Quote from: Cranewings;426948The whole Deadlands thing just strikes me as so fucking stupid.

I'd love to play some Brisco County Jr., but not this shit.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts on Deadlands. The closest I've come to this was running a small series of CoC adventures set around that time.

Quote from: RPGPundit;426334Often, yes.  Like, for example, if you say "the Confederacy were just joshing about all that slavery stuff! That wasn't what really mattered to them at all, and at the first real opportunity they'd do a full 180 and become such an inclusive culture that black men could become army officers!".

That's racist revisionist history.

RPGPundit

Deadlands isn't racist.

The end.

Quote from: Cranewings;426948The whole Deadlands thing just strikes me as so fucking stupid.

I'd love to play some Brisco County Jr., but not this shit.

A Briscoverse would be a lot lower magic level though. I like how Deadlands handles the magic.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;426975Deadlands isn't racist.

The end.

If that is how you want to see it, I don't think anyone can alter your view.

But for some of us, it's some of the most blatantly racist gaming material we've ever seen. I am in that camp.

I used to play the Dead Lands card game, sense I was huge into the L5R cards and it was by the same company. I just remember thinking that it was really shallow by comparison.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;426975Deadlands isn't racist.

The end.

Wow, the "toddler retort".  How useful.

Do you want to try again, this time trying to argue how it is that my argument about what they did re. the Confederacy does not amount to racism (intentional or not)? Or do you want to start to cry, call me a big meanie, and go off to sulk in your playpen?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;427220Do you want to try again, this time trying to argue how it is that my argument about what they did re. the Confederacy does not amount to racism (intentional or not)?

Let me take a stab at this, even though I don't like what Deadlands did and have never played it.

Hogans Heroes is a comedy set in a German POW camp during WW2.  The Gestapo show up but the germans are largely depicted as bumblers and it's played for laughs.  Was it anti-semitic because it ignores the Holocaust?

The US TV series Wonder Woman started out taking place during WW2 with Wonder Woman fighting Nazis.  Was it anti-semitic because it ignores the Holocaust and Wonder Women never tried to rescue those held in concentration camps?

The US TV series the Dukes of Hazzard featured a car called the General Lee with a big Confederate battle fag on the roof.  Was that racist because it ignored the racial elements of the Confederacy, even though it was clear in the course of the show that Duke family wasn't racist?

There are plenty of great classic Science Fiction movies made during the 1950s that feature all white casts that don't acknowledge the racism of the day.  Is it racist to enjoy When Worlds Collide and not notice or dwell on the fact that everyone saved from destruction is white?

Alex Ross created a graphic novel where Superman goes on a mission to feed the starving people of the world.  Should a superhero take a vacation or kick back and have any fun so long as there are starving people in the world and people being oppressed by despots big and small?  

There is currently a controversy where Armenian groups are complaining about Kobe Bryant's two-year endorsement deal with Turkish Airlines because of the Armenian genocide.  Is that really necessary?

No doubt the Holocaust, slavery, Armenian genocide, and countless other atrocities, both recent and historical, were truly horrible and should not be forgotten or dismissed, but is it possible to do any work of fiction that depicts Nazis without acknowledging the Holocaust or the Confederacy without acknowledging racism?  Is it possible for fiction to forget some of the suffering in the world, the starvation, sex slavery, child abuse, and so on so that adventures can be light and fun?  Is it impossible to say or do anything nice for a Turkish company until the Turkish government makes amends to the Armenians?

It seems to me that we are digging deeper and deeper to find offense and are actually creating it on purpose where people would not naturally find offense.  People wouldn't be offended by many of these things if they weren't told to be, including some of the people who you might think should be.

Nobody that I know of was hinting that the Dukes of Hazzard was racist in the 1980s, yet when they tried to make a Dukes of Hazzard movie recently, the General Lee became controversial.  The problem is that the Confederate battle flag was certainly used by racists and certainly symbolizes the side that fought for slavery, but for many people, it simply symbolized "Southerness", which is about a whole lot more than racism, including a few rappers.  

