Dungeon Crawl Classics What is cool to you from a player perspective?

[Voadam]

If someone makes their Space Nazis or their Space Confederacy heroic, barring other data to the contrary, you can reasonably infer some things about their worldview.

You then get the question of whether dark satire space marines as the heroic good guys of the 40K universe are taken straight as non satire space Nazi heroes. Judge Dredd gets this too.

 

[Parmandur]

also with the Wheel of Time's Seanchan who are sort of a glorified mythic fantasy Confederacy who are slavers and brilliant military people and administrators and full of honor and the results of their conquering and enslaving people is portrayed as an overall positive thing.

...

That...is not how I read the books. In fact, I'd take it a very different critical direction, that the Seanchan are an Orientalist-tinged negative take on non-Western societies. Not Confederacy apologetics.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If someone writes fan fiction making the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery sides of a conflict morally equivalent, or, worse, the pro-slavery side the good guys, and we choose to completely suspend judgement and shut our eyes to the implications there, that's a moral abdication. As Neil Peart wrote, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Desmond Tutu had some words as well, about people who are neutral regarding injustice.

Your choice to take personal insult to a general point is your own. Your choice to assume the most hostile possible interpretation is your own. It's one I've seen you make a lot. Which is a bummer.

It's a big world, there are a lot of different types and degrees of depictions of unsavory content. I'm not saying that it's always an easy black and white line or that liking fiction with morally-dubious stuff in it is inherent immoral, by any means. But ignoring history and context rarely gets us anyplace good. If someone makes their Space Nazis or their Space Confederacy heroic, barring other data to the contrary, you can reasonably infer some things about their worldview. If they make their Space Federation one where slavery is explicitly protected by interplanetary law, likewise.

My entire point here is simply that I think it's wrong to levy moral judgement on those who don't criticize a given work of fiction to the degree or extent that you do. Whether or not a person calls out a lack of attention to the unsavory aspects of something they are reading doesn't IMO imply anything about them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't know about that, in many things I would really want at least a little more data.

I think even if this isn't applicable to you, it's not hard to look around the world and find examples of people for whom "the noble lost cause" stuff is associated with darker beliefs. I would go as far as to say that, while it's obviously not a 100% correlation, it's a pretty strong one. (And I have a direct ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, before anyone decides I'm some uppity Yankee making pronouncements from atop an ivory tower somewhere.)

If you are in Viking fandom spaces (for lack of a better term), you are almost certainly tripping over people who will occasionally come out with some pretty extreme views in the same way. (The heavy metal scene is open about this being an issue, for instance.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You then get the question of whether dark satire space marines as the heroic good guys of the 40K universe are taken straight as non satire space Nazi heroes. Judge Dredd gets this too.

And whether everyone gets that it's a satire. A lot of the Warhammer 40k memes floating out there are extremely political and are from people who definitely don't seem to get who the bad guys are in the setting.

 

[Argyle King]

Re Firefly: I agree that the browncoats (and the civil war of that show in general) have parallels to the Confederacy from the US Civil War. Though, I would also say that there are elements of the Second Boer War mixed in, as the primary point of contention in Firefly's (fictional) conflict is central authority vs autonomy.

When writing fiction for a contemporary audience, there are times when it is difficult to understand where the line is at between "write what you know" & using touches of real-world inspiration to help with verisimilitude VS causing offense.

Similarly; RPG-wise, the friction between writing for games in which the primary method of conflict resolution often involves unaliving VS a contemporary culture seeking to humanize monsters can be tough to navigate.

A lot of large corporations and gaming companies have grown risk-adverse, and that brings me back on topic to something about Dungeon Crawl Classics that is cool to me as a player.

I like that, generally speaking, Goodman Games does seem care about the people who play their games as people and as human beings. At the same time, Dungeon Crawl Classics is not under the oppressive yolk of corporate overlords, so the game can take chances and try new things.

Right now, there is a Backerkit campaign for a series of adventures based upon pinball machine artwork. It's creative, cool, and something different. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other company writing an adventure that features a half-man/half-motorcycle. Even if there were, there are very few who I believe would do so and somehow manage to make it good.

 

[Smackpixi]

Wow has this thread devolved. I guess no one that cared about OP is still reading, but I will say anyway, as player I liked the character creation via the funnel, it’s sorta like rolling for stats, but you have these rolls ànd try to protect the best one in the opening adventure.

 

[Mannahnin]

What does "deliberately uncritical" even mean? Who gets to determine that someone's else's appreciation for a work of fiction is too "deliberately uncritical" to pass moral judgement?

And your second comment about "useful inferences" is a not-so-subtle way of saying this is an easy way to pass moral judgement on a content creator and those who like their work.

I mean, if someone talks about The Turner Diaries as a simple dystopian story, yeah, that's a problem. And yes, something bad does happen. For example, I love the stories of Robert E. Howard, but there's a whole lot of racism and sexism in them, full stop. Not discussing those issues marginalizes people, creating a hostile environment for them in the fandom. You can enjoy stuff while still being critical of it.

