Happy Solstice Weekend

No post today: I've been swamped between Masonic stuff, the Solstice, writing work, and now I'm about to run DCC in a few hours (this weekend's Traveller game had to be cancelled; that's how busy I've been!).

So, if you want me to be able to prioritize the blog more, please consider clicking on that paypal donation button to your right!  It's like "Patreon" for normal people.

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Lorenzetti Solitario Egg + Gawith's Navy Flake

Thinking of Game Design as the Whole Package

So in a recent blog entry, someone compared Gary Gygax in terms of ability as a game designer to the Sex Pistols.  It was not meant to be a flattering comparison, as the implication was that the Sex Pistols succeeded by accident and were not actually good musicians.

I think the Sex Pistols comparison is incredibly apt, in fact. Because you have all these idiots imagining themselves music critics who go around saying "the sex pistols were shit (insert band here) are so much better"; ignoring that the Sex Pistols accomplished what said band could never fucking hope to do. Their argument is not based on a holistic view of what it takes to be great musicians, because they think only (insert thing they care about here: guitar skills, lyrics, whatever) is what makes a 'good' musician. And they're wrong.

Mentzer, for example, was akin to a good guitarist; he may have been better at taking Gygax's genius and reworking it into a more basically comprehensible set of rules, for example. But he was no Gary fucking Gygax.

You get this bullshit from certain Gygax-haters all the time who are always trying to claim that someone else should be praised as the great early-figure in RPGs (usually Arneson, but I've heard others). But that's bullshit. Gygax was the Whole Package, and thus the one who made it happen, and thus a great game designer. Designing a game is more than just designing clever little mechanics, which is why the assholes who make obsessive and intricate heartbreakers full of point-buy complexity are losers and not the kings of the genre. It's why the Forge never got anywhere (though even the Forge understood to some degree the value of other factors of design, often better than a lot of the fucking bizarro-grognard-nerds who shit on Gygax). 

Conversely, it is why (although he's a lesser light than Gygax) Kevin Siembieda Won the Hobby: he became the Last Man Standing of the original industry because he's a brilliant game designer even though he's only at best a so-so mechanics-writer and a poor-to-terrible businessman.

(Siembieda: The Jerry Lee Lewis of the RPG Hobby)


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10th Anniversary Classic Rant: Aquelarre, and the Fucking Basques!

So, have any of you bought Cthulhu Dark Ages, or were thinking of doing so?

Well fucking don't. Here's what you do to get your medieval dark magic kick instead: Take a class in Spanish, and buy Aquelarre.

Aquelarre, by Ricardo Ibañez, is basically a total rip-off of the Cthulhu system, set in an ultra-realistic Spain between 1300-1450, with supernatural horrors of the medieval kind. Yes, instead of foul tentacle-things man was not meant to know, you have the entire pantheon of demonic entities in the Inferno of the Catholic Church and Dante, plus the weird and often uber-creepy creatures of Spanish, Catalan and especially Basque mythology.

Fucking Basques. Goddamned descendants of the little people with their weird bizarre language with no known etymological roots and their strange totally alien pagan beliefs and their absolute resistance to cultural immersion, fucking should've been wiped out thousands of years ago but somehow manage to survive, hide in caves in those fucking mountains of theirs...

Goddamnit, I despise the Basques. They're plotting you know! They're out to call forth the outer gods when the stars are right and destroy us all! 
And I should fucking know! After all, I'm one-quarter Basque! My grandmother was an Errandonea! Euskal Erria!

(these aren't monsters or witches or anything, they're just "normal" medieval Basques)



Fuck, where was I?

Oh yes; Aquelarre. This game is brilliant. Its a house-ruled version of the BRP/CoC system with a few adjustments for setting's sake. The combat system is a little more detailed, which is a good thing.
The character creation system borrows from WFRP in that you don't get to choose your social background, its determined by random roll. And of course you have a far better chance of being a peasant than anything else. This works really well in an "authentic" medieval RPG; as long as the odds aren't made so ridiculous that they aren't worth having. In our game last night, we actually had one High Noble (son of a Baron), one Jewish Burgher, one Villain (in the old sense of the word, a city-dweller), and only one Peasant. The players did get extremely lucky on their rolls mind you (well, except the Peasant, obviously).

