So he added enough detail for them to want to solide with Palestine without realizing
I watched Louis Theroux in Israel recently and it amazed me that like 10 minutes into the mini documentary he hadn't talked to a Palestinian at all yet, only Israelis, but it didn't seem at all like it was biased TOWARD the Israelis because they did SUCH A GOOD JOB acting like evil religious zealots all on their own. They were so mask-off it was nuts.
That one member of the party who always took the empire's side

I’m not racist or anything but I hate how those shows ALWAYS cast a few of them to stir up controversy.
Why would there be gingers in these fantasy places? Always takes me out right out of the immersion.
And almost all of them are connected to the IRA too. Just sayin.
Downvotes didn't see the big, flashing "satire"-sign above this comment.
i think people don't realise the history of colonisation of Ireland, and how red hair is tied to that
This scene weirded me out immediately. There's like 37+ lead actors and they "decided to do something for her birthday"? Wtf? Nobody else's?
This looks like shopped to make his head big lmao
The Israel-Palistinian affair reflects the larger dichotomy of principle vs. loyalty.
The enlightenment values behind the US and French revolts and transformations are propped up by the principles that everyone is entitled to equal regard by the society, are endowed with the same rights, are treated equally by the justice system in so on.
(Mind you, both of these nations failed to embrace these principles fully, still don't, and progress towards this ideal is slow and meandering — to say the least.)
Of course the challenge, then, is extending that degree of citizenship to the worst wrongdoers, even after they've ~~profiteered on war and drug addiction, wrecked the economy through financialization and turned entire government institutions against the people they were supposed to protect~~ sexually assaulted kids or killed with intention.
We don't like giving our criminal suspects their day in court. When convicted, we don't like to consider that they were, wrongfully, and in either case, we want them to suffer not just incarceration, but to languish in squalor, abuse and neglect. We want them afraid to reach for the soap. We don't like extending rights to those we regard as outcast.
But if we don't, we dip into the other side of the coin, in which criminal is not defined by what you did, but who you are. Feudal society is structured based on contracts of loyalty. If you are born of the better blood (monied, ethnically pure, faithful to the orthodox) then you deserve all the benefits of the doubt. Whereas if you are alien or other, you deserve to be outlawed.
And this applies when the good guys fuck children, murder with intent, profiteer on war and drugs, wreck the economy though financialization and capture government institutions so they don't protect the people. And yeah, at it's worst, we see things like genocide and torture become controversial because the heroes are doing it and the goblins are on the receiving end of it.
So not just the US and Israel, but the entire world needs to reflect on what kind of society they want to be. Unlike economic structures that can be blended, guiding ideology tend to be a slippery slope. Once it is established that some people can be denied rights and regard by fiat because they're of the wrong faith or the wrong blood, or aren't rich enough, then that refusal of access can extend to anyone else, and eventually everyone else.
And we're seeing this develop in the US, as MAGA circles talk about liberals in blood libels and calls to hunt and execute them. In this case liberals includes anyone who isn't MAGA.
Normally I would call bullshit, but I just played first dnd session of my life few days ago and already met 2 hardcore zionists there (one of which apparently makes pro-israel tiktoks as a side-hobby)
I bet the Monsters Manual was written by a paladin.
I'd also normally call BS but recently learned a very liberal family member of mine "isn't sure which side to take" on the matter.
I've let them know, but they sort of dismissed me.
So I can only imagine what someone all-on on Israel would do.
Let them know that if they're the kind of person who thinks it's justified to deliberately kill children because terrorists are using them as shields, then they should be consistent and also believe that if a murderer is holding a baby up to shield them from the police it is also justified to shoot through the baby to kill the murderer.
I've fallen out with my supposedly radlib parents since the time a few years back when I brought up Israel's ongoing genocide in Palestine and they got weirdly quiet and non-conversational. It wasn't just because of that, but that was absolutely a major contributing red flag. I'm sure they're against Israel today, now that it's politically popular to be so.
Sees one-sided conflict with superior force and a complete civilian massacre
"I don't know, maybe they deserve genocide?"
Facepalm
Highly doubt. The Palestinian allegory to a Zionist would be cartoonist caricatures of rape and violence while the Isn'treal allegory would have been a pure place of light and peace.
From OOP:
thats the thing he let us do all the worldbuilding at the outset and then decided that the capitalist u.s./cop city proxy we set up was actually an israel proxy that he was going to commandeer to be The Good Guys.
but it went straight over all our heads lmfao
So apparently he let them design the general layout, which had the authoritarian government and the rebels fighting them, and thought the ‘cop city’ they’d made sounded awesome and heroic and was totally the super-cool state of Israel, and the rebels were those dastardly Palestinians, and ran the campaign that way.
