Quote from: CRKrueger;478752Yeah, sorry SB, but Ben and Bren are right, the boy's preachin'.  He's seen the light and the error of his ways and he's here to set us on the straight and narrow.

Is he at your house right now with a gun?  Have you called the police?

C'mon, dude, you are smarter than that.  He can rant and rave all he wants, what do you care?  Do we really need 550 posts to decide the guy is a bit of a crank and dismiss the crazy parts?  I mean, there is still a fairly interesting point about world-building and the role of 'evil', or 'monsters', or 'orcs' in there.  Hell, 'evil monsters' or 'evil orcs'.  'Evil orc monsters'.

I mean, does there need to be a full scale panic because J Random Player mentions the tautology that wiping out orc tribes is genocide?  When did everyone get so terribly frightened of their own gaming preferences?

I can only remind people so many times.  That post is so littered with qualifiers like "I think..." and "In my opinion..." it's almost hard to read.  If, after all that, you still think this guy is a fire and brimstone preacher trying to kick your door down, well...  Have fun with that, I guess.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478751I suppose it is a subjective call but my reading is this is exactly what he is saying. Especially when he said this kind of gaming promotes racial stereotyping and that it stunk to high-heaven of colonialism. The guy says a lot of stuff in his post, and he does backtrack a bit toward the end, but this is still my interpretation of his words.

Ok, sure.

Does that really affect the game as it is played at your table?  I mean, you are certainly free to interpret it that way, but does that interpretation mean you are going to change how you play?

Someone post this on RPG.net.

Quote from: B.T.;478796Someone post this on RPG.net.

Orc babies/genocide was already brought up in their "Evil in games" thread, and it was surprisingly civil.

Also, after having talked some more with a few of my players, I'm not sure anyone is going to reach a consensus on this.  The answers were just as varied as those in this thread.  Some were like "Whatever, bash orcs, they're not real."  Others were mildly weirded out, but not anymore than they've been with other games.  Others were completely neutral, or preferred to just decide what to do with orc tribes on a case-by-case basis.  

The only thing we could all agree on was that the group should determine before-hand what everyone is comfortable with and nail down the campaign details regarding moral paradigms before-hand so there's no bullshit "What is Good?" arguments down the road.  Not that characters can't disagree with one another in-game, but so it doesn't evolve into a meta-discussion about moral/ethical philosophy.

Quote from: B.T.;478796Someone post this on RPG.net.

I'm pretty sure RPGnet would've locked this thread and banned Benoist for reposting a private conversation.

Quote from: StormBringer;478746Likely.  I would even go further and say the 'common' orc (and possibly the goblins) could be interpreted as Japanese soldiers, and the Uruk-Hai were the Germans.  Were someone inclined to make that association, that is.  

Just for the record, Tolkien spent many many years saying that no, LotR is not a metaphor of anything (he hated metaphors) and that the comparisons Sauron = Hitler and the like were preposterous.

Quote from: StormBringer;478790Do we really need 550 posts to decide the guy is a bit of a crank and dismiss the crazy parts?

I'm confident that the thread will reach 1000 posts of absolute insanity.

QuoteI mean, there is still a fairly interesting point about world-building and the role of 'evil', or 'monsters', or 'orcs' in there.  Hell, 'evil monsters' or 'evil orcs'.  'Evil orc monsters'.

It is more interesting to cry like like members of BADD because some unknwon in a godforsaken place over Internet said something silly. At least in this place.

QuoteI mean, does there need to be a full scale panic because J Random Player mentions the tautology that wiping out orc tribes is genocide?  When did everyone get so terribly frightened of their own gaming preferences?

You may thank you all the pundits over the web and their uncessant and ridiculous doom & gloom chanting about how other people are going to infect the hobby and we won't be able to game anymore. Also, human nature.

Seriously, the first casualty in Internet wars are the brains of the participants.

Quote from: Imperator;478809It is more interesting to cry like like members of BADD because some unknwon in a godforsaken place over Internet said something silly. At least in this place.


You may thank you all the pundits over the web and their uncessant and ridiculous doom & gloom chanting about how other people are going to infect the hobby and we won't be able to game anymore. Also, human nature.

Seriously, the first casualty in Internet wars are the brains of the participants.

You've posted 15 times in this thread.

Quote from: J Arcane;478810You've posted 15 times in this thread.

Yeah, it's fun.

Also, most if not all of my posts have been about how the OOP is irrelevant, how for me it's OK if someone wants Absolute Good / Evil in their games, though I prefer grey areas, and how this is a tempest in a teapot. Fairy coherent, I think.

QuoteOrc babies/genocide was already brought up in their "Evil in games" thread, and it was surprisingly civil.

No, no, the whole "evil white colonialism and you're all secretly racist" thing.

