A couple of questions to the CB staff about fluff direction and the Infinity fandom

Sorrryy.

Hey, have you tried sending the OP as a email to CB? I did send them an email once and they answered.

 

It hasn't, it's just the new stuff that everyone has to focus on until the next new thing comes out. Lots of people could care less, and many won't even read it as it's not a main rule book.

Have you read the stuff about Hassassins sending in kill teams to take out executives who are just rezzed back up? Now that's pointless.

Psycho Crane stopped all those civilians from breathing pretty well. All jokes aside, even as a militarized police force, it's very hard to defend structures from locals, especially ones with military training, ordnance and the force of will to do anything that is necessary. ISS didn't go around firebombing blocks out of nowhere. The fluff covers the main points, not all the little stuff. Who knows how many attempts they stopped/ people they captured/ agents they killed or turned. Also, with how fast everything went, a big coordinated strike like that is hard to recover from and track down, I'm sure even with futuristic forensics.

 

If they were always supposed to be the bad guys, then how does it serve to undercut the menace of being the bad guy by the constantly losing and getting rolled over by PanO? Seems like a pretty terrible designated villains if apparently PanO can just punch them in the face and take their lunch money with no consequences makes them less of a threat and more a farce.

 

Because this is not a simple Hero vs Villain situation. PanO is not the good guys, Yu Jing is not the villain. They are competing forces with clashing interests both nations are willing to achieve by walking over corpses.

 

Doesn't change the fact if we are supposed to think Yu Jing is actually a be a meaningful threat to PanO, its completely undermined by the actions they get away with in Uprising, hence the lunch money remark.

 

Nothing Yu Jing is doing in the background during Uprising hasn't been done in real life by real government institutions to real minority groups. Plenty have done far worse. That doesn't excuse it, but it's hardly unrealistic that an authoritarian apartheid nation would react in the way they do to an independence movement and military uprising from a subjugated minority. There isn't anything in Uprising more morally questionable than, say, Kuang Shi or indeed the previous existence of Japanese citizens in YJ. They're morally grey because they are in fact pretty awful but then hey, is the Hexahedron any worse? Or does PanO just lie about it more? What about YJ troops on Paradiso, protecting international civilians with their lives? Are they now monsters because the government of the nation they were born into does horrible things?

There is grey. YJ were always darker grey, and they still are. But then hey, the JSA is fighting for a Japanese ethno-nationalist state where secret police ensure the "moral standards" of citizens and disappear people. If you're an ISS agent fighting to evacuate non-ethnic Japanese who are hidden in Tokyo, are you a bad guy? If you're a Hac Tao lying in wait to ambush a PanO weapons delivery to the JSA that is in clear breach of international law, are you a monster? These are the questions the game asks. It doesn't really give an answer, but I don' think it's quite as simple as "these guys are total shits." Some of them are. Some of them always were. Some of them are not.

But if you played ISS and didn't think that you weren't playing a brutal authoritarian secret judicial police force then you, er, weren't reading the background. Or maybe you were, and your forces tried to do things by the book, and fought against even worse people doing even more horrible things! Despite that, nothing has changed. I will accept that there are parts of Uprising that could be written better, but I don't think YJ is now any more unpalatable than it ever was.

 

I'll agree with that notion. Uprising did not paint Yu Jing in a particularly favourable light as far as their conflict with PanO goes. However, that is to be expected with a major crisis/civil war going on in their own territories. The situation was basically handed to PanO on a silver platter and they profited off it as they should have.

 

A montage you say. Would it have an upbeat rock song so they can cut the film to the beat and the squad learn to use exotic new gear in like a *really* short space of time. Also theres some knock-down stuff between two guys one of who is maybe an immigrant and the other is all-american and theyre never friends but they learn to respect each other and at the end of the song the squad is ready for anything the CA can throw at them. Maybe the montage could end with the LT saying "Allright, listen up everyone! You've done good on the training course" and he nods at the immigrant guy, and the all-american guy gives an approving look too [beat] "but this time it's going to be for real ..." That would be good Id definitely watch that. :)

 

Understament of the century.

 

The issue I have isn't that PanO managed to gain a win during through the chaos; its just they should at least their noses bloodied a bit more, as Sun Tze said, fighting someone who is cornered and has no escape is death ground, and PanO should've at least bleed for walking through the barbed bush.

 

I haven't read all of the new book yet (it arrived today), but it doesn't seem like PanO went deep into the shrubbery but rather threw a stone here and there, keeping their distance and making rude gestures.

 

Well this escalated quickly. I guess I should stop being constructive for a moment and put blame of Wotan start on some one because it portrayed Nomads as CA collaborators and doesn`t fit my headcanon.
Remember La Forja!

 

I might haven't been totally clear there, WH40k is the "so over the top with atrocities that the brain do not register", plus has been sold since the beginning as the trope of "UP TO ELEVEN!!!"

