Tabletop Games Thread

[mAc Chaos]

FATE is plenty mechanical. It has the usual bonuses and skills and stuff. It's just that it lets the players apply a lot of extra bonuses on top based off their character traits, and the game runs off this back and forth.

You know what? Have you ever played D&D 5e? You know how characters have personality traits like drawbacks, flaws, bonds, ideals, etc? And that the game recommends letting you get inspiration or roll with advantage when you lean into those? It doesn't happen often because it's sort of an afterthought in 5e, but that concept came from FATE. FATE builds the entire game around it. One of the "problems" with knowing when to give inspiration is what counts as leaning into it. If a player is very mechanical minded they might want to know EXACTLY how many feet they need to rush towards someone for it to count as a reckless charge, if their character is supposed to be a hot head as their flaw. In 5e most of the time it doesn't matter, but FATE has your main character trait based on concepts like this.

You pick an aspect, which is basically a description of your character, a title. Let's take my avatar, Perfect Cell. If I was using him as a character, I might make his aspect "the perfect being", that being a genetically engineered super fighter who has traits from all the other martial arts characters. There is no list of aspects, it's just whatever you want it to be and the GM approves. OK, so what does this do exactly? Nothing, on its own.

But when it's time to do some sort of action, in the same way a player might try to pull from his backstory to ask if it helps, like they might say "hey in my backstory I used to be raised by orcs, so would that help me understand these orc bandits we just ran into better", I might say, "as the perfect being, I have the same martial arts knowledge as all these other fighters, so it helps me with this roll to learn what martial arts style this other guy is using." The difference is in the former, it's purely the player basically asking if it's OK and the DM allowing it, while in the latter the game encourages the player to just lead with it and only if it's really crazy would the DM disallow it.

The DM can also draw on your aspect to put you in tight spots, using the same aspect -- a good aspect should have a good and bad side, not just be all good. For example, as "the perfect being" who has all of the other characters' traits, like Saiyans, the DM might say that I have to spare the characters I just beat because I would want to have a better fight. And I would have to go along with this (or pay some extra resources to overcome it, sometimes).

So as you can see, it requires the player being a good sport in not trying to constantly push the things they get out of their aspects to absurd lengths while at the same time using them to get most of their advantages, while also being the source of their disadvantages. And this is a negotiation done on the player to GM level rather than something the character has any idea about or decision about, in-game.

It is basically mechanizing how your character concept would impact the game without breaking it down to a ton of different separate skills and abilities you build out.

[Random]

So it works better when there's more rapport - or at least trust - between player and GM, and a solid ability to read the room on at least the part of the latter. That makes a lot of sense, definitely a strong argument against jumping right in with this system.

[Ratman]

In Bioessentialist Birthright...
Wait, actually, I cannot imagine that at all. If you're writing a game of court intrigue and don't even have 'ew that guy's bloodline is worse than mine', then you don't really have anything. Even if indeed you are writing that as a case study of why bloodline quality may not necessarily determine one's mettle. If you don't even let yourself write the conflict at all, it's all over.

[Random]

That thread is unhinged but there are some salient points to be made about overcorrection here when you're removing references to traditional beliefs and practices that would be suspect if they were justified, like the whole "driders are shunned as impure" thing or changing "breeding quaggoths" to "recruiting" as if they're submitting resumes and going for interviews. You're already ascribing these things to an entire race anyway - it doesn't make it less bioessentialist to sand the edges off the darker parts.

[Five_X]

It's on one hand a classic example of the flattening effect of consumer capitalism. All those edges are sanded off with the ideal of appealing to every possible demographic, enabling infinite growth and recursive profits. That this is unsustainable in the long-term gets forgotten. This material component is crucial, and this whole phenomenon wouldn't be nearly as prevalent without it.

On the other, I think it's representative of how self-consciously inward-looking Anglophone culture has become lately. You can read twenty different essays or articles or books and you'll hear not twenty but only one voice. There's so little playfulness with language and seemingly little joy in just making art that comes from the self. Maybe in that sense it's less literally inward-looking and more excessively outward-looking, a kind of anxiety about separating the perceived world into subjects and objects. I for one am not entirely sure that the injustices in our society can be fixed by changing some words in a tabletop roleplaying game manual, but that's the strange kind of scenario we've collectively wound up in. I think eventually it'll become more clear over time that linguistic overcorrections like these are boring and unsatisfying, and don't help anyone.

[Ideofago]

If we cannot be, then at least I will be. But who can I be without we?

[mAc Chaos]

Now that I know captives are held in quarters for the enslaved instead of slave pens, I can rest easy. I was worried for a moment.

[Random]

little joy in just making art that comes from the self

To be fair, they're not. I don't think anyone would argue that D&D is one of the most aggressively corporate franchises that exists right now. Art isn't made by one person and all that, but we're so far from the idea of an "author" at this point that it's easy to forget that there are people who have to actually write these books.

I for one am not entirely sure that the injustices in our society can be fixed by changing some words in a tabletop roleplaying game manual, but that's the strange kind of scenario we've collectively wound up in. I think eventually it'll become more clear over time that linguistic overcorrections like these are boring and unsatisfying, and don't help anyone.

I don't think whoever is stamping this iteration is doing it to "save the world". It's just that it's more profitable to seem actively eager to be inclusive - granted, for good reason, it's a TTRPG - without actually understanding the driving ethos of the modern progressive movement. Some of these changes, even the ones selected by this tweet eager to make them look insane, are completely fine and inoffensive. I think it's actually a good thing to broaden the baddies of that one adventure from "orcs" to "raiders", since there's obviously more freedom in that. But since they so clearly are only interested in keeping up appearances (which is really all they can do anyway because they're literally WotC), everything is superficial, and only the superficiality matters, which will be very obvious when they overdo it.

Which makes all the difference, right? Masiff Press, for example, explicitly designs games through their progressive political lens on purpose, and you would never catch Lancer doing this shit.

[Five_X]

Yeah, that's why I mentioned consumer capital first. I don't think you can understand one (corporate puritanism) without the other (intellectual pseudoprogressivism).

[Cypher Attic]

I didn't even think quaggoths were sentient… regardless I find this sanitization of the FR stupid considering this is a setting where blood magic exists (and was meant to be used by PCs).

Also, I heard that they were removing terms like "witch", "shaman", and "druid" to avoid offending people. Yet druids died out before Anglo-Saxons conquered England, witch is only used as a religious term by modern sex cults that culturally appropriate old (often non-European) religions, and shamans aren't even tied to any particular religion.

(I know some people still use the term druid, but it's an identical situation to witches and has additional ties to British ultra-nationalism.)

[Deathhappens]

In Bioessentialist Birthright...
Wait, actually, I cannot imagine that at all. If you're writing a game of court intrigue and don't even have 'ew that guy's bloodline is worse than mine', then you don't really have anything. Even if indeed you are writing that as a case study of why bloodline quality may not necessarily determine one's mettle. If you don't even let yourself write the conflict at all, it's all over.

This reminds me of a scandal in Greece a few years ago, when a history book described the massacre at Smyrne (Izmir, nowadays) in 1922 with the word "overcrowded".
While much of the ensuing furor was purely for political capital, the fact remains that trying to paper over distasteful aspects of human nature (whether in historical fact or in a fantasy setting which still very much reflects it) can only ever be harmful for the people reading it in the long term. You can't eliminate racism (just to choose an example) by refusing to talk about racism. Quite the opposite.