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The Politics of Tabletop RPGs

The Laurent said:
This feels like it's kinda missing the point of the actual post to engage in triumphalist chest-beating? Nothing you said is entirely untrue, and neither is anything that she said, none of which you even remotely address except to push it aside and impute in it a claim that's not being made.
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I'll be real man, if you don't see how my post was a direct response to "was he wrong" then that's on you.

I addressed how he was wrong and why the suffering was ultimately the lesser evil. That's not "triumphalist chest beating", it's addressing his criticisms.
 
Industrialization, industrialized war, and imperialism are linked together in history even if in theory you could have had the first without the third and perhaps even without the second in some Utopian conception of the world, and can have the first now while rejecting the third in the future.

Industrialization was all but inevitable, and quite necessary, and as Jenny points out but you ignore because it lets you beat your chest real hard, not only can we not go back, but we should not go back.

But this doesn't then mean that it's not crass and crude to chest-beat about how Industrialization was ultimately the way of progress when someone's looking at the Somme, and looking at a degree of devastation of nature that was hard to repair and which has done damage that now threatens all of human civilization with an age of chaos and ecological poverty.

Nonetheless the world only spins forward and in this devastation there is the promise of plenty and etc, etc, but we do not advance this understanding by talking about "lesser evils" IMO.

Fourthspartan56 said:
I'll be real man, if you don't see how my post was a direct response to "was he wrong" then that's on you.

I addressed how he was wrong and why the suffering was ultimately the lesser evil. That's not "triumphalist chest beating", it's addressing his criticisms.
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No, here is what you seem to be missing. You seem to have gotten entirely confused, and I'm not sure how? Here is what the "was he wrong" was in response to: the idea that Tolkien viewed industrialization and Industrialized Warfare as one and the same, not separate things that cannot be addressed but separately and unrelatedly.

At no point was @Jenny declaring that we must RTVRN, in fact she went out of her way to say that this was not possible or even desirable, simply that he was not actually neccessarily wrong that Industrialization and Industrialized warfare that killed millions of people (and Imperialism, but he was an Englishman and less concerned with that) are tied together and historically associated with each other, and that the effects of these are in fact devastating.

E: Like, to clarify here, most of Jenny's post was about highlighting the parallel processes of Industrialized Warfare and Industrialization, something you don't even talk about to instead impute a question of "Was it worth it?" that is in NO place talked about in Jenny's post.
 
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"Rise above barbarism;" what a rancid fucking take. Label the entirety of existence prior to industrialization as "barbarism." Why don't you call all those people savages next? Will that make you feel better about WWI?
 
Whether or not the horrors of industrialization were worth it in the end.
One thing remains certain.
They were not necessary.
Horrors of industrialization were a choice, or more accurately, thousand upon thousand individual choices, repeated again and again, by those with wealth and power, and by those who followed their lead.

Any TtRPG that wants to loo into industrialization, be it as a theme for steampunk, or as a struggle between industrialization vs agrarianism, or anything else, should remember that the horrors were not a natural inseparable part of the process.
 
Valmond said:
Whether or not the horrors of industrialization were worth it in the end.
One thing remains certain.
They were not necessary.
Horrors of industrialization were a choice, or more accurately, thousand upon thousand individual choices, repeated again and again, by those with wealth and power, and by those who followed their lead.
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Only inasmuch as industrialization was not, in principle, necessary (as a matter of history it probably was at least inevitable). Dispossession and bouts of body-destroying labor are inseparable consequences of industrialization for large parts of any industrialized people, and despoiling of the natural world are inseparable consequences of industrialization for any industrialized country (not even renewables come free).
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Wikis have text that can be read and reread at your own pace whereas youtube videos must be watched at whatever speed the person is talking (or be sped up and be hard to catch)

Therefore wikis are superior
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I have never agreed more with anything in my life, people try to recommend YouTube videos to me and I'm like "unless this is in text form it will be impossible to process and I'll resent the person talking for not just writing it down".
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
To me the answer is a resounding "it was worth it". Industrial development has allowed humanity to rise above barbarism. If the choice was between the suffering of the early Industrial Revolution or not growing as a species then the former is fundamentally better. Tolkien glorified pastoral living but the Shire could never send cosmonauts into space. Nor could it create the kind of plenty that modern society created, it isn't distributed equally but it could be. And that's why the Industrial Revolution was fundamentally positive- it laid the conditions for the most dramatic progress in history. Both that has happened already and that which could happen if society was altered further.

It's as Marx said, capitalism was fundamentally progressive. Not in the common idealogical term of being forward thinking or possessing solidarity, but in the historical sense of driving change. Industrialism under capitalism is wretched in many ways but Tolkien's criticisms are as non-actionable as any other reactionary critique.

(This shouldn't be taken as a take down of Tolkien, his writing is great and I have empathy for his background but his idealogy was always misguided)
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Miss me with the space stuff. I'll take clean air and pretty plants and small communities over our steady slide into a technologically-enforced fascist dystopia. What has space travel actually done to make the horrors of industrialization worth it? It's egotripping.