If someone writes fan fiction making the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery sides of a conflict morally equivalent, or, worse, the pro-slavery side the good guys, and we choose to completely suspend judgement and shut our eyes to the implications there, that's a moral abdication. As Neil Peart wrote, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Desmond Tutu had some words as well, about people who are neutral regarding injustice.

Your choice to take personal insult to a general point is your own. Your choice to assume the most hostile possible interpretation is your own. It's one I've seen you make a lot. Which is a bummer.

It's a big world, there are a lot of different types and degrees of depictions of unsavory content. I'm not saying that it's always an easy black and white line or that liking fiction with morally-dubious stuff in it is inherent immoral, by any means. But ignoring history and context rarely gets us anyplace good. If someone makes their Space Nazis or their Space Confederacy heroic, barring other data to the contrary, you can reasonably infer some things about their worldview. If they make their Space Federation one where slavery is explicitly protected by interplanetary law, likewise.

My entire point here is simply that I think it's wrong to levy moral judgement on those who don't criticize a given work of fiction to the degree or extent that you do. Whether or not a person calls out a lack of attention to the unsavory aspects of something they are reading doesn't IMO imply anything about them.

I think, as I already said, that there's room for nuance. As Voadam pointed out and eloquently illustrated, for example.

OTOH there are obvious edge cases. If someone enthusiastically recommends that their friends read The Turner Diaries, or Barker's Serpent's Walk, without any caveats about these being white supremacist or Nazi documents, I think we all would be right in looking askance at that person and inferring that their motives or worldview are perverse and antisocial, barring other solid evidence to the contrary.

In the gaming world we rarely get as obvious instances as NuTSR's Star Frontiers: New Genesis or Varg Vikernes' Myfarog explicitly encoding and endorsing white supremacist concepts in the text. Not all WS or otherwise anti-egalitarian writers so explicitly put their odious beliefs into their work. Other writers are more subtle, and leave more room for doubt or plausible deniability.

The degree to which any given person feels a desire not to share and endorse work by creators who hold and promulgate repugnant beliefs but don't explicitly put them into their games is up to the conscience of the individual.

Of course it's also a spectrum, with SF:NG and Myfarog at one end, games with no messages of bigotry showing in them at the other, and ones which might more subtly signal opposition to civil and human rights somewhere in the middle. Ones that whitewash the Confederacy, say. Promulgating Lost Cause propaganda, for instance.

"Who gets to determine"? We all do. And I would argue that we each have a responsibility to. Different people will naturally make varying choices according to their own moral compasses. But just as onlookers will judge if we see a person steal or lie or abuse a helpless person, we may understandably note when a person endorses the work of someone like Varg or Dave Johnson or even Macris without any caveats. Before this thread I was unaware that Goodman had published a game which puts Confederates (in space) on an equal moral footing with the Union (in space), and has the players start in the friendly spaceport of New Savannah, where space pioneers embark on a Westward Expansion for adventures in colonial conquest. That kind of triggers my ick, I have to admit. And it contextualizes their choice to work with an outspoken WS and to lie about the arrangement a little differently. It makes me a little less likely to give Goodman the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Voadam]

I think even if this isn't applicable to you, it's not hard to look around the world and find examples of people for whom "the noble lost cause" stuff is associated with darker beliefs. I would go as far as to say that, while it's obviously not a 100% correlation, it's a pretty strong one. (And I have a direct ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, before anyone decides I'm some uppity Yankee making pronouncements from atop an ivory tower somewhere.)

Yes, but for viewing say Deadlands I do not know if it was an attempt to make it a glorification or whitewashing of the Confederacy or an attempt to make a gameable Weird West with no slavery but a plot element of

Spoiler

a demon lord caused

prolongation of the Civil War

Spoiler

on both sides so as to feed on the misery of big war

and giving people from the American South as a playable option.

If you are in Viking fandom spaces (for lack of a better term), you are almost certainly tripping over people who will occasionally come out with some pretty extreme views in the same way. (The heavy metal scene is open about this being an issue, for instance.)

I expect if I was in such a fandom space and not just a fan I would.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think even if this isn't applicable to you, it's not hard to look around the world and find examples of people for whom "the noble lost cause" stuff is associated with darker beliefs. I would go as far as to say that, while it's obviously not a 100% correlation, it's a pretty strong one. (And I have a direct ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, before anyone decides I'm some uppity Yankee making pronouncements from atop an ivory tower somewhere.)

If we see someone pushing Lost Cause mythology/historical revisionism we've got a couple of possibilities. Genuine (hopefully correctable) ignorance, or entrenched bigotry. Unfortunately some of the latter is usually mixed in even when it's the former, IME.

If you are in Viking fandom spaces (for lack of a better term), you are almost certainly tripping over people who will occasionally come out with some pretty extreme views in the same way. (The heavy metal scene is open about this being an issue, for instance.)

I avoided participating in Norse paganism for decades because I didn't want to need to be constantly on the lookout for neo-nazis. I only got involved when I learned there were a couple of explicitly inclusive, anti-racist groups in my area.