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Sining wrote:

Not all feelings are valid and not all personal reactions are right. This guy's just being thin-skinned

Your feeling about that guy is not valid and wrong. You are being thin-skinned about tolerating other differing opinions. The same "logic" you use can just as easily be used to rule your statements invalid.

His feelings are valid even if they are not your own. You cannot argue he is being thin skinned without knowing his circumstances. You are not the arbiter of other people's opinions. Nobody put you in charge. He has his opinion and right to feel offended and not support. You have your own stance. MOVE ON.

You can say that. Notice how I'm not stopping you from saying that with some BS all feelings/reasons are valid schtick. I expressed an opinion, you're welcome to disagree with it and tell me I'm wrong.

What's weirder is you're the one arguing for a third party whom you also don't know anything about but you feel magnanimous enough to defend while assuming his reasons.

Feelings are inherently subjective and based on each individual's experiences and history. They cannot be proven wrong by logic in the way that facts can be. Likewise I am not arguing that his position is "right" either.

I am arguing that his position is equally valid as those that take no offence at the Rising Sun symbol and its use in this game. People are free to have their own opinions on an issue and though others may not share that feeling, they cannot dictate that he is "wrong". That is the whole concept of "mansplaining" or "whitesplaining", and precisely why those that encounter that are offended: the concept of their range of opinion and feeling being constrained and dictated by others.

It is similar to the concept of free speech. Even though I may not share his opinion, that Korean has the right to it. Just because it is different from your own does not make him suddenly "thin-skinned" or his feelings invalid.

Again, instead of trying to dictate what others have the right to believe, why not actually talk about the game in question

You do realise the concept of free speech also allows people to criticise other speech right? There's no concept that just lets people say what they want without being criticised, much like you think 'feelings' are


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As for this game, I like the minis but I'm not a huge fan of Eric or CMONs game balance

Criticizing is different from trying to invalidate or shut down their opinion. Trying to shut down someone else's free speech is not in itself protected as a form of free speech. "The right to swing my arms in any direction ends where your nose begins."

When it comes to taking offence, it is the offended party that ultimately decides whether they find something offensive, not others deciding for them. Again this ties into the whole concept of ""whitesplaining", with others telling/dictating to minorities whether they have the right to be offended by epithets or actions committed against them.


As for the game, its stereotyped fantasy Japan comes off as something more befitting the era of the 1980's, when it seemed much of the Western world had a mixture of fear and fascination with all things Japanese. I.e. it seems to give off anime fan vibes

I honestly don't understand what issue people are having with the mythological aspects of this game. The politics, I can understand, but Japan is a country with a rich spiritual and animist tradition, and an artistic and literary culture that has depicted and interpreted these traditions for a few 1000 years. If there's anything to take issue with, it could only be about whether or not the art in this game is true to the Japanese traditions, which doesnt seem to be what the conversation is about. And in regards to Orientalism... well i suppose they could have designed the game to be generic and use little green army men, but where's the fun in that? They chose some themes that are interesting, though perhaps not always well executed (hummingbird clan imho), and decided to throw some gods in there too. I suppose the gods could just have been different coloured erasers to set them apart from the green army men, but again, where's the fun in that? I actually support this type of game from an educational point of view. Not every interpretation may be accurate, but it gives the uninitiated a starting point they might not otherwise have when learning about the traditions of other cultures. And for context my wife is Korean and i studied East Asian history and religion in my undergrad.

 spiralingcadaver wrote:
Bob, it's just kinda' embarrassingly dated in sensibility. Like, probably woulda' been fine even in the late 90's, but that was 20 years ago. Now, I feel it's just a thing because, well, gaming culture as a whole has been pretty slow to adapt to the times.

So far, the "have your army commit suicide for points" is about the least-tasteful thing I've seen mechanically

Oof, I'd missed that, and would have to agree. Wargaming can be pretty retrograde, it's been a white boys club for most of its modern inception. It's just hard to separate the signal from noise at times. Probably would have been better to just set it in a fictional Japanese inspired land. As JohnH WangDD noted, the clan' seemed to somewhat track w Rokugan clans anyways.

