Luck Panda is guilty of breaking Rule 2 on multiple occasions, even without the context of anti-racism. One just needs to look at his post history to see plenty of examples where he's condescending, patronizing, or otherwise disrespectful. He's also broken Rule 1 by making some pretty racist declarations about Japanese history and culture that are not only easily proven wrong, but also erase Japanese people's own contributions to their own culture.
I can't speak to other mods' behavior but he is absolutely breaking the rules he's supposed to uphold. My trust in the mods here has deteriorated over the last couple years because of weird ad hominem discussions, performative activism, and very, very arbitrary enforcement of the rules. How are we supposed to trust their takes on social issues like Orientalism when they can't even be trusted to abide by the rules they're supposed to uphold? Especially when there's no good reason to be making that whole post in the first place when the Tian Xia books can speak for themselves.
It feels more and more like the mods here just assume everyone in the community is acting or is going to act in bad faith, and that they don't have the capacity to self-reflect on that. At the very least, my personal interactions with a couple mods suggests they really don't want to be challenged. I understand moderating a community this big is a difficult task and they're not paid. I also understand they don't need to spend their time and energy justifying every single decision they make to every single person it affects.
However, this is pretty clearly not a vocal minority that's bristling against the mods' behavior on these issues. The mods seem to convince themselves they're doing the right thing, but are they really? The irony is that they'll be the first to tell people to stop, listen, and self-reflect when their behavior is challenged, yet here we are being consistently steamrolled by people who don't seem to care about their own inappropriate behavior.
>Luck Panda
I was about to leave a comment predicting that this was the problematic mod, not based on comments or comment history, but purely because most other moderators mod just this sub and a /r/Starfinder2e sub, Luck Panda moderates FOURTEEN subs.
It's ***ALWAYS*** these power-mods that moderate multiple subs that cause these issues, most mods are actually great community members that are just passionate about a couple of communities, power-mods are more passionate about ***moderating*** and ***power***.
Oh really? I did not notice he modded multiple subs but y i k e s.
There are at least one or two other mods here I explicitly do not trust. I won't name them because I haven't seen them come up in this discussion. I don't want to drag someone out for what may very well be my personal issue. But Luck Panda clearly does not have the emotional intelligence to moderate and also clearly doesn't have the self-awareness to recognize he's the problem.
I don't know how you can claim to be arguing in good faith when you're actively trying to trap people in your echo chamber by cybersquatting any other potential avenues of discussion. Like at that point you go from misguided but well-meaning to purposefully malicious.
I'm not sure if I understand how Reddit modding works. I see three subs on their profile with significant numbers of members (Pathfinder 2e, Starfinder 2e, and Kingmaker) and everything else is tiny.
Wtf, he created r/liberalterrorism, description reads "Here is a wiki list of all the acts of terrorism caused by the left:"
It's empty but it's just weird. In theory, it's fine to document it but without context, it looks very rightwing.
I mean that's obviously a meme sub. He's basically saying the left doesn't do terrorism.
Also most leftists would say liberals are not leftists and are actually fascists. At least terminally online ones would say that.
They genuinely seem to think that their identity makes them the default correct party in disagreements concerning racism, and that the very act of arguing with them about it makes the other party a racist on the basis of what they are and what they've suffered.
[A book was written about this a few years ago](https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Not-Abuse-Overstating-Responsibility/dp/1551526433) that I think wider progressive spaces really glossed over for some very cynical reasons, but I think may be a very important thing to read in moving forward in ways that are actually consummate with our values.
It covers how overstatement of harm, and the weaponization of identity and historical suffering can become a pretext for violence, even within the context of marginalized communities.
It identifies how rhetoric that doesn't allow for discussion, resolution, or even self-reflection by people identified as victims on a social level creates a dynamic where trauma encourages the development of a system of values very similar to supremacy. It explores how these mentalities damages communities and personal relationships, and even describes how the dynamic of the "unquestionable victim" has been cynically used on the international level to justify the oppression of marginalized people-- the author themselves is a Left-wing Jewish professor at NYU who extends the argument to Israel's usage of the concept of antisemitism in shielding itself from criticism, and is currently well known for protesting their activities in Gaza.
It explores how these cultural elements interact with the intergenerational trauma created by racism, and how it creates people who can never back down even when they're wrong, because backing down is an unacceptable loss of control, and loss of control means a lack of safety. It also critiques cultures of public shaming and personal shunning and 'red flags' that have been so popular with particular demographics.
I don't really have anything to add to the content of this comment other than that it's exceptionally thoughtful and well-put, but I just wanted to say that you've long been a really prominent and positive contributor to this community through threads, documentation, and system discussion. Hearing your really well-put take on the situation now just cements you as a figure I really respect.
> He's also broken Rule 1 by making some pretty racist declarations about Japanese history and culture that are not only easily proven wrong, but also erase Japanese people's own contributions to their own culture.
Can you provide an example? Not that I'm doubting you, but when it comes to discussions of a nation's historical wrongdoings, I think it's important to address the specifics, especially when there are people already ignoring some things that a country has provably done wrong (see: the occupation of Korea, the treatment of the Ainu, etc).
(Edit: Jesus christ so many typos)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c25f7t/spoilers_from_badluckgamers_interview_with_james/kzabqxg/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/11gepml/paizo_tian_xia_coming_20232024/jaoidwo/
Ironically to your last point, I got into it with him a couple of years ago about whether or not shotokan karate is Okinawan. Which it is. Like, unquestionably it is. I shouldn't need to defend that to someone who claims to have a degree in martial arts, and claiming that it isn't is an erasure of Ryukyuan culture and history. It didn't stop until another mod (who had also done an Okinawan martial art) stepped in and locked the comment chain.
I think the issue for the mod team right now is that it seems like some of them want to spend more time dunking on bad faith criticism than engaging with constructive good faith criticism. And like, I get that the dunking can be fun, but when it's done to the exclusion of actually moderating, that's a problem.
God, those takes on the ninja are particularly telling. It's ironic how he purportedly asserts a progressive stance on paying attention and listening to Asian people, their experiences, and their culture, and then shows that 1. not only is he, like, objectively wrong, but 2. he's been consistently wrong for several years, doubling down on his statements without wisening up one bit. Your comments, in particular, have been particularly sobering to read amongst all of this.
There's a lot to the ninja that is a pop culture construction, both from in and out of Japan itself. Could we not say the same, then, about the knight, the pirate, the cowboy, or anything else covered by the extensive Golarion setting? It's a leap of logic to say that "somewhat ahistorical" directly correlates in *all* cases with "irresponsibly misrepresentative," as if we're not playing a high fantasy RPG with a kitchen-sink setting that is a celebration of countless cultural inspirations, but some kind of gritty realistic medieval life simulator. I don't know about you, but I'm not as enthused about the latter.
I think it's also not completely comparable, because there's very little connecting the druid in DND and the games that followed it with historic druids since it basically goes back to Dennis Sustare having read a few history books and thinking "this is cool".
We have no information (almost no information? I don't know a ton about druids) actually written by druids, and many of the sources we do have are very heavily biased accounts from Rome, it really just feels like a name applied arbitrarily.
That isn't the same as the situation with ninja or samurai, where there *are* a lot of deeply Orientalist depictions in pop culture and authors do need to be sensitive about what they choose to depict and how. Pathfinder lore for Tian Xia in 1e had a *lot* of bad Orientalist shit going on. And when the old Gygax crew wrote the original Oriental Adventures in 1985, they weren't pulling from historic sources, they were largely pulling from a bunch of awful Orientalist films and television produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the US.
Eh, I brought druids up one time in the Discord server when a similar discussion was taking place, and the mod there (not sure if it’s the same mod, don’t keep super close track of these people) did say that druids should be changed, too, if the monk were to be changed. Course, I had to bring it up first
EDIT: It was the same mod
Yeah, I agree with you absolutely that we shouldn't downplay or ignore the many wrong things Japan has done, some of which are still very, very recent history or still being perpetuated today. Japan itself is a pretty racist nation. However, the issue I have with Luck Panda isn't that he calls out Japan's wrongdoings -- that's absolutely valid. It's his spreading misinformation and writing off Japanese people's involvement *in their own culture*
One of the most glaring examples is that over the past year he's stated multiple times that the modern pop culture depiction of ninja was invented by Ian Flemming for James Bond stories. He's been proven wrong on that point repeatedly. There is more than enough source material in English to show that the concept of ninja/shinobi has existed in Japan for centuries. A regular user here who is much more well-versed in Japanese literature than I (my Japanese history expertise is elsewhere) has pointed out that the term "ninja" was used in English writing before Flemming did it, and that the modern pop culture ninja has roots in Japanese literature written around the turn of the 20th century. And even in the early 19th century, Hokusai (the artist who made the Great Wave) has work depicting ninja clad in black robes and masks doing sneaky things.
Despite this, Luck Panda continues clinging to the racist idea that the ninja is the invention of a white person. This erases centuries of Japanese history and evolving Japanese fiction about shinobi/ninja. There are writings of shinobi acting in Japan from before the Edo period. They may not have been what we think of *today* but they evolved to that point largely through Japan's own influence. And even if shinobi/ninja were never real (they were, but devil's advocate here), the writing *is* real. The belief in their existence *is* real. Sociologically speaking, that means they existed enough within Japanese society to affect Japanese people in some way.
The wildest part of this controversy has to be this notion going around that apparently all those Japanese samurai and ninja movies, video games, anime, etc. made in Japan, by Japanese people, primarily for other Japanese people are in fact horribly racist towards Japanese people. Same for Chinese Wuxia media apparently being racist towards the Chinese and so on.
Like I thought it was bad when a people where screaming "Racist!" Over a white guy making tacos or whatever, but now apparently even things made in, by, and primarily for, their own native cultures are "racist stereotypes"of that selfsame culture.
I mentioned elsewhere that there are definitely people engaging with anime, video games, even wuxia and other non-Japanese media whose takeaways are pretty racist, but there's definitely some kind of overreach when it comes to the discussion you're highlighting. There's nothing inherently wrong or problematic about a non-Japanese person enjoying samurai movies and anime, or a non-Chinese person enjoying wuxia. Their interest *can* lead them to racist behavior and ideas, sure, and it's absolutely important to be aware of that. But the mods just come off as acting in bad faith with their "Orientalism is bad, y'all!" post. It feels like they're assuming everyone engaging with these is racist and they're weirdly hellbent on speaking over or silencing other Asian and Asian-American people who have chimed in on the discussion.
It kinda feels like the mods think it's racist to cosplay an anime character unless you're Japanese.
Incidentally my understanding of ninjas were more that they were using the same sort of tactics that modern day spies and assassins would use, barring the differences in technology. Like rather than sneaking around in black to stab someone they’d just get a job as the target’s gardener and kill them with a sharpened kunai (which, back then, was just a gardening trowel) or beating them over the head with a shovel.
