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The Politics of Tabletop RPGs

Chloe Sullivan said:
Oh, boy is that a whole can of worms I see opening up?

Keep in mind the British made no provisions for what happened to the widows they rescued (or 'rescued' in some cases - some of these were suicides, not murders), and the result was a whole lot of destitute widows living miserably in poverty.

Much like the Roman Republic's pontificating about the immorality of human sacrifice, the British moral outrage against Sati rings a little hollow given their notable willingness to gleefully kill people in less dramatic ways. Like, y'know, blocking famine relief because of [insert excuses that boil down to racism here].
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Poverty is bad I grant you. I'm not sure it is so bad that rounding up the homeless and burning them alive is a preferable alternative.

The British empire was a group of individuals, individuals that had various different ideas about native indians, morality, evangelism and women's rights.

Some of the deaths in the Jonestown massacre were also voluntary. That doesn't mean drinking the kool-aid was right and good.

I think you are missing my point. If a serial killer donates $1 to charity for every victim that doesn't mean donating to charity is wrong or that murder is justified. If a child abuser tells a ten year old to look both ways before crossing the road that doesn't mean it is bad advice.

It is wrong to have a double standard where you make excuses for the failings of your group while criticizing other groups for the same stuff. I suggest it is also wrong to have a double standard where you criticize your own group for their failings but make excuses for the failings of other groups.

Having racist ancestors doesn't mean you need to approve of sexist, racist or exploitative traditions from foreign cultures.
 
MrCogmor said:
Poverty is bad I grant you. I'm not sure it is so bad that rounding up the homeless and burning them alive is a preferable alternative.

The British empire was a group of individuals, individuals that had various different ideas about native indians, morality, evangelism and women's rights.

Some of the deaths in the Jonestown massacre were also voluntary. That doesn't mean drinking the kool-aid was right and good.

I think you are missing my point. If a serial killer donates $1 to charity for every victim that doesn't mean donating to charity is wrong or that murder is justified. If a child abuser tells a ten year old to look both ways before crossing the road that doesn't mean it is bad advice.

It is wrong to have a double standard where you make excuses for the failings of your group while criticizing other groups for the same stuff. I suggest it is also wrong to have a double standard where you criticize your own group for their failings but make excuses for the failings of other groups.

Having racist ancestors doesn't mean you need to approve of sexist, racist or exploitative traditions from foreign cultures.
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Nitpick, but I think that @Chloe Sullivan is from the USA, so both the british and indians are foreign from her.
 
MrCogmor said:
The British empire was a group of individuals, individuals that had various different ideas about native indians, morality, evangelism and women's rights.
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The British empire liked to bring up certain things it did (including surpressing Sati and Thugee) as a way of trumpeting it's supposed moral character, but like, in context these were "positive" acts within a much larger system of imperialism and extraction that was decidedly negative.

Letting the British claim plaudits for "well we did do some positive things in the middle of exploiting the fuck out of your homeland" just doesn't seem at all appropriate. It implies a certain failure to look at proportions.

I'm not defending Sati, I simply think saying "we should credit the British" is tone deaf as fuck, because the proportion of people they killed with induced famines vastly outweighs the people they rescued from the Pyre.

Like, all I'm saying is that we should look askance at imperialist propaganda. Because win the context of British colonial actions, that's exactly what this is: propaganda.

It's no different from Romans making a bug deal about carthagian human sacrifice rites while pillaging cities and enslaving thousands.
 
Even excluding the Indian famines and the horrid ways the British responded to such in with a single exception for which the official was panned at for "wasting resources", there are other things the British could be faulted for like declaring the abolition of slavery in India yet continuing it under another name and punishing any officials who pointed out that the replacement system was also slavery.
 
MrCogmor said:
Poverty is bad I grant you. I'm not sure it is so bad that rounding up the homeless and burning them alive is a preferable alternative.
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I mean, this is a shockingly disingenuous reading of Chloe Sullivan's point.

Throwing widows into poverty just means a slow slide into death and general misery. You can't oppose burnings on humanitarian grounds and then do that. Dead is dead and the British didn't mind killing those women slowly by permitting, if not directly facilitating, their impoverishment.