To be fair, gaining points by having your units deliberately die, is a major game mechanic in Blood Rage too. It's one of the game design ways to make that game stand out from thematic (aka Ameritrash) games, and be a Euro-thematic hybrid, I think. In that, losing a bunch of your units early on, does not have to systematically disadvantage you for the rest of the game.

I do get that transferring that mechanic from representing "berserk charge against overwhelming odds, for honour" to "ritual suicide, for duty" is significant and potentially problematic, mind. For me it loses a lot of the nuance of what (little) I know of seppuku. There are lots of reasons for deciding that seppuku is the right thing to do, historically... I don't think any of them are "let's bank some power points with the river kami" or something.

Interesting stuff, Ian. And yeah, I totally remember being a dumb little impatient undergrad. Well, I hope some learn some useful stuff, even if it's against their will.



Regarding the question of chinese influence in Japan, I don't believe any country got a substantial foothold in Japan between well before feudalism until the American occupation. A game about the actual foundation of Japanese society, dealing with Korean and Chinese influences and native ethnically Japanese groups would be a kinda' ballsy game, but since it exists well before basically anything popularly associated with Japan, you'd probably never see it outside some little indie game made by history buffs.

Sining wrote:
I'd say the business can safely ignore this one guy considering that even for a minority opinion, he's a very minor one. Secondly, the company's making what? 3 mill right now on KS indicates his concerns aren't huge.

For far from the last time... popularity doesn't mean it's not got problems, it just means it's popular. Unless you're going to say that pop music and fast food are the epitome of music and cuisine, or perhaps their moral exemplars, hopefully you'll understand the flaw in the popularity argument without needing to go in to the success of various political or social movements.


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 Ian Sturrock wrote:
what (little) I know of seppuku. There are lots of reasons for deciding that seppuku is the right thing to do, historically... I don't think any of them are "let's bank some power points with the river kami" or something.

Nah, I think I remember that in some textbook. I'll need to dig that up

Yeah, I never really cared about that stuff, but I sure don't remember it as anything other than redeeming from utter failure. Contrary to popular belief, Japanese leaders usually wanted their troops and officials to be alive to be able to do things.

 spiralingcadaver wrote:

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 Ian Sturrock wrote:
what (little) I know of seppuku. There are lots of reasons for deciding that seppuku is the right thing to do, historically... I don't think any of them are "let's bank some power points with the river kami" or something.

Nah, I think I remember that in some textbook. I'll need to dig that up

Yeah, I never really cared about that stuff, but I sure don't remember it as anything other than redeeming from utter failure. Contrary to popular belief, Japanese leaders usually wanted their troops and officials to be alive to be able to do things.

Yeah. I'm in two minds about this one, as I am about so much of the game. I do like games that attempt to capture cultural nuance and turn it into game mechanics, as a general principle.

I suspect that with something as complex and potentially fraught as ritual suicide, mechanics like this would work better in an RPG than a boardgame. But games are converging -- one of the reasons people love this kind of game is that it has almost as strong a sense of theme and place as a good RPG, and almost as good minis as a good tabletop wargame, yet still plays in an hour or two like a good Euro. It's just... I'm not sure "almost as good" is good enough for this.

I guess what doesn't work for me, from what we know so far of the mechanics, is that I think of seppuku as being an attempt to maintain personal honour. I'm not sure that it should give a mechanical benefit to the *army* that the suiciding warrior belonged to. Again, in an RPG, this kind of thing could work incredibly well, and potentially quite sensitively -- you use the seppuku as a way to get a sense of closure for your character who attempted a great deed on behalf of his lord, and failed. You ensure that his family maintains its honour. Maybe this allows you to play his son as your next character. Etc.

Anyway -- I'm not Japanese, and I'm by no means an expert on this stuff (though I am fascinated by it!).

 Ian Sturrock wrote:

I do think that the two (is it two?) extra, invading clans are the natural place to add in Chinese culture -- slightly better than shoe-horning them into Japan -- but, honestly, it still seems pretty lazy and unnecessary. It's kinda like if you had a game based firmly on Arthurian mythology, but you really loved Croatia and so felt like you had to add a Croatian faction.

That would be awesome, though!

Full disclosure: I take a rather Pinkberry view of mythology-based fantasy rather than a Haagen Dazs view; throw it all in and mix it together. I probably would have been interested in Blood Rage if it had more Greek monsters or something.


