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Author Topic: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?  (Read 7957 times)

Battlemaster
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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #30 on: June 25, 2022, 10:20:57 AM »
It's not unecessary.  Most gamers today really don't know what things were like in the 1920s.  Have you see how Americans score on history tests?

Do you know what a TWK sign meant in the 20s?  Have you ever heard of D. C.  Stephenson?  Ever see ''Birth of a nation''?  Can you even imagine hundreds of thousands of KKK members in full robes marching thru Washington DC?

The world was different then. Unbelievably different. Giving people a few pages of data on the real world along with hundreds of pages about the mythos world is not 'woke'. 
Fuck the fascist right and the fascist left.

hedgehobbit

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #31 on: June 25, 2022, 10:38:54 AM »
The world was different then. Unbelievably different. Giving people a few pages of data on the real world along with hundreds of pages about the mythos world is not 'woke'.

The last version of CoC I have is 5.5 and it has very little historical information: a price list, some sample travel times, and a list of dates of various historical events that could potentially be mythos related. And that's it. Anything else is best left to the GM to research on his own. This is especially true today with so much historical information is available online, with a vast amount of novels, movies, records, and magazines in the public domain.

Cherry picking historical facts that support the author's current-day political narrative is the definitive example of woke writing.
« Last Edit: June 25, 2022, 10:42:43 AM by hedgehobbit »

Pat
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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #32 on: June 25, 2022, 10:44:36 AM »
I think it's bullshit to attack CoC 'woke' because it states that 1920's America (and most other countries in even the western world)  was unbelievably racist by today's standards. I mean, fucking read lovecraft sometime!

I've read Lovecraft -- every story and novel ever published in fact, and I can only imagine that people harping about how "racist" his works are have never themselves read them.

There is almost zero mention of race ... anywhere. No mention I can recall of anything regarding racial traits, comparisons, or denigration of any kind. The only "racism" I've seen in his stories is the very occasional use of words that were fine at the time but now deemed terrible because the Word Police change the "correct" terminology every 8 years just to keep you off-balance (to the point where it's now correct to say "People of Color", but woe to the bigot who says "Colored People". Even Gary Trudeau had a jab at that one.)
Herbert West, Reanimator. Part III. The description of Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke".

Battlemaster
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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #33 on: June 25, 2022, 10:56:41 AM »
Hpl wrote a poem called  ''on the creation of ni--ers''.

He owned a black cat named ''ni--er man''.

In ''the rats in the walls'' the character had a cat named that.

He used the term ''negroid' to describe some people in call of cthulhu.

Hpl was a product of his day and his day was full  of casual racism. I do not condemn him  as I understand being a product of your times. (That's why I'm not woke)  But yes,  most people have a sanitized idea of the 20's if any based on hollywood.
Fuck the fascist right and the fascist left.

HappyDaze

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #34 on: June 25, 2022, 11:10:47 AM »
I've gamed--as both player and GM--for a long time and have explored many, many systems. In all that time, I've never seen a "perfectly good" system.

caldrail

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #35 on: June 25, 2022, 11:17:20 AM »
Gaming rules generally have a tendency toward complexity (Megatraveller anyone?) then a shift toward something simple before the trend sets in again. That's a very interesting analogy of biology in fact, with creatures tending toward specialisation to succeed in their environment only to discover that the environment has changed and they're now part of the fossil record.

The big change in the environment lately has been 'woke' which to my mind is another manifestation of a minority desire within western society toward role reversal (You might disagree but I'm not going to discuss that here). Demonisation of history is another less than mature change in society too. Pushing the statue of Edward Coulton into Bristol Harbour hasn't done anything for racism or modern slavery whatsoever, just a futile public gesture in social affiliation. In fact, it serves the reverse purpose, because it replaces knowledge and memory with hatred and denial. I got accused of being a liar and racist because I challenged a popular opinion about the American Civil War on one forum, it isn't pleasant.

But at the end of the day - we are not slaves to rulebooks. Or at least, I don't think we should be, but then I got castigated on a certain RPG website not so long ago because I dared to voice my individualism :D

Abraxus

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #36 on: June 25, 2022, 01:41:41 PM »
So many were racist from HPL time. Some of you act as if he were the exception and not the rule. Don’t let such a thing as context or he general attitudes of many white people of the time in any way try to deter your carefully constructed personal narratives.

I don’t need some pearl clutching Wokescold of a developer giving me a history lesson in an RPGs. If I want history I can you know read an actual history book. Simply say the 1920s were a racist period in history.

Take the woke historical racial dissertations or novels and shove them up your collective asses.

As for new edition Chaosium had to do something new. Recycled rehashed rules with new cover and interior art was imo simply not going to cut. Especially when Trailbof Cthulhu fixed C0C flaws.

Zalman

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #37 on: June 25, 2022, 02:14:26 PM »
Hpl wrote a poem called  ''on the creation of ni--ers''.

He owned a black cat named ''ni--er man''.

In ''the rats in the walls'' the character had a cat named that.

He used the term ''negroid' to describe some people in call of cthulhu.

Indeed as I said, only a few uses of words that were not themselves derogatory or even particularly controversial at the time:

The Rats in the Walls is written in 1924, at the very nascence of the N-word being seen as derogatory. It wasn't until the late 1920's that the term's new designation was even known to most people.

