Quote from: John Morrow;429250You are claiming that whitewashing history in Deadlands is insulting.  While I think everyone agrees that whitewashing Nazis is mighty offensive, I think that whitewashing communists is a pretty good comparison for whitewashing the CSA.  Both get done by people with political motivations who find it easier to excuse atrocities, rationalize them away, or claim that the never happened than admit that the end game of their ideology might just end someplace really nasty and unpleasant.  The Nazis, however, were simply so evil that almost nobody makes excuses for them.  Instead, right and left try to pin them on the other side, even though they exhibited traits that both otherwise approve of (e.g., nationalism, central control).  

Yes, and a very good point that is. Now you've made it, and we can go back to talking about deadlands on this thread.

QuoteAnd my point was that if it's wrong to whitewash the CSA to get the cool trappings of the Confederacy and Lost Cause nobility for a role-playing game or work of alternate history fiction, then is it also wrong to whitewash communism to get the cool trappings of communist propaganda for a role-playing game or work of alternate fiction, or is that a question you'd rather sidestep?

yes, it would also be wrong, if not being done in a gonzo, ironic, or tongue-in-cheek fashion. And even in the latter areas one can question the appropriateness of it.

QuoteTo be perfectly honest with you, if you want to argue that racism is a special issue, I think I'm more insulted by the whitewashing of post-Civil War Jim Crow racism when it comes to pulps, the works of people like Robert E. Howard (who I would argue had some genuinely racist views), the Victorian era, the Prohibition era, and so on, which are all staples of role-playing games.  I'm not buying your "seriousness" argument because laziness, silliness, and whitewashing is probably more common than not.  And given that you've acknowledged at least a superficial similarity between your complain and Bruce Baugh's complaint about pulps, I'd like to know if there is more to your complaint than implausibility and cheesiness that made this particular example offend you while not having similar complaints about a host of similar examples.

The whitewashing in Pulps is not really quite the same.  But IF someone were to make a Pulp RPG that presented the 1920s as a time when black people explicitly had all the same opportunities as white people, or where women and other minorities were regularly presented as being institutionally in equal positions, and no one had an issue with things like sexual orientation or whatnot; in other words, if they took all the values of 2010 and projected them backward through time drooping them superimposed like some fat prostitute over an 18 year old farmboy on the historical backdrop of that other time; I would be just as bothered by it.  ESPECIALLY if their claim or their tone implied that this was meant to be taken as a serious and historically plausible setting.

That's my complaint: that historical RPGs shouldn't whitewash history by projecting modern values on historical periods.  Bruce Baugh's complaint is more like "RPGs should be forced to constantly address issues of racism and sexism and oppression which by the way we will judge entirely from our 21st century vantage point of smug superiority".  
Well, actually his complaint is more like "Waaah I'm a fat piece of shit who can't write and has no discernible talents but I want people to give me money anyways".

RPGpundit

Quote from: Spike;429252So...


You are saying classic came out 8 years too early and reloaded came out... um... 5 years to late?

I'm barely even considering reloaded, but yes. I'm saying that the ORIGINAL concept of Deadlands had the misfortune to come out at a time when everyone was so cowed by the White Wolf Pretentious mentality that the authors couldn't dare to make a game that just said "Its Gonzo, just roll with it".  That had it come out after D20 and the restoration of sanity, it probably would have been more likely to do so.

Instead, they took a setting that had zombie cardplayers and all the other things that have been mentioned here, and felt the need to add a thick, metaplot-rich backstory and alternate-history justification to try to seem "deep" to satisfy the White Wolf Swine.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Esgaldil;429257Unforgiven, and perhaps most importantly as comparison to Deadlands - Wild Wild West (1999).  Call it the Sheriff Bart effect.

But that's the point. Nowhere in Wild Wild West does the movie pause to explain "Here is how it turns out that the Fresh Prince can be the top U.S. secret agent; because see this is an alternate universe where people woke up one day and decided that they wouldn't be racist and would all eat granola, and that's TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE".

Instead, they just have the guy there, he's a black secret agent in a world with giant steampunk spider-constructs, and we all get that we're just supposed to run with it, because it makes no sense and couldn't possibly make any sense.
Deadlands, on the other hand, tries to claim that it does make sense and try to give ridiculous reasons why it could make sense.

RPGPundit

Ok, again, this is NOT the thread to be talking about "deaths caused by capitalism vs. deaths caused by communism"; there is no fucking way in which that is relevant to the issue of Deadlands.  

Take it elsewhere. Start a thread about it in the Pundit's forum if you like.  But keep talking about it here and I will have to end some people.

Its a stupid fucking argument anyways, as if a magic number somehow proves you're right and the other guy is wrong, as if "my" ideology killing 1.2 million versus the other guy's having killed 2.4 million is somehow "proof" that his is worse, as if democracy wouldn't still be better than autocracy if democracy had killed 200 times more people. Death is not the worst thing that can happen.  I would rather live in a world with more deaths by sugar overdose than in a nanny state where sugar is forbidden.

