Historical Games Round 75
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@Trashcan said in Historical Games Round 75:
Since I was namedropped earlier in the thread (thanks @Tez) I felt compelled to post something here.
@Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan @Trashcan
Thanks for being willing* to be dragged in to the conversation.
For me it comes down to two things:
a) Players need to know what to expect. The social contract that @Roadspike cited is a great place to set expectations.
b) Staff needs to do the work to maintain their vision.* not willing
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@Trashcan said in Historical Games Round 75:
Regardless, the expectation should be that a game clearly state on the tin exactly what unconscionable things might occur to your character in the course of play. Do not leave players to discover this through play. If my guy could be killed, say they could be killed. If they could be sexually assaulted, say they could be sexually assaulted. If they could be discriminated against, say they could be discriminated against and how it could look. Gritty Games are allowed. Please put the Narrative Facts on the side. I can choose if this is right for my diet.
I had a really good experience with a Social Contract on the last game I had any staff involvement in, mostly for expectation-setting. I never viewed it as a thing that flattened RP so much as one that set some baselines for what the world was and wasn’t. Players are, in my experience, often spotty on internalizing thematic realities that are even slightly different from their RL experience. Like, I spent a lot of time doing BSG RP back in the day. The amount of people who couldn’t wrap their brains OOC around the treatment of gender in the show and lack of sexism was…not incidental.
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I think when doing something like this you also need to be very aware that “historical prejudices” are still very real today and that mushes are still overwhelmingly white. So while it might be fun for one person to play being racially discriminated against in the old south, there are a whole lot of people who deal with that every day and might be going online to escape from that and not want to see that in their fun-pretendy-time game. Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
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@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:
I think when doing something like this you also need to be very aware that “historical prejudices” are still very real today and that mushes are still overwhelmingly white. So while it might be fun for one person to play being racially discriminated against in the old south, there are a whole lot of people who deal with that every day and might be going online to escape from that and not want to see that in their fun-pretendy-time game. Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
I agree and disagree with you:
Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
Maybe.
I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play. I’m more interested in themes of cultural xenophobia than colonial racism: the isms of different times and in different places. I’m interested in stories that don’t draw quite so direct a line to the here and now, but there are of course still echoes of any marginalized stories.
she/they
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@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:
I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.
This.
The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms, but resistance is practically the point, and the PCs are trying to be the good guys. So no, they are not racists. The players don’t want to do that and I don’t want them to.
And the truth is, there have always been some people who resist. It is far from inaccurate to depict them.
I also told the players that their characters had to pass for males over the age of 12, but only in the dark. So about a third of them are girls, dressed as boys by the standards of the 18th century, and the NPCs are either very bad at noticing or they don’t care. My take is that this is actually believable enough, but even if it’s not, well, we’re gonna play that it is because some people want to play women characters and that’s not a freedom I want to take from them.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:
@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:
Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.
Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
Maybe.
I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play.
I have, on two different games about ten years apart, run into entire groups of people playing actual, literal neo-Nazis. Both instances were disturbing, but the second instance was particularly strange. Somehow, my character – who was Jewish – got painted as the asshole for not wanting to deal with some dude walking around with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo.
But even weirder than that? I found out after the fact that one of the women in the group was someone I’d known for a years. In fact, it was a friend I’d lost contact with. A friend who I’d had long conversations with most of a decade earlier about how she was never going to play a black character again after dealing with a guy on the White Wolf mods who had sent out a really gross email including a lot of stereotypes about black people and then got very much called out on it by, like, half the Mage sphere. Long conversations about how upsetting that was for her because she was no longer comfortable playing characters who looked like her because of that incident.
To this day, I don’t really know how I should feel about that or if I even get to have an opinion on that, because her feelings on the subject are entirely her own and not something I get to dictate. But needless to say, I was shocked to discover that one of the most racist characters I’ve ever encountered on a game, with a player that took umbrage to people not wanting to interact with a group of neo-Nazis, was played by a person of color who had previously felt personally victimized by racist stereotypes proposed in RP.
