Quote from: Svenhelgrim on December 29, 2021, 11:37:13 AM
Baizuo is re-writing their entire game world based on one anonymous letter.  Who even knows if the person who wrote the letter is a actually a player, or even if they are offended. 

What are the odds this leads to republishing 'clean' versions of everything allowing them to get a sales bump off of otherwise stagnant product.

A more important question is this:

Who among you will, knowing all this and ostensibly not liking it, buy it anyhow?

This will go for whatever passes as "evolved" DnD.

If you like this stuff, then it doesn't matter.

Quote from: tenbones on January 05, 2022, 02:48:58 PM
A more important question is this:

Who among you will, knowing all this and ostensibly not liking it, buy it anyhow?

This will go for whatever passes as "evolved" DnD.

If you like this stuff, then it doesn't matter.

"Buy."


Heh. Heh heh.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 22, 2021, 08:26:30 PM
This reminds me of TSR removing demons & devils when Gygax should have gone offensive and told the ignorant religious folks that the demons & devils are bad guys intended to be defeated and only an idiot would think it was otherwise.

Wasn't that one of Lorraine's big ideas to "fix" the game? She has done too many stuff to remember everything...

The best (worst) part is that I'm currently playing a PF1 AP that literally starts with the party being slaves to pirates, and the first module is escaping said slavery. "Slavery is non-relevant" my ass.

Quote from: tenbones on January 05, 2022, 02:48:58 PM
A more important question is this:

Who among you will, knowing all this and ostensibly not liking it, buy it anyhow?

My sophisticated algorithm has calculated the chance I am going to purchase any current or future Paizo products as -2%, with a 2% margin of error.

I am really wondering what the endgame is, though. I can imagine a world in which all the bad things - oppression, slavery, discrimination, violence etc. - are fringe phenomenons only perpetrated by a small number of incorrigible insolents, and in which the PC heroes' (of any alignment? Whatever, standard PCs are good!) role is to put down these insurgents who are irrelevant to the world at large.

But is that a heroic game? To my mind, it is not. It's ironic, because in discussions about Traveller, I have always defended the Zhodani consulate as a viable, even enviable Sci-Fi picture of a human society. But I would never have recommended, or even allowed, Zhodani PCs - because a setting in which morally correct behaviour is universal and only small, similarly universally abhorred, pockets of deviance exist, simply does not allow for adventures in any sense I can think of.

If orcs are now racist stereotypes of black people according to wokism, who can be surprised at this?

Well, since Paizo wants to virtue signal....

Just as WOTC has Volo's Guide to Monsters; Paizo has the Monster Codex, for Pathfinder 1E.  It has a good long full page of lore expansion for each monstrous race, at the beginning of each race section.  They even used small type, to fit more lore content on the page.  They have a good write up about each "race" of monstrous humanoids.  Then they stat out several examples of each "race".  I have a hard copy, but I don't have access to it right now.  Of course, Orcs and Drow are included.  I bet there are some juicy nuggets there to be found.  And the Yuan-ti are in there, too.

Quote from: tenbones on January 05, 2022, 02:48:58 PM
A more important question is this:

Who among you will, knowing all this and ostensibly not liking it, buy it anyhow?

Not a chance in hell. I stopped giving Marvel and DC money years ago...neither Paizo nor WoTC get a dime from me either

Quote from: Gog to Magog on January 05, 2022, 05:57:28 AM
Your "heroic" characters will find themselves without villains.

At least we can still do fetch quests.

Maybe kill some boars.

Do a fishing mini-game.

The folks at Paizo are ashamed of slavery. 
It seems they must have had a huge part in it.

QuoteTabletop gaming is a fictional construct that all but hinges on ludicrous, absurd, mountainous, brobdingnagian amounts of violence.

Only... not? I mean sure D&D as derived from wargames is definitely violence prone, and people raised on video games are even more used to casual hack&slash, but there are wide arrays of Tabletop RPG's that does not hinges on absurd amounts of violences.

QuoteThat's the thing...all this gaming psychologically relies on the existence of evil. TRUE evil. The sort of evil that is destroyed without much hesitation because destroying evil is just. Destroying evil is right. It's good.