As for mashing all Asian cultures together...Is that just an issue because Rising Sun is set in Japan rather than an entirely fabricated land? Or would it be considered problematic for other reasons?

For example, I have seen that criticism levelled at The Initiate Brother, even though it is set in the kingdom of Wa, not a real place. (The book uses the intrigue and courtliness of Imperial Japan set against the history and scale of China during a not-Mongol invasion.) Is that worse than the kinds of generic European civilizations common in most fantasy? Why?

Pretty much impossible to come up with a definite answer to this stuff in a forum post about a setting I don't know. I do have half a mind to do a detailed close reading of Rising Sun in a year, though -- I'll post a link to it in the thread when I get it done.

Yeah... completely depends. It's probably basically guaranteed to end up with something orientalist but less-offensively so since there's artistic liberties with a fully fictional setting.

Sining wrote:
So far, it's one guy complaining about the title. I say CMON can safely ignore the thin-skinned fool.

I'll say this - he's allowed to be offended for any number of reasons, and given the historical fact of the number of people they imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, raped, and murdered, it's likely completely justified.

It is exceedingly uncool of you to call him a "thin-skinned fool." I rather doubt you'd be so kind a about people who might have raped & tortured your grandmother to death - something that actually happened to quite a number of Korean women during WW2.

No reply necessary, though. I don't feel you're the sort of person with whom I would enjoy conversation. You see, I can safely ignore you.

People getting offended is so 2016.

 Ian Sturrock wrote:

Back on topic... I can totally see the appeal of "let's do a game about samurai, samurai are cool!" Even if it's not the 80s any more. I do think that the two (is it two?) extra, invading clans are the natural place to add in Chinese culture -- slightly better than shoe-horning them into Japan -- but, honestly, it still seems pretty lazy and unnecessary. It's kinda like if you had a game based firmly on Arthurian mythology, but you really loved Croatia and so felt like you had to add a Croatian faction.

I'd see it as something more akin to adding a Persian Clan to a game about Greek city-states. Or Croats to a game about the Roman Republic, or.... you get the idea. Adding factions/teams/whatever based on neighbouring states with history and influence over one another isn't unreasonable as expansion content.

It's surely not as bad as entirely transplanting your Welsh-Arthurian mythology into a Frankish setting, right?

 Azazelx wrote:

It's surely not as bad as entirely transplanting your Welsh-Arthurian mythology into a Frankish setting, right?

Is that a reference to Bretonnia? My American education was every bit as thorough on post-Hellenic European history as on pre-WW2 Asian history.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

Sining wrote:
So far, it's one guy complaining about the title. I say CMON can safely ignore the thin-skinned fool.

I'll say this - he's allowed to be offended for any number of reasons, and given the historical fact of the number of people they imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, raped, and murdered, it's likely completely justified.

It is exceedingly uncool of you to call him a "thin-skinned fool." I rather doubt you'd be so kind a about people who might have raped & tortured your grandmother to death - something that actually happened to quite a number of Korean women during WW2.

No reply necessary, though. I don't feel you're the sort of person with whom I would enjoy conversation. You see, I can safely ignore you.

And you think Singaporean women were treated any better? It's not just Korea that suffered during WW2

To put it into context, this game isn't by the Japanese and the name isn't by anyone who was associated with WW2. I don't see a point in getting offended when americans make a game that is based on a land historically called the Land of the Rising Sun and calling it Rising Sun. Talk about pointless outrage.


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 spiralingcadaver wrote:
Interesting stuff, Ian. And yeah, I totally remember being a dumb little impatient undergrad. Well, I hope some learn some useful stuff, even if it's against their will.



Regarding the question of chinese influence in Japan, I don't believe any country got a substantial foothold in Japan between well before feudalism until the American occupation. A game about the actual foundation of Japanese society, dealing with Korean and Chinese influences and native ethnically Japanese groups would be a kinda' ballsy game, but since it exists well before basically anything popularly associated with Japan, you'd probably never see it outside some little indie game made by history buffs.

Technically depends if you can consider the Portuguese as such? They did spread christianity to the Japanese which led to some rebellions and quite a lot of executions.

