The real question is - who cares? Steven Jackson is a has-been and there are better generic systems out there.

Quote from: Tubesock Army on July 08, 2022, 06:15:02 PM
Between this and Biden's EO, it's shaping up to be a great week for freedom. Love Steve Jackson games, and now, I'll love them even more.

Hey, cheer up, dudes, at least you'll notch a win when Elon buys Twitt... oh.Never mind.

"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." -  Herman Melville.

You are one sad fuckin' Captain Ahab.

SJG is simply one more company that I'll boycott from now on. It's good news for my pocketbook, especially in these inflationary times.

Quote from: drayakir on July 09, 2022, 01:06:41 AM
The real question is - who cares? Steven Jackson is a has-been and there are better generic systems out there.

Bingo is your name-o.

Quote from: David Johansen on July 08, 2022, 10:43:15 PM
He's got the right to live wherever he likes and think and say whatever he likes.  But yes, if he wanted to pay more taxes he could spend a fortune and move his operations to California.

Does it belong on a game company's front page?  I've read the Daily Illuminator daily for around 20 years.  Sometimes he posts about non-gaming stuff.  Does Lego belong on a game company's page?  I dunno, it's his page, it matters enough to him to put it there.  Will it impact his sales?  I don't know, we're talking about it here but it's not being discussed on tbp at all, I expect if they did it would quickly devolve into a GURPS hating thread.

  I agree he has the absolute right to be a hypocrite.  I agree he has the right to say whatever he wants.  He has the right to believe he is filled with white, straight, male privilege. He can be filled with TDS to the brim if he likes.  His talk around abortion though, with zero nuance makes him look like a complete idiot though.  People terrified women will no longer be able to terminate 30 week pregnancies anymore in any state are confusing to me.  I think they may not understand what that court ruling really did while imagining what they think it did.

Quote from: oggsmash on July 09, 2022, 05:33:46 AM
Does it belong on a game company's front page?  I've read the Daily Illuminator daily for around 20 years.  Sometimes he posts about non-gaming stuff.  Does Lego belong on a game company's page?  I dunno, it's his page, it matters enough to him to put it there.  Will it impact his sales?  I don't know, we're talking about it here but it's not being discussed on tbp at all, I expect if they did it would quickly devolve into a GURPS hating thread.

Here's something else to boggle the mind: SJ, which maybe stands for Social Justice, was a law major before leaving college to join the game industry.  His decision spared the world from another lawyer who doesn't understand the U.S. Constitution.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on July 08, 2022, 09:58:29 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on July 08, 2022, 07:58:22 PMIt's still the best dark isekai ever written anyway.

Out of curiosity, as a total non-fan of anime, what's a "dark isekai"?

Sorry. Stories where the protagonist travels to a magical otherworld and goes on adventures.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on July 08, 2022, 09:58:29 PM
Out of curiosity, as a total non-fan of anime, what's a "dark isekai"?

Isekai is a genre of manga/anime where modern day people get transported to another world or are trapped in a RPG like video game (to the same effect.).  The dark part just means that it is a shitty world full of grief, pain, petty politics, and all the fun stuff we're trying to escape from.

In modern day, Isekai has a very gratuitous self indulgent patter.

The main character is often grossly overpowered, and the focus is usually on them amassing a harem of stupid but thankful bimbo slaves.

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash is a good example of a dark isekai.  People die, there is emotional trauma, and other fun stuff.

Quote from: drayakir on July 09, 2022, 01:06:41 AM
The real question is - who cares? Steven Jackson is a has-been and there are better generic systems out there.

I asked the same question. The only thing I know of that SJG has done in the last decade was a lazy re-release of Ogre.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on July 09, 2022, 11:13:32 AM

Quote from: drayakir on July 09, 2022, 01:06:41 AM
The real question is - who cares? Steven Jackson is a has-been and there are better generic systems out there.

I asked the same question. The only thing I know of that SJG has done in the last decade was a lazy re-release of Ogre.

If with "has been" one means that he is no longer producing stuff then I guess it is normal: he is old and possibly retired. However, I still like GURPS. 3E was tied to some of the warmest memories in my gaming life, and the books - no matter the edition - are a killer reading. I have 4E but I never run it because my group had a very bad experience with another GM and now they just won't hear about it ("He was fixated with realism. We wanted to play The Three Musketeers, he made us roll everytime we took some stairs to see if we tripped"). We play Call of Cthulhu 7E so everybody is happy but to me there is nothing like GURPS out there.

