{bi, polyam, nonbinary} aka the indecisive idiot
marketing & events @ SoulMuppet.
sometimes I draw things.

Wtf does that even mean...I hate you all for my having read any of that.

You know it's funny to me, all these modern day ultra leftists games that want to present all Police Officers as corrupt and Fascists.

Yet the funniest thing, is not even the Cyberpunk Genre goes with the idea of ACAB. Hell, the Cyberpunk Game, all of it's editions even LET you play a "Badge".

The Cops in Cyberpunk: EdgeRunners and Cyberpunk 2077 are presented as underfunded, overworked, and outgunned, much like the Detroit Police Department in Robocop.

There are supposed to be corrupt and Fascistic Police, but the regular officer on the street is just a guy trying to survive, make a marginal difference in the world and go home to his family alive at the end of the day.

I don't know why the Cyberpunk Games and Genre have managed to avoid the Leftist ACAB stuff when it infests every other game they make with a modern setting.

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on September 01, 2024, 08:35:14 AM"Our goal is to tell the stories of those marginalised in this
setting, not glorify their marginalisation"

Meh... Don't tell me what stories I can tell at my own feking table. Especially in a silly elf-game of pure imagination.

As soon as I see "stories of those marginalised" or some variant I'm tapping out. I already know the rest and know I'm not only not the target audience, but the target of the target audience.

Quote from: Chris24601 on September 03, 2024, 10:15:52 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on September 03, 2024, 08:57:03 AM

Quote from: Batjon on September 03, 2024, 05:56:08 AMJust have a look at the 'About Us' page for the company who publishes the game, Soulmuppet Publishing.

https://usa.soulmuppet-store.co.uk/pages/about-us

Welp, that was vomit inducing.

I feel sorry for the cat. It's probably the only sane member of the whole business and it has to deal with... that.

As a hardcore cat person it breaks my heart I can't rescue cats from these kinds of fools. They're one MSNBC invocation from trying to make the cat vegan.

Quote from: Orphan81 on September 03, 2024, 12:56:47 PMYou know it's funny to me, all these modern day ultra leftists games that want to present all Police Officers as corrupt and Fascists.

Yet the funniest thing, is not even the Cyberpunk Genre goes with the idea of ACAB. Hell, the Cyberpunk Game, all of it's editions even LET you play a "Badge".

The Cops in Cyberpunk: EdgeRunners and Cyberpunk 2077 are presented as underfunded, overworked, and outgunned, much like the Detroit Police Department in Robocop.

There are supposed to be corrupt and Fascistic Police, but the regular officer on the street is just a guy trying to survive, make a marginal difference in the world and go home to his family alive at the end of the day.

I don't know why the Cyberpunk Games and Genre have managed to avoid the Leftist ACAB stuff when it infests every other game they make with a modern setting.

Cyberpunk Red core book is fine, but Danger Gal Dossier had at least one hardcore SJW writer and it does have a fair bit of ACAB stuff. I ran a Cops campaign and had great fun with the Cop PCs blowing away the cop-murdering ACAB factions and their pink haired trans Furry allies. 🥹

Quote from: S'mon on September 03, 2024, 06:08:36 PM

Quote from: Orphan81 on September 03, 2024, 12:56:47 PMYou know it's funny to me, all these modern day ultra leftists games that want to present all Police Officers as corrupt and Fascists.

Yet the funniest thing, is not even the Cyberpunk Genre goes with the idea of ACAB. Hell, the Cyberpunk Game, all of it's editions even LET you play a "Badge".

The Cops in Cyberpunk: EdgeRunners and Cyberpunk 2077 are presented as underfunded, overworked, and outgunned, much like the Detroit Police Department in Robocop.

There are supposed to be corrupt and Fascistic Police, but the regular officer on the street is just a guy trying to survive, make a marginal difference in the world and go home to his family alive at the end of the day.

I don't know why the Cyberpunk Games and Genre have managed to avoid the Leftist ACAB stuff when it infests every other game they make with a modern setting.