Sining wrote:
I'd say the business can safely ignore this one guy considering that even for a minority opinion, he's a very minor one. Secondly, the company's making what? 3 mill right now on KS indicates his concerns aren't huge.

For far from the last time... popularity doesn't mean it's not got problems, it just means it's popular. Unless you're going to say that pop music and fast food are the epitome of music and cuisine, or perhaps their moral exemplars, hopefully you'll understand the flaw in the popularity argument without needing to go in to the success of various political or social movements.

 Azazelx wrote:


It's surely not as bad as entirely transplanting your Welsh-Arthurian mythology into a Frankish setting, right?

Well a lot of the Arthurian stuff comes from French writers, so it sort of works. Sort of. If you squint at it. Sideways. In a dim light.

As...interesting as a lot of this has been, please endeavor to stick to the topic at hand.

Dakka Discussions would be a great place for a lot of the tangents here though...

As a curiosity, I've been very wary of anything related to CMON and Studio McVey ever since the Sedition Wars debacle a while back. People say things have gotten better, but "preassembled plastic" doesn't really inspire comfort.

Is there a good source of how good the details for these miniatures will be? I see people arecomparing it to Blood Rage, but I can't find anything reliable aside from renders and studio paintjobs on resin.

Nope! Welcome to KS!

And, while CMON miniatures are the best boardgame miniatures I've seen, they're still boardgame miniatures.. You're not going to have enough time to paint all the KS miniatures to display or otherwise beyond advanced tabletop (and the details won't be as good as metal or resin), so, might as well wait for retail.

I *hate* pre-assembled boardgame plastic because of the mold lines. That's another reason to ask yourself if you really want to back a miniatures boardgame!

Absolutionis, here's some of my painted big monsters from Blood Rage. I am not showing them here for the paint job (which is OK, but not amazing!) but just to show the level of detail, which I certainly found acceptable.

 Absolutionis wrote:
As a curiosity, I've been very wary of anything related to CMON and Studio McVey ever since the Sedition Wars debacle a while back.

People say things have gotten better, but "preassembled plastic" doesn't really inspire comfort.

Is there a good source of how good the details for these miniatures will be? I see people arecomparing it to Blood Rage, but I can't find anything reliable aside from renders and studio paintjobs on resin.

Sedition Wars was a failed attempt to make a hobbyist miniatures boardgame. The hobbyist part failed, because the miniatures were all monopose and cast in an awful material that sucked to assemble, so there wasn't much visual variety in the models themselves, exacerbated by having even more of duplicates, rather than alternate sculpts or mix-and-match designs. The boardgame part failed in game itself was terribly designed as an overcomplicated mess without any real consideration toward balance and replayability; worse, the revised rulebook incorporated zero backer input to fix things. And the boards themselves were shipped early & warped.

Since that time, I see things like Blood Rage and observe that CMoN has gotten much better at miniatures design, specifically designing 1-piece models for the production and assembly process that they will use. The renders we see in the KS are very, very close to the final product we receive - no bait & switches like in Sedition Wars. They have a better rules team, instead of the hack that McVey used, and are previewing rules for feedback and comment. And CMoN allows $1 pledges and Late Backer option. Unlike Sedition Wars, the additional information and time means people can clearly evaluate the game itself before committing to a full pledge.

The details will be comparable to The Others and Blood Rage, both games designed and developed by the same team that is working on Rising Sun. I've seen them, and they look pretty good for $1 models.

cannot... re...sist...

 Absolutionis wrote:
As a curiosity, I've been very wary of anything related to CMON and Studio McVey ever since the Sedition Wars debacle a while back. People say things have gotten better, but "preassembled plastic" doesn't really inspire comfort.

Is there a good source of how good the details for these miniatures will be? I see people arecomparing it to Blood Rage, but I can't find anything reliable aside from renders and studio paintjobs on resin.

The single piece castings are fine.. and a lot of the pre-assembled are okay.. Except.. The Others.. that was absolute pants. Some of the castings were bad and some of the assembly was beyond bad.. with massive gaps, poorly clipped components, and more flash than I've seen on CMON stuff in a while.

I'm not throwing any money at them until I get Massive Darkness and can assure myself that it was a fluke.