Similarly, I never really noticed that everyone at the end of When Worlds Collide was white.  That was pointed out to me via a blog by a black science fiction fan who said her father asked her, "So where are the black people?" when she was watching movies like that, and I think it's a fair criticism.  However, I asked a black science fiction fan friend if that had bothered him and he hadn't really noticed, either, because he didn't have an adult demanding that he notice.  And nobody (or almost nobody) noticed that the Dukes of Hazzards' car had a racism angle until they were forced to notice that, too.  For most people, it just meant "Southern", just like Catherine Bach's fake Southern belle accent.

There are many things that can be looked at from two sides like that, and the side you look at will determine the tone.  When talking about America during WW2, do you want to focus on the horrible things that the Nazis and Japanese did and how the Americans defeated them or do you want to dwell on the atrocities committed by American troops and the racism in America and even in the military?  Can you focus on one without committing a horrible injustice to the other?  

So I think that the motivation for Deadlands was to keep the interesting non-racist trappings of antebellum Confederacy and a divided United States while not making slavery a huge issue in the game, which it most certainly would have been had they not gotten rid of it in the setting.  Firefly did the same thing, by putting the arguments of the Confederacy and States Rights libertarians in the mouths of Browncoats who were not fighting to defend slavery.  It was Whedon's attempt to capture what it felt like to be on the losing side of the Civil War without the racism and slavery issue casting a moral shadow over the fight.

In many ways, this goes right back to the arguments about pulp fiction and racism surrounding Spirit of the Century and Bruce Baugh's proposed New Horizons supplement (never completed) that was designed to focus on the racism, sexism, anti-gay, and (apparently) anti-communist sentiments of the historical period in question, precisely because people were bothered by those things being swept under the carpet in pulp nostalgia games.  

So if you can't enjoy a Deadlands Confederacy that sweeps the racism and slavery under the rug to keep them from becoming issues in play, should you enjoy a pulp game that not only sweeps the bigotries of the early 20th Century under the rug but may even play on some of them as archetypes integral to the genre?  Should you enjoy a WW2 game that doesn't dwell on the Holocaust or Rape of Nanking and focuses, instead, on adventures like Von Ryan's Express or The Guns of Navarone?  Can you play a retro 1950s science fiction game that doesn't dwell on the racism of that period?

As I've said elsewhere, even the monstrous evil races in D&D play on the same psychology that racists do when they depict other races as sub-human monsters to be feared.  This is why things like inherently evil races and killing orcs without pause trouble some people as being racist, because if you interpret those monstrous humanoids as being human with a choice between Good and Evil, it pretty much is.  So are the people who take those evil races at face value, as being inherently evil subhuman monsters, engaging in, flirting in, or mocking real racism because they don't?

Yes, I think that was Deadlands does is implausible and silly, but I don't think the motivation was malicious or racism nor the result inherently racist.  That is, of course, unless you are willing to apologize the Bruce Baugh and help him finish his New Horizons supplement for Spirit of the Century so that pulp games like that don't get away with sweeping their racism under the carpet or can explain why sweeping racism and historically inconvenient or unpleasant facts under the carpet to make a setting fun to adventure in is wrong sometimes and right other times because, clearly, it's not a matter of absolute principle for you and others.

Most people who demand that we notice racism are grievance-mongers who make a living off of ensuring people notice racism (real or mostly imagined), and those who have fallen for their schtick. We are not allowed to NOT notice blacks, or gays, or women or whoever is feeling put-upon this week. Seriously - you can't just go through life living your life, you have to have Deep Concerns for everyone around you who is demanding that you do so, or else you're some kind of bigot/racist. It is the ultimate heel-kicking, tantrum-throwing child behaior brought into full bloom in a world of supposed adults, and it is ruining the world.