(Also, sorry if the quotes got busted. Phone typing sucks.)
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@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
The tabletop game I’m running has all these historical -isms
A TTRPG works for historical games for the same reasons a private MUSH would, it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.
There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those
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See this is what makes pre modern games attractive in terms of ism handling. The world was so different that many of the categories of bigotry today just didn’t exist yet. The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.
It’s unavoidable in all human history that people have used bigotry to justify harming perceived political and social enemies. It’s not the only way to go after your enemies, either, and those other ways are a lot less retraumatizing for people who have experienced it. Few people have been traumatized by weaponized lightning bolts, disintegration rays, or medieval weaponry applied to them. Nor have they been hurt by people orchestrating a palace coup against them and running them off their throne. But the modern ism stuff? Why drive off players like that? If the beef is between like, Hittites and Myceneans, who cares? Go ham.
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@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.
There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those
Indeed there are.
it’s a known quantity of like-minded people. A public MUSH is a different animal.
Honestly, though, a MU does not have to be so different from aTTRPG. You can show people the door if they are not like-minded enough. This is not really all that hard.
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@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:
See this is what makes pre modern games attractive in terms of ism handling. The world was so different that many of the categories of bigotry today just didn’t exist yet. The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.
It’s unavoidable in all human history that people have used bigotry to justify harming perceived political and social enemies. It’s not the only way to go after your enemies, either, and those other ways are a lot less retraumatizing for people who have experienced it. Few people have been traumatized by weaponized lightning bolts, disintegration rays, or medieval weaponry applied to them. Nor have they been hurt by people orchestrating a palace coup against them and running them off their throne. But the modern ism stuff? Why drive off players like that? If the beef is between like, Hittites and Myceneans, who cares? Go ham.
Another agree and disagree. I personally prefer to explore pre-modern stories, but there’s still plenty of isms in those cultures which resonate on down the line: sexism, classism, etc. History is not freedom from isms, just distance. Hopefully.
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@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:
But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.
This exactly. It’s not that I WANT to see -isms in my RP. They’re just interwoven into society to such a degree that I cannot separate them from the time period.
You want to do alt history and show how history diverged? Cool.
You want to do a sci-fi / fantasy setting cosplaying as a historical time period? Cool - though I think Firefly demonstrated that even this can land problematically.
You want to say: “We acknowledge that these things exist in the real world but they are not the focus here so here are some boundaries”? Also cool, but tricky.
But if you’re going with: “It’s the 1920s but all prejudice has been solved” I’m just gonna be like…
@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:
@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:
Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.
There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those
Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.
Also I stink at formatting today apparently.
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@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:
The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.
I think that this is a good point, but man, some of these ancient grudges are 100% still around. From my own experience, they also tend to manifest in very strange ways and usually when you might not expect it (especially as an American).
Few people have been traumatized by weaponized lightning bolts, disintegration rays,
That’s what the academic elite want you to think! /s
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@somasatori said in Historical Games Round 75:
@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:
The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.
I think that this is a good point, but man, some of these ancient grudges are 100% still around. From my own experience, they also tend to manifest in very strange ways and usually when you might not expect it (especially as an American).
Dude, from 1993 to 2018, North Macedonia was officially entered into the United Nations under the name The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Because they were fighting with Greece about who got to be Macedonia and who got to be Macedonians and whether or not there was the potential for annexation of one state by another. You might assume that this was all the result of the Balkan Wars in the early 1900s and the regional conflicts of the early to mid-1990s, which were absolutely the central point of contention.
But, like, you also had national governments throwing around references to what names had been used and where the borders were during the Roman Empire.
Some Roman guy who died in 150-whatever BC scribbled some stuff on a map after Rome conquered Greece and literally two thousand years later, people were using it to say “Hey, fuck those people over there in particular.”