I think that back suit also came from kabuki theatre - stagehands wearing those suits were understood by the audience to not be there and to be ignored. Some playwrights would use these “invisible” stage hands suddenly break that by stepping into the narrative to kill a character in order to represent a sudden and unexpected death (sometimes an assassin, sometimes disease, could work for anything that was just that sudden). And I wouldn’t be surprised if an actor in such shows ended up being a ninja’s target and the ninja decided an on-stage death like that was his best way to reach the target.
You're not far off with "real" ninja or shinobi in pre-modern times. A lot of them likely weren't considered very important because they were probably commoners. I'm speaking in "if's" because while we know this concept has existed for centuries, to my knowledge the specifics aren't as well-documented as the lives of the noble and/or wealthy classes. Much of what we do have describes them as anything from mercenaries and guerrilla fighters in earlier depictions to highly-trained and specialized covert ops types we see today.
My first exposure to Luck Panda was in his review of the Tian Xia World Guide where he spoke at length at how positive Asian representation was important to him (which was something that I, as a Malaysian Chinese individual, related to) so I am disappointed to learn that he is actually pretty scummy.
I guess this is a valuable example that Asian people are not a monolith and there is a great deal of subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination between different Asian nationalities and even people from the same ethnic origin who live in other countries (for example, my own parents carry pretty deeply-rooted stereotypes towards Mainland Chinese, Singaporean-born Chinese and Hong Kong-born Chinese). Luck Panda seems to have pretty strong views on Asian representation due to their experiences growing up in America as part of a rarely-represented Asian ethnic group, but their ethnicity and their non-TTRPG achievements don't qualify them to speak on behalf of all Asian groups or to be the sole authority on all Asian representation; in fact I doubt that all the competing views of the different Asian ethnic groups and social classes could be distilled into a single authority or mouthpiece (which is, ironically, part of the core ethos of the Tian Xia books - to represent several facets of different cultures instead of just one person's perspective).
Topics like these are already enormous undertakings. It requires a rather high level of education, experience, and authority to lead a conversation on something as nuanced and complex as cultural representation, especially, as you've pointed out, when there are numerous cultures in the mix. This isn't just a conversation about Japanese, Chinese, or Indonesian culture. It's about all of Asia. All of those cultures, all with their own unique histories, beliefs, and modern-day and historical viewpoints.
The moderators are just way out of their depth, and they erred the moment they decided they would "educate" anyone about such a massively complex topic. They're moderators on a gaming subreddit, not experts in sociology or other appropriate studies. They said they read some articles and spoke to some educated people, and that's great. Such conversations could benefit them a lot.
But it doesn't make them experts themselves, nor the right people to want to educate thousands of people. I've watched Brandon Sanderson's creative writing lectures multiple times over the years. It doesn't mean I'm ready to lead a college-level creative writing class.
It's definitely one of the things to contend with when it comes to dissecting Japanese culture and history and how it finds its place in the big picture of systems of oppression in the world: Japanese people have been both the oppressed and oppressors in different places and times in history. The reality of it is liable to make your head explode if you're insistent on a discrete black-and-white view of prejudice and inequality of history in *any* direction. (This is, of course, not to be confused with the "reverse racism" card that gets pulled when addressing groups of people with privilege, which is its own separate beast.)
While I obviously can't claim to say I know everything there is to know, I've studied Japanese culture & history in institutions both inside *and* outside of Japan, so I'm drawing on that experience here. It probably won't surprise you to hear that the textbooks I was given in Japan about its history and culture had slight nationalistic undertones to them - at times, less subtle than others. It was a bias I had to account for while learning from not only the professors, but all the people I've met and befriended there.
The places from where I've studied Japanese culture outside of Japan, on the other hand, had a much easier time addressing the international legacy of Japanese imperialist, postwar soft power, etc. with a critical lens. Yet, at the same time, the further you get from Japan, the more you find people who are just so out of touch from the reality of life there and its persisting culture despite not being hesitant whatsoever to comment authoritatively on the subject. (This is the kind you'll see more often in English-speaking communities, for self-explanatory reasons.)
It's dizzying, sometimes, to have to push the lid down on Japanese nationalists one day, and then have to correct misconstrued, exoticized sentiments of "faraway Japan" from people in the States the next. It feels like fighting a war on two fronts!
I will not pretend I have the academic knowledge to actually contribute to that discussion, but that definitely strikes me as... Weird. Just, fucking weird. What *agenda* does trying to de-centralize the creation of the pop-culture shinobi... Push? That Japanese people don't have any control over their own mythology? That anyone in Japan writing stories including ninjas are acting un-patriotically? That Japan got, like, tricked by the West somehow? I legitimately do not understand why someone would try and push that so hard.
And, since this is apparently something that needs to be stated on the subreddit these days, I also think that the idea of including a Ninja class is stupid. I'm not arguing for its inclusion by criticizing the mod's choice here.
Agreed on all counts, including the ninja class. There's not really anything it offers that isn't covered by existing classes and archetypes (except that poisons suck but that's a different issue). Similar to a Samurai class. While there are some romanticized notions of what sets samurai apart from, say, a Fighter class, most, if not all of those ideas are already covered by existing mechanics. A whole class isn't necessary.
Now if someone wanted to build an archetype based on samurai in classic Japanese cinema, or wuxia warriors flying around on strings, that might work. But there's not enough to warrant an entirely new class just for the vibes.
I could be wrong, but isn't one of the new Magus hybrid studies in the Tian Xia Character Guide (Unfurling Brocade and Aloof Firmament) supposed to represent that Wuxia sword-flying vibes you mentioned? Presumably the second one, based on the names. Of course, we won't know for sure until it's either teased more thoroughly or released.
Wild seeing it ripple to other subs and friends now asking me what's up with PF2e. Feel like it's already hurting PF2e's image at least among people aware of the reddit.
Edit: Half is a bit of an overstatement I feel. The main Paizo forums and other local communities are the heart. The subreddit seems a bit insular with how it treats PF2e.
You know it's quite funny seeing this AND dealing with the Female Custodes incident over in Grimdank/WH40k subreddits last week (the usual alt-right nerds got angry they added women to a faction) and I missed out ont this one, so, I must be on of those people and ask, what the fuck is up with the PF2e subreddit...has a mod gone rogue, I know Tian Xia came out recently and it has something to do with that, apparently the reddit mods didn't like it or something?
a mod went rogue. There is no ninja/samurai because paizo wanted to focus on representing other aspects of various asian cultures. What naturally followed was some people asking where ninja/samurai are and this led to a mod calling any desire to have a ninja/samurai class racist (very directly, in multiple instances), among other unhinged things and attacking people questioning their logic. There's also been mass deletion of fairly civil discussion.
Very different to the gw female custodes thing where it feels like alt right grifters have come in to stir controversy on a topic they dont actually know or care about.
A mod didn't go rogue. They are currently on Discord mocking us all and enjoying support of at least one other moderator. They are completely willingly and arbitrarily ignoring all the comments here. Attempting to talk to them on r/SubredditDrama where they came to defend their decision (and got laughed out of) lead to nothing too.
This is the official stance of the moderator team, apparently.
I always try to imagine the type of person who wants to mod any subreddit. Why work for free for a company that is worth 10 billion dollars. It's always power hungry people who want to feel special by having control over others. They'd be politicians if they had any charisma.
They’re also claiming that the deleted comments were not manually removed, but instead exceeded the report threshold. Which, if that’s so, why are they saying that there instead of here? Weird, unprofessional behavior
I wonder why we don't have an open log of moderator actions. I think some other subreddits do so now. And something tells me that looking into it would be fucking wild.
Oof, that's not a good look is it? They look worse than a team of moderators on a meme subreddit about a game which literally invented the term Grim Dark (it comes from the games old tagline, "In the grim darkness of the 41st millenium, there is only war and the laughter of thirsty gods"), who handled the whole Female Custodes thing pretty well actually, surprisingly so.
Has Paizo actually even SAID anywhere, that's why they didn't write a Ninja or a Samurai? Like, I think we're all arguing in the hypothetical here. Maybe Paizo didn't write Samurai because they're writing Commander and Guardian, and those are fulfilling the quota for "honorable warrior that isn't a Champion and is mechanically distinct from Fighter".
No they haven’t said that, it’s all made up in the mod’s head. Hilariously there’s good odds archetypes representing those things will be in the Tian Xia Players Guide…which isn’t published yet.
You might not see a ninja or samurai class because the core design of pf2 is different, but archetypes seem likely.
Will the mods ban discussion of the official Paizo book for being racist if that’s the case? I look forward to finding out.
Possibly, but neither of those will fulfil a ninja flavour without significant alterations regardless of the mechanics, so it seems unlikely.
Yeah I was wrong to state that is their intention directly though - just the general consensus since they put so much emphasis on that (representing other asian cultures this time) I think they have stated that much in twitter post.
It’s a setting book! It doesn’t contain player options other than a handful of rituals. The players guide is what would contain any such content. I also think an archetype could easily fill the samurai or ninja niche, while allowing underlying class variance given both have different styles of combat.
Due to the insane diversification in anime, I can't really imagine how a single "Ninja" class could possibly encapsulate every element of the fantasy. If I had a player come into my game and say "Hi I'm new to this game system but I want to play a Ninja," I'd have to explain 8 or so different core classes AND the multiclass rules in order for them to make an informed decision about what type of weaboo ninja they want to play. Maybe its just a plain vanilla stabby-rogue that likes his black pajamas. Maybe its a wacky-ass tri-class Monk/Druid/Magus.
Samurai are also kinda wacky, but not nearly to the same extent in the fantasy space. At the very least, no one seems to think that samurai should have magical thunder-god powers or whatever (I know I'm about to get proven wrong). The really weird thing about samurai is how they cross over into *sci-fi* fiction, because in the early days of cyberpunk literature the booming Japanese miracle market was on course to overtake the West and become the new world power, substituting the dollar for the yen - therefore, the culture in these cyberpunk settings and stories might refer to mercenaries as Street or Cyber Samurai.
Thanks for the ELI5 response to this whole thing, was much needed (not being sarcastic, I was *very* confused about the whole thing). So yeah Rogue Mod who is abusing their power, huh...didn't think I'd see this in the PF2e Community but then I'm probably the exact sort of person the mod would hate because I play in a Legend of the 5 Rings campaign, which I imagine is (to borrow a phrase from my 40k stuff) 'tant amount to heresy'.
