Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 09:20:42 PM

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 08:25:15 PM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 07:31:43 PM

that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.

... so? Even if there was objectively one "right" ideology, that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with it. There are groups, cultures, even whole countries even in our world that I would say have as close to an objectively wrong ideology as is possible, yet they still exist.

sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise

a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.

I thought a bit about this.  I'm not sure I could ever agree.  I can think of many popular settings that are binary, evil vs good.  Star Wars.  Lord of the Rings.  Starship Troopers.

We should all remember that RPGs are originally thought of as kids stuff for middle school boys.

My own stories tend to have a few red herring plot twists, but my bad guy is an obvious bad guy who nobody should morn if he dies. 

About the only underlying, consistent view that one could tag onto my campaign setting is that "human nature doesn't change".  By extension, that includes non-human races that are played by humans, sometime with particular emphasis on some aspect of human nature.  The gods can be somewhat remote and mysterious, in which case any agenda they have is seldom overt.  Or they can be more in the Greek or Norse vein, with recognizable human aspects, albeit with super powers.  Either way, if it's being played up, it's about unchanging human nature.

Therefore, the politics tend to be all over the place, based on the goals and inclinations of particular groups, their traditions, their neighbors, the pressure on them, and so forth. It's likely that the full range of human nature (from utter depravity to candidate for sainthood) is somewhere in the world, though not always emergent in the way the campaign plays out.  Every civilized place is always a few bad steps away from sinking into barbarism or decadence, and every decadent or barbaric entity has a route to something better, though not an easy or likely one.  It's a tightrope between cynicism and hope.

I find that not only is this approach more satisfying for me and the players, it also conveniently tends to supply plenty of opportunities for characters to engage meaningfully with the world. 

It's been a long time since I ran Goddomir but it was a fantasy world with it's own internal politics.

The Seven Cities was a feudal magistracy that ran a union of city states around the southern edges of the Inland Sea. As the player went up in levels the Seven Cities underwent political threats, one from a well meaning but ineffective rebel lord, another from a politically ambitious religious leader. The third was a conspiracy from the Hidden Realm (witches operating covens like terrorist cells) which the players encountered but never realised went further.

The storylines were portrayed in the same pseudo-medieval manner that most of us utilise and I don't really see how that implies modern themes. If you mean was I politically correct, good god no. The Seven Cities were pretty ethical and well behaved, most of the nasty, evil, selfish, racist, oppressive, or other extreme stereotypes were away from the centre of this society, though I did use historical examples as inspiration for the purposes of the story - particularly the religious dictator. So what? It's a story. It does not imply I agree with such behaviour.

I'm planning to run my own version of Star Wars Clone Wars, but the flashpoint won't be taxes on trade routes.  It will be the ethics of cloning soldiers. 

1.  Republic at peace has a droid army.  Conscription isn't a thing, and is even the draft in wartime has been outlawed.  We have battle droids for that.  And a few military volunteers. 

2.  Jedi Order is tiny.  Nobody will give up their child to monks and never see them again.  Sure, back in the bad old days of the Sith Empire wars they did that for the greater good, but not now.  Most people think the Jedi are already gone. 

3.  Nemoidea and it's allies develop clone soldiers.  This is considered highly unethical tantamount to slavery.  Especially by the Jedi.  But their clone army is kicking ass.  Others copy them by also making clone armies to protect themselves, each one declared illegal and war is declared by the Republic.  It's not a smart move for the Republic.  Noble, but not smart. 

4.  The Republic can't pass a draft.  All they've really done is get the Jedi to lead armies, but defeat seems inevitable.  So they also do the unthinkable and clone an army of Storm Troopers.  This alienates the Jedi, most of whom desert the Republic army.  This gets them on the Republic bad side, especially the few Jedi still loyal (Anakin). Even without the Jedi, Anakin leads the Republic/Empire to victory.  The handful of Jedi are hunted down as deserters and traitors. 

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 09:20:42 PM

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 08:25:15 PM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 07:31:43 PM

that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.

... so? Even if there was objectively one "right" ideology, that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with it. There are groups, cultures, even whole countries even in our world that I would say have as close to an objectively wrong ideology as is possible, yet they still exist.

sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise

a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.

That would be someone's idea of a Utopia and adventures get mighty scarce in a Utopia. My settings, even though they are in the same world, differ from one another but none are Utopian, or even paradise but with monsters. Other people, often other people who are doing the righit thing in their opinion. are the main cause of conflict and conflict drives stories or history.

As Robert Heinlein had Lazarus Long say, "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly." which is pretty much what God said to Arjuna

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
where does your world that you made for rpgs (or something else, like a novel series like i'm planning to do, the rpg is just for my friends) fit on the political compass?

The sandboxy game I run is basically lawless wastelands with pockets of self-governing communities. I think I said this somewhere else, but the most organized government is run by a spectre, and I suppose he could be considered a despot of sorts. But oddly enough, pretty fair, and adheres to his own laws and honors his word. The small communities range anywhere from 50-100 people, and are typically clannish-type rule, with village elders dictating how the community will handle problems; they are probably technically barbarian or anarchist societies. There is one larger settlement (couple thousand people), but is centered around a massive mine, and the "government" is essentially the owner of a mining company. Probably a plutocracy or something if I were to give it a label, or probably just another despot. If you mean something more like left-wing/right-wing/whatever, I don't think those labels make much sense for my fantasy game. The people in charge tend to actually try to make their "realms" good places to live, regardless of their personal outlook on life.

For the Traveller/Cepheus game I occasionally run, that is straight up anarchist in the extreme. It's the Wild West, with each developed world being run by its own government, nearly uniformly aristocracies. I kind of like the Battletech way of doing it, but instead of multiple planet kingdoms, I decided to run it as world-based due to FTL in my game being highly unreliable and difficult/expensive to use. Lack of FTL communication also means most worlds are frontiers, so unless you have a strong government, the world will probably be overrun by pirates and criminals.