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@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:
Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.
I think that that depends on what’s in the social contract. Like, if the social contract says that no racism will be allowed onscreen, that’s going to be different than if it says you can only inflict it upon your own character, and that’s going to be different than if it says that racism is baked into the setting but that all characters will strive against it, and that’s going to be different than if the contract doesn’t mention racism at all.
The social contract can be used to set expectations for level of engagement with various pain points – at any level of engagement.
@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:
Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out.
Agreed 100%. You don’t let the nice Nazis in your bar, or they’ll drive off the non-Nazis and bring your friends, and then you have a Nazi bar.
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@Faraday said in Historical Games Round 75:
Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.
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.
I remember some people having their hackles up about location-inappropriate architecture. Or too much of it, or something. Now that I think of it, that ‘Darby’s Castle’ thing is almost true. In the sense that some rich blokes built miniature but still quite large castles for houses in Colorado.
(Okay we have mining claims, and a valley with a couple of competing cattle ranches and homessteads, and a ridiculous frickin’ castle that some freak had built by Italian masons that he imported for the purpose and had guarded by Pinkertons while they worked, then released to run wild across the plains, and now it’s the Manor House like Downton Abbey, but if those PCs go into town it’s more like Deadwood. But it’s Boylei guy’s Wild Imaginary West so you have to carry this steampunkish antenna thing around to prevent weird monsters or giant versions of normal animals coming near you. Later in this story the abandoned Italian masons will appear, having survived by taking over a troupe of giant apes.)
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@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
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.
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@Faraday I think these war stories are profoundly important to relay, because it’s pretty easy to discuss approaches in abstract, but when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.
That heat fades after a while and people may forget the details. We don’t need to wonder too much when there are actual cases. Players can have good experiences, but staff might be sitting there shell-shocked about it, and that should be a factor considering we generally need staff to run games.
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@Faraday Yeah, we are talking about the same PC-couple. I either forgot the magnitude of the kerfluffle or wasn’t aware of it. I know my scheme to hide the origins of the mixed-race baby never came to fruition. I didn’t think the lynch-mob talk was serious at all – not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”
Heh. That might have been fun RP if it wasn’t freaking people out. (Though if things went then as they’ve gone the last few years, I’d have asked them to schedule their lynching attempt so I could be there, since my PC would be on guard 'cause he lived there, had 'em say “sure,” and then logged in to find that it happened exactly when I said I couldn’t be there but that they’d acknowledged my PCs presence by RPing that he just sat there doing nothing, and then framed me as the bad actor for remarking that that’s kinda shitty.)
I remember the discomfort with the issues regarding indigenous people, but not any actual indigenous characters.
@Yam is right – well, certainly your perspective as gamerunner was of a much less OOC-peaceful game than mine as a player.
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@Yam said in Historical Games Round 75:
when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.
Yeah I highlighted a couple instances that stick out in my mind, but it’s been almost 15 years and a lot is hazy. What I remember above all was coming away from the experience thinking: “I love historical settings, but I am NEVER doing this again.”
So I can totally understand the folks who don’t want to deal with that stuff in their pretendy funtime games. I just also have trouble with the idea of sanitizing history. Apart from it breaking my brain because of how interwoven oppression is, it feels dismissive somehow to the oppressed.
@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:
not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”
Oh, no, they 100% were going to do it. Two things stopped it - one was me saying that I wouldn’t stop them trying, but I would not allow them to succeed. I wasn’t going to do anything bad to them, but their efforts would be thwarted. It was just a bridge too far for me. The other was that the players involved got so upset over the situation that they wrote the PCs out of the game, so it became kinda moot.
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@Faraday I remember them leaving, but not the why.
I would respond just the way you did.
ETA: + telling them that while maybe I wouldn’t do anything bad to them, if other PCs tried to, well, I wouldn’t stop them and the universe would be on their side if it came to that kind of call.
