Shallow Mobbin'

"Race fails on several fronts when it comes to describing fantasy peoples like elves, dwarves and..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:57:00 -0400

“Race fails on several fronts when it comes to describing fantasy peoples like elves, dwarves and wierdo dragon people.*”

- 1) It implies categories that lead to all kinds of discriminatory garbage in the real world.

2) In the real world, these categories are also shaky at best when they’re examined scientifically. (NOTE: Nature>nurture fans, your science is old and busted. How do Epigenetics? This applies to recent gender-essentialist arguments about RPGs too.)

3) The idea that these differences can create extreme, measurable competence differences is contentious and probably just stupid, and attaching the term to a game template suggests that kind of garbage.

4) The transfer of this term and associated ideas/symbols has already done damage by recreating racist caricatures in fantasy “races.” Tolkien admitted that orcs were explicitly based on a racist conception of Asians. In D&D’s Mystara, humanoid cultures were openly rendered straight transfers of racist stereotypes. (Look at Orcs of Thar. God.) In Eberron, dark elves reproduce racist stereotypes about Africans. This stuff is already making gaming suck, but it doesn’t have to.

5) The same dynamic works the other way by identifying humanity with whiteness, and non-whiteness with inhumanity. Monte Cook has written about how the interplay between fantasy race and human ethnicity influenced WotC’s art direction to marginalize certain groups.

6) The ethnicities encompassed by human “race” divisions can happen within a fictional group. There are Asian and North American First Nations Atlanteans in Woundgate/World of Darkness: Mirrors, for example, and black halflings in D&D4e.

7) There are examples of fantasy peoples who are interspecies, artificially created or transformed from another type, none of which fit the term “race.” It’s stupid to stick to “race” just to appease some lame tradition of terminology that doesn’t even succeed in describing its subject properly.

* I guess I think it’s okay to discriminate against wierdo dragon people.

This is what my son can do.

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:55:34 -0400

This is what my son can do.

RPG Systems and the Focus on Fighting

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:21:00 -0400

On three occasions I’ve arranged fight scenes for plays: one fencing scene for Twelfth Night, one wrestling bout for As You Like It, and one stick to stick for a soap set in medieval England. Stage combat is hard. It probably represents the greatest effort per second of performance on the part of the actors. You need to learn a set from what is basically an intentionally erroneous martial art and then act as if these movements are not only spontaneous, but reflect the characters, the purpose of the scene — even the historical context in which moves like those might occur, if you’re feeling picky (and some folks *are* that picky).

This does not mean that Twelfth Night, As You Like It or the soap are primarily about hand to hand combat.

Think on that when you’re about to argue that a game is hypocritical for saying it’s about interpersonal drama even though it features decompressed, multi-step combat.

The Essential Things in Vampire: The Masquerade

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:59:00 -0400

So as I was saying on Twitter too Daniel Perez, it’s easy for people to take the too-obvious way to “addressing theme.” They want something to be about Fear so there’s the Fear Trait that you roll and spend and invoke.

But good games get an effect not from getting right to it, but by making the effect emergent, so that it’s not a labelled pretence but an experience beyond the sum of its parts.

So in Vampire, we don’t “Roll the Beast.” It just makes it repetitive and banal. Instead we have relationships between traits. There’s Humanity vs. Blood. To get blood, you need to risk Humanity. There’s Willpower and Nature. To get Willpower faster you need to satisfy your nature beyond any strategic goal (Requiem does this a bit better with Virtue and Vice, though this is hobbled because they aren’t concrete enough).

These interactions make the catchphrase “Beast I am, least Beast I become,” come to life. “Beast I am (to survive without recourse to the Beast, I must behave in passionate ways that violate my strict self interest) lest Beast I become (to stave off the Beast when it threatens I need Blood, which I must acquire by wagering my humanity through violence).”

These interactions project the theme into the game’s fiction without being crowded by strict identification with a single game trait; they are not reflexively reduced to the shallow accounting of systems.

And that’s why Vampire works.

Testin'

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:37:58 -0400

Here I am on Tumblr, for when I want to spend more than 140 characters saying something trivial or ill-considered.