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In passing in reaction to something
Jan. 22nd, 2009 11:05 pmIt bugs me when people use RPGs to mean, basically, Dungeons and Dragons, or crit fantasy as being based on Tolkien.
RPGs are as varied as imagination makes them, D&D doesn't rule the world, fantasy can draw on any and every story.
If I want to RPG based on Buffy or DW or Star Wars or B5 or, well, probably anything else, there's a rules system, often official, and a lot of world background. All of them will have different issues. Some of them you probably wouldn't call fantasy, but they've got knights with burning swords, or mages (techno or otherwise), or a guy in a travelling box with a little magic wand. Not exactly hard SF. Big spectrum. And even if you rule out the SF trappings, you still get fantasy that isn't based on Tolkien.
Unless you've defined fantasy as Tolkien, and RPG as D&D, in which case what are the rest of us playing?
/irritation
This looks random just sitting here. But it's not relevant to the serious think-about-race post that set it off.
Thinking about race, as well as class and gender and ablism and everything else, applies in RPGs as well as more linear stories. Saying it's just a game works even less well than it's just a story, cause playing the game you make choices within it, and if those choices involve killing off a lot of dark skin people, well, that's a Thing.
I liked best the RPGs set in urban fantasy settings, preferably with less forced levelling and packaged characters than some systems insist on. I don't want to buy a category pre-paid, I want to make a character however they develop. But I can see the appeal of the other way. I suspect it lends itself poorly to -isms though, since a package plus a picture can be a stereotype rather more easily than someone you have to spend a few days designing. Still, for those who don't find character design worth a whole weekend...
But then: urban fantasy. World basically like this one. You could end up with a Buffy-esque oddly white world with a few black vampires, or an Angel problem where The Black Dude stops hanging out with other black guys once the white party turns up. It don't get away from having -ism issues to set it in a world structured by them.
I've been thinking on how I'd design a fantasy world, especially now I'm reading up on Banestorm Yrth and also have the Infinite Worlds campaign book. There's a lot of rich variety to draw on from history and mythology and fiction, but doing so without importing the structuring -isms of the originals is a right tricky task. Like writing pirate movies without importing the racism was tricky, apparently invisible, and rather fail. Or like noticing that even thousand year old stories might be talking about other races and being rather racist about them under skinny covering of myth. Sometimes the symbols used have drifted so much they might not be first glance obvious, other times the symbols are still with us and hence as invisible as most common-sense and agreed-with culture. Sometimes you end up in a tangle of 'but it's historical fact!' and running full tilt into all the mass arguments about who writes history and all the advocates for write it better.
I'm frustrated to find thus far a fantasy world where women don't get to play. Sure, they're drawing on historical cultures, postulating a world populated by people scooped up by magic and dropped on Yrth a village at a time, and there was a lot of sexism going on in history. But we watched a video in the Medievalism bit of last semester where they revisited the position of women and showed how actually right after plagues there weren't enough workers to fill the jobs so everyone's labor was in demand, women included, and for a while women owned and ran businesses with something like equality. Sudden isolation and colonising a world from scratch would seem like an all-hands scenario to me. Perfect opportunity to equalise the roles of women. And then there's the impact of magic. One section, about dwarf society, has the classic biological justification for hiding the women at home cause they can have babies and men can't so they can afford to lose men. But this is in a RPG that has spells for putting babies in males, or starting them from scratch, from whatever species you want if you pour on the advanced magery. Different setting, granted, but the spells are in the book. Why not use them to reshape the assumptions?
And maybe they do in a different bit of the book, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm looking forward to the Vorkosigan game 'verse partly because biotech difference are so central to shaping Bujold's worlds, and the planet descriptions will have to deal with that. Plus, herm characters! Take that, stupid patriarchal game 'verses.
But I also want to strap on some armour and go smite dragons in a party of my sisters in arms, in a medieval sort of world where this is business as usual.
... it might help if I could find an RPG group to play with where I wasn't The Girl.
... actually it might help if I could find an RPG group. Sort of in general. I'm really out of the habit lately.
