Basically, a desire for a game to be more lethal or not have mechanics inherently tied to narrative logic.
FATE can’t do everything. It can’t do a lot of things. The more a game tries to be good at everything, the more it’s just plain worse at any one thing compared to some other system. This goes for all sorts of “setting neutral” and “generic” systems.
An example of such is?
FATE isn’t good for high tension, gritty games, in my experience. For anything even vaguely “pulpy” such as Indiana Jones, Superheroes, etc., it kind of excels.
I tend to also play a bunch of stuff based off of Apocalypse World as well.
What I don’t play are games like Pathfinder with their 200 pages of tables and charts. Life is too short to memorize 500 page rule books full of charts that people, in practice, ignore half the time anyway.
Given that the review goes into some detail about the notion of “Indian time…” Why, yes, you’re right. It doesn’t sound racist at all.
Plot armor is when major characters can’t die without a good narrative reason to die, and apparently going into dangerous situations where anyone could die isn’t usually considered a good enough narrative reason to die.
It isn’t a complexity issue. Stress and freely-decided consequences, extra hit points for higher levels, extra wounds for wild card characters, etc. can grant plot armor at different complexity levels. And if one or two bad rolls can kill you, that can cancel plot armor.
I don’t want built-in plot armor, because if it makes danger less dangerous, for the action-oriented, it makes bravery less brave, and for the history-oriented, it makes history less historical.
P.S. Harold Godwinson would have killed for good plot armor. Instead he died, probably from a long bowshot, on the edge of victory.
I’m afraid it does to some folks. “Oh, hey, let’s take a minority person’s words about their own culture as a white person and apply them to the minority to possibly denigrate them.”
In that sense, FATE is obviously that sort of game. I don’t know of any others. Apocalypse World is notorious for “Ok, you die” in response to the player doing something stupid. “Trade harm for harm, as established.”
No you’re quite right it doesn’t, it may be rather flippant I’ll grant you that, but racist? hardly.
Maybe not to you. You’re a white guy talking about a Native American, right? No, it sounds racist to use the terms a minority uses for his own culture to flip him shit. You wouldn’t use the n word with a black man, would you, even if he used it?
No obviously I wouldn’t as it is a derogatory term for a person. You may like to take some logic classes.
It was (and is) a comment relevant to the article with an admittedly weak attempt at humour.
I’m sorry that it didn’t work for you.
I’m sorry your privilege doesn’t allow you to see how racist your comment sounds. Maybe you should get some education yourself.
Although you have decided that the concept of Indian Time is racist, despite it being the focus of the article itself, I think it’s best to give folks the benefit of doubt rather than insult them.
Thanks for misspeaking what I actually said. I decided it sounds racists when a non-Native uses the terms a Native American uses to apply to his own people as a way of criticizing or mocking the Native person. The author of the article was discussing his own culture and ethnicity, not coming in as a member of majority culture discussing a minority one and using it as the basis of criticism.
Lots of ethnic minorities use terms or talk about their own culture in ways that wouldn’t be appropriate for a white person to come along and do. You think this is a controversial opinion?
He had an opportunity to actually apologize or clarify but he, basically, doubled down on it and told me to take logic classes. So, yeah, I think he’s possibly a closet racist or at least a person who doesn’t recognize his privilege and the way it is perceived by others when he talks about minorities.
You are entitled to that opinion, yes.
Where you’re getting hung up is in inferring denigration and criticism where there is none. There’s nothing wrong with “Indian time,” so it’s not derogatory. If you think it is derogatory, then you must think that this aspect of Indian culture is a defect.
But that doesn’t sound racist at all!
Yeah, he wasn’t mocking the game’s author at all in response to someone else’s note of criticism!
Well, if we’re not American Indians, and we don’t have years of experience with Indian time, then I think we should be careful not to misunderstand Indian time. Saying that these delays are or aren’t an aspect of Indian time seems a bit hasty to me, though speculating that a tendency to prioritize completeness over schedules might be influenced by Indian time might not be too hasty.
[quote=“thaumatechnicia, post:14, topic:59649, full:true”]
In any case, even if you’re not fond of the phrase, it’s still weird that you implied that a Native American reviewer was racist against Native Americans.
Ahhh, no, I didn’t imply it, you inferred it. No, I was drawing attention to the fact that the ‘Native American Experience’ of the Coast Salish from BC is different from that of the Mi’kmaq, or of the Plains Indians, or of the Cree of Northern Quebec. Where do the Inuit stand in there, eh?
Do you want to get me going? Just say something like: “Oh, that’s how they do it in Europe. --You mean Albania? Or Ireland? Or Finland?”…
Edited to add: There’s nothing inherent to being First Nations that makes you immune to racism. Just like there’s nothing inherent to being a white person that automatically makes you racist.
I don’t know as much about how the Natives fare in Canada (my vague impression is that it’s better, but not loads better), but at least in the United States, I think it’s fair to say that the Native American experience is characterized by living on reservations (or having family on reservations) that tend to be poor and plagued by drug and alcohol abuse, and being always aware that the country is run by the descendants of people who very nearly exterminated your ancestors and your culture, and who now view your people with paternalistic condescension at best and outright bigotry at worst.
I imagine that those things would be recognized across different tribes in different places, with very different cultures and languages. I would venture to guess that even a Native American who was born to middle-class parents in a city far from the reservations would still be aware of those things, even if she didn’t experience them as directly as others. All together, I would say that this (and other things that I may have missed) forms a common experience that most Native Americans in the US share, despite their many other differences.
Is that not so?
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