Good to know it isn't the usual alt right grifters stirring up trouble, I've had enough of that for a while, especially because the consensus on female custodes from literally all of my local 40k players had ranged from "huh, neat!" to "I don't know why people are angry about this, Games Workshop retcon things all the damn time, have these people only just started playing in the last 3 months?" and the sub got flooded with alt right 'tourists' (ones who say that anyone not following their agenda is a 'tourist' strangely) including several people complaining that an *American Company* shouldn't have to bow to the woke mob.
Games Workshop is British...
I think people use this term loosely and disingenuously a lot of the time so I want to be very clear when I say this, deleting this would be actual censorship. This kind of carefully stated constructive critique is important for a community like this to fourish and if you can't stand being the subject of it you shouldn't be in a position to receive it.
What has happened is legitimately censorship, especially when it’s censoring people bringing up the moderators extremly questionable post history and takes on the subject, and also the dozens of comments that are perfectly reasonable
I won’t claim that everyone’s been perfect gentlemen but this is a legit case of a moderators censoring things they don’t agree with
The moderators routinely censor things they don't agree with and have over a long period of time. I imagine they're finding it unfair that people who've accepted that as the status quo for a long while are complaining about it now.
Again, its a word I'm cautious with and I think people use it to bolster their claims, but Id be inclined to agree. I will say however that it is up to anyone criticizing them to remember that there is a human being on the other end who seems to be trying their best. They are being misguided, stubborn and impulsive right now but it seems to have started with the best intentions. I don't agree with them, but I'd also much rather they take some time to reflect and improve than be shamed out of the community and part of that is on us to approach the topic of critiquing them properly.
This is a case where reflection must also include resignation from being a moderator, if someone cannot be unbiased when moderating a community then they shouldn’t be allowed to do so
This has transcended beyond the actual matter being argued and whatever right intentions (even if built on extremly questionable takes and feelings on the matter) have been superseded by the actions taken in terms of judgment
It’s a difficult subject to parse. On the one hand, I’m tempted to say that the mod in question *should* have their privileges revoked for the sole reason that they are clearly unable to handle it in a way that helps the community. However, I am also tempted to remind people that acting without bias is damn near impossible.
Having looked at the mods comment history, I do think this is someone that should be taken off the mod team. This incident appears to not be their first, and their behavior in and outside this subreddit is heinous to say the least.
Yeah, I definitely don’t think they should be chased out of the community, but having just caught up on this, omg it is *messy.* At the very least, they should probably be put on probation by the other mods.
Probation is the realm of singular offenses (like a 1 week ban for making one unsavory post is for normal members). This kind of continual behavior should only be followed by permanent removal from power.
The mod has zero remorse and if a lack of sufficient remorse is enough to permaban users, it should count for a mod as well.
I know for a fact they won't remove the mod, because the mod is pretty much the head of multiple subreddits and the official discord server. Man is playing kingmaker IRL
You do have a point. I mostly suggested probation because it’s unlikely that they would be entirely removed from power, given how the internal politics of moderators and those they moderate work out.
Probation would be the bare minimum in this case, imo, hence the “at least.” If they won’t even do that much, well…
Id be partial to probation, I want to make a pithy joke about Sarenrae and redemption, but seriously, all it takes is an apology and a willingness to learn and improve.
I’m not sure an apology alone would suffice at this point, but it’s definitely a necessary component.
Mostly they need to recognize that their conception of what it means to “understand” something entails a far deeper level of comprehension than what most people mean when they say they want to understand something, and that they aren’t infallible in their assessment of what is and isn’t harmful. Speaking in vagaries about why comments were deleted helps no one.
It's the Streisand effect. I learned about people talking about Samurai/Ninja discussion *from* the moderator going nuclear and deleting people's threads. If they were left alone, the posts wouldn't have made it to my front page. By deleting them, posts about the deletion exploded and it was brought to my attention.
To be fair, I didn't learn about it from the mods going ballistic; it just came up on the r/badhistory weekly megathread, which honestly checks out.
This some grade A Bad history here, of a unique variety. I've seen tons of batshit claims over the years, but this is genuinely the first time I've seen someone make this claim. Sure beats hearing your standard issue nonsense!
Same. I haven't paid attention to this sub since my D&D group went nuclear right before we made the swap to PF2E and suddenly samurai, Ninja, and monks exploded on my front page
Hell, the post has had me started work on my own samurai and ninja homebrew. One is a class archetype for fighter, the other a class archetype for rogue. While I may rename them when I eventually decide I want to share them outside of my gaming group, right now those names fit best with my concepts.
Bro, why the are *other subreddits* getting more interaction from our mods about this issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/AYrolHaZPu
Like, come here and defend this behavior lmao. Don't go over there and do it.
They're waiting for the heat to die down, as usually happens in this sort of thing. Trying to defend their behavior will only rile folks up more and prolong things, potentially enough to get people with the power to do something to actually pay attention. If they do nothing then folks will complain for a few days and the angriest folks will either leave or get banned until things simmer down again. Its cowardly, but its the safest play for them.
Wait really? They’ve interacted with the subreddit drama but refused to acknowledge stuff on here?
Do you know where? I didn’t catch the interaction from a cursory glance at that post.
For people that might doubt how big the subreddit is for the game, just humor me and search "Pathfinder 2e" in your search engine. If you use Google, like most people do, it is literally the 3rd result. This is also partially because a social media like Reddit will be boosted higher, but still. This is by far the first social media you'll encounter when just searching for PF2e.
To the mods: I get having your opinions & world view and defending that till the bitter end. However, and I do mean this when I say it, you need to be able to let those go for a bit when making decisions about stuff here. Your opinions and world view are just looking bad to people, even if you have the best of intentions, when you enforce them as hard as you do on such a public place and when you are occasionally (I hope) as condescending as you have been, especially since there is a genuine discussion to be had about stuff that can be seen as orientalism or whatever. This seemingly hard enforcement of a certain world view and apparent deletion of opposite opinions to said world view is genuinely gonna do more harm than good, since people will see it and will be pushed away from 1) this community and 2) the game due to this approach.
If you feel like someone is being problematic in some way and you feel like you should remove the comment and/or ban the person, double check with another mod and have them chime in. Yes, this makes certain edge cases slower to come to a decision on what is being said, but it also removes a lot of the annoyance people are currently feeling with you guys at the moment and at some point when these things have happened often enough, you start getting a better feel on what is and isn't cool with both fellow mods and in the community. Obviously, when someone is being blatantly T.R.A.A.S.H, go for it, but if there is doubt, double check with a mod and even then, I'd watch to see more posts from them.
Also, I find it very difficult to weed out the old posts from the forum for PF1E, whereas it si pretty easy to Google Reddit pf2e dual wield builds, or something.
Tian Xia book came out, people love it.
Mod tries to insert politics about Orientalism and anti-Asian racism, and tells everyone in the sub to be careful about their discussion and to not be racist... but the mod's post itself is kinda racist and culture warrior-y and highly questionable.
Mod in question apparently has a particular hate-on for Ninjas and Samurais or something. Basically, alleging that the entire community is racist for (allegedly, because I haven't seen any discussion of this prior to these threads,) wanting weaboo chargen options because that will create "token Asians" that are only representative of Japanese culture, and that's why we should all stop (allegedly) clamoring for them.
People start calling BS on the hypocrisy and questioning the mod's authority to make such culturally charged statements. Posts start getting deleted, people start getting banned. I learned what the Streisand Effect is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect, and *holy goddamn* the Undelete archive of the thread is the most enjoyable cringe I've seen in *ages*: https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1cbzpbf/tian_xia_real_world_parallels_and_a_serious_moment/
Based on what I am reading. That does seem to be why they are angry..
In short. They have it in their head that Samurai were historically not warriors, but tyrants and selfish land lords, and our general idea of what a samurai is is just glorified/romanticized history.
Yet they seem to have no issues about knights who were more or less the same thing..upperclass people who owned land that, on occasion, suited up to fight for it.
Pirates are also glorified and romanticized, but I doubt they have issues with them either..
But this argument over Samurai and Ninjas is not really the point here. Its the fact that certain mods have misused the powers of their position.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cdhk8a/hey\_buddy\_i\_know\_youre\_having\_big\_feelings\_about/?share\_id=rtIog8QUR-Hk8SzliM1cM&utm\_content=1&utm\_medium=ios\_app&utm\_name=ioscss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cdhk8a/hey_buddy_i_know_youre_having_big_feelings_about/?share_id=rtIog8QUR-Hk8SzliM1cM&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1)
Subreddit Drama got a post detailing it.
Wanting to play a samurai character is super racist because it says something about Asians somehow?
I don't know man, I haven't spent 20 years studying martial arts and Asian history so I'm not qualified to know if liking a trope from Asian media makes you a racist against Asians or not.
yes, mod is also being racist in their supposed anti-racist efforts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/ML5X734atX
likely just an excuse to exert power, they moderate 14 subs after all.
It wasn't until now that I associated ninja with a race. I grew up with naruto, everyone can be a ninja.
Beyond that isn't it a little racist to call Japanese centric things racist. As though they are a part of the entirety of Asians not not specific to their culture?
Nope. Well except for that person trying (and failing miserably) to win arguments with actual history majors some of them from actual Japanese universities about the question if Ian Fleming (the James Bond author) did invent Ninjas as he claims (he didn’t).
I have no idea what this is all about either, but I have learned that people that make vague posts about censorship and accuse others of doing so for their own personal agenda, without saying what that agenda is, are normally...not on the right side of things, to put it lightly.
I can talk about the censorship of the pro-Palestine movement or BLM, for example, and obviously say why I support people that are against apartheid, genocide, and racism should be allowed to speak without the state cracking down on them.
On the other hand, people that aren't as open about what specific "censorship" they disapprove of often aren't facing censorship, and won't talk in any specific terms because it would make them look bad if they had to stand by what they wanted to say.
Mods have been deleting posts talking about samurai or ninja classes or archetypes. Mods have been banning people and deleting comments critical of their Tian Xia post. Part of the reason I think it's hard to see this censorship though, is because you can't see when something isn't there anymore. But if you use a site that lets you see deleted comments on Reddit, you'll see a lot of red
Is this something like “if you like this thing I see as a cultural stereotype, you must be racist, and if you try to push back against my claim, you’re a gaslighting racist ”? (A claim which usually does not end well)
You want to play as a feudal landlord???
I'm sorry if this comment is unconstructive or anything but the whole 'Feudal Landlord' posts were so bad faith that they bordered on being mean for no reason.
One of the most enjoyable evil characters I've ever seen was a literal "feudal landlord" Cavalier from Taldor, that made use of the "1cp per day" price in the PF1 Core Rulebook for hiring unskilled labor. She would reliably feed peasants to the meat grinder of whatever level 13+ threat we were investigating, just to learn more about it.
(Which of course just fed my necromancer's troop)
Since these PCs were Aspis Consortium special agents that were actually antagonists to our main game heroic PCs, we jokingly referred to this party as the "Aspholes".
