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The Politics of Tabletop RPGs

Walter said:
GW can't really have it both ways. Like, "our good guys are really bad guys and this is all the world's longest cautionary tale" is certainly a line you can take to evade someone being like 'hey, you guys are deffo fash, I can tell by how you glorify bigotry 24/7', but it is genuinely *weird* when transposed with the fact that their business model is basically "What color Gestapo is your favorite? Gotta catch em all!"

Like, the fundamental message of one thousand percent of GW's marketing is that Space Marines/Past Space Marines are the coolest thing that could ever possibly exist, and that serving The Emperor/Sigmar/The Great Leader is a great idea. Black Library publishes an average of 3 books a month about that. They have at least 2 lines of comic books. They have a line of literal children's books. They have a streaming service. People record their audiobooks. If you sat down and tried to absorb all of the media (read/listen to all the books/podcasts, watch all the videos, etc) that portrays the Imperium as dauntless warriors against evil you would literally be sitting down for years. There is no possible way to take that kind of output other than as painfully, cringingly sincere.

Here's the perfect example of GW's other mouth (their symbol being the double headed eagle is, uh, apt) communicating exactly the opposite of today's 'we don't mean anything we say haha, how could you anyone think that?, these characters are all monsters!'. (Look how inclusive we are! Even multi racial families can enjoy our pure hearted hobby uwu!) https://www.warhammer-community.com...arthalos-hobby-project-is-pure-warhammer-joy/ .

So, re: today's post, that kid is definitely experiencing the Space Marines Stormcast Eternals as the intolerant genocidal maniacs that they are, yeah? We are sure he understands that this is satirical?

It's deeply silly. Their actual position is, roughly, 'there's a big market for this stuff, so we sell it to them', but they can't bring themselves to admit that out loud, so we get this kind of insane statement, which falls apart if you think about it for a second and a half.
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Warhammer Fantasy and 40K are fundamentally different franchises, like they have similar tones but there are actually good if sometimes retrograde factions in Fantasy whereas (Tau aside) the same can't be said of 40K. Particularly the Stormcast Eternals, while they hit a lot of the same aesthetic, are much more actually heroic as compared to the faux heroism of the Space Marines.
 
Also, like, are they not supposed to make any models? Are they only supposed to make completely inhuman ones?

Like, that link is focused on non-white people painting up minis to look like them, and it's being celebrated by GW. And they're the Stormcast, who use the physical aesthetics of the Marines but are vastly different fluff.

Beyond that, a lot of people think Astartes look cool. The Guard are a "realistic" army line that is still sci-fi.

Are people just...not supposed to buy the models? I'm all for saying GW should be spreading the proverbial love out a bit, but are we truly in a feedback loop of "Marines get promoted, sell more, get promoted more, etc", or are they more popular because more people genuinely like their design and stylings and chapter fluff?
 
Stormcast Eternals all died as mortals and head hunted for defending their homes and families from Chaos Insurgencies. They are chosen rather than being the right genetic stock. From the end of a Conan the Barbarian facing off against a superior Chaos Champion, to a mere hospice worker trying to buy time so everyone else can escape, to a beggar staring down a Plague Cultist mob because she felt it was right. I find that better than picking the brainwashed child soldiers.

I'll give you those Stormcast that end up being tyrannical through dying so much they end up becoming Simulacrum in their flawed reincarnation, making the exact causes of being overthrown by the citizenry for you know, being horrible to the citizenry.

And on that Counterpoint in Age of Sigmar's side, you can get redeemed. Sure it's the literal "I will beat the evil out of you" Shonen Style but saving one's souls is a better message than, "you're radicalized, therefore no hope for you."
 
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While I would say that it being satire is hit or miss, especially since you can see them laying the seeds for an internal pivot\civil war storyline for the Imperium\Primaris Marines\Soritas, AoS is absolutely not the same in any meaningful way.
 
