@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
I want to hear your war stories.
I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.
Spoiler alert: They weren’t fine with it (well, not all of them).
For those unfamiliar, the setting was a small town in Wyoming just after the Civil War. There was a whole article on historical plausibility, but the most relevant rule was this (paraphrased for brevity):
This is a historical game, and on-screen portrayal of prejudice is permitted. Staff in no way endorses racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism, but we are not trying to rewrite history. Keep it IC.
Most of the PCs were super tolerant. That was nice in many ways, but it got to the point where:
Some of the players doing storylines about overcoming prejudice felt kind of gaslighted (like they were overreacting / their struggles weren’t real)
Some of the players who stuck closer to historical norms felt ostracized (like they themselves were racist)
It felt jarring any time a NPC acted with historical prejudice.
I got caught in the middle a lot, and it wasn’t fun. The worst situation was when two good players (whom I considered friends) left the game after other PCs threatened to
Spoiler
form a lynch mob to go after their characters, who were involved in an interracial romance
Were the other PCs acting historically? Yes. Did it suck? Also yes.
There was also tension in how to handle the conflict between settlers and Native Americans respectfully, which made me personally uncomfortable.
The biggest drama was people throwing fits over the number of “exceptional” characters. I approved PCs by looking at their character in its historical context: could that character exist in 1866? Many were bothered by the cognitive dissonance that occurred when you had all these exceptional characters together in this small town. But I wasn’t about to say yes to a female ranchhand but then turn around and say no to a Black doctor because we’d met some arbitrary quota of folks who didn’t adhere to historical norms. Some likened it to Twin Peaks 1866, and I was ok with that. Others weren’t.