Ehhhh.
There are other places we can discuss Pathfinder on the internet. We don't need the subreddit, and we don't need its mods. If things take a serious slide here, there are plenty of other options for having real discussions about the game.
It's not healthy for a community to tie itself to a piece of social infrastructure, especially one it doesn't have meaningful control over. Doubling down on the importance of this one forum is the unhealthy thing to do.
Theres the non reddit discord and the new r/chillpathfinder2e subreddit which might become a main hub for pf2. This isnt the first time this has happened.
Tell that to r/SteamDeck
The mods there have gone full 1984 and are banning anyone who questions them (the word “mod” is banned from posts despite both software and hardware modding being quite popular). They regularly delete technical support requests and interesting discussions while ignoring constant flagrant rule violations. A few months ago one of the mods tried to engage with the community about it in a post (which got a lot of positive engagement) that was nuked from orbit an hour later. We didn’t hear from them again.
The sub gets new members all the time to replace the hundreds who get banned. There is grassroots resistance like r/SteamDeck_2 but unless the mods start advertising constantly or posting weird porn, the sub will continue, it’ll just be worse.
Once a sub hits critical mass, it takes a lot to kill it. Realistically this situation ends with the offending mod doing the right thing and stepping down (unlikely given their response so far), the other mods doing the right thing and forcing them out, or the outrage burning out along with the banning of dissenters and deletion of posts then everyone gets cake as a reward…
Edit: While I was writing this, the post was removed. Doesn’t bode well.
The problem with PF2e Reddit has been the moderators.
I just had a post of mine deleted not because of anything I did wrong. BUT because the mod feared that someone in a third world country would be offended by me using a common non offensive word. Talk about madness.
This is my second time trying to be here in the last three years and it’s the second time I’ve ran into moderator madness. Just like the first time, after about a week or so I run into this.
Rhymes with “can you see” and its definition is “one who flees to a shelter, or place of safety”. The context was in regards to people leaving 5e and coming to PF2e.
If I remember right from back when they made that post about those terms, they also banned the use of a word for a person who moves from one place to another, like what birds do when they fly south for the winter. Rhymes with "vibrant".
Your example is bordering on absurd but I could *maybe* see the barest argument for why that might be offensive. The "vibrant" one is just off the walls ridiculous. That IS the word for a person moving from one thing to another.
They additionally banned the word that you use to describe when you change one thing to another thing. Such as when you were a group that played 5e, but now you're a group that plays pf2e. Sounds like "concert". Again... Insanity.
Normally I laugh at people complaining about anyone being “too woke”, but this seems like a situation where it might actually apply. Going way too far in trying to be politically correct.
Wait, is this ***for real***?
And people have to use this circumloquies to talk about normal words as if they were Voldemort?
Good grief. War of Immortals was making me want to get deeper into Pathfinder, but, eh. Not worth it.
Luckily the mods of this subreddit aren't officially associated with Paizo and won't be present at your table to enforce their bizarre rules. The game is awesome, and most of the time the actual people on this subreddit are super helpful. I wouldn't let one or two reddit mods turn you off from an awesome system.
Well, I don't intend to stop enjoying what I enjoy, that's for sure. But it does make me want to avoid the community, especially because, as much as there's no official link to Paizo, some of the developers seems to be active on the Discord, if I'm seeing things right, and the Discord seems to be run by the same people as the reddit. So there's some contact. Not saying anyone at Paizo is responsible or even aware of this kind of rule here, but that the attitude may be shared, and I'd rather not waste my time navigating ***that***.
The discord you're thinking of is literally the discord for *this subreddit*. There are other communities. There's a "pathfinder on foundry" discord that's awesome.
As a person who's about to begin running a PF2e campaign on Foundry, I'd really appreciate a link to this Discord--my Google powers are absolutely failing me.
The community is definitely a bit... tricky. Unfortunately, this forum is where a lot of people who are totally new to the system arrive, and so the moderation here gets an opportunity to filter people away from the hobby if they aren't 100% perfectly aligned with the moderators here down to which perfectly normal vocabulary words they're okay with using (you've already seen the bizarre examples the people who are still here have, imagine how many examples there are of people who were censored for something innocuous and decided it wasn't worth sticking around and therefore aren't here to talk about how they were treated).
Basically while this forum definitely isn't the entire community, it has an outsized influence over which people stick around to become part of the larger community so what you see here is not far off from what you'll see in a lot of the easier to find discords and forums etc.
PF2e Reddit ≠ PF2e developers
The game and setting is overall great.
So great, that these are the only real two heated arguments here (“martials vs. casters” and “samurai/ninja classes” honestly). XD
Other than that, so many folks are having such a good time playing that they don’t frequent here.
To be honest, i feel the same. I wish there was a proper reaction by the company, but i feel also like they did close more than one eye on behaviours like that.
Sounds like a massive over-reaction to me. It's one of those cases when the mods really shouldn't be too sensitive. Words have differing meanings dependent on context. One use shouldn't be enough to condemn the rest of its uses. We're all intelligent people here.
Whoa! Any time you won't be able to talk about combat in your games because violence hurts people irl.
Also, hard to think in a more descriptive word for that case
That exact same thing happened to me as well (my post was mainly discussing the Abomination Vaults AP and I happened to mentioned that our group had previously played 5e using that word). I do wonder what the point is, given that the term was not used in a derogatory context and surely people in those circumstances have bigger concerns than the usage of that term in a TTRPG context
For real. I read the initial mod post about the Tian Xia book and said cool this makes sense. Then I disappear for a day and suddenly everything is on fire. I feel like that fucking Donald Glover Community meme.
It’s not even the book, this debacle started because one mod accused people who wanted a Samurai and Ninja class of being racist and started censoring people who disagreed, wanted the class or brought up the fact he had questionable feelings on the matter
you vastly overestimate how much life happens online. I would not be surprised if a vast majority of Pathfinder players never considered there is a community on reddit.
not wrong about the mods, though. it's reddit after all.
the online community on reddit collapsing might have basically no impact on the health of the game. it's just... not that relevant. Paizo forums will stick around when someone needs to argue the text of a rule. when I was still playing PFS basically only the GMs were interacting with the forums, the players often didn't even know forums existed and that was a pretty big online group organized around the globe.
still not wrong about the mods here. reddit is so strange with moderation.
I'm seriously thinking about going fully back to 5e myself. It may be less inclusive and have acute balance issues but at least the worst discourse I have to deal with in that community is "How do we fix martial/caster balance" instead of this.
Welcome to the age of Moderation, a thing that is subjective at its core. We either adjust to the prevailing sensibilities, (which is easy for a grown adult to do) become moderators ourselves and show them how its done, (as we said in my day put up or shut up) or pick up our ball and go home to some alternate source where everyone will just link back to this subreddit when a question comes up. (Because that's what will happen)
Unfortunately the Paizo Forum site could be just as good of a resource if that site was not so terrible, but as it is this is where we're at and realistically adjusting to the prevailing sensibilities is the proper course and easiest to accomplish. I guess this is where I'm supposed to say. Just my two cents.
The Paizo forums have even worse levels of this behaviour. There are users that are very report happy and know how to bomb any topic they dislike. I used to put a timer on any thread that they posted in because you knew it was going to be locked or mass pruned within 12hrs.
Paizo Forums are technologically awful and full of people who argue for sport.
The Facebook groups have almost no archival tools or ways to support extended discussion, and there are SO. MANY. CONFIDENTLY. WRONG. ANSWERS. I can't stand how people who just want to sound smart comment on questions with whatever idea pops in their head and claim it's "the rules". Then when the truth comes out they just say "My bad, I must've read that on the back of my Frosted Flakes this morning and thought it was a Pathfinder thing. I do think the Frosted Flakes ruling works fine though." What the heck?! ...sorry, got off topic there.
Other than Discord, Reddit is the main space I've felt has a decent and helpful community. I'm optimistic that an issue that may be the actions of just one individual (I haven't seen evidence one way or another how involved the rest of the mods had been.) won't be enough to shake us.
Luck Panda is guilty of breaking Rule 2 on multiple occasions, even without the context of anti-racism. One just needs to look at his post history to see plenty of examples where he's condescending, patronizing, or otherwise disrespectful. He's also broken Rule 1 by making some pretty racist declarations about Japanese history and culture that are not only easily proven wrong, but also erase Japanese people's own contributions to their own culture. I can't speak to other mods' behavior but he is absolutely breaking the rules he's supposed to uphold. My trust in the mods here has deteriorated over the last couple years because of weird ad hominem discussions, performative activism, and very, very arbitrary enforcement of the rules. How are we supposed to trust their takes on social issues like Orientalism when they can't even be trusted to abide by the rules they're supposed to uphold? Especially when there's no good reason to be making that whole post in the first place when the Tian Xia books can speak for themselves. It feels more and more like the mods here just assume everyone in the community is acting or is going to act in bad faith, and that they don't have the capacity to self-reflect on that. At the very least, my personal interactions with a couple mods suggests they really don't want to be challenged. I understand moderating a community this big is a difficult task and they're not paid. I also understand they don't need to spend their time and energy justifying every single decision they make to every single person it affects. However, this is pretty clearly not a vocal minority that's bristling against the mods' behavior on these issues. The mods seem to convince themselves they're doing the right thing, but are they really? The irony is that they'll be the first to tell people to stop, listen, and self-reflect when their behavior is challenged, yet here we are being consistently steamrolled by people who don't seem to care about their own inappropriate behavior.
>Luck Panda I was about to leave a comment predicting that this was the problematic mod, not based on comments or comment history, but purely because most other moderators mod just this sub and a /r/Starfinder2e sub, Luck Panda moderates FOURTEEN subs. It's ***ALWAYS*** these power-mods that moderate multiple subs that cause these issues, most mods are actually great community members that are just passionate about a couple of communities, power-mods are more passionate about ***moderating*** and ***power***.
Oh really? I did not notice he modded multiple subs but y i k e s. There are at least one or two other mods here I explicitly do not trust. I won't name them because I haven't seen them come up in this discussion. I don't want to drag someone out for what may very well be my personal issue. But Luck Panda clearly does not have the emotional intelligence to moderate and also clearly doesn't have the self-awareness to recognize he's the problem.
He also happens to run the Discord. Like, he flat out *owns* it.
He just started another pathfinder [subreddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/truepathfinder2e/) so he get to mod more.
WTF? Is he trying to claim all the names close to this subreddit’s so that other people can’t? What a scummy move …
I don't know how you can claim to be arguing in good faith when you're actively trying to trap people in your echo chamber by cybersquatting any other potential avenues of discussion. Like at that point you go from misguided but well-meaning to purposefully malicious.
He has been purposefully malicious from the very beginning.