And yes, I'm getting the last word about this subject on this thread.  You want to respond? GO START ANOTHER FUCKING THREAD that isn't about deadlands.

RPGPundit

So Pundit's argument seems to have been reduced to 'Deadlands is racist, sexist, revisionist, anti-Masonic etc because it provides some half-hearted explanation of it's reason why you can play black and female characters whereas if thery had just done it with no half-hearted explanation it would have been fine.'

Is the alternative that any game set in anything that looks like the real world should carry a caveat that ethinc and female characters have a limited number of careers and come with the disadvantage 'minority'.

I can just see Pundit going for that

James bond: cool I want to play a female 00 agent... ah sorry as a female you are limited to the roles of "evil assasin", "Ugly Henchwoman" or "Shag fodder" (in the 007 game they used the name Beautiful Foil but you get the idea).

Cthulu: Cool I want to play a Black PI .... ah sorry as a black PC in CoC you are restricted to "Hobo", "Jazz Musician" and "Criminal" .....

Hmmm I can see how well that would go down

Quote from: jibbajibba;429324Is the alternative that any game set in anything that looks like the real world should carry a caveat that ethinc and female characters have a limited number of careers and come with the disadvantage 'minority'.

NO......
The Alternative is that the player and GM stick to something close to real history and talk it out ahead of time how this particular character survives in the era as an ethnic or subculture minority.
How did this potential character confront the barriers to wind up as an adventurer of some kind?

 As I pointed out in an earlier post, there WERE Black Sherrifs and such in the 'Old West'. Not a huge number - but enough of them to be plausible.

Ever see "Deadwood" ?  Calamity Jane was a real woman. (Maybe not looking like that tho and not as 'friendly') There may have been one or two others in tne REAL Old West. A player could somewhat believably come up with a backstory for such a character - without having a BS alternate timeline of the real world.

Part of the ongoing campaign of course would be these characters butting heads with prevailing bigotry in some towns - but their allies and friends in the player character party are there to back them up (or should be).


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;429326NO......
The Alternative is that the player and GM stick to something close to real history and talk it out ahead of time how this particular character survives in the era as an ethnic or subculture minority.
How did this potentialk character confront the barriers to wind up as an adventurer of some kind?

 As I pointed out in an earlier post, there WERE Black Sherrifs and such in the 'Old West'. Not a huge number - but enough of them to be plausible.

Ever see "Deadwood" ?  Calamity Jane was a real woman. (Maybe not looking like that tho and not as 'friendly') There may have been one or two others in tne REAL Old West. A player could somewhat believably come up with a backstory for such a character - without having a BS alternate timeline of the real world.

Part of the ongoing campaign of course would be these characters butting heads with prevailing bigotry in some towns - but their allies and friends in the player character party are there to back them up (or should be).


- Ed C.

Bravo, I agree 100% with ya here Ed.

Yup, Ed's basically got it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Koltar;429326NO......
The Alternative is that the player and GM stick to something close to real history and talk it out ahead of time how this particular character survives in the era as an ethnic or subculture minority.
How did this potential character confront the barriers to wind up as an adventurer of some kind?

 As I pointed out in an earlier post, there WERE Black Sherrifs and such in the 'Old West'. Not a huge number - but enough of them to be plausible.

Ever see "Deadwood" ?  Calamity Jane was a real woman. (Maybe not looking like that tho and not as 'friendly') There may have been one or two others in tne REAL Old West. A player could somewhat believably come up with a backstory for such a character - without having a BS alternate timeline of the real world.

Part of the ongoing campaign of course would be these characters butting heads with prevailing bigotry in some towns - but their allies and friends in the player character party are there to back them up (or should be).


- Ed C.

Of course, some estimates say upto 30% of cowboys in the 1860s were black but that doesn't mean that one is going to get elected Mayor of Dodge so easily.

The fact is that if you really place bigotry, sexism, Islamaphobia or the like acurately in an RPG it gets tired and creates conflict in the group.
In one of my earliest Cthulu games back in school one of the players decided to play a black sportsman in 1920s Boston. The GM played it acurately so the guy was banned from diners, brutalised by the police, and generally picked on. I thought it was unnecessary and gratuitous the GM just said he was being acurate and to be fair he probabaly was but it didn;t make it fun for that player.

Most of us don't want our games to become studies in social injustices so we whitewash that stuff. It's the same as the horey old debate as to whether women should get a Strength penalty on their stats or whether you should differentiate stats based on race in modern "realistic" games like you do with demi-humans in fantasy.

You are playing in a game where there are Zombie card sharps and magic is real are you really going to get hung up on the fact that Black PCs should be hauling cotton not shooting irons...really .....

