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Message: <blockquote data-quote="payn" data-source="post: 8372951" data-attributes="member: 90374">Thinking about the Western genre and rubber foreheads threads has been a bit revealing to me about where my gaming has been going the last 10 years or more. I tend to focus on civilizations, or lack thereof, and factions with large political implications for my settings. I dont really feed into the nuances of cultures such as having green scaly skin or having unique languages. Sometimes I want to explore those things as a player, or my players want to explore them and I will try and indulge. Though, most of the time I ignore those nuances and just focus on conflicts over resources or philosophy and let everyone just be people. With the Western genre for example, I tend to focus on the frontier as the setting. Being an arms length away from civilization were there is opportunity for prospectors, immigrants, and thieves. The conflicts arise from folks trying to establish a foothold against all odds of the roaming lawless and the encroaching empires. Its a place rife for adventure of all kinds, and all types. These types, in their groups, are pretty much multicultural and conflict doesn't arise from their differences specifically. That's how I run the western genre.   You can see this pattern in all the game worlds I run. I tend to focus more on class warfare and political ideology. I do this because I feel most comfortable exploring those elements. I cringe to think about some of the specific historical generalizations I have experienced in gaming. I have experienced discrimination only in a specific way and not a systemic way and dont feel like I can adequately write about it. I see it done well, such as Star Trek Deep Space Nine's Cardassian/Bajoran conflict, or the episode about black sci-fi writers in the American 50's. I also see it done poorly, in my opinion, in work like that which Quentin Tarrentino has done in the last decade with African Americans and Jews. I would love to have the experience and chops to write the former, but it would likely come out like the latter which Id just rather avoid. So this is my approach to Westerns specifically, but also genres generally.</blockquote>

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