Do your Political Views shape how your villains and heroes act?

Luckily, that is unimportant. You hang around alt-righters enough, you begin to think of their viewpoint as normal, I do not so I would notice that, capisce?

What does that have to do at all with this conversation? Please don’t project viewpoints into me that I don’t hold. My politics, if you must know them, are to the left and liberal. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything you say.
 

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doctorbadwolf

Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I agree with that. But I don’t think the mental framework are boundaries. You can think outside the box, so to speak. And since you can do that, it does not necessarily follow that your plots or villains or what-have-yous must necessarily be informed by that framework.

Didn’t say they were boundaries, nor did anyone else to my knowledge. It is inescapable in that it “moves with you”, and influences everything you think and do. It doesn’t determine everything you do, but it’s influence is literally unavoidable.
 

MoonSong

Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
Perhaps

I feel I have been quite clear that I am speaking (a) primarily as an American, and (b) I do not believe that said silence is always or even often intentional. But intent is only part of the equation (I don't believe, as many of my political stripe do, that intent is completely irrelevant); impact matters too.

However this is the internet. We are in an American site owned by an English gentleman with posters from all over the globe and that is this site alone. If you were to find my stuff in the wild you'd never know a thing about myself including my frame of reference.

A work that is very conspicuously not trying to say anything, however? That, I feel, speaks volumes.

Maybe I just don't want to antagonize either side and just share things that come from the heart and reflect my observations on human conduct?
 

Bawylie

A very OK person
Didn’t say they were boundaries, nor did anyone else to my knowledge. It is inescapable in that it “moves with you”, and influences everything you think and do. It doesn’t determine everything you do, but it’s influence is literally unavoidable.

I disagree that it’s unavoidable. :)
 

maruahm

First Post
To try to answer OP's question: my politics heavily impacts the lens through which my games play, but my personal beliefs do not impact the good-evil demarcation I use in my games. As an example of the latter, in a system with mechanical morality like D&D, I understand alignment to follow the natural law tradition in ethics, which is not a view or mode of analysis I am sympathetic to IRL.

In terms of how my political views infect my games, here are some examples: 1) my views on how power is structured, which heavily borrows from de Mesquita, Smith, et al. in Logic of Political Survival, shape how empires and kingdoms function in my fantasy; 2) my views on grand history, which are heavily influenced by Braudel's historiography in The Mediterranean and Civilization and Capitalism; 3) my family's background in a communist country and what it was like to live in one, which impacts my understanding of authority and social capital.

More controversial subjects like immigration in my fantasy games are things which are not impacted by my (generally pro-) views. I have run games depicting immigration as bad, as good, or as something complex and nuanced, often in the same game. I expect my players to understand that my fantasy games do not represent my views, and though I try to have some verisimilitude in my fantasy politics, there are many things that are very different in fantastical situations, such as morality when gods of good and evil exist. And power structures. And so on.

tl;dr Yeah, my politics impact my games, but I try to make sure they're still fun for everyone involved as long as they can understand that the games do not represent even my views. Make-believe is a special place to explore possibilities, not the real world. I have run conservatives and liberals in the same group IRL and never had any problems, but I concede that none of them were particularly radical.

Good question by the way, OP. Just a shame some of the posts are getting heated.
 

S'mon

Legend
Random thought that came through is that do the political views of the DM shape how the stories npc heroes and villains act? My villains tend to be not necessarily super evil, but more on the corrupt official lets get rich people to give me money and i'm decidedly liberal on a lot of my views.

Personally I would tend to strongly avoid drawing any strong real-world parrallels, and I think running fantasy games it's pretty important to avoid making villain expys out of "those guys I hate IRL". Whereas I do use real-world behaviour as a guide to how people behave in my fantasy universe, so eg politicians often tend to behave a lot like real politicians, fanatics behave like real fanatics, and everyone is great at justifying their own behaviour, contrary to the proud-to-be-bad D&D Alignment system.