Quote from: StormBringer;478792Ok, sure.

Does that really affect the game as it is played at your table?  I mean, you are certainly free to interpret it that way, but does that interpretation mean you are going to change how you play?

No. The guy is free to think what he wants about gaming, race, etc. I am just voicing my disagreement with his conclusions. My primary concern the whole time has been that the argument he is making (which I have seen more and more of lately) to me looks like another variation on the old 1980s D&D hsyteria (it is just coming from another end of the political spectrum, but its raw assumptions sound similar).

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478777This is an accurate summary. While racist beliefs are usually essentialist prejudices about groups, not all essentialist beliefs are racist.

I'd be willing to buy the "personal preference; live and let live" thing more if this were a different audience. Many, though not all, of the posters on this thread calling the OP an idiot have bitched and moaned about games like 4e breaking their immersion because of their gamey elements, and arguing in favour of a style of play that strives to emulate the real world and encourage
PCs interacting with the world in a way that is fundamentally similar to the way a similar person in the real world would interact with the challenge.

That is, they acclaim and laud the same paradigm I advocate (if anything, I am more willing to accept games like 4e than most of them), until it can be shown that within its context, certain ideas about how to build worlds are inferior to others.

In a game that values verisimilitude paying attention to the consequences of particular interactions between your premises are critical.

And that is one reason I tend to shy away from dungeon crawls and hack n slash style campaigns myself. Also why I tend to avoid games like 4E where flavor explanations seem to begin with gameplay considerations.

My biggest issue with the post in the OP is the implication of racism being in games where orcs are pure evil (which I just don't agree with) and the underlying assumption that there is something fundamentally dangerous about our hobby and if we don't walk the line carefully it can bleed into our regular lives.

Quote from: John Morrow;478784And I'd be willing to buy that explanation if you weren't telling me that that I couldn't possibly have run the actual campaign that I ran for over a year with the choices that I made and had it work the way it did.  I ran the players through the precise scenario that seems to be causing the most angst here, the characters justifiably slaughtering evil humanoid women and children after getting a good look at exactly how their society was structured, and rather than being simplistic and uninteresting, those scenes produces some of the most intense deliberation and pathos among the players in the entire campaign played by players more interested in deep in character role-playing than hack-and-slash.  So please excuse me if I think that you are confusing your own opinions with objective fact and confusing the limits of your imagination with the limits of what's possible.

I'm glad you managed to have fun, but you don't understand morality very well, and your self-described system for it has all sorts of ridiculous characteristics. We've discussed it several times over the years now, as you should recall.

I am not impressed with the creation of fake moral dilemmas by exploiting metaphysics. "Should orc noncombatants be killed?" is as stupid as "Should you travel back in time to kill Hitler?" It's a purposefully constructed puzzle (in the Wittgensteinian sense) of morality trying to disguise itself as an actual moral deliberation.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478821My biggest issue with the post in the OP is the implication of racism being in games where orcs are pure evil (which I just don't agree with) and the underlying assumption that there is something fundamentally dangerous about our hobby and if we don't walk the line carefully it can bleed into our regular lives.

Don't waste my time with telepathy. One of the most tremendously intellectually dishonest things people do around here on a consistent basis is pretend to read other people's minds. "Underlying assumption", nothing. You're describing your fantasy and belief and importing it back onto the author. You're not the worst person in this thread for it, but it remains utterly stupid.

Read the actual text of his post and respond to it.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478824Don't waste my time with telepathy. One of the most tremendously intellectually dishonest things people do around here on a consistent basis is pretend to read other people's minds. "Underlying assumption", nothing. You're describing your fantasy and belief and importing it back onto the author. You're not the worst person in this thread for it, but it remains utterly stupid.

Read the actual text of his post and respond to it.

I read the actual text of his post (several times in fact) and I think the underlying assumption I described was pretty clear. Sure it is a minor leap on my part to get there, but it isn't like it doesn't follow from much of what he is saying. And lets be honest, the viewpoint he advances is one embraced by many across the internet (I really haven't encountered it at an actual RPG session) who do explicitly worry about how things like hidden forms of racism, violence and oppression in RPGs impact our real lives. And my impression from the OP is he clearly shares these concerns. You are free to disagree. But it isn't like I am just drawing it out of thin air or projecting onto his post. I already said he back tracks at times, but to me there is a clear underlying assumption at work in the OPs words.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478826I already said he back tracks at times, but to me there is a clear underlying assumption at work in the OPs words.

Of course there is, otherwise the guy wouldn't have bothered wasting a few hours of his time formulating it.

The amount of hand-wringing this has prompted is hilarious. Divide and conquer baby.

I also have to wonder if Pseudo is actually an Ettin, his head is so far up his own arse.