Historical Games Round 75
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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.
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I avoid this consistently. Because no matter how many guardrails you put in place someone, somewhere, at sometime is always going to cross someone’s line. Because everyone has different tolerances for different things, it is impossible to know what’s okay for everyone. And someone will end up feeling a way they shouldn’t have to feel.
At least, in my experience.
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i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.
I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.