There's also a spy game I run sometimes that is set in a late 70s James Bond-style world, so the governments all mirror real world stuff. The most fun I had running that game was when the PCs snuck into East Germany from Berlin and got arrested. The younger players apparently didn't understand how those sorts of governments operate.

Quote from: WillInNewHaven on December 12, 2022, 04:41:15 PM
That would be someone's idea of a Utopia and adventures get mighty scarce in a Utopia. My settings, even though they are in the same world, differ from one another but none are Utopian, or even paradise but with monsters. Other people, often other people who are doing the righit thing in their opinion. are the main cause of conflict and conflict drives stories or history.

That was the fundamental fail of Blue Rose. It was a wish-fulfillment utopia for fans of a certain kind of fantasy hot in the 90s. They never seemed to realize despite the things they loved in the books, mostly women filling male gender roles without question and acceptance of homosexuality, those books weren't utopias. Hell, half the time the women in male roles had to struggle against that not being without question.

Criticism of it was also reduce to homophobia, giving us a preview of the current scene 20 years ago.

Sadly, the system in it, True20, never got a fair shake away from that awful world.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
For the Traveller/Cepheus game I occasionally run, that is straight up anarchist in the extreme. It's the Wild West, with each developed world being run by its own government, nearly uniformly aristocracies. I kind of like the Battletech way of doing it, but instead of multiple planet kingdoms, I decided to run it as world-based due to FTL in my game being highly unreliable and difficult/expensive to use. Lack of FTL communication also means most worlds are frontiers, so unless you have a strong government, the world will probably be overrun by pirates and criminals.

In my Traveller setting, robots and advanced AI do most of the productive work. As a result, most developed worlds have basically evolved into European-style welfare states, where the masses are kept content not only with a basic income, but also with drugs, entertainment, and virtual realities. Although gun laws are strict on paper, law enforcement is so feeble that you can get away with almost anything if you have the right connections or know whom to bribe. It is a world of megacorps, but unlike the cyberpunk genre, the masses are not oppressed, because the society focuses on hedonism. The player characters, by contrast, are not content with this and thus seek adventure on the frontiers.

My campaign's in the mid 1984, so I guess around here?


Here's a blank Nolan Chart for people who want to plot theirs.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on December 12, 2022, 10:33:22 AM
I thought a bit about this.  I'm not sure I could ever agree.  I can think of many popular settings that are binary, evil vs good.  Star Wars.  Lord of the Rings.  Starship Troopers.

Star Wars (in the original, pre-Lucas-going-senile, pre-Disney era) was strictly comic book morality. The Good Guys are Good, the Bad Guys are Evil. It wasn't really espousing any sort of ideology or belief system. The depth of it's political commentary could basically be summed up as "A tyrannical, genocidal empire is bad, mmmkay?". It's fine for what it is, mind, but even at that, most of of the EU kind of had to introduce nuance to be able to keep telling interesting stories, and I know I sure did back when I was running D6 Star Wars.

Starship Troopers is a bit more nuanced than you're giving it credit.

Lord of the Rings is... complicated, and, again, a bit more nuanced than you're giving it credit. Tolkien himself was conflicted on how binary he wanted the morality of the setting to be, in fact, as he comments several times in his writings.

Quote from: PulpHerb on December 13, 2022, 12:01:01 AM

That was the fundamental fail of Blue Rose. It was a wish-fulfillment utopia for fans of a certain kind of fantasy hot in the 90s. They never seemed to realize despite the things they loved in the books, mostly women filling male gender roles without question and acceptance of homosexuality, those books weren't utopias. Hell, half the time the women in male roles had to struggle against that not being without question.

Criticism of it was also reduce to homophobia, giving us a preview of the current scene 20 years ago.

Sadly, the system in it, True20, never got a fair shake away from that awful world.

Ayup. And as bad as the first version was, the AGE version doubled down on a lot of the problems.

Although it's not unique. Look at Eclipse Phase - and I hate to say it, because I actually *like* Eclipse Phase, as a setting, but the developers absolutely use it to push forward their particular views on things, and tended to double down on any point that they got criticized for, like their presentation of the Jovians.

The new campaign setting I will hopefully use is the Hyborian Age of Conan. So as far as politics, it ranges from theocracy, where the gods and the clerics and sorcerers rule the land (Stygia) to tribal rule in the Pictish Wilderness. Tech levels range from primitive to Dark Ages Europe.

Quote from: Cathode Ray on December 13, 2022, 08:12:52 AM
My campaign's in the mid 1984, so I guess around here?


Here's a blank Nolan Chart for people who want to plot theirs.

I'm about to play in a Coalition States game in Savage Rifts.

Lock and load. Time to collect some elf-ears. Yeah we'll kill Demons along the way too. Same thing.

Quote from: tenbones on December 13, 2022, 02:03:00 PM
I'm about to play in a Coalition States game in Savage Rifts.

Lock and load. Time to collect some elf-ears. Yeah we'll kill Demons along the way too. Same thing.

This.

We run games playing as "The Bad Guys" for funsies.  These are not because we're closet Alt Right people.   Alt Right is a term WAY overused on normal people just to the right of center.  It's just interesting, and it's just a game.  Play the Storm Troopers of Star Wars.  The Rifts Coalition.   The Armies of Chaos in Warhammer.  The Zentraedi of Macross.  We've done all that. 

After all, you don't play Exploding Kittens because you actually want it to happen in real life.  Or an undead Lich Knight because you want to really be undead. 

It's make-believe. 

I hate some arguments that think everything is literal.  It's ruining comedy and life in general.