PrimeJunta

Are you, by any chance, white, male, straight, with a middle-class (or higher) background, and living in a first-world country? Serious question, 'cuz it's extermely relevant to the 'punching up vs punching down' thing. These things are not symmetrical because of power relations! (Full disclosure: I am all of the above.)

Would you understand why someone might take offence with a game where you played as a German and the zombies happened wear yarmulkes and have names like Abram, David, Rebecca, and Rachel? (Edit: Actually, it might be possible to pull that off. You'd just have to be really, really good at wildly over the top humor. The South Park guys might be able to do it, even if they too fall flat on their faces from time to time. You'd be making brutal fun of racists by turning all the knobs to eleven. But the zombie game you're referencing isn't like that at all; it just reinforces existing, entrenched stereotypes. Punching down is not the same as punching up, see.) (Another edit: rephrased the question for more precisely communicating intent.)

So, you would consider, say, the Westboro Baptist Church 'politically correct' then?

What is this "Political Correctness bandwagon" you speak of?

Some of the hints Obsidian has been dropping have been pretty promising. Perhaps some society is really strongly prejudiced against magic-users for example. That would be cool. Re stats and bigotry, mmmmaybe. I just think it's unlikely that the bigotry would necessarily track the stats. The weaker or dumber could band together to keep the smarter or stronger down, for example. Being the smartest or strongest kid in the class is not an automatic ticket to being the most popular one, y'know.

At least for Tolkien's elves and dwarves it looks like plain ol' birthrate, rather than lack of ambition or somesuch. In fact the main overarching story for his elves was the rebellion and exile of the Noldor. They set out from the safety and glory of Valinor to carve out kingdoms for themselves in the broad lands of Middle-Earth, against the will of the Valar. The sons of Fëanor were in it for the Silmarils of course, but Galadriel and many who followed her did it out of ambition and other very "human-like" motives. OTOH his elves seemed to produce roughly the same number of offspring as humans, but over a much, much longer time period as they were biologically immortal. (Círdan the Shipwright of the Grey Havens was one of the first generation of elves, for example – he wasn't born, but awoke at Cuiviénen.) That means that humans would outbreed them by a factor of ten or more. That means that over a couple of centuries they're effectively screwed unless they adopt a pest control type strategy before it's too late.

Technologically potent individuals, their groups, orders, factions fighting all over the place because fo racist sexual and other discrimination is chaos. Why would a bunch of nerds discriminate women instead of welcoming another talent to their rank? ... Oh.

Or, of course, a bunch of templars and wizards could band together and burn her at the stake.

Good point. In my particular case, I assumed humans would be on top because of what Obsidian has told us about the world of P:E. They specifically mentioned that orlans are subject to prejudice and discrimination, and that Vailians – the most technologically advanced, richest, and most expansive civilization – are human. I would be very interested to play a game set in, say, a gynarchy. It would be an interesting way to explore this stuff from a different angle. However, the point I attempted to make was pretty much the same you're making. I.e., that it's fine for the world to be prejudiced, but it's not fine for the game to be the same. The game could do this in any of a number of ways. IMO the best way would be to give each race/sex/whatever broad advantages in some circumstances and broad disadvantages in others. For example, assume that orlans are subject to discrimination. So then make a part of the game take place in a Vailian city, and another equally developed part in an orlan village. How will the humans treat the orlans? How will the orlans treat the humans? Maybe the human will find himself treated as a mark, a cop, or a tourist, and will have to fight a real uphill battle to get the locals to cooperate at all. Personally I'm not really that concerned about stuff, as in, "getting the best." In any case most "stuff" in games like this is either crafted or found adventuring. I don't think it'd be an unbalancing advantage for, say, humans to have access to better merchants. That would be quite easy to balance out, say by giving the orlans some cool racial special abilities, or access to those grubby pawnshops which turn out sell the best poisons and the hottest stolen stuff under the counter. But yeah good point about humans and men always being the majority. It would be cool to see that assumption flipped. I hope someone soon does that. T:ToN perhaps?

Or, of course, it could go like it usually does: they could designate you an honorary human. Even the Nazis designated some Jews honorary Aryans. (I bet they were really chuffed about that honor.)

Less content. Less interesting challenges. Less interesting gameplay. Bloodlines is an excellent example of how to do it right. The Nosferatu had particular challenges they had to surmount, and the game experience was different because of them. You didn't get the social intricacies of playing as a Toreador, but you got something else instead. So it's kind of correct to say that the the world of Bloodlines treats Nosferatu as second-class citizens, but the game of Bloodlines totally doesn't. Nosferatu gameplay is fully fleshed-out and every bit as interesting as playing as any other clan.