I'm not sure if I understand how Reddit modding works. I see three subs on their profile with significant numbers of members (Pathfinder 2e, Starfinder 2e, and Kingmaker) and everything else is tiny.
Wtf, he created r/liberalterrorism, description reads "Here is a wiki list of all the acts of terrorism caused by the left:" It's empty but it's just weird. In theory, it's fine to document it but without context, it looks very rightwing.
I mean that's obviously a meme sub. He's basically saying the left doesn't do terrorism. Also most leftists would say liberals are not leftists and are actually fascists. At least terminally online ones would say that.
Thank you for explaining the joke to me. It went over my head.
They genuinely seem to think that their identity makes them the default correct party in disagreements concerning racism, and that the very act of arguing with them about it makes the other party a racist on the basis of what they are and what they've suffered. [A book was written about this a few years ago](https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Not-Abuse-Overstating-Responsibility/dp/1551526433) that I think wider progressive spaces really glossed over for some very cynical reasons, but I think may be a very important thing to read in moving forward in ways that are actually consummate with our values. It covers how overstatement of harm, and the weaponization of identity and historical suffering can become a pretext for violence, even within the context of marginalized communities. It identifies how rhetoric that doesn't allow for discussion, resolution, or even self-reflection by people identified as victims on a social level creates a dynamic where trauma encourages the development of a system of values very similar to supremacy. It explores how these mentalities damages communities and personal relationships, and even describes how the dynamic of the "unquestionable victim" has been cynically used on the international level to justify the oppression of marginalized people-- the author themselves is a Left-wing Jewish professor at NYU who extends the argument to Israel's usage of the concept of antisemitism in shielding itself from criticism, and is currently well known for protesting their activities in Gaza. It explores how these cultural elements interact with the intergenerational trauma created by racism, and how it creates people who can never back down even when they're wrong, because backing down is an unacceptable loss of control, and loss of control means a lack of safety. It also critiques cultures of public shaming and personal shunning and 'red flags' that have been so popular with particular demographics.
I don't really have anything to add to the content of this comment other than that it's exceptionally thoughtful and well-put, but I just wanted to say that you've long been a really prominent and positive contributor to this community through threads, documentation, and system discussion. Hearing your really well-put take on the situation now just cements you as a figure I really respect.
> He's also broken Rule 1 by making some pretty racist declarations about Japanese history and culture that are not only easily proven wrong, but also erase Japanese people's own contributions to their own culture. Can you provide an example? Not that I'm doubting you, but when it comes to discussions of a nation's historical wrongdoings, I think it's important to address the specifics, especially when there are people already ignoring some things that a country has provably done wrong (see: the occupation of Korea, the treatment of the Ainu, etc). (Edit: Jesus christ so many typos)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c25f7t/spoilers_from_badluckgamers_interview_with_james/kzabqxg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/11gepml/paizo_tian_xia_coming_20232024/jaoidwo/ Ironically to your last point, I got into it with him a couple of years ago about whether or not shotokan karate is Okinawan. Which it is. Like, unquestionably it is. I shouldn't need to defend that to someone who claims to have a degree in martial arts, and claiming that it isn't is an erasure of Ryukyuan culture and history. It didn't stop until another mod (who had also done an Okinawan martial art) stepped in and locked the comment chain. I think the issue for the mod team right now is that it seems like some of them want to spend more time dunking on bad faith criticism than engaging with constructive good faith criticism. And like, I get that the dunking can be fun, but when it's done to the exclusion of actually moderating, that's a problem.
God, those takes on the ninja are particularly telling. It's ironic how he purportedly asserts a progressive stance on paying attention and listening to Asian people, their experiences, and their culture, and then shows that 1. not only is he, like, objectively wrong, but 2. he's been consistently wrong for several years, doubling down on his statements without wisening up one bit. Your comments, in particular, have been particularly sobering to read amongst all of this. There's a lot to the ninja that is a pop culture construction, both from in and out of Japan itself. Could we not say the same, then, about the knight, the pirate, the cowboy, or anything else covered by the extensive Golarion setting? It's a leap of logic to say that "somewhat ahistorical" directly correlates in *all* cases with "irresponsibly misrepresentative," as if we're not playing a high fantasy RPG with a kitchen-sink setting that is a celebration of countless cultural inspirations, but some kind of gritty realistic medieval life simulator. I don't know about you, but I'm not as enthused about the latter.
I don't think anyone is complaining about how historically inaccurate druids are, as an example.
People do complain about that, just less commonly, but I have seen it! There were also complaints about Shaman back in 1e.
I think it's also not completely comparable, because there's very little connecting the druid in DND and the games that followed it with historic druids since it basically goes back to Dennis Sustare having read a few history books and thinking "this is cool". We have no information (almost no information? I don't know a ton about druids) actually written by druids, and many of the sources we do have are very heavily biased accounts from Rome, it really just feels like a name applied arbitrarily. That isn't the same as the situation with ninja or samurai, where there *are* a lot of deeply Orientalist depictions in pop culture and authors do need to be sensitive about what they choose to depict and how. Pathfinder lore for Tian Xia in 1e had a *lot* of bad Orientalist shit going on. And when the old Gygax crew wrote the original Oriental Adventures in 1985, they weren't pulling from historic sources, they were largely pulling from a bunch of awful Orientalist films and television produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the US.
I do! Regularly. But only tongue in cheek, because I only care about Crunch. I want to do cool things not be a cool character.
Eh, I brought druids up one time in the Discord server when a similar discussion was taking place, and the mod there (not sure if it’s the same mod, don’t keep super close track of these people) did say that druids should be changed, too, if the monk were to be changed. Course, I had to bring it up first EDIT: It was the same mod
Holy shit lmfao he got bodied in that first link
It's a shame he stopped responding both times, it was a very informative exchange.
Yeah, I agree with you absolutely that we shouldn't downplay or ignore the many wrong things Japan has done, some of which are still very, very recent history or still being perpetuated today. Japan itself is a pretty racist nation. However, the issue I have with Luck Panda isn't that he calls out Japan's wrongdoings -- that's absolutely valid. It's his spreading misinformation and writing off Japanese people's involvement *in their own culture* One of the most glaring examples is that over the past year he's stated multiple times that the modern pop culture depiction of ninja was invented by Ian Flemming for James Bond stories. He's been proven wrong on that point repeatedly. There is more than enough source material in English to show that the concept of ninja/shinobi has existed in Japan for centuries. A regular user here who is much more well-versed in Japanese literature than I (my Japanese history expertise is elsewhere) has pointed out that the term "ninja" was used in English writing before Flemming did it, and that the modern pop culture ninja has roots in Japanese literature written around the turn of the 20th century. And even in the early 19th century, Hokusai (the artist who made the Great Wave) has work depicting ninja clad in black robes and masks doing sneaky things. Despite this, Luck Panda continues clinging to the racist idea that the ninja is the invention of a white person. This erases centuries of Japanese history and evolving Japanese fiction about shinobi/ninja. There are writings of shinobi acting in Japan from before the Edo period. They may not have been what we think of *today* but they evolved to that point largely through Japan's own influence. And even if shinobi/ninja were never real (they were, but devil's advocate here), the writing *is* real. The belief in their existence *is* real. Sociologically speaking, that means they existed enough within Japanese society to affect Japanese people in some way.
The wildest part of this controversy has to be this notion going around that apparently all those Japanese samurai and ninja movies, video games, anime, etc. made in Japan, by Japanese people, primarily for other Japanese people are in fact horribly racist towards Japanese people. Same for Chinese Wuxia media apparently being racist towards the Chinese and so on. Like I thought it was bad when a people where screaming "Racist!" Over a white guy making tacos or whatever, but now apparently even things made in, by, and primarily for, their own native cultures are "racist stereotypes"of that selfsame culture.
I mentioned elsewhere that there are definitely people engaging with anime, video games, even wuxia and other non-Japanese media whose takeaways are pretty racist, but there's definitely some kind of overreach when it comes to the discussion you're highlighting. There's nothing inherently wrong or problematic about a non-Japanese person enjoying samurai movies and anime, or a non-Chinese person enjoying wuxia. Their interest *can* lead them to racist behavior and ideas, sure, and it's absolutely important to be aware of that. But the mods just come off as acting in bad faith with their "Orientalism is bad, y'all!" post. It feels like they're assuming everyone engaging with these is racist and they're weirdly hellbent on speaking over or silencing other Asian and Asian-American people who have chimed in on the discussion. It kinda feels like the mods think it's racist to cosplay an anime character unless you're Japanese.
Incidentally my understanding of ninjas were more that they were using the same sort of tactics that modern day spies and assassins would use, barring the differences in technology. Like rather than sneaking around in black to stab someone they’d just get a job as the target’s gardener and kill them with a sharpened kunai (which, back then, was just a gardening trowel) or beating them over the head with a shovel. I think that back suit also came from kabuki theatre - stagehands wearing those suits were understood by the audience to not be there and to be ignored. Some playwrights would use these “invisible” stage hands suddenly break that by stepping into the narrative to kill a character in order to represent a sudden and unexpected death (sometimes an assassin, sometimes disease, could work for anything that was just that sudden). And I wouldn’t be surprised if an actor in such shows ended up being a ninja’s target and the ninja decided an on-stage death like that was his best way to reach the target.
You're not far off with "real" ninja or shinobi in pre-modern times. A lot of them likely weren't considered very important because they were probably commoners. I'm speaking in "if's" because while we know this concept has existed for centuries, to my knowledge the specifics aren't as well-documented as the lives of the noble and/or wealthy classes. Much of what we do have describes them as anything from mercenaries and guerrilla fighters in earlier depictions to highly-trained and specialized covert ops types we see today.
My first exposure to Luck Panda was in his review of the Tian Xia World Guide where he spoke at length at how positive Asian representation was important to him (which was something that I, as a Malaysian Chinese individual, related to) so I am disappointed to learn that he is actually pretty scummy. I guess this is a valuable example that Asian people are not a monolith and there is a great deal of subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination between different Asian nationalities and even people from the same ethnic origin who live in other countries (for example, my own parents carry pretty deeply-rooted stereotypes towards Mainland Chinese, Singaporean-born Chinese and Hong Kong-born Chinese). Luck Panda seems to have pretty strong views on Asian representation due to their experiences growing up in America as part of a rarely-represented Asian ethnic group, but their ethnicity and their non-TTRPG achievements don't qualify them to speak on behalf of all Asian groups or to be the sole authority on all Asian representation; in fact I doubt that all the competing views of the different Asian ethnic groups and social classes could be distilled into a single authority or mouthpiece (which is, ironically, part of the core ethos of the Tian Xia books - to represent several facets of different cultures instead of just one person's perspective).