That it's less directly painful then burning them alive is true but besides the point. Ending the practice was just propaganda, it wasn't a sincere concern for Indian women.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Ending the practice was just propaganda, it wasn't a sincere concern for Indian women.
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Honestly, I'm willing to credit some of the British colonial administration with a genuine horror at the practice and thinking that death by burning was specially bad…

But the thing is, these big empires, they have a tendency to not put effort into understating local conditions. So they come in and do "good works" and well… often it just ends up fucking things up more, because they came at the issue from an outsider perspective and thus failed to understand it.

So even when you have colonial or imperial officials who mean well, they doesn't mean they make things better.

I mean despite the bitter words of many later writes looking back, my read is that most of the people involved with the Mahele of 1848 were well intentioned and thought that it would help the common Hawaiian (oh boy did it not).

Which, coming back to RPG talk, I am brainstorming ideas for how to implement imperialism/colonialism and resistance to such as mechanics. Because I am a dummy who wants to run XCOM2 in pathfinder.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Which, coming back to RPG talk, I am brainstorming ideas for how to implement imperialism/colonialism and resistance to such as mechanics. Because I am a dummy who wants to run XCOM2 in pathfinder.
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My first attempt at a faction system accidentally pushed my players to be imperialist, even though they weren't comfortable with it. I've had to go back to the drawing board a few times to try to come up with a system that makes such actions a choice, as opposed to a pressured default. Ironically enough, one of my solutions puts the PCs in the roll of Xcom in Enemy Unknown. Instead of conquering the world to create a resistance, instead to play peacemaker and secure funding for an anti apocalypse program.

Sadly all my idea's are XCOM:EU, so I'm not sure if they would help.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
I mean, this is a shockingly disingenuous reading of Chloe Sullivan's point.

Throwing widows into poverty just means a slow slide into death and general misery. You can't oppose burnings on humanitarian grounds and then do that.
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Sure you can, there's no contradiction here at all. "A slow slide into death and general misery" is an unappealing but accurate description of human life in general. Sparing someone life's but otherwise leaving them to their own devices, instead of killing them, is a decision people make on humanitarian grounds all the time. Even though the Union did appallingly little to ensure their wellbeing afterwards, freeing the slaves was in itself a good and humanitarian act. Option A being less directly painful than Option B is in itself humanitarian grounds for choosing Option A. If the only consequence of British colonial rule was banning sati, it would have been on the whole very slightly beneficial. The British Empire was awful, but it wasn't an old-school D&D-style Demon realm constitutionally incapable of anything but pure evil.
 
skanszy said:
Sure you can, there's no contradiction here at all. "A slow slide into death and general misery" is an unappealing but accurate description of human life in general. Sparing someone life's but otherwise leaving them to their own devices, instead of killing them, is a decision people make on humanitarian grounds all the time. Even though the Union did appallingly little to ensure their wellbeing afterwards, freeing the slaves was in itself a good and humanitarian act. Option A being less directly painful than Option B is in itself humanitarian grounds for choosing Option A. If the only consequence of British colonial rule was banning sati, it would have been on the whole very slightly beneficial. The British Empire was awful, but it wasn't an old-school D&D-style Demon realm constitutionally incapable of anything but pure evil.
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Pure sophistry, there is a profound difference between growing old as a beggar and a wealthy person. That you would seriously try to equivocate between the two is obscene.

Sparing someone's life and then leaving them to suffer is something people do all the time yes, but that doesn't make it good. It's reprehensible and immoral. Inaction is a decision, if you have the power to help someone and choose not to then you're no different from someone who directly kills them. It's just murder through callousness and cowardice.

This argument is fractally wrong.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Inaction is a decision, if you have the power to help someone and choose not to then you're no different from someone who directly kills them.
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I'm not saying you're wrong, but this sentiment does keep me up at night. I don't have much money, but with the money I have I could give it all to people who need it more. I could go help the people in Ukrane with their fight (by helping with logistics likely).

Does my lack of action male me evil, and if so, how does one deal with the guilt of knowing they are irredeemably evil? It's things like this that make me contemplate very self destructive courses of action. I can't act on them, because I have expectations riding on my by my wife and family, but.... if they weren't around, wouldn't I be less evil if I did give all my money to others and live out of my work truck that.my company supplies?

