) I like the theme of it not just being about kicking out the empire, but how to run things once the empire is gone.

Quote from: Armchair GamerEvil Hat's fairly well established, the TBP thread was long but has fallen on to the third page, and as of right now, Fate of Cthulhu's #23 on the DTRPG bestseller list. It's not going to be the equal of, say, CoC 7E or even Sandy Petersen's guides to Cthulhu for Pathfinder or 5E, but it has a presence.

Personally, I don't much care for Lovecraft as a person or a writer any more, but part of that's because I think the TTRPG field has hit the point of saturation and then some when it comes to Cthulhu and ilk. But an analogy:

Gene Roddenberry was an inveterate philanderer and adulterer, at times a shady businessman, and thoroughly anti-religious--and those elements of his character arguably show up in his work about as much as Lovecraft's racism. Despite that, I can still enjoy Star Trek. Yet if I were to write a Star Trek work, calling those parts of Roddenberry's character out front and center in the introduction would probably seem tacky, ungrateful and hypocritical.

I don't generally give a damn about outrage over some RPG product because it's introduction fails to show proper respect or express the right politics. There are a handful of RPGs that actually represent extremist points of view (like an RPG by a convicted murderer), but for the most part, I can't see getting worked up over things like this. If a religious author wrote a Star Trek game that called out Roddenberry's anti-religion stance, I similarly wouldn't particularly care.

Quote from: insubordinate polyhedral;1120682To pile on, there's also something exhausting, depressing, and fundamentally destructive about this constant dredging up people's flaws and disavowing of them as a result. Especially when they are long gone and there is nothing they can do about it anymore -- which makes it even more likely that whatever the flaw was a product of their time and not an egregious error on their part.

It reduces everyone to the worst aspects of their character, always. So why try?

To burnish your own moral reputation with your peers. Some people are so insecure and so desperate for status that the only way they know to gain it is to morally denounce others - ideally, people who can't fight back.

Quote from: jhkim;1120857If a religious author wrote a Star Trek game that called out Roddenberry's anti-religion stance, I similarly wouldn't particularly care.

That Magna Roma Star Trek episode was pretty clearly pro-Christianity. It also implied Uhura was Christian - "It's not the Sun in the sky - it's the Son of God!"

Obviously by the 1980s that sort of thing was not allowed any more; only a hippy New Age Spiritualism version of 'Native American belief system' got any respect, in Voyager. Plus I guess the DS9 Prophets stayed nicely ambiguous.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1120675Evil Hat's fairly well established, the TBP thread was long but has fallen on to the third page, and as of right now, Fate of Cthulhu's #23 on the DTRPG bestseller list. It's not going to be the equal of, say, CoC 7E or even Sandy Petersen's guides to Cthulhu for Pathfinder or 5E, but it has a presence.

We'll see if it has any actual staying power.  "Bought it" doesn't mean "going to play it"  or even "going to read it."

Quote from: jhkim;1120857If a religious author wrote a Star Trek game that called out Roddenberry's anti-religion stance, I similarly wouldn't particularly care.

And then asked players to play star trek where everybody was religous and if you where not you where a bad person? Would you not care then?
Remember the endgoal is to get rid of invisible nazis. If those invisible nazis don't disapear after 1 effort that means the message wasn't strong enough, and so more must be changed to get at them.

Quote from: S'mon;1120835At my work we've been told to "Decolonise the Curriculum", which means removing white/European authors and replace them with non-white/non-European authors. This is regardless of what we're teaching.

Your teaching skills can be monetized in the corporate world. Mine certainly have been. I'm still surprised how much my special education teaching skills still come into play in my current far-from-education career.

It can't be fun being a teacher at an communism indoctrination day care center, especially as the school management becomes increasingly retarded. It'll become especially un-fun when you can't dance fast enough to hide how you really feel about their bullshit.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1120904It'll become especially un-fun when you can't dance fast enough to hide how you really feel about their bullshit.

I'm polite, but I'm pretty sure they know how I feel!

I guess at some point I may get the midnight knock on the door as things get crazier and crazier, but we're a ways behind the top UK Unis, who in turn lag the big US ones, who lag the US private colleges.

One funny thing is that my students are mostly south-Asian, the majority being Muslim female, and their views on most things are much closer to mine than to the views of the far-left extremist academics who dominate culturally. They're ok with the idea that white males in positions of power should be replaced with Muslim females, but for them it's just simple self-interest - more opportunities for them - no Marxist dialectical framework explaining how whites are the Most Evil Ever. And of course they're socially/culturally conservative and tend to sympathise with Christians being persecuted by the cultural-Marxist authorities.