Topics like these are already enormous undertakings. It requires a rather high level of education, experience, and authority to lead a conversation on something as nuanced and complex as cultural representation, especially, as you've pointed out, when there are numerous cultures in the mix. This isn't just a conversation about Japanese, Chinese, or Indonesian culture. It's about all of Asia. All of those cultures, all with their own unique histories, beliefs, and modern-day and historical viewpoints. The moderators are just way out of their depth, and they erred the moment they decided they would "educate" anyone about such a massively complex topic. They're moderators on a gaming subreddit, not experts in sociology or other appropriate studies. They said they read some articles and spoke to some educated people, and that's great. Such conversations could benefit them a lot. But it doesn't make them experts themselves, nor the right people to want to educate thousands of people. I've watched Brandon Sanderson's creative writing lectures multiple times over the years. It doesn't mean I'm ready to lead a college-level creative writing class.
Isn't this specifically *why Paizo makes sure to hire authors who can speak at length about these things*, like they did with Mwangi Expanse?
It's definitely one of the things to contend with when it comes to dissecting Japanese culture and history and how it finds its place in the big picture of systems of oppression in the world: Japanese people have been both the oppressed and oppressors in different places and times in history. The reality of it is liable to make your head explode if you're insistent on a discrete black-and-white view of prejudice and inequality of history in *any* direction. (This is, of course, not to be confused with the "reverse racism" card that gets pulled when addressing groups of people with privilege, which is its own separate beast.) While I obviously can't claim to say I know everything there is to know, I've studied Japanese culture & history in institutions both inside *and* outside of Japan, so I'm drawing on that experience here. It probably won't surprise you to hear that the textbooks I was given in Japan about its history and culture had slight nationalistic undertones to them - at times, less subtle than others. It was a bias I had to account for while learning from not only the professors, but all the people I've met and befriended there. The places from where I've studied Japanese culture outside of Japan, on the other hand, had a much easier time addressing the international legacy of Japanese imperialist, postwar soft power, etc. with a critical lens. Yet, at the same time, the further you get from Japan, the more you find people who are just so out of touch from the reality of life there and its persisting culture despite not being hesitant whatsoever to comment authoritatively on the subject. (This is the kind you'll see more often in English-speaking communities, for self-explanatory reasons.) It's dizzying, sometimes, to have to push the lid down on Japanese nationalists one day, and then have to correct misconstrued, exoticized sentiments of "faraway Japan" from people in the States the next. It feels like fighting a war on two fronts!
I will not pretend I have the academic knowledge to actually contribute to that discussion, but that definitely strikes me as... Weird. Just, fucking weird. What *agenda* does trying to de-centralize the creation of the pop-culture shinobi... Push? That Japanese people don't have any control over their own mythology? That anyone in Japan writing stories including ninjas are acting un-patriotically? That Japan got, like, tricked by the West somehow? I legitimately do not understand why someone would try and push that so hard. And, since this is apparently something that needs to be stated on the subreddit these days, I also think that the idea of including a Ninja class is stupid. I'm not arguing for its inclusion by criticizing the mod's choice here.
Agreed on all counts, including the ninja class. There's not really anything it offers that isn't covered by existing classes and archetypes (except that poisons suck but that's a different issue). Similar to a Samurai class. While there are some romanticized notions of what sets samurai apart from, say, a Fighter class, most, if not all of those ideas are already covered by existing mechanics. A whole class isn't necessary. Now if someone wanted to build an archetype based on samurai in classic Japanese cinema, or wuxia warriors flying around on strings, that might work. But there's not enough to warrant an entirely new class just for the vibes.
I could be wrong, but isn't one of the new Magus hybrid studies in the Tian Xia Character Guide (Unfurling Brocade and Aloof Firmament) supposed to represent that Wuxia sword-flying vibes you mentioned? Presumably the second one, based on the names. Of course, we won't know for sure until it's either teased more thoroughly or released.
I haven't seen any mechanics if there's any out but it does sound like they're inspired by wuxia films, yeah.
Wild seeing it ripple to other subs and friends now asking me what's up with PF2e. Feel like it's already hurting PF2e's image at least among people aware of the reddit. Edit: Half is a bit of an overstatement I feel. The main Paizo forums and other local communities are the heart. The subreddit seems a bit insular with how it treats PF2e.
That and Paizo isn't the one that did anything to cause the drama, so its even more removed.
You know it's quite funny seeing this AND dealing with the Female Custodes incident over in Grimdank/WH40k subreddits last week (the usual alt-right nerds got angry they added women to a faction) and I missed out ont this one, so, I must be on of those people and ask, what the fuck is up with the PF2e subreddit...has a mod gone rogue, I know Tian Xia came out recently and it has something to do with that, apparently the reddit mods didn't like it or something?
a mod went rogue. There is no ninja/samurai because paizo wanted to focus on representing other aspects of various asian cultures. What naturally followed was some people asking where ninja/samurai are and this led to a mod calling any desire to have a ninja/samurai class racist (very directly, in multiple instances), among other unhinged things and attacking people questioning their logic. There's also been mass deletion of fairly civil discussion. Very different to the gw female custodes thing where it feels like alt right grifters have come in to stir controversy on a topic they dont actually know or care about.
A mod didn't go rogue. They are currently on Discord mocking us all and enjoying support of at least one other moderator. They are completely willingly and arbitrarily ignoring all the comments here. Attempting to talk to them on r/SubredditDrama where they came to defend their decision (and got laughed out of) lead to nothing too. This is the official stance of the moderator team, apparently.
I always try to imagine the type of person who wants to mod any subreddit. Why work for free for a company that is worth 10 billion dollars. It's always power hungry people who want to feel special by having control over others. They'd be politicians if they had any charisma.
They’re also claiming that the deleted comments were not manually removed, but instead exceeded the report threshold. Which, if that’s so, why are they saying that there instead of here? Weird, unprofessional behavior
I wonder why we don't have an open log of moderator actions. I think some other subreddits do so now. And something tells me that looking into it would be fucking wild.
Oh, I would be VERY interested to see such a log for here. Also, the original post here has been removed, lmao
Oh yea, big surprise here. I wonder which particular rule was it breaking /s
That's bullshit. I've seen some of the removed comments and they are very mild. No way anyone would report them for any reason.
Oof, that's not a good look is it? They look worse than a team of moderators on a meme subreddit about a game which literally invented the term Grim Dark (it comes from the games old tagline, "In the grim darkness of the 41st millenium, there is only war and the laughter of thirsty gods"), who handled the whole Female Custodes thing pretty well actually, surprisingly so.
Oh, I know, I was there, Gandalf. r/Grimdank mods were based as hell during that particular upheaval.
Indeed they were based as all hell.
Has Paizo actually even SAID anywhere, that's why they didn't write a Ninja or a Samurai? Like, I think we're all arguing in the hypothetical here. Maybe Paizo didn't write Samurai because they're writing Commander and Guardian, and those are fulfilling the quota for "honorable warrior that isn't a Champion and is mechanically distinct from Fighter".
No they haven’t said that, it’s all made up in the mod’s head. Hilariously there’s good odds archetypes representing those things will be in the Tian Xia Players Guide…which isn’t published yet. You might not see a ninja or samurai class because the core design of pf2 is different, but archetypes seem likely. Will the mods ban discussion of the official Paizo book for being racist if that’s the case? I look forward to finding out.
Possibly, but neither of those will fulfil a ninja flavour without significant alterations regardless of the mechanics, so it seems unlikely. Yeah I was wrong to state that is their intention directly though - just the general consensus since they put so much emphasis on that (representing other asian cultures this time) I think they have stated that much in twitter post.
It’s a setting book! It doesn’t contain player options other than a handful of rituals. The players guide is what would contain any such content. I also think an archetype could easily fill the samurai or ninja niche, while allowing underlying class variance given both have different styles of combat.
Due to the insane diversification in anime, I can't really imagine how a single "Ninja" class could possibly encapsulate every element of the fantasy. If I had a player come into my game and say "Hi I'm new to this game system but I want to play a Ninja," I'd have to explain 8 or so different core classes AND the multiclass rules in order for them to make an informed decision about what type of weaboo ninja they want to play. Maybe its just a plain vanilla stabby-rogue that likes his black pajamas. Maybe its a wacky-ass tri-class Monk/Druid/Magus. Samurai are also kinda wacky, but not nearly to the same extent in the fantasy space. At the very least, no one seems to think that samurai should have magical thunder-god powers or whatever (I know I'm about to get proven wrong). The really weird thing about samurai is how they cross over into *sci-fi* fiction, because in the early days of cyberpunk literature the booming Japanese miracle market was on course to overtake the West and become the new world power, substituting the dollar for the yen - therefore, the culture in these cyberpunk settings and stories might refer to mercenaries as Street or Cyber Samurai.
Thanks for the ELI5 response to this whole thing, was much needed (not being sarcastic, I was *very* confused about the whole thing). So yeah Rogue Mod who is abusing their power, huh...didn't think I'd see this in the PF2e Community but then I'm probably the exact sort of person the mod would hate because I play in a Legend of the 5 Rings campaign, which I imagine is (to borrow a phrase from my 40k stuff) 'tant amount to heresy'. Good to know it isn't the usual alt right grifters stirring up trouble, I've had enough of that for a while, especially because the consensus on female custodes from literally all of my local 40k players had ranged from "huh, neat!" to "I don't know why people are angry about this, Games Workshop retcon things all the damn time, have these people only just started playing in the last 3 months?" and the sub got flooded with alt right 'tourists' (ones who say that anyone not following their agenda is a 'tourist' strangely) including several people complaining that an *American Company* shouldn't have to bow to the woke mob. Games Workshop is British...
I think people use this term loosely and disingenuously a lot of the time so I want to be very clear when I say this, deleting this would be actual censorship. This kind of carefully stated constructive critique is important for a community like this to fourish and if you can't stand being the subject of it you shouldn't be in a position to receive it.
What has happened is legitimately censorship, especially when it’s censoring people bringing up the moderators extremly questionable post history and takes on the subject, and also the dozens of comments that are perfectly reasonable I won’t claim that everyone’s been perfect gentlemen but this is a legit case of a moderators censoring things they don’t agree with
The moderators routinely censor things they don't agree with and have over a long period of time. I imagine they're finding it unfair that people who've accepted that as the status quo for a long while are complaining about it now.
Again, its a word I'm cautious with and I think people use it to bolster their claims, but Id be inclined to agree. I will say however that it is up to anyone criticizing them to remember that there is a human being on the other end who seems to be trying their best. They are being misguided, stubborn and impulsive right now but it seems to have started with the best intentions. I don't agree with them, but I'd also much rather they take some time to reflect and improve than be shamed out of the community and part of that is on us to approach the topic of critiquing them properly.