To be clear, I'm not buying GURPS because, even if one day we'll play it, I already have all I need. But I don't agree with the whole "SJ woke, GURPS bad!!11" witch-hunt. I'm against woke content in books, nothing else; and let's not forget the whole "Slave Mentality" fiasco on TBP.

Quote from: Reckall on July 09, 2022, 12:03:33 PM
I don't agree with the whole "SJ woke, GURPS bad!!11" witch-hunt. I'm against woke content in books, nothing else....

That's a good point to make. There's a difference between complaining about what a work, artist or company may be preaching, and complaining that a work, artist or company is preaching at all.

Full disclosure requires me to admit that in this particular case, for me (being as noted a Catholic), it's far more about the cause SJG is supporting than about it publicly taking a stance at all; I would have stopped buying SJG products even had I only found out about this stance accidentally. But the Woke list in general is targeted as much at the idea that excessive preaching on any topic tends to ruin entertainment as entertainment, and that people deserve to know which products and companies make this likelier.

Right, but that's your personal preference. Generally speaking, the "market" has moved away from systems as crunchy as GURPS. Clearly they've never seen Hackmaster.

Anyway, I say that he's a has-been in the sense that SJG hasn't really made anything that's wildly popular lately. Most people are playing 5e, some are still holding out to 1E Pathfinder, and then you have everything and everyone else. SJG falls into that last one, except for Munchkin, but that's neither an RPG, nor is it still all that popular (compared to about 15 years ago). Him being woke really doesn't bother me all that much - ultimately it's his company and he can choose to do whatever the fuck, just like I can do whatever the fuck, including not paying him money.

I will say this though, I'd dearly love to find people to play Illuminati on Tabletop Simulator...

There is often an inverse relationship between intelligence and wisdom.  I believe the quote attributed to Mark Twain is something like "There are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual can believe them."  For many well-educated people, their education has only furnished them with a ready-made stable of intellectual excuses to ignore reality and substitute their own desires as to what reality should be.  The fact that their ideas, rationales, and even epistemologies are counter-intuitive to a normal person is seen as a positive, more evidence that they are smarter and better than you (much like movie critics tend to find absurd reasons to love absolutely awful movies... as a way to demonstrate that they somehow understand film-making better than the average rube).  The uneducated generally has to live with the reality of the world taken at face value; the intellectual can find a dozen reasons why what is "obvious" to everyone is really not the case (as long as you twist logic and facts into a jargon-soaked pretzel).

Steve Jackson is obviously a smart dude.  He is also a fool.  Any objective reading of his statement could only conclude that, taken individually, most of his points sound like the unhinged ranting of an ignorant ideologue:

• From all indications, our other civil rights are in for an equally hard time under the theofascist minority in power (the religious fascists are in power... right)
• and I am threatened by this Supreme Court. (Amy Coney Barrett is lurking in his back yard, I guess)
• A federal binary gender standard that just incidentally wipes out transgender treatment and gay marriage? (what does binary gender have to do with sexual preference?)
• Further criminalization of voter aid when the voters in question are minorities? (Define "voter aid" please.  I was unaware that many people needed help bubbling in circles on a ballot.  I guess he's referring to the aides who voted for the mentally compromised in Michigan nursing homes?  Probably not...)
• A national tithe? (It's called taxes.  And the political party that treats taxes like a sacrament is not the same as those supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade)
• Helping someone affected by one of the mass shootings that the right, and the Court, seem to be fostering out of sheer vicious perversity. (Once you are convinced that your opponents want other people dead... unless of course your actual complaint is that the law won't let you kill full-term babies...)
• Helping someone accused of a "voting offense" just for trying to vote. (Well, did they try to vote multiple times?  In multiple places?  When they are not US citizens?  Most people would support calling those prosecutable "voting offenses"...)

So, sadly, Steve Jackson just ends up as another data point suggesting that intelligence is far more likely to be a hindrance to acquiring wisdom than it is a path to it.  I think W. F. Buckley was directly on target when he stated, "I'd rather be governed by the first 2000 names from the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty"...