Another clever part of the system is how instead of "sanity" points, you have "rationality/irrationality": These are two stats that have to add to 100, and work as percentages. The more rational you are, the less irrational you are. High Rationality gives you more resistance to magic and the supernatural, but also means it will work for you less. High Irrationality means you're fairly nuts by modern 21st century standards, but you can understand and use the supernatural better. And of course, being exposed to supernatural entities and magicks means that you will lose points of Rationality, and gain Irrationality. Unless you DESTROY those things and BURN whoever brought them about, in which case you gain Rationality. That's right; burning heretics, witches and sorcerers is built into the game mechanic!

The system couldn't be grittier if you dumped a sandbox on it. When the Spaniards say "Medieval Roleplaying" they fucking mean it.

Think I'm being hyperbolic? In last night's game two of the four PCs died. But not from combat or the supernatural, no. They died from fucking Cholera.

And they've all begged me to play again. Some of them want it to replace the Wilderlands campaign as our regular campaign.

So, if you read Spanish, or are willing to pay someone to translate the game for you, get Aquelarre. It has RPGPundit's Guaranteed Anti-Swine Seal of Approval.

RPGPundit 

(Originally posted April 16, 2006)

More on Defining Identity and Rachel Dolezal

My latest article on Everyjoe has proven to be a big source of attention; according to the Invincible Overlord, it's one of my most-read articles in my history of writing there. It also generated tons of comments not only on the site but all over G+ where it was posted.

Naturally the core of the debate has been about the question of what gets to determine identity?  Some have insisted it should be on the basis of biology; even some of the people that admit that genetics has very little relationship to what we (in our culture) actually define as "race" (or "gender", or "sexual orientation") still feel that this is somehow the only 'logical' determinant.
Others feel that in the case of race, it should be skin colour that determines identity.
Still others try to argue that it should be culture.
But there are some very good reasons why none of these actually make the best determinant, and what we're left with is individual self-determination.

Let's use race as our case study, because that's at the heart of the Dolezal story:

There have been cases of fraternal twins of biracial couples (or just plain siblings) where one comes out looking every bit as blonde as Rachel Dolezal used to, and the other black-skinned.
If you judge by skin colour then only one of those two would be black.
If you judge by genetics, then they're both black but an adopted sibling that didn't have black parents wouldn't be.
If you judge by upbringing then the black child raised from infancy by a Dutch couple would not be black.

If a white kid was adopted by black parents as a baby, raised by them, and felt he identified as black, would he not be black?

And, conversely:  let's say a child was BORN of black parents, but with skin so white as to 'pass' as completely caucasian.  He identifies as black.

If the first kid is "not black", wouldn't the second also be "not black"?

As to what any of this might have to do with me: I'm half-latino, but you'd never know it to look at me. I have blue eyes and my skin is whiter than some vampires.  Does that make me "not latino"?

If I am latino anyways in spite of the colour of my skin, is it just by virtue of my birth?  Or is it because I was raised by a latino mother with hispanic cultural elements, language, and values?

If the former, does that mean that someone who was adopted right after birth, is latino but doesn't 'look it', and was raised by white German-descended Americans who raised him to 'hate mexicans' would also still be latino? Even if he in no way identified with the culture, didn't know the language, doesn't have the slightest clue of his real ancestry, and despised the people?

Or, if some other pale-skinned boy with no latino history lived in a latino neighbourhood, spoke fluent Spanish with the particular dialect of the people around him, knew all the customs, and spent 15 years of his adult life working for social causes on their behalf, would that make him Still Not A Latino, even though he's culturally WAY more latino than Minuteman-Border-Patrol Lad and probably "more latino" than I am in spite of my genetics and the fact I live in a South American country?

The problem with all this reasoning is that by any standard other than self-defining identity, you're going to end up saying to some people that they're Not This Race who would be absolutely indistinguishable in every other respect from people you arbitrarily decide do count.

Self-identification is the only way that makes sense here. And the fear that this will lead to a bunch of 'fakers' that will be just 'pretending' to be a race they aren't for some sort of nefarious purpose seems to me about as unfounded and hateful as the 'fears' some fundamentalists expressed about how transgender rights would lead to "perverts cross-dressing to get to go into women's changing rooms".

The real reason a lot of the identity-politics Left and the religious Right are so determined to find some criteria other than self-determination is because they are Collectivists. They want to get to control Identity as a way to control people: to say "you don't belong to this group" or "you get to be a special protected group" (which they must then prevent the 'wrong' people from 'appropriating') or "this group gets to be X while the other gets to be Y" as a measure of social control.  It's the same from left OR right; whether it's about controlling gender to control sex in order to control people, or whether its about keeping women 'in their place' or whether it's about having a 'narrative' that attacks certain collective-defined groups by painting other collective-defined groups as Perpetual Victims.  In ALL cases, letting people get to define their own identity fucks up the agenda. 