I'd say destroying evil because evil is like in bottom three of most boring aspects of gaming. I mean sure high tactical wargaming is cool - but do you really need some very thin veiled pretentious faux morality to engage in deadly combat? I mean sword & sorcery heroes were quite often ambiguous guys fighting other ambigous guys and it was damn cool.

QuoteTBH If those potential players love reckless violence so much... why not play video games really? Then what are you as a hero? Are you stopping every single moment to consider the full ramifications of killing that orc before you? Is it not as valid as you? What are its motivations? What brought it to this moment? When even a Beholder might be kind and innocent with the flip of a coin, how can you EVER be sure you're righteous?

And why do you need to feel righteous in elf-game, my friend? I mean did Conan has such needs? Or Fafhrd? I mean you know there are quite easy ways to achieve certain level of certainity without you know easy boxes. In fact I'd say most of fantasy and most of film with clear evil and good works quite fine without members of irreversibly evil races.
Trick is - it's of course mostly on GM side - you are either under unjust external attack as team (and then you know maybe it's just misunderstanding, but ultimately you are in right to defend itself), then there is defending others, and then there is avenging evil-doers that did something terrible. I mean if band of raiders burned a village, and kidnapped children to sell to slavers, does it matter for your heroes whether they are "always CE" horde of orcs wanting to sell to "always LE" fire giants, or maybe "any alignment" human raiders wanting to sell to "any alignment" human slavers.

Now of course you are right that removing various atrocities to fight is bad design for heroic game, and woke foolishness, but that's like another pair of shoes from always evil orc.

Quote
You are the monster. Self-flagellate. De-colonize your mind. Repent. Beg for forgiveness. Feel terrible. Feel as terrible as the people that make these changes feel every moment of their miserable, anxiety-ridden, train-wreck, dumpster-fire lives. Share in their misery and self-loathing.

They do not believe in heroes so they must make sure you cannot feel like one.

The game has collapsed because the fictional underpinnings it relied on have been stripped away by short-sighted idiots that typically use game-night as an excuse to gossip and whine rather than game.

I must say generally watching some D&D streams run mostly by woke streamers I see no such attitude. Sure there is removing racial alignments and so on, but those are still usually combat heavy games where diverse team of players destroy some Evil - like you now fantasy equivalent of Donald Trump and Proud Boys, let's say, but still - overall scheme is contained - you smack those who are considered evildoers in your game.

QuoteI really liked this part. I noticed that Basic Fantasy doesn't have alignment, and I didn't like that. It always seemed like ... a bit of a liberal cop-out. I prefer OSR games that keep alignment -- good and evil clearly defined.

Problem is alignment - just not racial alignment - is much better for woke games, with their moral puritan attitude and consantly treating anyone un-Woke as Evil.
It's much less suitable for Sword & Sorcery - which is rogue fantasy about thieving barbarian wanderers.

And let's be clear - alignment debate is quite ancient, and for most cases anti-alignment team has not been attacking alignment because of woke reasons, but because it's clunky, boring, and philosophically just ridiculous as basics of cosmology. That is something generally opposed to woke-ism (because strict alignement rules suits woke very well - with all Republicans as LE bigots, and all libertarians as CE tax-dodging child diddlers.).

QuoteJust as WOTC has Volo's Guide to Monsters; Paizo has the Monster Codex, for Pathfinder 1E.  It has a good long full page of lore expansion for each monstrous race, at the beginning of each race section.  They even used small type, to fit more lore content on the page.  They have a good write up about each "race" of monstrous humanoids.  Then they stat out several examples of each "race".  I have a hard copy, but I don't have access to it right now.  Of course, Orcs and Drow are included.  I bet there are some juicy nuggets there to be found.

PAIZO quite cleverly made drows to be result of curse so elf can drow-himself if he is evil enough, and good drow will de-drow. That with more hellish and less-black purple skin, and their curse being result of demon worship, allows basically to play drows as morally responsible for being drows not elves.
Their orcs on the other hand... XD

Quote from: Wrath of God on January 05, 2022, 09:36:07 PM

QuoteTabletop gaming is a fictional construct that all but hinges on ludicrous, absurd, mountainous, brobdingnagian amounts of violence.

Only... not? I mean sure D&D as derived from wargames is definitely violence prone, and people raised on video games are even more used to casual hack&slash, but there are wide arrays of Tabletop RPG's that does not hinges on absurd amounts of violences.