Cyberpunk Red core book is fine, but Danger Gal Dossier had at least one hardcore SJW writer and it does have a fair bit of ACAB stuff. I ran a Cops campaign and had great fun with the Cop PCs blowing away the cop-murdering ACAB factions and their pink haired trans Furry allies. 🥹

That's unfortunate, but not unexpected.

The guy behind Interface Zero also wanted to go ACAB with the 3.0 version of the game, but he actually got pushback on Kickstarter and reversed course. IIRC, one of the original campaign ideas in the book was to involve the PCs playing law enforcement characters, and he wanted to scrub that since obviously no decent person could work in such a profession.

I and a few others in my regular group backed this based on really liking Best Left Buried. That was a very tight little indie game with fun mechanics and we had a great time playing it. I would still recommend it to anyone looking for a rules light dungeon crawler, especially if you liked the video game Darkest Dungeon. 

Orbital Blues went off the rails as the company seemed to pivot to woke.

Once we got our books I tried to run the game. We can always ignore the virtue signaling shit, but we ran into a lot a vaguely defined rules which ended up killing the enthusiasm. It is a shame as the skeleton of a decent game is there. I just don't have the time to flesh it out to make it worth playing more for us.

seems like politicking to me, with "virtue" signaling about how enlightened they think they are, denouncing the past (even virtues like the free market) while embracing the injustices and prejudices of today.  I would avoid that publisher like the plague.  Because this way of thinking is one.

I originally wrote disclaimers in my RPG, which grew shorter with each module.  Mainly, because I was selling on DriveThru and without the warning, could have been cancelled for wrongthink.  But I didn't use the disclaimer for making fringe political statements.

Quote from: Brand55 on September 03, 2024, 07:19:36 PMThe guy behind Interface Zero also wanted to go ACAB with the 3.0 version of the game, but he actually got pushback on Kickstarter and reversed course. IIRC, one of the original campaign ideas in the book was to involve the PCs playing law enforcement characters, and he wanted to scrub that since obviously no decent person could work in such a profession.

That's funny to me since I was the lead developer for Interface Zero 2.0, but understandable. Dave Jarvis (Head of Gun Metal Games, owner of the IP) was always very left leaning, and at the time I was doing writing on IZ 2.0 I was more left leaning too, but I had to hold him back a little from how much he wanted to present a progressive slant in the game.

We parted ways to do irreconcilable differences in development and I had nothing to do with 3.0

Quote from: Orphan81 on September 03, 2024, 09:10:35 PMThat's funny to me since I was the lead developer for Interface Zero 2.0, but understandable. Dave Jarvis (Head of Gun Metal Games, owner of the IP) was always very left leaning, and at the time I was doing writing on IZ 2.0 I was more left leaning too, but I had to hold him back a little from how much he wanted to present a progressive slant in the game.

We parted ways to do irreconcilable differences in development and I had nothing to do with 3.0

I have 2.0 and think it's a great game, though I really wish he'd followed through on the Malmart Catalog and space expansion rather than spend all his time porting the game to every system under the sun. Jarvis' biases definitely shine through in the setting; I sadly wasn't surprised to see another game where the ultimate bad guys are us evil, bigoted Southerners. I half-expected him to come right out and rename the NAC as the New Confederacy in the current edition.

Quote from: rgalex on September 03, 2024, 07:21:00 PMI and a few others in my regular group backed this based on really liking Best Left Buried. That was a very tight little indie game with fun mechanics and we had a great time playing it. I would still recommend it to anyone looking for a rules light dungeon crawler, especially if you liked the video game Darkest Dungeon. 

Orbital Blues went off the rails as the company seemed to pivot to woke.

Once we got our books I tried to run the game. We can always ignore the virtue signaling shit, but we ran into a lot a vaguely defined rules which ended up killing the enthusiasm. It is a shame as the skeleton of a decent game is there. I just don't have the time to flesh it out to make it worth playing more for us.

For me, this is the biggest sin of left leaning game makers.  Seeing lefty politics front and center is almost always a signal to me that the game itself is poorly made.  Those that aren't are almost always just setting material for a good game, and usually the original setting is better.