Oh, I know I'll get it now, from all sectors - I must be racist or bigotted or a homophobe because of those comments, right? No, the truth is a) I almost never think about anything in those terms and b) probably don't care anyway. Is a lack of caring a sign of hatred? It is if you listen to the folks pushing their agenda. Nope, its not enough to not actively hate people, you can't just go along to get along - you have to be CONCERNED and have to DO SOMETHING, or else you may as well be the one putting the noose about their neck.

Political Correctness is used like a blunt instrument, and unfortunately it works far too often.

I think it is highly relevant to this discussion that Deadlands is absurd.  It's not an attempt to construct a plausible alternative that could have happened, keeping most of the people and their motivations the same.  I'm pretty sure the Deadlands Jefferson Davis, for example, isn't even human.  Once Jackalopes, Wu Xia, and Ray Guns are present you have left the bounderies of Alternative History and entered Anything Goes territory.  You can criticize Deadlands for being unconcerned with history (while being happy to come up with real dates and events that suit the fiction they are presenting), but I'm not sure if "revisionist" can even apply - it's like accusing Star Wars of not being scientifically realistic.

Deadlands intentionally insults me.

The original art for Tombstone Frank is a picture of me from back when I used to write L5R stuff. After AEG and I went our separate ways, they showed who was classier by chopping the character's head off and putting it on a stick.

-Frank

Quote from: Werekoala;427263Most people who demand that we notice racism are grievance-mongers who make a living off of ensuring people notice racism (real or mostly imagined), and those who have fallen for their schtick. We are not allowed to NOT notice blacks, or gays, or women or whoever is feeling put-upon this week. Seriously - you can't just go through life living your life, you have to have Deep Concerns for everyone around you who is demanding that you do so, or else you're some kind of bigot/racist. It is the ultimate heel-kicking, tantrum-throwing child behaior brought into full bloom in a world of supposed adults

True.  There is not, and has never been, any discrimination against gays, blacks or women.  Their spoilt whining is just a distraction from real issues, like the states rights concerns of middle class white men and the lack of fences to keep Mexicans out.

Quoteand it is ruining the world.

Shouldn't the world have been ruined by jazz music, evolution, abortion, Elvis, feminism and the sheer existence non-Christians by now?  Surely civilisation can't stand another catastrophe on the same scale.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;427314Deadlands intentionally insults me.

The original art for Tombstone Frank is a picture of me from back when I used to write L5R stuff. After AEG and I went our separate ways, they showed who was classier by chopping the character's head off and putting it on a stick.

-Frank

Really?

Quote from: Cranewings;427339Really?

Yes. Really.

My time with Alderac came to a close when I discovered that the rules for "traits" in L5R technically made it so that Oni who could not wear armor could be paid for by artificers and all kinds of other stupid crap. I suggested an alternate set of trait rules. They called me a cheater, banned me from their rules discussions forever (they said I could continue to write fiction pieces for free, I declined), and chopped the head off my avatar. Then in the next revision of the rules, they used my suggested trait rule without attribution.

Classy stuff.

-Frank

I always enjoyed the game, but it always irritated me.

Like, why is the nation so militarized after 1000 years of the emperor's peace? Why is it impossible to beat a crane in a duel? Why is their any other type of character besides Shugenja and Mantis Archers?

I loved the original card game, for a long time too. I started playing it around the Anvil of Despair up to Oblivion's Gate, but the stupid I was overlooking just got to fucking terrible.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;427344Yes. Really.

My time with Alderac came to a close when I discovered that the rules for "traits" in L5R technically made it so that Oni who could not wear armor could be paid for by artificers and all kinds of other stupid crap. I suggested an alternate set of trait rules. They called me a cheater, banned me from their rules discussions forever (they said I could continue to write fiction pieces for free, I declined), and chopped the head off my avatar. Then in the next revision of the rules, they used my suggested trait rule without attribution.

Classy stuff.

-Frank

I'm not sure that writing good rules for the game was anywhere on their agenda.