Is Golarion racist? Lots of stereotypes

>It's a theme park setting
So was Greyhawk, but because that was made back in The Good Old Days it gets a pass as lovable OSR gonzo creativity while Golarion is obviously drek made by casual SJW niggers who should be playing storygames.

You'd be hard pressed to find a well known fantasy setting without AT LEAST one "theme park" culture. Normally it'd be vikings, gypsies, "Middle Easterners" and/or "Far Easterners" (you know, that kingdom which has a great wall and is also all jungle and filled with samurai and ninja).

It's easier to write, it's easier to understand, it's easier to make assumptions about and it saves you the trouble of creating a culture by yourself only to have it poked full of holes by a player who happens to know more anthropology or history or about agriculture or whatever than you. It can be done (Greg Stolze's REIGN's default setting isn't easily comparable to any real world culture I can think of), but it's rare and when it is done half the time Veeky Forums will call tryhard-fixing-what-isn't-broken-change-for-the-sake-of-it shenanigans.

...

>only to have it poked full of holes by a player who happens to know more anthropology or history or about agriculture or whatever than you
Listen to this wise man's advice, kids: don't write for normal people! Write for hardcore autists!

You'll be surprised, but real SJW's accuse Paizo of racism all the time.

>Greyhawk
>that was made back in The Good Old Days
Your sarcasm is actually correct, though. A lot of the faults in Greyhawk's setting can be forgiven to an extent for being a product of an older time, since it was created during an age when common tropes hadn't been overused to the point of even being labeled "tropes".

Golarion, on the other hand, doesn't get off that easily because even when Pathfinder was first new people were making fiction more complex than "Like [Earth culture], but with ____". It was a generic setting made secondary to the main motivations of cashing in on the disgruntled 3.5 fanbase, and attempts to bring uniqueness to Golarion have just led to it being a cluttered mishmash of cultural stereotypes.

My Little user Can't Possibly Be This Reddit!

Anyone who isn't an autist wouldn't give a shit about "theme park cultures" either, autist.

If the originality of the setting affects your enjoyment of it than it shouldn't matter to you under what circumstances it was created.

You should know better than to assume that people on Veeky Forums actually play any games, rather than simply talking about them.

But greyhawk was designed from the beginning as "literally earth with the continents flipped backwards".

I prefer settings based on real world cultures that I can identify with than any of those 'different' and 'unique' settings, that often don't make any sense. I would pick Westeros over Malazan any day.

Fuck you autists and your "muh original setting" bullshit.

My Little user: Opinions are Cancer

And Golarion was designed as "literally earth but with fantasy elements thrown in", same as innumerable other settings, including everyone's much beloved Warhammer Fantasy. I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's ubiquitous and that singling out Golarion just because you dislike the game it's associated with is silly.

You can have both. Settings based on real world cultures with original ideas. Just saying.

Sure, but some autists on this board will just dismiss them for being "theme park" settings.

Where from you pulled the assumption that I give a shit about it, retardino?

Golarion was made that way so you can run the type of game you want without much trouble. Any GM worth its salt knows how to adjust the details to fit its game.

>including everyone's much beloved Warhammer Fantasy
Grognards only found out that they had apparently loved it so much after it was gone. Personally, I don't like what it is, I like the way it's done.

You gave enough of a shit to write an angry post :^)

Here's a two step process to determine if something is racist:
>1 was it made by a fucking white male?
>2 was it made by a race traitor uncle tom like Kanye West?

If you answered yes to either, it's racist trash and should be tossed into the dustbin of history.

That's not what I was angry at.
>creating a culture by yourself only to have it poked full of holes by a player who happens to know more anthropology or history or about agriculture or whatever than you
is bullshit of the highest grade.

Reminder that science shows that there actually isn't a White Race. Or Black Race, etc...

It also shows many of us are mongrels. Especially in Europe.

Golarion is a shitty setting, if thats what you're asking.

So are you calling bullshit on the writer for not having done more work or on the autist for poking holes in a simple game of make believe?

>Like [Earth culture], but with ____

Honestly, I'm kinda okay with aping Earth cultures.
The trick is to do your reading, cause most of them time the truth is wildly divergent from the pop-culture version of history.

Also, I think it's kinda neat to have a setting centred on a given culture be sorta like how that culture viewed the world.
For example, I've always wanted to run a Greece-Near East circa Greco-Persian wars setting based heavily off Herodotus' Histories.
Herodotus was of course quite misinformed about a lot of things, but it's interesting all the same.