Also "rise above barbarism". Look around you. Look at the world. Look at the oceans of blood, listen to the screaming. Look at the smoke in the air, hear the violence all around. Nothing has changed and we've learned nothing but how to Make More Mans Even More-er.

We are literally trading paradise for parking lots and our freedom and privacy for a technological panopticon controlled by fascists. None of it was worth it.
 
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stratigo said:
If climate change kills humanity, will industrialism still have been worth it?

Just curious
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To be fair, this is unlikely. Now, absolutely devastate humanity to the extent that humanity as a whole will never be as wealthy as it was in the early 21st century? Quite possible, debating probability will be a long discourse. But I don't think it's quite at the level of extinction event.
 
Kaiya said:
We are literally trading paradise for parking lots and our freedom and privacy for a technological panopticon controlled by fascists. None of it was worth it.
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Given my disability I'm not willing to call pre-industrial times "paradise". For all that the lows of industrial society are fucking horrific, the rest of society's also given me options besides being abandoned in the woods as a baby. I'm sure you find the injection of nuance annoying but I'm not willing to be quiet about my survival, actually. We can do a fuck of a lot better than our current society but heading straight for throwing everything out leads you into eugenics.
 
Zimmerwald1915 said:
Only inasmuch as industrialization was not, in principle, necessary (as a matter of history it probably was at least inevitable). Dispossession and bouts of body-destroying labor are inseparable consequences of industrialization for large parts of any industrialized people, and despoiling of the natural world are inseparable consequences of industrialization for any industrialized country (not even renewables come free).
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No, they are not.
They are choices, like having homeless people is a choice societies make, like prohibitively high healthcare costs is a choice.
Society could have chosen another, gentler, less destructive, path, it did not.

As for despoiling the natural world, again, we could have done so, so, so much better, we chose not to.
 
DanZapman said:
Given my disability I'm not willing to call pre-industrial times "paradise". For all that the lows of industrial society are fucking horrific, the rest of society's also given me options besides being abandoned in the woods as a baby. I'm sure you find the injection of nuance annoying but I'm not willing to be quiet about my survival, actually. We can do a fuck of a lot better than our current society but heading straight for throwing everything out leads you into eugenics.
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I'm disabled, too. Mentally and physically, incapable all but the most basic physical tasks, and even then not without extreme pain. I would be long dead if I was born any time before about 1990. I stand by my position: it wasn't worth it. There's trade-offs to everything. I'd pick the tradeoff that has a healthy planet where things can live indefinitely, rather than killing everything for a brief surge and then everything burns away.
 
I think in the long term, space travel is vital. The fact is that we won't be able to prevent extinction if we stay on just one planet. Admittedly, it's an inevitability no matter what we do, but multiple planets will at least postpone it. Perhaps of to more immediate relevance, modern medicine and industrialized farming are things that have enabling massively better living standards for people. Also, air conditioning is something you really miss when its gone.
 
Kaiya said:
I'm disabled, too. Mentally and physically, incapable all but the most basic physical tasks, and even then not without extreme pain. I would be long dead if I was born any time before about 1990. I stand by my position: it wasn't worth it. There's trade-offs to everything. I'd pick the tradeoff that has a healthy planet where things can live indefinitely, rather than killing everything for a brief surge and then everything burns away.
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I think you have an exaggerated view of the scope of the harm anthropogenic climate change and pollution can cause and I feel that's distorted your priorities. We absolutely can fuck a lot of things up for a very long time and we should dedicate our efforts to averting that but the choice is not in fact between paradise at the cost of eugenics and killing or burning actual literal everything.
 
Zimmerwald1915 said:
And yet. And yet and yet. Even with all that, the Shire-hobbits' neighbors still refer to them derisively as "colonists," and we get lines like Gildor's about how it's not the hobbits' "own Shire," how others were there before hobbits and how others will be there after hobbits are gone. It would appear that a campaign of conquest and genocide a la Joshua's in Canaan is not necessary to render settlement problematic at least.
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Certainly true, but he did still spare them the bloodywork even if he let them cop an occasional derisive epithet or two.

Actually, this reminds me of the Redwall books and associated setting, which certainly had a sizeable influence on the Mouseguard setting and game.

Anyone remember the former? Or am I simply a doddering geriatric? :V
 
Parzival said:
I think in the long term, space travel is vital. The fact is that we won't be able to prevent extinction if we stay on just one planet. Admittedly, it's an inevitability no matter what we do, but multiple planets will at least postpone it. Perhaps of to more immediate relevance, modern medicine and industrialized farming are things that have enabling massively better living standards for people. Also, air conditioning is something you really miss when its gone.
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Meh. When we die we die, so long as we're not trying to make it happen this century. Nothing lasts forever, and space travel is a pipe dream at best, the herald of a new age of horrors at worst.
DanZapman said:
I think you have an exaggerated view of the scope of the harm anthropogenic climate change and pollution can cause and I feel that's distorted your priorities. We absolutely can fuck a lot of things up for a very long time and we should dedicate our efforts to averting that but the choice is not in fact between paradise at the cost of eugenics and killing or burning actual literal everything.
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shrugs Agree to disagree.
 