Hykal94 said:
You will not be missed Part 2. Good. Fuck the tournament organisers for giving the Nazi shithead MAX POINTS because everyone else refused to play with him.
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The saddest part of this is that the tournament organisers probably weren't acting on any kind of ideological sympathy or affinity for the Nazi when they did this.

I suspect, more than anything, it comes down to a combination of Lawful Stupid (i.e. the RULES say he wins so he does!) and tone-deaf blindness to the ominous reality of the situation.

I don't think the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but I do think it's paved with the actions of people who are so stupid and ignorant that they tend to enable extremism rather than counter it.
 
Also, I think the Stormcast have the problem of being the first thing introduced in the process of turning Warhammer into even higher and more interesting fantasy. While you can say "Sigmar is just the Emperor", it kind of ignores that if that's the case, he's a much better version of the Emperor, who built a coalition doomed to failure by virtue of him being a million times more reasonable and accepting than the other people in it. He's indisposed not by him being such an asshole that he turned his kids to evil, letting himself get whomped into a coma by his favorite son, but by him literally spending all his time trying to rectify his mistakes and holding himself personally accountable when his greatest champions have a vulnerability that damages their being but not their effectiveness.

Dude got Nagash, Moranthi and Gorkamorka to be team players, albeit temporarily.
 
Athene said:
Also, I think the Stormcast have the problem of being the first thing introduced in the process of turning Warhammer into even higher and more interesting fantasy. While you can say "Sigmar is just the Emperor", it kind of ignores that if that's the case, he's a much better version of the Emperor, who built a coalition doomed to failure by virtue of him being a million times more reasonable and accepting than the other people in it. He's indisposed not by him being such an asshole that he turned his kids to evil, letting himself get whomped into a coma by his favorite son, but by him literally spending all his time trying to rectify his mistakes and holding himself personally accountable when his greatest champions have a vulnerability that damages their being but not their effectiveness.

Dude got Nagash, Moranthi and Gorkamorka to be team players, albeit temporarily.
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And just to add the Book Soul Wars Sigmar scenes are pretty much "ah I fucked up." Meanwhile Nagash is the pettiest motherfucker around. One crucial Sigmar Scene is the empty Pantheon room where all the gods were and wondering if it was right. (The entire Plague Wars and such amounted to trying to rebuild said coalitions without doing the whole Colonizer thing and fucking over the Plans of other Gods.) Sigmar hates Nagash for many reasons and put aside that hate because he felt rebuilding civilization and lives of mortals mattered more.
 
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There's a bit in Soulbound that points out that there is some colonizer shit in the whole idea of Azyr striking back at chaos before its final victory and reclaiming the realms and that there is a three way tension in the people that held out against Chaos, Azyr and those who were conquered and forced into worshipping chaos that Sigmar welcomed back into the fold.
 
You know, it's kinda weird that GW is responding at all. Not to say they didn't last year, but I'm just surprised a corporation is doing this. Even Xbox's Phil Spencer says they're 'reconsidering' their relation with ActiBlizzard.
 
Hykal94 said:
You know, it's kinda weird that GW is responding at all. Not to say they didn't last year, but I'm just surprised a corporation is doing this. Even Xbox's Phil Spencer says they're 'reconsidering' their relation with ActiBlizzard.
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You can't run a half billion dollar a year niche hobby company on a bunch of racist white guys anymore.
 
Hykal94 said:
You know, it's kinda weird that GW is responding at all. Not to say they didn't last year, but I'm just surprised a corporation is doing this. Even Xbox's Phil Spencer says they're 'reconsidering' their relation with ActiBlizzard.
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Athene said:
You can't run a half billion dollar a year niche hobby company on a bunch of racist white guys anymore.
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I also think we should bear in mind that changes in the media landscape: namely the rise of social media, makes it a lot easier to amplify acts of malfeasance which might otherwise go uncovered or get buried by traditional formats of news media coverage.

Social media also hugely empowers whistleblowers and other people who expose such things in the gaming industry.