It's very depressing.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
I mean, this is a shockingly disingenuous reading of Chloe Sullivan's point.

Throwing widows into poverty just means a slow slide into death and general misery. You can't oppose burnings on humanitarian grounds and then do that. Dead is dead and the British didn't mind killing those women slowly by permitting, if not directly facilitating, their impoverishment.

That it's less directly painful then burning them alive is true but besides the point. Ending the practice was just propaganda, it wasn't a sincere concern for Indian women.
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It was a reduction ab absurdum. An argument that if you accept the argument as valid then it leads to an obviously absurd conclusion so the premise is flawed. I did not expect to have to argue against that conclusion but here we go.

Why was the slow slide into misery inevitable for Hindu widows but not unmarried Hindu women, white women, etc? Someone that is alive can potentially make a living, be supported or protest their treatment. All the government benefits in the world won't do any good for a pile of ashes.

It is typical for government policy to be somewhat inconsistent and dysfunctional due to conflicting ideas, individuals and compromises.

(For example in the Victorian Era there was a common form of fraud where shipowners would repaint their old ships, over-insure them, overload them with cargo and then send them on a journey with contracted sailors. The ships would sink, the sailors would die and the shipowners would get richer. Samuel Plimsoll - Wikipedia was a social reformer politician that set out to end the practice. Some of the other British politicians were major shipowners that engaged in the practice.)

The idea that Sati was purely humanitarian (and not motivated at all by material concerns like taking the women's property) whereas the banning was pure propaganda is absurd.

Fourthspartan56 said:
Sparing someone's life and then leaving them to suffer is something people do all the time yes, but that doesn't make it good. It's reprehensible and immoral. Inaction is a decision, if you have the power to help someone and choose not to then you're no different from someone who directly kills them. It's just murder through callousness and cowardice.

This argument is fractally wrong.
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If someone is just sitting there sipping a martini, holding their spare EpiPen just out of reach as a guy in front of them goes into anaphylactic shock that could be more sadistic and viscerally evil than some forms of murder.

If someone buys a martini (or videogame, whatever) instead of making an extra donation to the EpiPen foundation and someone dies because they don't have enough EpiPens then that is a normal.

A guy dies either way but there is a major difference in the psychological circumstances of each scenario. Humans are not super intelligent moral theory executing robots able to automatically see the consequences of every choice. We are animals and on that note.
Jakinbandw said:
I'm not saying you're wrong, but this sentiment does keep me up at night. I don't have much money, but with the money I have I could give it all to people who need it more. I could go help the people in Ukrane with their fight (by helping with logistics likely).

Does my lack of action male me evil, and if so, how does one deal with the guilt of knowing they are irredeemably evil? It's things like this that make me contemplate very self destructive courses of action. I can't act on them, because I have expectations riding on my by my wife and family, but.... if they weren't around, wouldn't I be less evil if I did give all my money to others and live out of my work truck that.my company supplies?

It's very depressing.
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If you make yourself miserable every time you give for not giving more then that just trains your brain to avoid giving at all.

If you make yourself miserable for enjoying any moment of happiness that could be spent on someone else instead then you'll just keep getting more miserable untill something snaps. Your compassion, your self preservation instinct or both.

If you did give all your money to others would those others later on do the equivalent of you living out of your work truck, or would they spend their money on their own luxuries?

I recommend you read at least the first few articles of https://mindingourway.com/guilt/
 
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The Narrator said:
A problem with a lot of speculative fiction is treating species and culture as interchangeable: every nonhuman species/race/etc. will have a single culture, with only humans having a wide variety of cultures.
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That's a remmnant of using nonhumans as standins for groups or ideologies among humans.
Madam Carstein said:
So honestly, it would be bloody nice to come across a system where trans people don't have to experience that sort of risk to become our true selves.
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In pathfinder it's a 2,250 gold potion, so there's one at least.
 
