Bigotry in Period Gaming

[Tuk the Weekah]

Hey all!

I'm sure that this has been discussed a fair but before, but my search-fu is weak. I'm wondering how people, both GMs and players, deal with historical bigotries in a game context.

I know that some games & settings (Deadlands, Steampunk, cough cough) hand-wave away the bigotries of the era, and I have heard of examples when people have used 'in-character' bigotry to bully other players. My personal experience has been mixed.

I ran a time-travel campaign where the players played (somewhat idealized caricatures of) themselves. One of the players in the game was gay, and he played his character as gay. I found it added a certain distinction between the different time periods to show when being gay was accepted vs tolerated, vs discouraged, vs publicly vilified with a well-connected underground, vs outright criminalized. The player quite enjoyed playing out a character that reflected that side of him, and it didn't seem to cause any issues with the other players.

Recently, I ran a Victorian Monster Hunters campaign. As all but two of the characters were Status 1+, and one of those two was essentially 'the Bride of Frankenstein', I never really played up any of the racial tensions of London in the 1860s. They players all seemed quite happy without that kind of detail (as, to be honest, so did I), and it certainly fits the milieu better than playing it out. But looking back, the 5 gaming sessions in 3rd Century Rome, or at Waterloo, etc. feel more like a distinct place than the 18-months in Victorian London.

What thinks the hive mind?

[ericthered]

Rule #1: Know thy players! people expect different things out of history, expect different things out of a game, and take offense at different things.

That said, I like to play up cultural and class distinctions, though I usually use a light hand.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Rule #1: Know thy players! people expect different things out of history, expect different things out of a game, and take offense at different things.

That said, I like to play up cultural and class distinctions, though I usually use a light hand.

Also, it is easy to go too far in the opposite direction, and present societies as monolithically oppressive and totally on board with ideals laid down from above. I have heard scholars who ought to know better doubt whether there were women-who-preferred-women in the Roman world, or whether women could hold political power in medieval Europe.

Real societies are messy, and every 'rule' has exceptions, whether people who openly reject it or people who say they support it but somehow fail to notice when their friends break it. But finding the invisible walls of that space of possibilities is difficult even in your native society; its even harder in a society you pretend to visit for one evening a week between Monty Python jokes and the pizza guy.

[trechriron]

I agree with Eric.

It really depends on what you and your players are going for. What kind of game do you enjoy? Do you want to explore cultural bigotry?

There are plenty of comic, TV and movie examples of protagonists in a historical period, adventuring and engaging in shenanigans without much bigotry coming to the forefront.

There are plenty of TV and movie examples of period pieces that deeply explore these issues.

I base it on the group and what they want to play. Generally I run more cinematic style games of high adventure, so regardless of cultural stereotypes, social mores or prevalence of bigotry, I always encourage players to create the characters they want, even against "type". If a player chooses a disadvantage that calls out such things - that is an indication (to me) they want to explore it. :-D

[talonthehand]

It's something that absolutely requires talking about with the group beforehand too - one player dropping an unexpected, but completely historically accurate n-bomb does a lot to ruin the night. When I GM Cthulhu stuff, I explicitly state at the beginning that there's a lot of bigotry and racial/religious discrimination, and that the characters can be assumed to act as such, and therefore we don't actually need to act it out.

It seems to work fairly well.

[whswhs]

I'm playing in a campaign set in the late 1940s. One of the characters is a Japanese-American college student who spent the war in an internment camp. My character is a retired Swedish-American doctor who worked in that same camp as a medical officer. Another character is an ex-cop who spent much of the war as a POW in Germany, and who has condescending attitudes toward nonwhites. There have been some interesting clashes of point of view.

I'm not going to say that people shouldn't play characters who are enlightened about race and sex and the like in a 21st century fashion; in fact, my character is sort of such a character, though I deliberately put in some skew (for example, he's a supporter of eugenics, but he believes in hybrid vigor and therefore thinks racial purity is a bad idea). But my personal suspension of disbelief may be strained in the campaign world has no negative attitudes toward out-groups; I have something more of a taste for realism. I want to know how the heroic and exceptional PCs have dealt with those particular issues.

This is personal tastes; I'm not trying to lay down the law for other people's campaigns.

[Varyon]

The easiest way to deal with it (if you want to at all) is to first decide if it's a straight Disadvantage, just a Quirk, or a Feature. In reverse order, Features are the easiest - it's something of note, and the character might rarely run into issues (likely offset by minor bonuses) from it. Quirks are going to come into play somewhat often, but the effects will be minor - an occasional -1 reaction, and maybe an NPC calling the character by a pejorative now and again. For Disadvantages, you need to decide what Disadvantage it is. Things that are obvious from looking at or observing you, or that can (somehow) be readily discovered, are likely Social Stigmas. These can include a reduced Appearance, as the reference society finds you outright less attractive on account of your race (or cultural artifacts, like distended earlobes, shaved head, tattooed face, etc), but that can be a bit dicey to explain ("Oh, your character's black? Yeah, that defaults to Ugly..."), and outside of extreme cases isn't really all that accurate (by and large, all humans are attracted to - or repulsed by - the same general features). If your behavior gives you away, it's an Odious Personal Habit - some gay men would have OPH (Effeminate), for example. Unacceptable methods of speaking - the lisp some gay men seem to have cultivated, blacks speaking "ebonics" (or its apparent predecessor seen in Django Unchained), and so forth - might combine other effects (notably OPH) with Stuttering or even Disturbing Voice. Unacceptable beliefs - atheism, feminism, Christianity, Buddhism, etc, depending on reference culture - are likely to include a Delusion (and, as Characters notes, having a Delusion doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong).