>I've always wanted to run a Greece-Near East circa Greco-Persian wars setting

by this I mean a setting that's essentially Not!Greece to Not!Bactria of around that era

Aping other cultures is a good shorthand so that you can get the worldbuilding out into the players heads fast and clean.

Even if the stereotypes are racial (are they?), I'm more inclined to say it is just superficial.

It must work on that "one-detail-to-the-max" principle and almost nothing else. It works, just don't expect more than what it shows right away.

Your mom is a racist stereotype.

youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM

Personally, IRL, it's definitely a cultural thing.

My more rural friends say when the Irish Travellers set up shop nearby you lock up your shit and even then expect a few screwdrivers and the like to be stolen.

I mean, it's not like there's a gypsy gene that encourages stealing, it's just the culture that they are raised in, and I'm sure there's individuals that buck the trend.

Unfortunately as they are very insular they are quite resistant to social engineering.
Honestly my (poorly formed) opinion is that the best thing to do is to require that their children have a permanent address for schooling, else social services gets involved.

I know, that constitutes soft genocide (destruction of a culture without killing), and reduces the diversity of human culture, which as a dirty romanticist I'm against, but what can one do?

tl;dr stereotypes that are real are learnt, not inborn

It's 2017. EVERYTHING is racist. And sexist.

>Those tits could crush his head if she wanted to

Every stereotype is true to some extent. It takes most people a lifetime to figure this out.

They apply to groups generally, but not to every member of a group, and under most circumstances you should judge people based on their character and give everyone a chance, if possible.

One of the guys in my old, tiny Comp Sci class was Muslim, and he is pretty dead on.
Like he didn't drink or go out, but he was a pretty swell guy.

I guess it's a matter of how liberal you are, which kinda applies to all religions.
I guess it's just cause of the political situation in the Middle-East that liberal Islam is less prominent than liberal Christianity relatively speaking.

>liberal
and I mean this in the classical sense of "pro-liberty and self-determination" rather than the contemporary american usage

Or the Australian usage, which is also wrong but basically the opposite of the american usage!

The mideast was never classical liberal. Ever.

I think that any game setting is what you make of it as the DM. Custom settings can be amazing or shit depending on the narrative strength of the creator. However, even the best custom world has the issue accessible information to the players. Unless the cultures, stats, ect are all afforded to the players by some means other than talking to him it can leave the players feeling like they are sort of lost at sea. Using a published campaign setting, Golarion or otherwise, allows everyone access to this information and often times in greater depth than what a DM might create. Personally, I do use Golarion as my game setting but by no means do I think it is perfect. no setting is. We have fun playing in it and after all it is a game in which to have fun. Golarion is open ended enough to allow us to tell the stories we want to tell within it's setting. So it works for now, until something better comes along.

ISIS is liberal Islam. It's the expansionism of Islam merged with the total irresponsibility of liberalism.

> and I mean this in the classical sense of "pro-liberty and self-determination"
So conservatism.

Nah lad, it's a theocratic apocalypse cult

Conservatism is maintaining the status quo, isn't it?
I mean liberalism in the sense that people should to an extent be trusted to live their own lives, with the biggest caveat being that said living shouldn't infringe one others
It's more an ideal than a practical system, but that doesn't mean that we should strive towards it

That just makes it a more religious version of liberalism.

muslim apologists should move to sweden

No it wasn't, but it could have been.
As a Brit benevolent imperialist, I do really hate what we did to Iran, because they could have been a decent democracy had we not been too concerned over oil.
But I guess that's one of the major problems with representative democracy: term-length myopia, long-term be damned

I mean Liberalism as the belief that every person should be free to decide their own destiny, and that no one is better due to the circumstances of their birth

>Iran, because they could have been a decent democracy
Oh fuck off, Mossadeq would have aligned with the Soviet Union and turned Iran into Cuba just like Castro (who also styled himself a "democrat"). That or he would have lasted 1-2 years and been overthrown by the Communists and become a mini-Afghanistan satrapy.

where is the vagaina?

No.

>Arabian nights on crack

?

Whats "deep" about putting super cliched versions of historical civilizations and giving them fantasy names?

>Literally europe, africa and the levant with fantasy names

>literally everything is based on Earth cultures!
>nothing original in this world!
>sheesh

I understand why theme park settings like Golarion exist, but Paizo really should have made another setting at some point.

They exist because Americans would sue because it wasn't dumbed down enough for them.

Soooo... Britain in the late 19th and pre WW1 days?