Which is, of course, pretty much the best argument for why we should do exactly that. 

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking:  Lorenzetti Solitario Egg + Gawith's Navy Flake

Game of Thrones Finale Contemplations

So unlike most of the planet, I didn't watch the season finale of Game of Thrones until last night.  That's because I go to my friend Bill the Elf's apartment to watch it: he has one of those awesome full-wall projectors, surround sound, plus the guy is a top-trained chef who cooks something fucking amazing every single week.  All this adds up to me being willing to postpone satisfaction for 48 hours, often at great risk of spoilers, just for the whole-package experience.

Anyways, now I have watched it, and it was good, but you know what my first thought was as the final credits rolled?  Not "oh my god they killed him" or "what a disappointing fucking end for that guy", or "wait, are those two just dead, then?" or "are those guys going to enslave her or make her their queen again?" or "jesus fuck Arya is a badass".
No, the first thought that spontaneously came to my head was "Not bad, but my Dark Albion campaign is better right now".  I kid you not.  I did a bit of a double-take right after that, but it's true.

Of course, Albion has a few advantages: it's happening in the theater of the mind, unlimited budget in imaginationland, etc. etc., but special effects has never been a weak spot for GoT.  It's based on real history, which to me at least is if anything more interesting than putting one's own spin on real history; but of course others might not agree.

Mostly though, it wasn't really so much a question of praising my own Albion campaign, however excellent it's been going, as it has been on how, in spite of still being really awesome, this season of GoT was undoubtedly the weakest one yet.  It felt like an intermediate season; while other seasons often started slow and built up to really huge events at the end, this one felt like it was going at a middle-pace all season long and built up to nothing; or rather, it is probably building up to whatever will happen NEXT season.  In all likelihood there's no more than two seasons left to GoT after this, and now that's quite clear, particularly with this season finale where a number of major players were taken off the board.  The endgame is approaching, but at the point where the season cut out it was like the storylines were more rambling and disconnected than ever. Nothing had very much to do with anything else this season, and I think that somewhat hurt the pace and feel of the show.

I get it though, where they're at is the lull, the equivalent in the Albion campaign of that period from 1472 to 1481 where the Rose War wasn't actually being fought in any significant way. When I was DMing my campaign, I was worried that this period would end up going glacially and feeling very blase, but instead it turned out to be hugely productive, and has had a steady if slow buildup to the climactic period of the campaign from 1483-85  (we're on 1481 right now).  So in that sense, again noting that as a GM rather than a director I had way more freedom blah blah blah, I think I handled the "slow period between major events" quite a lot better than GoT did with its five utterly disconnected plotlines.

Not saying I didn't have fun, though.  Just really wondering if next season this will end up quickly shifting into going somewhere and building up intensity again, or if we're going to have another season of this.

RPGPundit

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Everyjoe Tuesday: Remember When Feminists Hated Trans People? It Sounds a Lot Like Hate for Rachel Dolezal Now...

Today, on Everyjoe, we talk about how just about EVERYTHING that the left is saying about Rachel Dolezal today is like what the radical feminists used to say about trans people. I guess the right to define one's own identity only matters when it's convenient to your cause...

Please retweet it, share it, go comment, +1 it, etc. etc.


RPGPundit

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10th Anniversary Classic Rant: Gary Gygax: The Original Pundit

You gotta give it to Uncle Playdoh, he's the man. Take a look at this quote, from a while back:

"There is a small but extremely vocal segment of the hardcore RPG audience, consisting of game designer-publishers and their dedicated fans, that views the game form as being something other than it is. This element believes that "story" and theatrical elements are the true substance of the game form. As the D&D game is action-adventure oriented, and the most popular RPG, it has become the target to attack by this group. It appears that the thinking in this regard is that if the 3E D&D game can be made less dominant in the marketplace, then the door will be opened for their own game products. So the debate continues. 
Perhaps there is merit in the novel theory of what the role-playing game is all about, but current successes seem to point toward combat and the heroic as remaining the themes that attract players. The 3E D&D game, and its open-source approach, will stand or fall on its own merits. My bet is that the much-abused "hack and slash" RPG format will continue to dominate the marketplace regardless of what happens, for it doesn't preclude other aspects, merely centers on the heroic fight. Hoary as the underlying concept might be, the attraction of this sort of adventure has been popular since Homer's time."

He's the man.


RPGPundit

(Originally posted march 24, 2006)