The poem you cite was written in 1912.

The cat died in 1904, when Lovecraft was 14 years old.

The word "negroid" does not appear in the story Call of Cthulhu. Fake News. (Nor was it exclusively a racist term.)
« Last Edit: June 25, 2022, 02:16:20 PM by Zalman »
Old School? Back in my day we just called it "School."

jhkim

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #38 on: June 25, 2022, 05:07:47 PM »
The word "negroid" does not appear in the story Call of Cthulhu. Fake News. (Nor was it exclusively a racist term.)

Technically correct, but here is a relevant quote from The Call of Cthulhu:

Quote
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

From The Horror at Red Hook:
Quote
The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.
...
From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion.

From Herbert West, Re-animator:
Quote
The match had been between Kid O’Brien—a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose—and Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke”. The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly—for a purpose I knew too well.

From The Rats in the Walls:
Quote
These myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition, repelled me greatly. Their persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors, were especially annoying; whilst the imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forbears—the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.

Beyond direct language, one of Lovecraft's most common horror themes is tainted ancestry. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is about a town contaminated when a sea captain brought back a bride from the South Seas. The Arthur Jermyn story is about an ancestor bringing back a monstrous bride from Africa.

Battlemaster
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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #39 on: June 25, 2022, 07:15:23 PM »
Hpl wrote a poem called  ''on the creation of ni--ers''.

He owned a black cat named ''ni--er man''.

In ''the rats in the walls'' the character had a cat named that.

He used the term ''negroid' to describe some people in call of cthulhu.

Indeed as I said, only a few uses of words that were not themselves derogatory or even particularly controversial at the time:

The Rats in the Walls is written in 1924, at the very nascence of the N-word being seen as derogatory. It wasn't until the late 1920's that the term's new designation was even known to most people.

The poem you cite was written in 1912.

The cat died in 1904, when Lovecraft was 14 years old.

The word "negroid" does not appear in the story Call of Cthulhu. Fake News. (Nor was it exclusively a racist term.)

In CoC he used negro in various bad terms.

Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout.

...

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

He did use negroid in 'the horror at red hook'. I got them confused as it's been forever since I read either. mea culpa.

Now here's a quote from 'herbert west reanimator'

The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life—but the world holds many ugly things.


I can say hpl was a racist, by today's standards he would be intolerable to all but the kkk/white nationalist crowd. I can also say he was a product of his times. In his day racism was the default setting.  Things like 'miscegnation' were considered horrors beyond belief. Why do you think the central element to 'the shadow over innsmouth' was non human creatures wanting to mate with white people and produce inhuman offspring?

HPL also had obvious mental issues. Lots of creative types do. I can let his racism pass due to those factors.

Plus I love some of his work. 'At the mountains of madness' is a masterpiece. It also lacks any racist content.

I can accept that 100 years ago things were different. I can also say maybe people  should be shown the truth. Let them choose how to react to it.
« Last Edit: June 25, 2022, 07:38:34 PM by Battlemaster »
Fuck the fascist right and the fascist left.

jeff37923

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #40 on: June 25, 2022, 09:02:32 PM »
A lot of people want to burn the book the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain because it uses a racial slur throughout the book, yet the book is not racist nor does it promote racism.
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Pat
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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #41 on: June 25, 2022, 09:24:19 PM »
A lot of people want to burn the book the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain because it uses a racial slur throughout the book, yet the book is not racist nor does it promote racism.
Huck Finn is anti-racist. Not in the modern sense, where anti-racist is code for double-dog down racism. But the in the real sense. It deals with the issues unflinchingly, and with humanity.

Zelen

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #42 on: June 25, 2022, 10:45:35 PM »
It's a weird kind of intellectual bankruptcy to be so myopically focused on the particulars of word choice of a genius author from a century ago. If every single artist has to pass this same kind of purity test, there isn't much left in any intellectual field whatsoever. Virtually every man of note in the history of humankind had views that would be unacceptable.

Pat
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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #43 on: June 25, 2022, 11:54:40 PM »
It's a weird kind of intellectual bankruptcy to be so myopically focused on the particulars of word choice of a genius author from a century ago. If every single artist has to pass this same kind of purity test, there isn't much left in any intellectual field whatsoever. Virtually every man of note in the history of humankind had views that would be unacceptable.
No, H.P. Lovecraft is a bit of an extreme case. Even accounting for his time.

Visitor Q

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Re: why do companies insist on fucking up perfectly good systems?
« Reply #44 on: June 26, 2022, 10:46:23 AM »
It's a weird kind of intellectual bankruptcy to be so myopically focused on the particulars of word choice of a genius author from a century ago. If every single artist has to pass this same kind of purity test, there isn't much left in any intellectual field whatsoever. Virtually every man of note in the history of humankind had views that would be unacceptable.
No, H.P. Lovecraft is a bit of an extreme case. Even accounting for his time.

To clarify this and note it isn't an opinion but a fact, Lovecraft's Jewish wife went on record to note his extreme antisemitism and the fact he became almost livid with rage when having to mix with people from other races on the streets of New York. Furthermore this was corroborated by some of his friends.