So Conservative?

Don't worry, user, soft genocide is only terrible when it's done to white people by those devious SJWs.

>implying stereotypes are racist

>Conservatism is maintaining the status quo, isn't it?
Not in America today.

American politics are one of those cases where nothing can come from appropriating the names but confusion. The American "conservatives" are also the liberals, AND claim to be the democrats, but are also opposed to what would be seen as core values of both liberalism and democracy anywhere else in the world, while their "liberals" are democrats but NOT conservatives who are also opposed to half of what democracy and liberalism stand for anywhere else. It's best to think of American political parties as their own things, complete with the bizarre dichotomy of one party being pro gun rights but opposed to abortions while the other is being the opposite.

Yeah, I really hate it when settings make a country based on our own history's real "Conan versus robots from space" period, but with fantasy names.

>complete with the bizarre dichotomy of one party being pro gun rights but opposed to abortions
Nothing about the combination of those two things is bizarre. What are you gonna do, somehow equate self defense with killing babies?

I know it's shocking to you burgers, but in most of the world the distinction is between the guys who are for more rights and the guys who are for more control, not arbitrary combinations of the two. If you're for giving people the freedom to own guns and grow their own weed, you'd most often also be for giving them the freedom to marry who they like and have abortions. Conversely, if you're not, you're most likely not going to give them those.

The standard reply to this story is that when some non-muslim murders his wife and/or children, people don't try to pin the blame on relgiion.

From an article discussing the event:
>Just in the last week: A Virginia woman was fatally shot in an apparent domestic dispute that also injured her husband. A woman in Washington state was killed by her boyfriend. A man was charged with killing his wife and two stepchildren in their Virginia home. And on and on.
>Three weeks ago, a Chinese graduate student at Virginia Tech cut off a female friend's head with a knife. Not a single news outlet referred to his religion.

I like how you think Americans are morons who can't see how fucked up our system is, but what I've gathered from living in america for all my life is that when you want more personal freedoms and socialized government systems you look to the Democratic Party, when you want Big Business and privatization of everything from the DMV to the EPA to hell probably even the military, you go to the republicans who all seem to want a Theocracy on top of Corporations ruling us all.

ACTUALLY saying it's racist is racist against gamers

>The standard reply to this story is that when some non-muslim murders his wife and/or children, people don't try to pin the blame on relgiion.

Fuck off Francis. When a baptized Italian Catholic kills his girlfriend, he doesn't do so while shouting out Bible passages out loud. He also doesn't shoot Muslim reporters while shouting "This is for Jesus!". Also, compare how many people in Europe have been killed in the name of Islam in the past year compared to those who have been killed in Europe in the name of any other religion in the past ten years.

And we can even move a step further away, ignore the deeds of the believers and merely look at Christian doctrine. What we then discover is that the deeds of such groups as the Islamic state are simply what's in the Qu'ran and the Hadith.

I am one of those people who believes that we should judge others on their character first and foremost. If one of those people says "I'm a Muslim", he says "I believe that the Qu'ran is the direct and unquestionable word of God" and "I believe the conduct of Muhammad is examplary", by which he also implicitly says "I believe it is good to kill the unbelievers until they declare there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet" and "She 9 but dat mouth 18 tho" and "the day of Judgement will not come until the last of the Jews are beaten to death". If those ideas don't make one's character rotten to the core, I do not know what does.

>It's a crutch

Says you. For long time I also hated viking land, Transylvania-county, Pirate islands and alike. Because they were stereotypes and stereotypes I was extremely familiar with. But guess what, when you tell someone campaign will be in egypt, arabian nights, viking lands; they have some general idea what to expect from the game. And also how the world and characters look visually depending on culture that inspired it.

You can bitch and moan about originality (I know I had for a long, long time) but human history is not so diverse. You can try going off left field and you will get some alien culture that isn't interesting and just plain weird.

It depends what you do with that culture and how you make game interesting.

It is kitchen sink setting (gasp like 99% of rpgs). I don't think it is particularly interesting or particularly boring.

My only problem is that there is no buffer zones between different cultures or nations. If every nation was reduced by 50% in size it would be great for bitchy people like you. That way you can create nations between them and make more gradual cultural differences.

You have a very Huffpo view on Republicans.

It's true though at least where I live, which is in a primarily republican area and that shit is exactly the bullshit they spew, aside from hating niggers and so on.

Whereas anyone identifying as Christian is obviously all in favour of stoning rebellious kids to death.