Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
You know, the more I hear about the setting, the less I like it. I just like the idea of bringing Nazis to justice more than I like the idea of Nazis escaping justice for decades. In my opinion, Nazis make better targets than they make heroes and having entire generations being raised Nazi without external influences who enslaved the natives just means that you have an entire world of targets.
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Eh, I like Non-Player
Characters, not just targets. Video games are a far superior media to role-playing if you are just going to interact with anyone not explicitly on the heroes' side as either targets or quest-givers.
One of the reasons I like Antarctic Space Nazis as villains is that they are frightening, nasty and come with easy-to-hate pre-packaged motivations and associations, but they're also based on an ideology and people who really existed, which means that they're a lot more complex and nuanced than most servants of a Generic Evil Empire.
I mean, yes, this Antarctic Space Nazi society is somehow even crazier and darker than the actual Nazis (no easy feat), what with their Faustian bargain with world-ending, necromantic Things Man Was Not Meant to Know (which bargain, however, is a deep dark secret of the innermost circle of the leaders), but at the same time,
any human society will be home to ordinary people with the same human feelings and desires as any of us, just wanting to provide a safe home and bright future for their loved ones.
Can PCs shoot the Antarctic Space Nazis? Sure. And they have done so before and will do again.
But can they just treat them as targets without human qualities?
No, not if the PCs are supposed to be any better than the worst Nazis in history.
And not if everyone is to have fun, because it's a hell of a lot more fun to have PCs fall for the beautiful Nazi girl (hello,
Elsa Schneider!), have faux-polite conversations with the aristocratic SS officers and come to reluctantly admire some of the Waffen-SS they face in battle than it is to have them shoot Nazis with all the emotional investment they bring to target practice. Despicable villains intermixed with crackpots who are funny and scary at the same time, interlaced with the occasional honorable foe, sympathetic opponent, rivals who aren't open enemies and just regular people caught in a strange situation, are a lot more fun than just targets.