Quote from: Batjon on September 01, 2024, 07:44:07 AMCrooked Establishments:

There are many types of organization you can be in Too Deep with: criminal gangs, mercenary companies, military units, police departments, corporations.  In Orbital Blues, the only difference between a gang member and cop is that one of them is definitely a fascist.

Talk about enabling broken stairs. Still find the left's constant idealization of criminal thugs and terrorists over those who oppose them deeply concerning. None of these idiots have any experience dealing with such individuals, and they'd be eaten alive on the spot if they tried.

Quote from: blackstone on September 03, 2024, 07:56:26 AMNo real historian would use such loaded terms as "Age of Greed" or "Golden Age of Capitalism", which is obvious. It's bias and any good historian worth his degree knows that you must view history from a unbiased stance. The commonly accepted terms are "pre-WWII", "post-WWII", and so on. Your dig at me, though try as you might, falls flat. Because those of us who are actually in the field and studied would know that touting such terms as "Age of Greed" are for one thing only : to sell books.

Argue from authority much? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22decade+of+greed%22&btnG= has > 1000 hits and plenty of them are from what look like peer-reviewed papers rather than books; but even in scholarly books rather than popular books I'd take it.

Or https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=decade+of+greed&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 - it was a really common term around '93 for referring to the previous decade, even though it's used less now.

My PhD isn't in history (it's computer science, thanks, successfully defended in 2004), but I'm married to a historian who's done a lot more publication than I have in the last decade so I'll take your unsupported assertion with a grain of salt.

So here you've moved the goalposts - you decried the term and said "nobody but a leftist boob" would use it, and used that to assert that the author was obviously "Marxist", now you're saying "good historians" wouldn't use it in scholarly writing? Which is, pretty clearly, false - or assuming the consequent, if you're going to say that definitionally none of those historians are good.

So, this game uses some widely-known 20th century historical references to quickly sketch its setting. Even if I don't like its political leanings, that's awesome - far better than the anachronistic pap we get from recent 5e, right? Or does WotC have a summary somewhere that I've missed?

What other games or settings have a good concise 2-paragraph summary like that? It would *really help* me set player expectations to be able to do that for fantasy worlds, when I'm trying to run OSRishy for new-school players.

Quote from: Naburimannu on September 04, 2024, 12:00:06 PM

Quote from: blackstone on September 03, 2024, 07:56:26 AMNo real historian would use such loaded terms as "Age of Greed" or "Golden Age of Capitalism", which is obvious. It's bias and any good historian worth his degree knows that you must view history from a unbiased stance. The commonly accepted terms are "pre-WWII", "post-WWII", and so on. Your dig at me, though try as you might, falls flat. Because those of us who are actually in the field and studied would know that touting such terms as "Age of Greed" are for one thing only : to sell books.

Argue from authority much? https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22decade+of+greed%22&btnG= has > 1000 hits and plenty of them are from what look like peer-reviewed papers rather than books; but even in scholarly books rather than popular books I'd take it.

Or https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=decade+of+greed&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 - it was a really common term around '93 for referring to the previous decade, even though it's used less now.

My PhD isn't in history (it's computer science, thanks, successfully defended in 2004), but I'm married to a historian who's done a lot more publication than I have in the last decade so I'll take your unsupported assertion with a grain of salt.

So here you've moved the goalposts - you decried the term and said "nobody but a leftist boob" would use it, and used that to assert that the author was obviously "Marxist", now you're saying "good historians" wouldn't use it in scholarly writing? Which is, pretty clearly, false - or assuming the consequent, if you're going to say that definitionally none of those historians are good.

So, this game uses some widely-known 20th century historical references to quickly sketch its setting. Even if I don't like its political leanings, that's awesome - far better than the anachronistic pap we get from recent 5e, right? Or does WotC have a summary somewhere that I've missed?

What other games or settings have a good concise 2-paragraph summary like that? It would *really help* me set player expectations to be able to do that for fantasy worlds, when I'm trying to run OSRishy for new-school players.

OK