QuoteThat's the thing...all this gaming psychologically relies on the existence of evil. TRUE evil. The sort of evil that is destroyed without much hesitation because destroying evil is just. Destroying evil is right. It's good.

I'd say destroying evil because evil is like in bottom three of most boring aspects of gaming. I mean sure high tactical wargaming is cool - but do you really need some very thin veiled pretentious faux morality to engage in deadly combat? I mean sword & sorcery heroes were quite often ambiguous guys fighting other ambigous guys and it was damn cool.

QuoteTBH If those potential players love reckless violence so much... why not play video games really? Then what are you as a hero? Are you stopping every single moment to consider the full ramifications of killing that orc before you? Is it not as valid as you? What are its motivations? What brought it to this moment? When even a Beholder might be kind and innocent with the flip of a coin, how can you EVER be sure you're righteous?

And why do you need to feel righteous in elf-game, my friend? I mean did Conan has such needs? Or Fafhrd? I mean you know there are quite easy ways to achieve certain level of certainity without you know easy boxes. In fact I'd say most of fantasy and most of film with clear evil and good works quite fine without members of irreversibly evil races.
Trick is - it's of course mostly on GM side - you are either under unjust external attack as team (and then you know maybe it's just misunderstanding, but ultimately you are in right to defend itself), then there is defending others, and then there is avenging evil-doers that did something terrible. I mean if band of raiders burned a village, and kidnapped children to sell to slavers, does it matter for your heroes whether they are "always CE" horde of orcs wanting to sell to "always LE" fire giants, or maybe "any alignment" human raiders wanting to sell to "any alignment" human slavers.

Now of course you are right that removing various atrocities to fight is bad design for heroic game, and woke foolishness, but that's like another pair of shoes from always evil orc.

Quote
You are the monster. Self-flagellate. De-colonize your mind. Repent. Beg for forgiveness. Feel terrible. Feel as terrible as the people that make these changes feel every moment of their miserable, anxiety-ridden, train-wreck, dumpster-fire lives. Share in their misery and self-loathing.

They do not believe in heroes so they must make sure you cannot feel like one.

The game has collapsed because the fictional underpinnings it relied on have been stripped away by short-sighted idiots that typically use game-night as an excuse to gossip and whine rather than game.

I must say generally watching some D&D streams run mostly by woke streamers I see no such attitude. Sure there is removing racial alignments and so on, but those are still usually combat heavy games where diverse team of players destroy some Evil - like you now fantasy equivalent of Donald Trump and Proud Boys, let's say, but still - overall scheme is contained - you smack those who are considered evildoers in your game.

QuoteI really liked this part. I noticed that Basic Fantasy doesn't have alignment, and I didn't like that. It always seemed like ... a bit of a liberal cop-out. I prefer OSR games that keep alignment -- good and evil clearly defined.

Problem is alignment - just not racial alignment - is much better for woke games, with their moral puritan attitude and consantly treating anyone un-Woke as Evil.
It's much less suitable for Sword & Sorcery - which is rogue fantasy about thieving barbarian wanderers.

And let's be clear - alignment debate is quite ancient, and for most cases anti-alignment team has not been attacking alignment because of woke reasons, but because it's clunky, boring, and philosophically just ridiculous as basics of cosmology. That is something generally opposed to woke-ism (because strict alignement rules suits woke very well - with all Republicans as LE bigots, and all libertarians as CE tax-dodging child diddlers.).

QuoteJust as WOTC has Volo's Guide to Monsters; Paizo has the Monster Codex, for Pathfinder 1E.  It has a good long full page of lore expansion for each monstrous race, at the beginning of each race section.  They even used small type, to fit more lore content on the page.  They have a good write up about each "race" of monstrous humanoids.  Then they stat out several examples of each "race".  I have a hard copy, but I don't have access to it right now.  Of course, Orcs and Drow are included.  I bet there are some juicy nuggets there to be found.

PAIZO quite cleverly made drows to be result of curse so elf can drow-himself if he is evil enough, and good drow will de-drow. That with more hellish and less-black purple skin, and their curse being result of demon worship, allows basically to play drows as morally responsible for being drows not elves.
Their orcs on the other hand... XD

The Yuan-ti are in there, too.

Please do not defame name of proud Ydersius' children with comparisons with those half-Human, half-Chinese, mutant abominations from Faerun