Plus, gaming companies are fairly vulnerable to public pressure. GWS I would argue especially so because it provides fairly high-end products for a customer base with a lot of disposable income. So losing a dedicated customer who decides to stop buying GWS products and merchandise is a significant blow.
 
Also, like, hmm, how to phrase it.

GW has an ENORMOUS and incredibly strange 'non customer base'. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. Imagine if when you sat down to play chess a dozen kibitzers popped up to talk about how knights ought to move, none of whom would ever play themselves.

You will see, everywhere, people who are passionately invested in the hobby, people who have opinions that are core to their identity about how much armor piercing a bolter should have at 11 inches in the tactical doctrine. These people will go on and on about absolutely any aspect of the game you care to talk about.

They are not customers. They get their models from china, their rules from battlescribe/wahapedia, their fiction from the trove and their paints from amazon. GW has never gotten a cent from them. They attend tournaments, they run tournaments, and they benefit GW absolutely 0.

These people are natural adherents to any and all reasons that they are the victims. Nobody (or, I guess I should say, very few people) likes to be the bad guy, so you get endless versions of 'I don't buy from them because', followed by ways that the company kicked their puppy.

"I steal because the company I am robbing are in league with the far right" would absolutely slide right into that quiver. Every member of the non customer base used to be a customer, and GW must always be vigilant against anything that would give a customer an excuse to slide on over. Silly statements like the one they just put out are just the corpos' ham-fisted attempts to staunch this endless leak.
 
Walter said:
and they benefit GW absolutely 0.
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I strongly disagree. The "free to play" gamers help popularize and populate the franchise community, increasing the chance of Games Workshop eventually netting another "whale" from the formed fanbase, willing to buy their overpriced niche products. Even if the ratio is 100 to 1, that's still one more whale that GW wouldn't have without those 100.

It's like a free-to-play pay-to-win MMO or a gacha mobile game. GW just has less direct control over the whole process than they would like.
 
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Madam Carstein said:
I also think we should bear in mind that changes in the media landscape: namely the rise of social media, makes it a lot easier to amplify acts of malfeasance which might otherwise go uncovered or get buried by traditional formats of news media coverage.

Social media also hugely empowers whistleblowers and other people who expose such things in the gaming industry.

Plus, gaming companies are fairly vulnerable to public pressure. GWS I would argue especially so because it provides fairly high-end products for a customer base with a lot of disposable income. So losing a dedicated customer who decides to stop buying GWS products and merchandise is a significant blow.
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Games Workshop has a highly visible mass market success going in Total War: Warhammer. Which uses the same company logo. This is a big deal. The 40k videogames have generally not succeeded in reaching a wide audience, but this sure did. Enough that they are going to revive the fantasy setting even...

Not coincidentally I think, GW initiated a massive crackdown on fan works. They want image control and there's a lot of...material in 40k in particular that looks real bad if visually depicted.
 
Walter said:
GW can't really have it both ways. Like, "our good guys are really bad guys and this is all the world's longest cautionary tale" is certainly a line you can take to evade someone being like 'hey, you guys are deffo fash, I can tell by how you glorify bigotry 24/7', but it is genuinely *weird* when transposed with the fact that their business model is basically "What color Gestapo is your favorite? Gotta catch em all!"
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I don't agree with this logic.

This assumes that any kind of depiction is an endorsement. But if taken to its logical conclusion is insane, it would be like assuming that the devs who make Grand Theft Auto are sincerely in favor of violent crime.

Now obviously it's true that fiction can influence us and how something is depicted matters but this logic is entirely unsustainable. If you're right and there's inherently a tension between selling fiction that is from the perspective of bad people and rejecting their badness then we should reject any form of villain protagonist. But that's absurd, having a work of fiction where some people are evil and are protagonists is not inherently unreasonable.

