RPGMemes

I just realized in our pirate campaign, we became the corrupt rich law enforcement over time.

i imagine in law enforcement hell they have to sit all day watching people jaywalk and don't get to do anything about it.

I mean props to the DM for saying the current queen is ruling properly. They could've just been like "oh this queen just thinks she can rule as well as a man. she's actually hot headed and you note that public executions rise during a certain time of the the month"

I’ve had a similar “DM’s unexamined biases” experience with treating certain races as inherently deserving of slaughter. Like, my first campaign ever was run with a goblin sorcerer who I got really close with. “There’s a war where one side is all goblins” is not a clear cut plot hook to get us to join the opposition by itself.

To his credit he did let us decide which faction to support, but it was kind of exhausting getting a constant stream of “no, absolute male hereditary rule is good and normal”.

I think there's a very traditionalist patriarchal angle you can play on a game like this that boils down to the consequences of a shifting social dynamic resulting in upheaval you don't want/can't afford. An Elizabethan/Victorian Era might result in other women thinking they also shouldn't be second-class citizens relative to their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. Consequently, you get a First Wave Feminist movement, complete with street protests, labor strikes, vandalism, and the occasional act of violence aimed at a leading patriarchal figure. Alternatively, you end up with a reactionary fascist movement, as traditionalists launch capital strikes, threaten secession, or author fascist military coups. Maybe you get both.

Sometimes sticking with the old bad system is preferable (for your elite group of insiders) because you value social stability over progress. Especially true if the threat of a domestic insurgency is paired with some broader economic strife or external crisis.

I think its easy to believe "oh well, everyone is just awful and that's why nothing changes". But a cleverly written story can put you in the real position of making hard choices. You might find yourself playing the John Adams, explaining to your outspoken feminist wife Abigail why women aren't being enfranchised in the new national constitution, because we've already had a Shays' Rebellion, a Whiskey Rebellion, a Fries's Rebellion, and a nascent State of Muskogee to deal with, and you can't afford to splinter public opinion any more than the current compromise constitution already has.

Or you might find power in progress and decide normalizing political power between the genders yields an untapped surplus of loyalty and economic cohesion.

Yeah, politics is literally at a basic level just the description of group decision making and distribution of power and resources. Good luck avoiding that in any system/story that is based around groups of players or has more than one NPC.

I think it is referring to keeping real-world politics out of campaigns. Like for instance, one time during a campaign, we blamed a museum heist on Islamic terrorits. It made the rest of the game real weird.

Everyone is a rock and they just sit there eroding

In Warhammer fantasy.

Know-know where man-things hide the warpstone, yes-yes! Near Tikrit, Baghdad... east-east, west-west, south-south, north-north also! See-find, we will see-find them!

It took them a while to wise up to it.

Yes-yes, old words from Tennessee-thing, maybe Texas-thing too! Say-speak, trick fool-thing once, make you, yes-yes, you feel the shame! But trick-fool poor rat-thing twice? No-no! Can't trick-fool, no trick-fool again, no!

One of my favorite podcasts (Critshow) involves a group of humans who basically want to commit multi-planar ethnic cleansing against everything not human, the DM has commented that playing these NPCs feels like it’s tainting his soul just giving them a voice

"He's a LICH, you can't kill him, he'll just keep coming back."

"All part of the fun."