Don’t do religion, kids.
Alright that makes sense and makes it comedy. I won't edit mt previous comment but I am doing a sicko yes rn
I think if that happened to me every marble in my brain would have dropped out too lol
Imagine not reading the room at all as a DM, or Idk, I have no idea how this happens. Online game maybe? I only play with friends so.
Yeah, it was an online group. Everyone immediately quit lol
But seriously, forget real-world politics for a sec. How often in tabletop RPG history has the empire/police state/whathaveyou ever been the good guys and the rebels the bad? Had that DM never played a game before?
We didn't get to the end, but I played in a "Dragon Queen" campaign where we were protecting the kingdom from evil dragon-worshipping cultists.
That guy haven't watch star wars it seems.

The issue is that there is no utopia. If you make one, it instantly looks like a cover. "A place of pure light and peace" is hiding something. Even if the DM intended for it to be perfect, the players could certainly see it as a threat. Unless the DM breaks the fourth wall and explicitly tells them it's real, there's no way for the players to know that.
Then, when that place that has tons of resources is fighting some poor faction next door, it looks pretty damning. The same issue as above happens if you portray them as pure evil. There's no way they're actually that evil, and it must be propaganda.
This all happens even more if your players have been trained to spot these things because this is how the real world works.
When you're dealing with a setting that is that clear-cut and obvious, you tend to have a situation where the place of light and peace is rotten at the core and has very effective propaganda, while the cartoonish violent rapists are often downtrodden victims whose suffering is made invisible.
But the Zionist wouldn't put that in there. They dont see that. "Theres no propaganda in America". Same shit. It'd be like playing one of those shitty American war porn films following Private Badass of The Good Guys.
There's this thing in DND where there's a whole table of people and when the DM says 'you go into a tavern and see a mysterious stranger in a dark cloak half lit with moonlight lighting up a pipe you catch a small glimpse of his rugged face, the other patrons look uneasy at his presence... also that's a gnome called Gifgledork picking his nose at the bar' the party will almost always go 'we ignore The Dark Ranger of Mystery, and spend all night buying drinks for our new best friend Gifgledork. If he set up a 'The Good Guys' power structure the players could have all easily decided said good guys were secretly evil and opposed them at every turn. I had a party once INSIST on eating the two birds in a glade I put there as guides to help them get through the trials of the area for plot reasons. they killed and ate the guardian forest birds... it was incredibly upsetting to decide that eating ancient forest guardians probably gave them cool powers. but playing the game is about playing the game and letting your party have fun is more important than playing YOUR game. and when you add in stuff you're excited about, sometimes the party says fuck that and intentionally sets your bread crumbs on fire and walks into the forest with no hints and finds a witch that makes wooden coins that are bewitched to look like real money. for no reason at all. Is really dumb to go at it with your personal feelings all deeply attached to every plot point.
I think sometimes about politics in games. Especially the unexamined kind. Like a guy one time ran a game predicated on literal patriarchy - the story was about how a baby boy was due the throne instead of his elder sister. I'm like ... You could have written anything. I don't want fantasy patriarchy.
Meanwhile, my game right before that was about helping an anarchist collective stop a counter revolution from restoring the despotic monarchy. And my current game the players just shot a surveillance CEO on the street and donated all of the wealth they could get out of his unlocked phone to charity.
True but the best stories are sometimes the one's that make you go "wait... are WE the bad guys?!" and then give you the agency to choose the other side
To his credit the guy let us oppose the patriarchy, but it was a huge out of character drain to explain to the other players why I think male headed absolute rule is bad, actually, and I don't enjoy that in my leisure. It was not the right group for me.
no game can be better than bad game. you have to do you. I couldn't sit through a game that's about supporting things hurting my life in real life either. there's a lot of themes that would have me saying 'sorry not a good fit for me, enjoy you game, goodbye'
I desperately hope this is true
I do wonder if in this example the party actually detected the intended propoganda, versus if they just were in a campaign doing what they thought good characters would do in a situation. If not it's so much more telling, as the best way to tell if you are standing on principles or just biased propoganda, is if you would make the same judgments if the names were hidden or even reversed. Even more ironic because obviously the DM controls the facts of the fictional world. Literally likely to not know or leave out details that hurt his case.
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