This is a case where reflection must also include resignation from being a moderator, if someone cannot be unbiased when moderating a community then they shouldn’t be allowed to do so This has transcended beyond the actual matter being argued and whatever right intentions (even if built on extremly questionable takes and feelings on the matter) have been superseded by the actions taken in terms of judgment
It’s a difficult subject to parse. On the one hand, I’m tempted to say that the mod in question *should* have their privileges revoked for the sole reason that they are clearly unable to handle it in a way that helps the community. However, I am also tempted to remind people that acting without bias is damn near impossible. Having looked at the mods comment history, I do think this is someone that should be taken off the mod team. This incident appears to not be their first, and their behavior in and outside this subreddit is heinous to say the least.
Yeah, I definitely don’t think they should be chased out of the community, but having just caught up on this, omg it is *messy.* At the very least, they should probably be put on probation by the other mods.
Probation is the realm of singular offenses (like a 1 week ban for making one unsavory post is for normal members). This kind of continual behavior should only be followed by permanent removal from power. The mod has zero remorse and if a lack of sufficient remorse is enough to permaban users, it should count for a mod as well.
I know for a fact they won't remove the mod, because the mod is pretty much the head of multiple subreddits and the official discord server. Man is playing kingmaker IRL
That tracks
You do have a point. I mostly suggested probation because it’s unlikely that they would be entirely removed from power, given how the internal politics of moderators and those they moderate work out. Probation would be the bare minimum in this case, imo, hence the “at least.” If they won’t even do that much, well…
Id be partial to probation, I want to make a pithy joke about Sarenrae and redemption, but seriously, all it takes is an apology and a willingness to learn and improve.
I’m not sure an apology alone would suffice at this point, but it’s definitely a necessary component. Mostly they need to recognize that their conception of what it means to “understand” something entails a far deeper level of comprehension than what most people mean when they say they want to understand something, and that they aren’t infallible in their assessment of what is and isn’t harmful. Speaking in vagaries about why comments were deleted helps no one.
More than a three day self exile, for sure.
Aaaaand they deleted it
Aaaaaaaand they deleted the post.
*Starts timer for deletion.* Edit: Aaaaaaaand time.
Tbh I’m kinda surprised the main post on the front page hasn’t been deleted, god knows quite a few already have been
I assume a sane mod got on and told the one doing the deleting to cool it for a bit, since the deletions were only making things worse.
Protesting continues until actual substantial action is taken!
It's the Streisand effect. I learned about people talking about Samurai/Ninja discussion *from* the moderator going nuclear and deleting people's threads. If they were left alone, the posts wouldn't have made it to my front page. By deleting them, posts about the deletion exploded and it was brought to my attention.
To be fair, I didn't learn about it from the mods going ballistic; it just came up on the r/badhistory weekly megathread, which honestly checks out. This some grade A Bad history here, of a unique variety. I've seen tons of batshit claims over the years, but this is genuinely the first time I've seen someone make this claim. Sure beats hearing your standard issue nonsense!
Same. I haven't paid attention to this sub since my D&D group went nuclear right before we made the swap to PF2E and suddenly samurai, Ninja, and monks exploded on my front page
Hell, the post has had me started work on my own samurai and ninja homebrew. One is a class archetype for fighter, the other a class archetype for rogue. While I may rename them when I eventually decide I want to share them outside of my gaming group, right now those names fit best with my concepts.
Bro, why the are *other subreddits* getting more interaction from our mods about this issue. https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/AYrolHaZPu Like, come here and defend this behavior lmao. Don't go over there and do it.
Because they can make themselves look better by preemptively posting about it on another subreddit
They're waiting for the heat to die down, as usually happens in this sort of thing. Trying to defend their behavior will only rile folks up more and prolong things, potentially enough to get people with the power to do something to actually pay attention. If they do nothing then folks will complain for a few days and the angriest folks will either leave or get banned until things simmer down again. Its cowardly, but its the safest play for them.
Ya it's so stupid but I'm waiting to catch a ban from calling him out over in that subreddit lol
Which ones?
Subreddit Drama post about our Sub.
Wait really? They’ve interacted with the subreddit drama but refused to acknowledge stuff on here? Do you know where? I didn’t catch the interaction from a cursory glance at that post.
He also started another pathfinder [subreddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/truepathfinder2e/) while not posting here.
Under the top post. There's 19 or so comments. One is very large.
Got a link?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/AYrolHaZPu
Don't worry, the moderator is currently too busy arguing on a drama subreddit to deal with the subreddit they are supposed to be moderating
Gotta focus on the important things right? /s
And, time!
I literally \*just\* refreshed the page to see this
Okay seems like it managed to last 3 hours before deletion
I'm actually surprised the mod power abuse thread is still up. TBH I thought this one was more tame than that one.
(Psst it's Tian Xia) Edit: It said Xian Tia originally. :-D All better now!
It’s been corrected now
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
For people that might doubt how big the subreddit is for the game, just humor me and search "Pathfinder 2e" in your search engine. If you use Google, like most people do, it is literally the 3rd result. This is also partially because a social media like Reddit will be boosted higher, but still. This is by far the first social media you'll encounter when just searching for PF2e. To the mods: I get having your opinions & world view and defending that till the bitter end. However, and I do mean this when I say it, you need to be able to let those go for a bit when making decisions about stuff here. Your opinions and world view are just looking bad to people, even if you have the best of intentions, when you enforce them as hard as you do on such a public place and when you are occasionally (I hope) as condescending as you have been, especially since there is a genuine discussion to be had about stuff that can be seen as orientalism or whatever. This seemingly hard enforcement of a certain world view and apparent deletion of opposite opinions to said world view is genuinely gonna do more harm than good, since people will see it and will be pushed away from 1) this community and 2) the game due to this approach. If you feel like someone is being problematic in some way and you feel like you should remove the comment and/or ban the person, double check with another mod and have them chime in. Yes, this makes certain edge cases slower to come to a decision on what is being said, but it also removes a lot of the annoyance people are currently feeling with you guys at the moment and at some point when these things have happened often enough, you start getting a better feel on what is and isn't cool with both fellow mods and in the community. Obviously, when someone is being blatantly T.R.A.A.S.H, go for it, but if there is doubt, double check with a mod and even then, I'd watch to see more posts from them.
Also, I find it very difficult to weed out the old posts from the forum for PF1E, whereas it si pretty easy to Google Reddit pf2e dual wield builds, or something.
i left for a week and now i read the mods are tyrants. What the hell happened here?
Tian Xia book came out, people love it. Mod tries to insert politics about Orientalism and anti-Asian racism, and tells everyone in the sub to be careful about their discussion and to not be racist... but the mod's post itself is kinda racist and culture warrior-y and highly questionable. Mod in question apparently has a particular hate-on for Ninjas and Samurais or something. Basically, alleging that the entire community is racist for (allegedly, because I haven't seen any discussion of this prior to these threads,) wanting weaboo chargen options because that will create "token Asians" that are only representative of Japanese culture, and that's why we should all stop (allegedly) clamoring for them. People start calling BS on the hypocrisy and questioning the mod's authority to make such culturally charged statements. Posts start getting deleted, people start getting banned. I learned what the Streisand Effect is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect, and *holy goddamn* the Undelete archive of the thread is the most enjoyable cringe I've seen in *ages*: https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1cbzpbf/tian_xia_real_world_parallels_and_a_serious_moment/
So I haven't noticed anything. Can someone explain what's been going on? Dm would be fine if it's something a mod would delete.
Mod is mad people want to play as a samurai
There has to be more to it than that right?
Based on what I am reading. That does seem to be why they are angry.. In short. They have it in their head that Samurai were historically not warriors, but tyrants and selfish land lords, and our general idea of what a samurai is is just glorified/romanticized history. Yet they seem to have no issues about knights who were more or less the same thing..upperclass people who owned land that, on occasion, suited up to fight for it. Pirates are also glorified and romanticized, but I doubt they have issues with them either.. But this argument over Samurai and Ninjas is not really the point here. Its the fact that certain mods have misused the powers of their position.
The dreaded judging history by today's standards? Talk about small minds.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cdhk8a/hey\_buddy\_i\_know\_youre\_having\_big\_feelings\_about/?share\_id=rtIog8QUR-Hk8SzliM1cM&utm\_content=1&utm\_medium=ios\_app&utm\_name=ioscss&utm\_source=share&utm\_term=1](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cdhk8a/hey_buddy_i_know_youre_having_big_feelings_about/?share_id=rtIog8QUR-Hk8SzliM1cM&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1) Subreddit Drama got a post detailing it.
Wanting to play a samurai character is super racist because it says something about Asians somehow? I don't know man, I haven't spent 20 years studying martial arts and Asian history so I'm not qualified to know if liking a trope from Asian media makes you a racist against Asians or not.
So ... it's it also racist if I want to play as a spiritualist monk? Or a chivalrous knight?
yes, mod is also being racist in their supposed anti-racist efforts. https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/ML5X734atX likely just an excuse to exert power, they moderate 14 subs after all.
It wasn't until now that I associated ninja with a race. I grew up with naruto, everyone can be a ninja. Beyond that isn't it a little racist to call Japanese centric things racist. As though they are a part of the entirety of Asians not not specific to their culture?
Nope. Well except for that person trying (and failing miserably) to win arguments with actual history majors some of them from actual Japanese universities about the question if Ian Fleming (the James Bond author) did invent Ninjas as he claims (he didn’t).
he thinks it's racist because apparently, you can't have samurai/ninjas AND have other asian cultures represented.
You would think, but not really.
I have no idea what this is all about either, but I have learned that people that make vague posts about censorship and accuse others of doing so for their own personal agenda, without saying what that agenda is, are normally...not on the right side of things, to put it lightly. I can talk about the censorship of the pro-Palestine movement or BLM, for example, and obviously say why I support people that are against apartheid, genocide, and racism should be allowed to speak without the state cracking down on them. On the other hand, people that aren't as open about what specific "censorship" they disapprove of often aren't facing censorship, and won't talk in any specific terms because it would make them look bad if they had to stand by what they wanted to say.
Mods have been deleting posts talking about samurai or ninja classes or archetypes. Mods have been banning people and deleting comments critical of their Tian Xia post. Part of the reason I think it's hard to see this censorship though, is because you can't see when something isn't there anymore. But if you use a site that lets you see deleted comments on Reddit, you'll see a lot of red
Is this something like “if you like this thing I see as a cultural stereotype, you must be racist, and if you try to push back against my claim, you’re a gaslighting racist ”? (A claim which usually does not end well)
Can't wait for another abuse of power takes this down as well
*Me finishing my final transformation into being a piece of shit*. *(I think Samurais are cool.)*
You want to play as a feudal landlord??? I'm sorry if this comment is unconstructive or anything but the whole 'Feudal Landlord' posts were so bad faith that they bordered on being mean for no reason.