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raptorgalaxy said:
That's a remmnant of using nonhumans as standins for groups or ideologies among humans.
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That's part of it, yeah. Nonhumans are often a metaphor for something. For H.G. Wells, Martians are colonialism. For Tolkien, elves are tied up in religious stuff; much like how wizards in Middle-Earth are actually angels, elves are people without original sin. The Prawns in District 9 represent victims of apartheid. Metahumans in Shadowrun are victims of racial prejudice. The Visitors in V are fascism. Various aliens in Supergirl are immigration; Superman comics were originally about the immigrant experience. The xenomorph from Alien is literal and metaphorical rape; the xenomorphs in Aliens are the Vietnam War.

But sometimes the answer is even simpler. Creating a fictional culture is hard. Creating multiple fictional cultures is even harder.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Pure sophistry, there is a profound difference between growing old as a beggar and a wealthy person. That you would seriously try to equivocate between the two is obscene.

Sparing someone's life and then leaving them to suffer is something people do all the time yes, but that doesn't make it good. It's reprehensible and immoral. Inaction is a decision, if you have the power to help someone and choose not to then you're no different from someone who directly kills them. It's just murder through callousness and cowardice.

This argument is fractally wrong.
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Sophistry is using half-assed utilitarian reasoning to argue there's no humanitarian grounds for preferring a life of poverty to being burned alive. By this logic, carrying an unconcious person out of a burning building is "murder through callousness and cowardice," assuming you aren't intending to take care of them for the rest of their lives. By this logic, there's no humanitarian grounds for wanting police to stop killing homeless people. To bring this back to the thread topic, this is an argument for Paladins slaughtering their orc prisoners.
 
The discussion on the drow makes me wonder if you could apply a similar logic to making a hell plane. Have Loth be in charge still but give her an afterlife where she runs things.

Every whenever she decides to flip the board and now X arbitrary characteristic is what our heirarchy is based around. Its authoritarian-bigot hell where the obvious lesson is obvious.

I'm also partial to the hell escape valve that is the 'If you genuinely change you get out'. Less because its a good way to teach lessons and more I think she would find it hilarious when the bigots misinterpret what happened and triple down.
 
raptorgalaxy said:
In pathfinder it's a 2,250 gold potion, so there's one at least.
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That's actually one of three explicitly trans-coded consumables in Pathfinder. I'll explain all of them in just a moment for anyone who isn't aware of them already. ^^

Pathfinder is quite good as a system in terms of trans representation having like actual game mechanics that basically allow player characters (or anyone for that matter) to medically transition.

For one thing, Pathfinder has an explicitly trans female character named Shardra Geltl: a Dwarf Shaman whose background explicitly states that she was assigned male at birth. Like, there's no hint or implication to it, she is just plainly a trans woman. There's no ambiguity or implication or "could be/couldn't be" to it, she just is clearly stated to be trans.

I wanted to do an aside on the item you mentioned and more because I find this very interesting.

The potion you describe is an Elixir of Sex Shift. The person who drinks this elixir immediately and permanently takes on different sexual characteristics of their choice (so actually this would cover someone who identifies as nonbinary). This is done instantaneously and requires nothing more than the consumption of the elixir in question.

However, it should be pointed out that 2,250 gold is a prohibitively expensive item for many people in-universe. 2,250 gold is more than the cost of a full set of masterwork full-plate armour and shield along with a masterwork weapon. So this is out of reach for a number of people.

That said, there is an alternative...

-----------------------------------

There are two inexpensive (worth 5 gp) alchemical remedies known as the Anderos Salve and the Mulibrous Tincture. Taking regular doses of either of the two will cause the user to develop primary and secondary sexual characteristics of their desired gender identity. Taking doses of both remedies will cause the user to have a more androgynous appearance.

Those who take Anderos Salve will develop more masculine characteristics whereas those who take Mulibrous Tincture will develop feminine characteristics.

Whatever is taken, the user's body gradually changes in line with the characteristics they seek to develop and the effects become permanent after six months.

In other words, Pathfinder basically has its own equivalent of masculinising and feminising Hormone Replacement Therapy, and can also be used to allow nonbinary-presenting individuals to look the way they want. The fact that this remedy it is alchemical as opposed to magical I think is pretty deliberate too. Making it, more-or-less, a synthetic manufacture rather than something born of supernatural power.
 