To make space travel useful you need to be able to create an stabilize a biosphere somewhere, so it's probably behind work on keeping the earth liveable. any situations where you can't do that, you also can't really do anything on other planets, so space travel would be limited to orbital structures and that's kinda pointless scale
 
The idea of space travel as a solution to any of our problems is foolish. Space travel is a scientific curiosity; something to let us see the universe around us. It is not and will never be a solution to what happens here on Earth.
 
Parzival said:
I think in the long term, space travel is vital. The fact is that we won't be able to prevent extinction if we stay on just one planet. Admittedly, it's an inevitability no matter what we do, but multiple planets will at least postpone it. Perhaps of to more immediate relevance, modern medicine and industrialized farming are things that have enabling massively better living standards for people. Also, air conditioning is something you really miss when its gone.
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Define 'long term' -- last I checked, we've got a few billion years, or at least as long as the history of life itself, before whatever sapient species exist here absolutely have to move.
Earth, even one subject to pretty bad climate change, is far, far more habitable than any other planet in our solar system (which wouldn't help with that multi-billion-year deadline anyway), and for the foreseeable future, extrasolar planets are essentially irrelevant for human survival, given just how long it'd take to get anywhere.

Fourthspartan56 said:
To me the answer is a resounding "it was worth it".
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That wasn't the question, as @The Laurent helpfully explained. As I spelled out, I wasn't saying we can go back to pre-industrial civilization, nor that we should; instead, I was saying that industrialization bore marked similarities to industrial warfare itself, that the costs of the Industrial Revolution should not be forgotten any more than the costs of the World Wars. If we hope to change society, we should bear in mind that however we change it will have costs, and try to reduce or mitigate those costs.

***

Anyway, let's get back to roleplaying games and the politics thereof, with this hot take, dealing with player group politics and implicit assumptions about games: tabletop RPGs are better as a collaborative game than as an adversarial game, and PCs should only die permanently if the player is okay with it.
 
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I wonder how many who idealize pre-industrial societies remember all the downsides of said socities. Rule of kings, pillaging being standard military operating procedure, periodical famines, diseases that would wipe out entire communities...
 
Mandemon said:
I wonder how many who idealize pre-industrial societies remember all the downsides of said socities. Rule of kings, pillaging being standard military operating procedure, periodical famines, diseases that would wipe out entire communities...
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Tbf the post that kicked off this derail wasn't doing that, just remarking that the costs of the Industrial Revolution should be remembered alongside the progress it brought.

I think Kaiya is the only one who actually went full on into "it wasn't worth it".
 
Jenny said:
Define 'long term' -- last I checked, we've got a few billion years, or at least as long as the history of life itself, before whatever sapient species exist here absolutely have to move.
Earth, even one subject to pretty bad climate change, is far, far more habitable than any other planet in our solar system (which wouldn't help with that multi-billion-year deadline anyway), and for the foreseeable future, extrasolar planets are essentially irrelevant for human survival, given just how long it'd take to get anywhere.


That wasn't the question, as @The Laurent helpfully explained. As I spelled out, I wasn't saying we can go back to pre-industrial civilization, nor that we should; instead, I was saying that industrialization bore marked similarities to industrial warfare itself, that the costs of the Industrial Revolution should not be forgotten any more than the costs of the World Wars. If we hope to change society, we should bear in mind that however we change it will have costs, and try to reduce or mitigate those costs.

***

Anyway, let's get back to roleplaying games and the politics thereof, with this hot take, dealing with player group politics and implicit assumptions about games: tabletop RPGs are better as a collaborative game than as an adversarial game, and PCs should only die permanently if the player is okay with it.
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Additional unasked for hot take to add onto the hot take at the end: lowering the tone of a notionally serious campaign with extended shenanigans is in a very real sense adversarial play, and while understandable, also a problem.
 
Claudette Savagely said:
Additional unasked for hot take to add onto the hot take at the end: lowering the tone of a notionally serious campaign with extended shenanigans is in a very real sense adversarial play, and while understandable, also a problem.
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That does lead me to wonder about the inverse (heightening the tone of a notionally silly campaign), because my first RPG started very comedic, but we kinda slid into a more dramatic tone. (TBF, that was at the suggestion/instigation of multiple players, myself among them, and we never quite lost the comedy shenanigans, but I do wonder how @Iron Wolf (our GM) actually felt about it).
 
Jenny said:
That does lead me to wonder about the inverse (heightening the tone of a notionally silly campaign), because my first RPG started very comedic, but we kinda slid into a more dramatic tone. (TBF, that was at the suggestion/instigation of multiple players, myself among them, and we never quite lost the comedy shenanigans, but I do wonder how @Iron Wolf (our GM) actually felt about it).
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Good question!

Once again we come to issues surrounding "the GM is playing too".

How into social preference optimisation problems halp am not good with puter??
 
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