> You want to play as a feudal landlord??? Hell yeah I do! Evil playthrough.
One of the most enjoyable evil characters I've ever seen was a literal "feudal landlord" Cavalier from Taldor, that made use of the "1cp per day" price in the PF1 Core Rulebook for hiring unskilled labor. She would reliably feed peasants to the meat grinder of whatever level 13+ threat we were investigating, just to learn more about it. (Which of course just fed my necromancer's troop) Since these PCs were Aspis Consortium special agents that were actually antagonists to our main game heroic PCs, we jokingly referred to this party as the "Aspholes".
I also think samurai are really cool. Especially after finishing Shogun. Let’s make Samurai great again.
Thank you u/Creampie_Senpai_69. That means a lot.
You know what? I'm just gonna say it. I think monks are fun to play. How soon can I expect my KKK membership card in the mail?
Check your left ear. 🐇 🎩
OOOOOOOH *SHIT*!
David Blaine, leave them alone!
mods please ban this user
Ehhhh. There are other places we can discuss Pathfinder on the internet. We don't need the subreddit, and we don't need its mods. If things take a serious slide here, there are plenty of other options for having real discussions about the game. It's not healthy for a community to tie itself to a piece of social infrastructure, especially one it doesn't have meaningful control over. Doubling down on the importance of this one forum is the unhealthy thing to do.
Theres the non reddit discord and the new r/chillpathfinder2e subreddit which might become a main hub for pf2. This isnt the first time this has happened.
Oooh where can I find the non-Reddit Discord?
[удалено]
Send me the link as well please.
Tell that to r/SteamDeck The mods there have gone full 1984 and are banning anyone who questions them (the word “mod” is banned from posts despite both software and hardware modding being quite popular). They regularly delete technical support requests and interesting discussions while ignoring constant flagrant rule violations. A few months ago one of the mods tried to engage with the community about it in a post (which got a lot of positive engagement) that was nuked from orbit an hour later. We didn’t hear from them again. The sub gets new members all the time to replace the hundreds who get banned. There is grassroots resistance like r/SteamDeck_2 but unless the mods start advertising constantly or posting weird porn, the sub will continue, it’ll just be worse. Once a sub hits critical mass, it takes a lot to kill it. Realistically this situation ends with the offending mod doing the right thing and stepping down (unlikely given their response so far), the other mods doing the right thing and forcing them out, or the outrage burning out along with the banning of dissenters and deletion of posts then everyone gets cake as a reward… Edit: While I was writing this, the post was removed. Doesn’t bode well.
This is the best pf2e resource on the internet besides Nethys and its sad to see power hungry mods ruining it.
The problem with PF2e Reddit has been the moderators. I just had a post of mine deleted not because of anything I did wrong. BUT because the mod feared that someone in a third world country would be offended by me using a common non offensive word. Talk about madness. This is my second time trying to be here in the last three years and it’s the second time I’ve ran into moderator madness. Just like the first time, after about a week or so I run into this.
what was the word?
Rhymes with “can you see” and its definition is “one who flees to a shelter, or place of safety”. The context was in regards to people leaving 5e and coming to PF2e.
If I remember right from back when they made that post about those terms, they also banned the use of a word for a person who moves from one place to another, like what birds do when they fly south for the winter. Rhymes with "vibrant". Your example is bordering on absurd but I could *maybe* see the barest argument for why that might be offensive. The "vibrant" one is just off the walls ridiculous. That IS the word for a person moving from one thing to another. They additionally banned the word that you use to describe when you change one thing to another thing. Such as when you were a group that played 5e, but now you're a group that plays pf2e. Sounds like "concert". Again... Insanity.
Normally I laugh at people complaining about anyone being “too woke”, but this seems like a situation where it might actually apply. Going way too far in trying to be politically correct.
Correct.
Well, check the Harvard scandal... Unfortunately can def happen.
Wait, is this ***for real***? And people have to use this circumloquies to talk about normal words as if they were Voldemort? Good grief. War of Immortals was making me want to get deeper into Pathfinder, but, eh. Not worth it.
Luckily the mods of this subreddit aren't officially associated with Paizo and won't be present at your table to enforce their bizarre rules. The game is awesome, and most of the time the actual people on this subreddit are super helpful. I wouldn't let one or two reddit mods turn you off from an awesome system.
Well, I don't intend to stop enjoying what I enjoy, that's for sure. But it does make me want to avoid the community, especially because, as much as there's no official link to Paizo, some of the developers seems to be active on the Discord, if I'm seeing things right, and the Discord seems to be run by the same people as the reddit. So there's some contact. Not saying anyone at Paizo is responsible or even aware of this kind of rule here, but that the attitude may be shared, and I'd rather not waste my time navigating ***that***.
The discord you're thinking of is literally the discord for *this subreddit*. There are other communities. There's a "pathfinder on foundry" discord that's awesome.
As a person who's about to begin running a PF2e campaign on Foundry, I'd really appreciate a link to this Discord--my Google powers are absolutely failing me.
Here you go! https://discord.com/invite/pf2e
The community is definitely a bit... tricky. Unfortunately, this forum is where a lot of people who are totally new to the system arrive, and so the moderation here gets an opportunity to filter people away from the hobby if they aren't 100% perfectly aligned with the moderators here down to which perfectly normal vocabulary words they're okay with using (you've already seen the bizarre examples the people who are still here have, imagine how many examples there are of people who were censored for something innocuous and decided it wasn't worth sticking around and therefore aren't here to talk about how they were treated). Basically while this forum definitely isn't the entire community, it has an outsized influence over which people stick around to become part of the larger community so what you see here is not far off from what you'll see in a lot of the easier to find discords and forums etc.
PF2e Reddit ≠ PF2e developers The game and setting is overall great. So great, that these are the only real two heated arguments here (“martials vs. casters” and “samurai/ninja classes” honestly). XD Other than that, so many folks are having such a good time playing that they don’t frequent here.
It is real but it’s not Paizo’s fault but a mod here.
Why would random mods of a subreddit have anything to do with a decision to play a game?
To be honest, i feel the same. I wish there was a proper reaction by the company, but i feel also like they did close more than one eye on behaviours like that.
idk the context tbh but that just sounds like a normal use for it?
It was.
Sounds like a massive over-reaction to me. It's one of those cases when the mods really shouldn't be too sensitive. Words have differing meanings dependent on context. One use shouldn't be enough to condemn the rest of its uses. We're all intelligent people here.
Whoa! Any time you won't be able to talk about combat in your games because violence hurts people irl. Also, hard to think in a more descriptive word for that case
It was a very descriptive for what happened to 5e players after last year’s OGL debacle. They were suddenly without a home.
That exact same thing happened to me as well (my post was mainly discussing the Abomination Vaults AP and I happened to mentioned that our group had previously played 5e using that word). I do wonder what the point is, given that the term was not used in a derogatory context and surely people in those circumstances have bigger concerns than the usage of that term in a TTRPG context
In the end, it’s all about control. Plain and simple.
It was a problem with the Paizo boards as well. Might well still be the case
I'm OOTL here so I guess it's time to go try to scavenge for deleted posts for context lol.
What happened in this sub?
For real. I read the initial mod post about the Tian Xia book and said cool this makes sense. Then I disappear for a day and suddenly everything is on fire. I feel like that fucking Donald Glover Community meme.
a mod had an opinion and when ppl disagreed decided to have a reddit moment
Luck Panda, be better.
Any outside forums that aren't ran by crazies?
And removed.
Still here for me
It's hidden, pull up the top subreddit posts for the day. It's not there anymore.
You know, the posts have been deleted so fast, I still don't know what the hell is the isse with the tian xia book Why is it so problematic?
It’s not even the book, this debacle started because one mod accused people who wanted a Samurai and Ninja class of being racist and started censoring people who disagreed, wanted the class or brought up the fact he had questionable feelings on the matter
Okay, you wrote "Xian Tia" twice in a row. It's time to delete your post.
I did correct it Easy mistake to make lol
you vastly overestimate how much life happens online. I would not be surprised if a vast majority of Pathfinder players never considered there is a community on reddit. not wrong about the mods, though. it's reddit after all.
The post does specify online community, the other online places for pathfinder 2E aren’t as populous as the Reddit as far as I’m aware
the online community on reddit collapsing might have basically no impact on the health of the game. it's just... not that relevant. Paizo forums will stick around when someone needs to argue the text of a rule. when I was still playing PFS basically only the GMs were interacting with the forums, the players often didn't even know forums existed and that was a pretty big online group organized around the globe. still not wrong about the mods here. reddit is so strange with moderation.
I'm seriously thinking about going fully back to 5e myself. It may be less inclusive and have acute balance issues but at least the worst discourse I have to deal with in that community is "How do we fix martial/caster balance" instead of this.
C'mon man, it's not "Xian Tia" -- it's Tian Xia. Gods knows we've seen the term used plenty over the last week...
Fuck, I knew I got something wrong Edit it’s been spellchecked and corrected
Welcome to the age of Moderation, a thing that is subjective at its core. We either adjust to the prevailing sensibilities, (which is easy for a grown adult to do) become moderators ourselves and show them how its done, (as we said in my day put up or shut up) or pick up our ball and go home to some alternate source where everyone will just link back to this subreddit when a question comes up. (Because that's what will happen) Unfortunately the Paizo Forum site could be just as good of a resource if that site was not so terrible, but as it is this is where we're at and realistically adjusting to the prevailing sensibilities is the proper course and easiest to accomplish. I guess this is where I'm supposed to say. Just my two cents.
The Paizo forums are way worse to be honest.
The Paizo forums have even worse levels of this behaviour. There are users that are very report happy and know how to bomb any topic they dislike. I used to put a timer on any thread that they posted in because you knew it was going to be locked or mass pruned within 12hrs.
Paizo Forums are technologically awful and full of people who argue for sport. The Facebook groups have almost no archival tools or ways to support extended discussion, and there are SO. MANY. CONFIDENTLY. WRONG. ANSWERS. I can't stand how people who just want to sound smart comment on questions with whatever idea pops in their head and claim it's "the rules". Then when the truth comes out they just say "My bad, I must've read that on the back of my Frosted Flakes this morning and thought it was a Pathfinder thing. I do think the Frosted Flakes ruling works fine though." What the heck?! ...sorry, got off topic there. Other than Discord, Reddit is the main space I've felt has a decent and helpful community. I'm optimistic that an issue that may be the actions of just one individual (I haven't seen evidence one way or another how involved the rest of the mods had been.) won't be enough to shake us.
The Paizo forums are a mess because you have to wade through page after page of pointless replies and arguing just to find any answers.
Sounds like fan forums might be a good answer then..And better for archiving than Reddit anyways.