This puts me in the mind of one of those PBS (or maybe it was TLC) reality shows where they had families come out to the Montana "territories" and live for a few months prior to winter and they were graded on how they prepared for the coming winter months.

Basically the most prepared were the families who spent about 80% of their time chopping wood and the rest of the time preparing food, but I digress:

One of the participants was a black guy married to a white woman and it was laid flat out to the guy that neither he nor his kids were entitled to anything Montana per territorial laws.  No education, no protection under the law, nothing.  He took it in stride, and the (for lack of a better term) "Game masters" said, okay, here's what: this is out in the territories, far, far from the Capital, far from anyone else.  What's on the books for territorial law and how people actually behave are/were often different things.  So, as long as a territorial marshal doesn't show up (and they didn't role-play any doing so), you're one of us just the same.

I thought it was pretty interesting how they handled that.

Quote from: jibbajibba;429391Of course, some estimates say upto 30% of cowboys in the 1860s were black but that doesn't mean that one is going to get elected Mayor of Dodge so easily.

The fact is that if you really place bigotry, sexism, Islamaphobia or the like acurately in an RPG it gets tired and creates conflict in the group.
In one of my earliest Cthulu games back in school one of the players decided to play a black sportsman in 1920s Boston. The GM played it acurately so the guy was banned from diners, brutalised by the police, and generally picked on. I thought it was unnecessary and gratuitous the GM just said he was being acurate and to be fair he probabaly was but it didn;t make it fun for that player.

Most of us don't want our games to become studies in social injustices so we whitewash that stuff. It's the same as the horey old debate as to whether women should get a Strength penalty on their stats or whether you should differentiate stats based on race in modern "realistic" games like you do with demi-humans in fantasy.

You are playing in a game where there are Zombie card sharps and magic is real are you really going to get hung up on the fact that Black PCs should be hauling cotton not shooting irons...really .....

Zombies aren't real. magic card sharps aren't real. The injustice done to blacks in America during and after slavery is real. To 'whitewash' it is disgusting, demeaning and insulting. I can't possibly think of a better word for this unethical act than 'whitewash'.

Quote from: Tetsubo;429412Zombies aren't real. magic card sharps aren't real. The injustice done to blacks in America during and after slavery is real. To 'whitewash' it is disgusting, demeaning and insulting. I can't possibly think of a better word for this unethical act than 'whitewash'.

I agree.

Cf Jibba's example: If the player in the CoC game intended to play a black sportsman and the Keeper thought of running the 1920s environment in a believable fashion vis a vis his character, the Keeper should have told him so before the game started. If the player wouldn't want to face this type of environment, he would be welcome to play another character. But whitewashing the environment for the sake of "more fun" feels like a very slippery slope to me, one that I'm not willing to engage in with a semi-historical game like CoC or whatnot. Next you might go for stuff like "un-racist Nazis" which happen to be "great heroes" and whatnot which frankly, I would find totally insulting and unacceptable at a game table.

Quote from: Tetsubo;429412Zombies aren't real. magic card sharps aren't real. The injustice done to blacks in America during and after slavery is real. To 'whitewash' it is disgusting, demeaning and insulting. I can't possibly think of a better word for this unethical act than 'whitewash'.

So that means you don't play pseudo-historic or modern games?

What about sexism in your medieval fantasy games ? etc etc

Aren't you being less racist by having a Deadlands game with a black Sherrif than one in which black npcs get treated really badly by PCs because that would be 'in character' for the time period?

I am not proposing we whitewash history. I am proposing that we can play a game with our mates without having to consider the socio-political ramifications of the setting.

Honestly, I think Deadlands has as much to do with a "plausible alternate history" as it does with plausible geology (Ghost Rock literally being the solidified souls of the damned) and plausible biology (salt rattlers being dune-like worms living in the great salt flats).

As far as the whitewash goes, if anyone has read Back East: The South, if I remember correctly, all the historical stuff is laid out the way it always is, as an "in character" Tombstone Epitaph newspaper article.  In the case of this article, the contributors are all southerners.

The claim that they were following White Wolf is specious at best.  As gonzo supernatural alternate reality goes, Deadlands is much closer to Shadowrun.

Quote from: Benoist;429418I agree.

Cf Jibba's example: If the player in the CoC game intended to play a black sportsman and the Keeper thought of running the 1920s environment in a believable fashion vis a vis his character, the Keeper should have told him so before the game started. If the player wouldn't want to face this type of environment, he would be welcome to play another character. But whitewashing the environment for the sake of "more fun" feels like a very slippery slope to me, one that I'm not willing to engage in with a semi-historical game like CoC or whatnot. Next you might go for stuff like "un-racist Nazis" which happen to be "great heroes" and whatnot which frankly, I would find totally insulting and unacceptable at a game table.

so this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_90aSXkP5Q
funny?
or an insult to 6million jews, 1/2 a million Rom and most of the population of Russia?