Once you've got that, most of the work is done for you. If the player decides he doesn't want to have those Disadvantages, of course, you may want to reconsider if your players will be comfortable playing in a setting where such bigotry is present.

[dfinlay]

I don't often run true historical games - they're usually either modern, sci-fi or set in fictional worlds that are partially inspired by something historical. And that is a significant point (and a bit of a pet peeve of mine). Your game can't be historically incorrect in it's depiction of X if it's set in a fictional world (it can be internally inconsistent, but that's another story).

That said, racism is a significant factor in most of my games and as part of the milieu rather than something villains do, but I don't go to the level of, say genocide unless it's intended to be something the PCs fight against. Racism shows up at two levels: the first is that there usually are a few groups in the setting that are disproportionately discriminated against. I give these Social Stigma, so the players explicitly know what they are getting into. Beyond that, though, there is a general mistrust of foreigners. No matter where you are, people from somewhere else are distrusted and since I usually work out a fair amount of history, there is often some offense, conflict or stereotype that can be used to exacerbate this by those who want to make a deal out of it. I encourage PCs to consider this normal and partake but not to go so overboard that it excludes characters from the party.

As for sexism and homophobia, one of the first questions I ask in creating a fictional society is what their gender and sexuality roles are and how strictly and seriously they percieve those things to be. I've had cultures with quite a few different combinations and I often try to have differences between cultures in the same setting because those are interesting sources of conflict. However, I usually try to have enough strictness that it creates conflict and challenges amongst at least some groups while having enough groups that don't care too too much that players can still create the chracters that they want (No "if you are an openly gay man, you will be shunned or executed by basically everyone" because that isn't an interesting conflict for someone who wants to be openly gay, it's a prohibition on playing one).

This works pretty well for my group who all know each other very well and are comfortable dealing with such themes. Whenever I've played with people I don't know very well, I'm a lot more careful (I remember a recent conversation about whether it was fine for me to use real world religions as a source of conflict in a sci-fi game I was running).

That all said, I recently learned the hard way that it doesn't necessarily transfer to true historical settings. I pitched a game set in the late 1700s in Britain and I ran it exactly as I would a fantasy game in these regards: I told my players that unless they had a good reason not to, their characters should probably accept the memes of the British Empire: that the Empire deserved to rule the world, that it was civilizing savages and that British were superior to other white people who were superior to everyone else. Although the same players had been perfectly fine with that sort of role-play in a fantasy setting, the real-world nature of it made at least one of my players extremely uncomfortable and that was one of several reasons that I wound up scraping the campaign

[khorboth]

I feel like it adds to the world, but I take ques from the players for how much we should focus on it. In the fantasy world I created, there is a fair lot of misogyny, but racism is restricted along species lines. When I ran a large campaign in the world, cosmopolitan ports and merchants paid no attention. Conversely, people isolated or without incentive to be nice were pretty bigoted. It made it quite interesting to have "good guys" who tossed around racial superiority while saving the PCs and "bad guys" who were very equal about their subjugation. The players didn't really like it as a theme, so I kept it isolated and everyone was happy.

In a current steampunk game set in the 1860s, I am playing an upper-class Brit while another PC is a black former slave. We've remained civil, but have clashed socially. Particularly, the use of the word "savage" has been a point of contention. This is not made less awkward by the facts that my PC is gay and his is Handsome with +2 charisma. My character is so far in the closet he's having tea with Mr. Tumnus, but the black man recently figured it out. This has all made for really good interactions and character growth on both sides.

On the other hand, when I'm running pure dungeon fantasy, unless someone takes social stigma or I'm trying to make someone look mean, it doesn't come up at all. It would just bog down the process of smiting and stealing.

To me, it depends upon what themes you're going for and those can be dependent on your players. I would tread with caution unless you know them quite well. An easy way to get around the biggest social impact is to look up period accurate slurs. In a Victorian setting, calling someone "cargo" or "cast iron" can have the same in-game effect as the n-word in modern day without the same out-of-game issues.

[Flyndaran]

I would think "realistically", multi-species worlds would have a more cultural prejudice than racial or even species form. Like how ancient Romans cared more for birthplace/culture than skin hue.
Us vs. them is inevitable, but where that dividing line gets drawn isn't always obvious to our modern way of thinking.