Furthermore, it's more than possible to think "this character or faction is cool but they shouldn't be endorsed morally". Because it's not real, just because Space Marines are deranged fanatics who serve as the vanguard of a fascist state does not mean that one is morally wrong for thinking they're cool. Sometimes monsters, literal or figurative, can be compelling. That's fine.

What matters is that one recognizes that they're monsters, thankfully GW does that.
 
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Eh part of all this crap is how GW itself kicked out all the over the top obviously funny or rather exaggerated content and went full speed ahead GrimDerpness or as many refer to it the Great Darkening of the 90's and 00's.

Other than that good riddance to bad rubbish. Coming in fastooned in swastigas should have seen him not allowed in the building much less allowed to participate.

Hykal94 said:
You know, it's kinda weird that GW is responding at all. Not to say they didn't last year, but I'm just surprised a corporation is doing this. Even Xbox's Phil Spencer says they're 'reconsidering' their relation with ActiBlizzard.
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I would argue that GW has been moving to curb or quietly move under the rug the most visibly hienous crap for years.

Case of point, blowing up WHF, killing off/putting Slaanesh on the bus, reforming the Dark Eldar, eliminating the Beastmen rape hordes entirely etc.
 
Eliar said:
Eh part of all this crap is how GW itself kicked out all the over the top obviously funny or rather exaggerated content and went full speed ahead GrimDerpness or as many refer to it the Great Darkening of the 90's and 00's.
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I don't think that's the issue, if anything emphasizing how monstrous and self-sabotaging the Imperium is would be even easier in a darker story.

The problem is that for too long GW doubled down on pandering to pro-Imperial apologism, which is something that could've happened even in a more satirical story. Because ultimately what caused this wasn't too little satire, it was a decision to pander to a group of people who are uncritically pro-IoM.
 
Eliar said:
Case of point, blowing up WHF, killing off/putting Slaanesh on the bus, reforming the Dark Eldar, eliminating the Beastmen rape hordes entirely etc.
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I should note as someone who plays 40k and AOS slannesh and dark eldar are very much still things. Slannesh being locked up was a temporary plot point and dark eldar being reformed was only some of them in the ynarri which itself is a plot line that's fading out. That said there does seem to a push to make some factions less evil queer coded and or cut out some of their more overt sexual assault elements to their background fluff to make the setting a bit more appealing.
 
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Eliar said:
Eh part of all this crap is how GW itself kicked out all the over the top obviously funny or rather exaggerated content and went full speed ahead GrimDerpness or as many refer to it the Great Darkening of the 90's and 00's.

Other than that good riddance to bad rubbish. Coming in fastooned in swastigas should have seen him not allowed in the building much less allowed to participate.




I would argue that GW has been moving to curb or quietly move under the rug the most visibly hienous crap for years.

Case of point, blowing up WHF, killing off/putting Slaanesh on the bus, reforming the Dark Eldar, eliminating the Beastmen rape hordes entirely etc.
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How is blowing up WHF in any way getting rid of the heinous crap? They scrapped the less problematic setting on favour of the more problematic one.
 
I mean.

For years one of the big complaints people had in regards to 40ks popularity relative to Fantasy was that Fantasy was by far the more nuanced and subtle of the two settings, including having factions and characters who could actually be described as heroic without any controversy.
 
Eliar said:
In what way?
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WHF was a fairly nuanced, complex setting with no clear heroes or villains (beyond Chaos, Skaven and maybe Dark Eldar as villains, and even then these were mostly victims of circumstance/oppressed by cruel rulers) and a number of sympathetic characters in a number of factions. WHF can be at mostly-peace without much issue; it treats the obsessive fanatics (who would still be executed for being too lax and heretical in 40k) with the wary fear they deserve.

While there are certainly elements of the setting that are less-than-ideal (some Chaos stuff, mostly), it's miles more agreeable than 40k.

EDIT: The reason they blew it up was because it didn't make them as much money as 40k, so they wanted to reboot it into a different genre to see if that would get them more £££.
 
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