EDIT: Oh.. another consideration outside of miniatures.. a lot of the CMON stuff has felt same-y. Maybe the objective is different or turn sequence is different but the overall experience feels like managing a crapload of tiny cards and rolling dice with strange symbols then trying to remember what this or that does.. This isn't really just CMON.. I'm just getting into my Monolith Conan so some of that is rubbing off too.. but it's still.. a lot of these designers must be on a message board swapping design philosophy or something.

 MLaw wrote:
a lot of these designers must be on a message board swapping design philosophy or something.

Design mechanics go in and out of fashion as they all see what they other guys are working on, based on what the "hot" item is.

Not a huge amount of innovation, as similar games are easier to pitch and teach compared to all-new, all-different games.

 MLaw wrote:
EDIT: Oh.. another consideration outside of miniatures.. a lot of the CMON stuff has felt same-y. Maybe the objective is different or turn sequence is different but the overall experience feels like managing a crapload of tiny cards and rolling dice with strange symbols then trying to remember what this or that does.. This isn't really just CMON.. I'm just getting into my Monolith Conan so some of that is rubbing off too.. but it's still.. a lot of these designers must be on a message board swapping design philosophy or something.

Are you playing more than just Ameritrash?

At one extreme, CMON released to retail The Grizzled, a cooperative card game that plays nothing like, say, Zombicide or Massive Darkness. CMON has released two hybrid games, Blood Rage and Rising Sun, and I'd say that these games play very differently than, say, Rise of Moloch. OTOH, If you're just looking at the miniature-laden games, most of these are Ameritrash, since AT suits the KS "mini-expansion" model of SG's much better than Eurogames.

Speaking of, it's too bad about CMoN's Dogs of War - elegant game which suffered badly from CMoN's overproduction of schlocky stuff that made the game look cheaper than it should have.

ced1106 wrote:

 MLaw wrote:
EDIT: Oh.. another consideration outside of miniatures.. a lot of the CMON stuff has felt same-y. Maybe the objective is different or turn sequence is different but the overall experience feels like managing a crapload of tiny cards and rolling dice with strange symbols then trying to remember what this or that does.. This isn't really just CMON.. I'm just getting into my Monolith Conan so some of that is rubbing off too.. but it's still.. a lot of these designers must be on a message board swapping design philosophy or something.

Are you playing more than just Ameritrash?

At one extreme, CMON released to retail The Grizzled, a cooperative card game that plays nothing like, say, Zombicide or Massive Darkness. CMON has released two hybrid games, Blood Rage and Rising Sun, and I'd say that these games play very differently than, say, Rise of Moloch. OTOH, If you're just looking at the miniature-laden games, most of these are Ameritrash, since AT suits the KS "mini-expansion" model of SG's much better than Eurogames.

Not a fan of that label but I typically buy into a boardgame for the miniatures. That said, I've played enough classics (all the family stuff, RISK, monopoly, Stratego, etc),plus Settlers, Indigo, the GoT boardgame, and.. hm.. names of others are escaping me at the moment but when I was in college we had a boardgame club.. so lots of rotation not a lot of retention...
These days I am mostly looking for fast, light, beat-em-up games that are genre heavy. I'm not a board game person per se.. and honestly would ditch all of that in favor of tabletop gaming or map and miniature rpg/rpg-lite experiences. Resource management, zone control, and those types of things (again, I'm not a boardgame fanatic so I am probably not using the "correct" terminology) are things that I would look for in extreme moderation. To me, a lot of CMON and other "Ameritrash" (though Monolith is European and I think HINT is Polish or something.. and Imperial Assault.. not sure where FF is out of but I thought they were Euro.. and all kinda same-y). Anyway.. those types of things seem like they need to pick a lane. They want you to get into the action but also throw lots of weird "just because" mechanics and cards and counters and crap that I have started to loathe. Even just cutting down on the cards and stuff in favor of a character sheet maybe (HQ anyone?) or making the cards a bit larger so my large hands and bad eyes are not tested every time I want to roll some dice with my kids.

That said.. I have no clue if the Rising Sun mechanics are similar to what I'm describing.. I was mostly responding to a question/point.. I am fairly sure Massive Darkness (which I am using as a barometer for CMON going forward) is going to be a variation of Zombicide.. if not with even more of those "wonderful" little tedious additions that I don't feel add to the experience.