Yep. It's one thing for the game world to discriminate against classes of individuals; it's another for the game to do the same. This is why I dislike tired videogame tropes like boobplate and damsels in distress. They just pander to some really dumb expectations and relegate one class of individuals – women – to eye-candy status only. So it would be a bad thing if bigotry in P:E led to a situation where, say, playing as an orlan or a woman would lead to a significantly poorer game. This doesn't mean the game world can't be bigoted. You just have to put in alternative content for all sides. If a city guard is human males only, you might make a criminal underground that's non-humans only. If additionally you made elements of the guard corrupt and elements in the criminal underground take care of the community where it operates, then both paths would get a rewarding and materially different experience, and both paths would benefit from the added depth the other brings to the table. It would have the added benefit of believability, since this resembles how bigotry and social groupings operate in real life. You wouldn't want to overdo this of course; it'd be a bit of a let-down if the entire plot was predetermined by the choices you made at character creation. But I think it would be possible to work in this kind of thing "organically" as it were.

I take it you really, REALLY like pauldrons?

I agree. Just salting in constant and repetitive malicious comments is a very cheap and easy way of doing it, and rather than that, it would be better not to do at all. What I'd like to see is shops, taverns, inns, guilds etc. that are "men only," "women only," "humans only," "orlans only" etc., with suitable social status associated. An orlan entering a shop selling magical luxuries would be turned away with "We don't serve your kind here;" a human barging into a grubby orlan pawnshop would be met with "Please sir, we have nothing here." Hey, you could then even add features that would let you circumvent these limitations. Disguise skills or illusion magic that would let you pass as a member of another group (if you knew how to act the part too), special, perhaps demeaning and humiliating, perhaps exceptionally challenging quests that would get you accepted as an honorary hu(man), and so on.

Fantasy is often escapist, but it doesn't have to be, and IMO it's not the core of the genre at all.

Socialist Realism is only good for kitsch value. A cRPG should not stoop to that. All forms of bigotry make for good story and setting material. Utopias breed few heroes and make for boring stories. What I don't like is gamemakers oblivious to their own privilege who just make their imagined worlds pander to that. I have no fears on that score however, knowing who's writing for P:E. I also don't like transparently didactic stuff, even if I agree with the politics. There's always a subtext, but I don't want it rubbed in my face TYVM.

That's one of AD&D 2's flaws. Mages just get way overpowered at higher levels. You can't make a game without dominant strategies like that in a system so badly flawed.

To each their own. I hated DA:O combat. Partly because of the MMO-esque mechanics, but mostly just because it was so. endlessly. repetitive, and so heavily reliant on the "neener neener" ploy, i.e., materializing waves of enemies around you or plonking you in the middle of an ambush. BG2, on the other hand, had rich, varied, and occasionally interesting combat challenges that made the most of the horrifying mechanical mess that is AD&D v2. So for combat I'll take any IE game over DA:O.

I'm all for naked people in P:E. I just want the nakedness to make sense -- and I would prefer not to have nakedness for the sake of titillation only. There are circumstances where it makes sense to be naked or nearly so, and circumstances where it doesn't. There are even circumstances in which it makes sense to go into battle naked, or nearly so. What doesn't make sense -- and, what's more, what's extremely threadbare, clichéd, and tired -- is the trope that mean wear full plate and women wear chainmail bikinis, or that men wear breastplate shaped to deflect blows, and women wear breastplate shaped to show off their breasts. In short, I'm all for naked disembodied spirits, naked berserker warriors who paint themselves blue, hoplites who go into battle in a tightly-packed hot sweaty formation carrying nothing but their shields and spears, naked wild dancing witchy rituals invoking spirits, deities, or other powers, naked orgies, naked baths, cultures where people go more or less naked in their everyday life, and Cap d'Agde. Just no boobplate, chainmail bikinis, or no-ladies-over-21-allowed. That is all.

@Ulquiorra, I can direct you to a couple of Tumblrs in case you need to educate yourself about female anatomy.

I like problem-solving in games. Puzzles... yes and no. If they're too transparently puzzle-ish, i.e., there's no or very little in-game rationale for them being there, they tend to jolt me out of the game. I think that's what first comes to mind when you think of a puzzle. But if P:E turns out to have lots of challenges that need smarts, knowledge, color perception, tone perception or whatever to solve, and if they're well integrated into the gameworld, I'm all for it. The toughest ones, or at least the ones that would otherwise lock out, say, colorblind, deaf, or tone-deaf people, are probably best left in optional areas. There can be too much of a good thing of course. Wouldn't want P:E to turn into an adventure game.

I'm all for optional, hard to reach content. They flesh out later playthroughs brilliantly. Even better if there's some of such stuff that's only accessible to particular character builds. I had a lot of fun looting the Death God's vault in MotB for example.

Must-read essay on Sparta and that homoerotic movie you're talking about.

On a second reading, maybe I will play a monk after all at some point. And I will name him, Thelonius.

I think the "different eras" look makes perfect sense for P:E's Conquistador premise. The Vailians are clearly Renaissance, whereas the others are more "antiquity." This mirrors the New World in the 1500's.