Madam Carstein said:
For one thing, Pathfinder has an explicitly trans female character named Shardra Geltl: a Dwarf Shaman whose background explicitly states that she was assigned male at birth. Like, there's no hint or implication to it, she is just plainly a trans woman. There's no ambiguity or implication or "could be/couldn't be" to it, she just is clearly stated to be trans
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They also added another in the video game adaptation of wrath of the righteous Anevia with her wife's wedding gift being an elixir of sex shifting.
 
Claudette Savagely said:
So uh

Who /mörk Borg/ here?
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I have the game and I like it quite a lot. Not least because I think it manages to vindicate that niche of weird and violent
metal-inspired RPGs that previously had Lamentations of the Flame Princess as its main representative. LotFP has a few issues, some pertaining to the game itself and some that are rather connected to its creator, as much as these can be distinguished.

LotFP has been succinctly described as a razor: all edge and no point. The game's aesthetics are characterised by an excess of provocative imagery with little tying it together beyond the offense of it all. Contrast it with MB which is unified in its grisly brutality. It is an aesthetic of sludge and dissolution. It is focused, unlike LotFP. And its focus is destruction, not wanton provocation. There is no weird vaginal sex magic and baby killing, there is however a table where you roll to see if the world ends today.

As for the creators of the games. The problem with James Raggi IV is that he is exactly the kind of person who would have written LotFP. That is, an unrepentant edgelord who literally hates fun. He is a controversial figure and his various actions (continuing support of Zak S, a photo-op with Jordan Peterson an so on) have contributed to LotFP broadly falling out of favour these days.

The creators of MÖRK BORG on the other hand wrote this as an addendum to the MB OGL
Remember: Make it dark, depressing, weird and cruel. But let everyone partake in the suffering.
Be sure to avoid sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic tropes and themes in your content. There's plenty of that crap in the real world already. The world of MÖRK BORG doesn't need it.
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The neatly summarises the attitude of the game towards these issues. It is focused on unreal apocalyptic violence and not on provoking anyone. It is this attitude that I think lets the game avoid the utter tastelessness that it could otherwise risk.

Another thing about MÖRK BORG that I find interesting is that it takes the implications of OSR lethality to their logical thematic conclusion. Dungeon Crawl Classics does so too, but DCC uses the lethality emphasize the heroism and skill of those few that do succeed. MB instead revels in the doom and carnage of it all.
 
Arrou said:
I have the game and I like it quite a lot. Not least because I think it manages to vindicate that niche of weird and violent
metal-inspired RPGs that previously had Lamentations of the Flame Princess as its main representative. LotFP has a few issues, some pertaining to the game itself and some that are rather connected to its creator, as much as these can be distinguished.

LotFP has been succinctly described as a razor: all edge and no point. The game's aesthetics are characterised by an excess of provocative imagery with little tying it together beyond the offense of it all. Contrast it with MB which is unified in its grisly brutality. It is an aesthetic of sludge and dissolution. It is focused, unlike LotFP. And its focus is destruction, not wanton provocation. There is no weird vaginal sex magic and baby killing, there is however a table where you roll to see if the world ends today.

As for the creators of the games. The problem with James Raggi IV is that he is exactly the kind of person who would have written LotFP. That is, an unrepentant edgelord who literally hates fun. He is a controversial figure and his various actions (continuing support of Zak S, a photo-op with Jordan Peterson an so on) have contributed to LotFP broadly falling out of favour these days.

The creators of MÖRK BORG on the other hand wrote this as an addendum to the MB OGL

The neatly summarises the attitude of the game towards these issues. It is focused on unreal apocalyptic violence and not on provoking anyone. It is this attitude that I think lets the game avoid the utter tastelessness that it could otherwise risk.

Another thing about MÖRK BORG that I find interesting is that it takes the implications of OSR lethality to their logical thematic conclusion. Dungeon Crawl Classics does so too, but DCC uses the lethality emphasize the heroism and skill of those few that do succeed. MB instead revels in the doom and carnage of it all.
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Couldn't have put it better, really.

's why I admire the whole thing so much, and the vibrant fan zine community which the creators embrace and which follows the example they set in terms of values just adds to the quality of the experience.

It's also sick as hell.

The presentation of the core book still blows my mind every time I open it.

I can't wait for the DM screen and Cult Volume 2: Heretic.

roight propa stuff
 
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