Some other posters disagree here, saying that those who wanna play ISS can only play I-SS (see further back on this post)

Yes it does. Bakunin goes into depravity (Pupniks "stress relief"), for example. Funny how I had little trouble back in the day when I read about a colony in Eclipse Phase so devoted to kinkyness and vice, one of its members was addicted to being eaten by a giant T-Rex. Then again, and this is the most relevant part of this stuff or the atrocities we can see in the latest Battletech game (second main mission? "Hospital" / gulag with some stomach-churning stuff hinted, straight from 1984 and letting people starve). However, the critical differences are two: first, it's hinted and not repeteadly thrown at the player's face, and second it is done by the villains/NPCs. If CB wanted to really make things palatable, things like the CBL would not be about I-SS, but IA or some other things, and, for example, center it on the battles on Japan. Instead, we are ALL dragged into this as supporters of one side, the other, or the aliens.

So, since out there in the Real World things are much worse and detailed, I should be happy a less descarnate version of that is inserted in my little mental corner of free time? I reject your reasoning. I do not have to tolerate the creeping of al of this things into some sort of normalcy, so there comes a time that real world atrocities have a lesser impact on my perception.

No, it's an endemic "philosophy". Make things sloppily because you can't be bothered to do it good. Then patch things up. Until there are more patches than base. Then keep going until it falls apart... it will be somebody else's problem (even if that somebody is you in a few years).
Add to that the Galician trope of "maybe, maybe not" that leads them to wait and let every opposing thing dissapear...

Apparently, "grey" means to some that there needs to be Blackguards and Paladins. To others like you, that is totally open to interpretation (except, no it's not. The I-SS deserves the Evil, with capital E, shtick, while the Kuge have the Evil Bastards).

Perhaps you need to dust off previous posts. Nobody but you talks about "missing insurgency actions" during or after Uprising. It was about how the YanYing and the ISS totally failed to detect even a single speck of Uprising in the years that took to set it up.
Unless the next Deus ex Machina is that in fact it had to be cobbled together in a few months and YJ caught up the events and thanks to that it currently holds Kuraimori... until O-12 comes and tells YJ to give "back" the continent to the Japanese.

There is a difference. Those things were made in the way of Magnificent Bastards, and "upped" all participants: there was a plot, there was intelligence, there was skill... and the "good guys" in Outrage won by the slimmest margin (Die Hard: every Player Character wants to be McLane, victorious in the end but with their best effort).
In Uprising, Treason and the CBL I only see Bastards and Evil. And I use something as simplistic as "Evil" because it is that simple.

The biggest problem with all this is the HUGE DISSAPOINTMENT in the alleged second human nation.

Except it hasn't been thrown at the faces of the players repeteadly with gruesome detail. It has been, for now, relegated to back fluff. And presented in such a way that can be read as "like today, but the lobbies ARE the political parties, instead of paying the political parties to further their agendas". The Atek problem being their "background noise" like the Kuang Shi was YJ's "Background Noise" (the darkest parts).
Simply put, now YJ has taken several steps into the BLACK direction.

You do realize that such programs do exist nowadays and are implemented? For mentally ill people. With personality disorders, for example. Or insane attraction to children.

Turning people into suicide bombers is, indeed, horrible. Turning people that is a threat to themselves or others into integrated people is, in a way, more acceptable. And certainly better than keeping them behind bars for their whole lives or executing them.

Or maybe you didn't thought things with the right perspective. Like how that executive miss the important meeting that can't be moved... and that, for example, is the difference between the YanYing detecting the Uprising months before it starts.

When goods don't matter and inmortality is at hand, the time you are out of the "game" is the real loss.

Not secret, but Emperor-sponsored Judicial Police founded to neutralize a wave of crime so rampant the triads felt they could assault a courtroom and take the accused by force with them.

Then, after all that, it was tasked with more things to do. But heck, what do I know... it's just Xi Zhuang's background, even if he somehow ends in counterinsurgency instead of in the anti-organized crime division.

Nah, just started an unprovoked war with YJ for 20 days on Earth and Paradiso. Pretty tame stuff, it's quite hidden in the timeline.

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Back on topic: I hope this direction is not the one YJ will remain, and I PRAY it's not the one the whole game is digging into. I left behind all the emo and "dark and evulz is so cool" culture back in the 90's when I stopped playing Vampire TM. Even if I still enjoy playing Vampire: Bloodlines in my PC.

 

Yeah, they usually get along pretty well, don't they? The premise of the whole setting is them being at war most of the time, even if its happening through proxies, covert ops and sabotage.

 

I don't think I'm implying everything you think I am - I'm just pointing out that the current presentation by CB is not entirely monolithic, nor does it have to represent your dudes.

If some guy on the forum disagrees with me about what my army is about, that's his problem, not mine. As I've said before, unless you are gonna come to my game store and take away my figurines, I ultimately get to be the final judge of who my 10 dudes are.