... given that I used to play clerics that's kind of a pun.
okay, going now.
RPGs are as varied as imagination makes them, D&D doesn't rule the world, fantasy can draw on any and every story.
If I want to RPG based on Buffy or DW or Star Wars or B5 or, well, probably anything else, there's a rules system, often official, and a lot of world background. All of them will have different issues. Some of them you probably wouldn't call fantasy, but they've got knights with burning swords, or mages (techno or otherwise), or a guy in a travelling box with a little magic wand. Not exactly hard SF. Big spectrum. And even if you rule out the SF trappings, you still get fantasy that isn't based on Tolkien.
Unless you've defined fantasy as Tolkien, and RPG as D&D, in which case what are the rest of us playing?
/irritation
This looks random just sitting here. But it's not relevant to the serious think-about-race post that set it off.
Thinking about race, as well as class and gender and ablism and everything else, applies in RPGs as well as more linear stories. Saying it's just a game works even less well than it's just a story, cause playing the game you make choices within it, and if those choices involve killing off a lot of dark skin people, well, that's a Thing.
I liked best the RPGs set in urban fantasy settings, preferably with less forced levelling and packaged characters than some systems insist on. I don't want to buy a category pre-paid, I want to make a character however they develop. But I can see the appeal of the other way. I suspect it lends itself poorly to -isms though, since a package plus a picture can be a stereotype rather more easily than someone you have to spend a few days designing. Still, for those who don't find character design worth a whole weekend...
But then: urban fantasy. World basically like this one. You could end up with a Buffy-esque oddly white world with a few black vampires, or an Angel problem where The Black Dude stops hanging out with other black guys once the white party turns up. It don't get away from having -ism issues to set it in a world structured by them.
I've been thinking on how I'd design a fantasy world, especially now I'm reading up on Banestorm Yrth and also have the Infinite Worlds campaign book. There's a lot of rich variety to draw on from history and mythology and fiction, but doing so without importing the structuring -isms of the originals is a right tricky task. Like writing pirate movies without importing the racism was tricky, apparently invisible, and rather fail. Or like noticing that even thousand year old stories might be talking about other races and being rather racist about them under skinny covering of myth. Sometimes the symbols used have drifted so much they might not be first glance obvious, other times the symbols are still with us and hence as invisible as most common-sense and agreed-with culture. Sometimes you end up in a tangle of 'but it's historical fact!' and running full tilt into all the mass arguments about who writes history and all the advocates for write it better.
I'm frustrated to find thus far a fantasy world where women don't get to play. Sure, they're drawing on historical cultures, postulating a world populated by people scooped up by magic and dropped on Yrth a village at a time, and there was a lot of sexism going on in history. But we watched a video in the Medievalism bit of last semester where they revisited the position of women and showed how actually right after plagues there weren't enough workers to fill the jobs so everyone's labor was in demand, women included, and for a while women owned and ran businesses with something like equality. Sudden isolation and colonising a world from scratch would seem like an all-hands scenario to me. Perfect opportunity to equalise the roles of women. And then there's the impact of magic. One section, about dwarf society, has the classic biological justification for hiding the women at home cause they can have babies and men can't so they can afford to lose men. But this is in a RPG that has spells for putting babies in males, or starting them from scratch, from whatever species you want if you pour on the advanced magery. Different setting, granted, but the spells are in the book. Why not use them to reshape the assumptions?
And maybe they do in a different bit of the book, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm looking forward to the Vorkosigan game 'verse partly because biotech difference are so central to shaping Bujold's worlds, and the planet descriptions will have to deal with that. Plus, herm characters! Take that, stupid patriarchal game 'verses.
But I also want to strap on some armour and go smite dragons in a party of my sisters in arms, in a medieval sort of world where this is business as usual.
... it might help if I could find an RPG group to play with where I wasn't The Girl.
... actually it might help if I could find an RPG group. Sort of in general. I'm really out of the habit lately.
... given that I used to play clerics that's kind of a pun.
okay, going now.