When I was running science fiction game White Star recently in the Galactic Consortium setting, I probably did use it to take a few pokes at real-world stuff, but low key enough I'm not sure anyone noticed.

Back around 2010 in my Wilderlands setting I created the Black Sun villain network, who were heavily influenced by modern Neo-Nazism, for a more serious than usual campaign influenced by the Balkan wars of the 1990s. They were trying to restore the Empire of Nerath, and wipe out the Altanians who they blamed for its fall. The best way to defeat them was to convince the ordinary Nerathi that the Black Sun were the bad guys, and that the Altanians were not the racial enemies of the Nerathi. So this was a Liberal, Star-Trekky sort of premise. The Altanian PCs instead went into kill-em-all mode, and basically did the Black Sun's work for them, pushed the Nerathi to support the BS, resulting in a massive Black Sun victory. I guess this was influenced by my political view that genocide is bad. :)
 
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Yes, but I try to be subtle. To convince you can't force them to agree with you, and worse if they don't trust you because you disrespected them. I can't tell the evil megacorporations in my settin are Kreml Inc. and Zhongnanhai & Co. I can't write the fantasy rpg version of "the maid's tale" set in the equivalent of an islamic or communist dictatorship because then it would be cheap and annoying propaganda. I use arcane and divine spellcasters like analogies of business and state. The clerics, like the state, tell you they want help and defend you, but you have to obey their rules, and the wizards are feared and envidied by the most of the normal people, and they tell their power is by their effort and talent, but anybody don't believe them.

In my settin evil cults create and rule mason lodges who conspire against the church (and a lot of enemy propaganda), because people with faith are endurace better against supernatural corruption and evil powers. And the fay lords want to rebel against deities in the same way these against the primal titans in the ancient titanomachy. But could the rebel become after a worse tyrant? Do remember the character Paul Atreides from Frank Herbest's Dune saga, a warning against our hopes for the heroes.

In my settin the messages are "don't trust in a economy what is controlled by people who don't suffer consequences when they are wrong because we, the rest of society, pay the broken plates", "if you don't respect the human dignity then when you fight against monsters, you may become like them, without respect for human dignity you can't fight fanaticism nor intolerance", "Galileo Galilei wasn't condemned to death as the French scientist Lavoisier did", "misotheism/anticlericalism may be so dangerous like racism or homophobia"and "anarchy isn't so cool, anarchy is a nerd suffering bullying while teacher do nothing or some intruders ring your door and say you that they like your wife, she has to get a shower now because she will be the next after your daughter".

Other idea is a "mirror universe" to create a satire about our possible prejudices, for example a Earth with superheroes but where America is Communist-Keynesian and Russia and China are Capitalist or pro-free-market, OCP is Russian multinational with links to the maffia who creates war cyborgs and Umbrella Co. is a Chinese megacorp who master genetic engineering. How do you know who are the good and the bad guys?

A controversial matter in the sci-fi is the ectogenesis, creation of sentient beings in an artificial matrix/womb. And what if that technology was used to implant unborns (and being born alive after the right pregnancy time) from mothers who don't want those children? Should be allowed these "empty-mind" children to be the "body hosts" of minds who loaded their memory to a "cortical stack" with transhuman technology? And what if these body doesn't want be punished because the previous mind did any illegal actions, and he was discovered when the government read the memory of that cortical stack to test he remembered to have paid all the taxes? Or he suspect the memories of illegal actions aren't true, with a trick to blackmail him.
 
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Eltab

Lord of the Hidden Layer
Some of the argument upthread seems to be rooted in the philosophical assertions that a person can only react to the circumstances around him, or that he can become something more.
 

dragoner

KosmicRPG.com
It's a well know fact that environment influences people. Part of recognizing that influence, also helps to think outside the box. Though "the lady doth protest too much, methinks"; seems to be playing a part as well.
 

I'm a libertarian myself, and I run a campaign where I prefer to have politically-thoughtful players (not necessarily ones that agree with me) because many of my favorite works of fiction involve politics and philosophy.
 

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