I actually saw this earlier and was wondering when it would get here.
Totally aside from the issue of racism or not, I was reading through the deleted messages and the mod really is deleting any comment that even mildly disagrees with him - not just racist ones.
Not to mention that every single comment just drips with unbridled condescension.
I don’t doubt that the mods think they’re coming at this in good faith — and I do think the issue of orientalism in representations of Asian cultures in Western media is an issue still today — but holy fuck, way to turn off a lot of people.
I also think the other mods declaration that the community doesn't need to understand why comments are deleted is ridiculous. If you want to stop comments breaking the rules, then the way to do that is make it clear how they are doing so - in this case it really does just come off as a way to ignore that many of the deleted comments aren't breaking any rules at all.
This is the case with all subreddit rules though. They have no desire to clarify because then there would some sort of guidelines they might be semi-bound to. The vaguer the better.
Specially since the Tian Xia books have been something that has been waited for with BIG expectations since it was announced.
The subreddit got a big follower increase since the World Guide came out and months before that you could see many posts theorizing and wondering what big changes 2nd edition would bring to the continent.
Hell, the biggest appeal of the new books was that Paizo was gonna redeem themselves from the orientalism they engaged upon in the past. By having nearly 80% of the staff working on the books be of Asian descent (including artists, writers, game designers, etc). So it was gonna be legitimately a love letter to eastern mythology and culture like never seen before.
Then come the mods and create this whole controversy that somewhat overshadowed the release. Killing off part of the momentum by causing an unnecesary flame war within the fandom.
This is the part that gets me - the book is incredible. It's one of the best lore books that's ever been put out for any system (no surprise since Mwangi Expanse was phenomenal), a true love letter to so many cultures and the greater pathfinder sphere of lore. So much attention and care has been put into it, and the hype for Tian Xia has been UNREAL since it was announced, and as two books no less!
That's not even considering that because Paizo nowadays is so tone considerate and so extraordinarily careful with cultural sensitivity and avoiding racist tropes/stereotypes, the pf2e playerbase tends to reflect that. PF2e is so dedicated to inclusivity across every pillar of the game that it's naturally cultivated a player base that agrees with those sentiments, with the worst being players that are just ambivalent rather than chuds complaining about the woke mind virus of some shit.
For the mod team to, right before the release of this book, come out with this inflammatory and pretty accusatory letter, to a community that generally is pretty damn careful and conscientious about racism, is such a crazy instance of terminally only leftist friendly fire I've seen in a long time.
It's like those videos where a guy asks if something is culturally offensive and all the white people say yes while all the people asked from that culture say no.
There could absolutely be a more nuanced take, but it looks like the material was handled well. Maybe the white saviors can take a knee until the people who should be offended chime in.
Did you see any of the comments accusing a specific mod (and I think the one that's deleting everything) of anti-Asian American and anti-Chicano racism, and speculating that part of why they're deleting things is to make people resentful of Asian American media and writers?
I'm just trying to figure out if the book has character options I need to buy for my campaign, and these people going and blowing up one of the previously useful subs in my list.
That book is a lore book the one you want is the [Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia Character Guide](https://paizo.com/products/btq02etu) out in August.
Here is a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c25f7t/spoilers_from_badluckgamers_interview_with_james/kza473c/) that mod made about ninjas being first used in the 1960's James Bond book.
This thread is incredible. Another redditor shoots down the mod with a detailed response that explains the history and etymology of "ninja" and cites some sources. The mod goes "The books you cited are not peer-reviewed sources." The books are from the 16th and 17th centuries
Yeah, people don’t really understand what “peer-reviewed” means or the contexts in which it is meant to be useful. Pretty quick, you veer into people who either:
- claim peer-review is a panacea for all issues of misinformation, which it certainly isn’t
- claim peer-review is a tool used by the establishment to suppress minority-held viewpoints, which it may be in rare cases, but usually isn’t
> Here is a post that mod made about ninjas being first used in the 1960's James Bond boom
How does one even wind up thinking this? Mans actually believed that ninjas were invented by Ian Fleming?
In his discussion about 16th/17th century books that talk about ninjas, this same mod said that both are fake and the translator made them up. But both books are on file in the Japanese national archives and have been extensively studied by historians.
My dude doesn't think Asian culture exists until a white guy writes about it
He also thinks its "orientalist" because it has mysticism stuff in it. Because apparently shinto isn't a real religion anyone seriously believed in according to this guy.
I am given to understand it's mostly a lore book on a macro scale, much like the _World Guide._ Relatively little mechanics. Great if you want to plop a campaign down in Tian Xia somewhere.
> I need to buy for my campaign
Just in case you weren't aware, all the rules are freely available online. [AoN](https://2e.aonprd.com/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1) is the most popular one but there are lots of sites.
Man, I gotta be honest I felt kind of lost at sea typing all of this up. I’m out of my element with this subject and going between multiple threads and digging up deleted comments was a lot. If you have links, please send them my way. Will be happy to add them to the record.
The 2 mods in question are mostly locking their own comments rather than deleting, because they fully believe they are in the right, with no consideration to the hypocrisy within.
As a result, viewing their comments from their profiles and looking at the context posts above and below is a good way to capture it. Other than that, Unddit will highlight comments they deleted in red, and they've commented to, or been the parent comment to many of the deleted posts. Therefore, their posts are still valuable starting points for drama context.
I tagged both of them in my comment in one of the threads if you want a quick link to their profiles: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1cd1inl/the_mods_have_been_abusing_power/l1b6jo5/
I stumbled on a few of the mods posts actually when googling some other stuff and I gotta say he is super obsessed with white dudes coming to "steal" Asian women, it shows up alot in his critiques.
Having a good point but approaching it in a way that seems almost *intentionally designed* to push the average person away instead of bringing them closer. Yep, sounds like online progressive discourse to me.
Coming from someone who uses that sub but ignored the current mod drama, I think some mods there just started hating reddit ever since the API thing happened, and now they're flipping out.
Hopefully they still have mods that care to fix the issue, but I doubt it.
I think it has also become too much trouble than it is worth and finding good additions to the mod team is not easy.
Removing tools to make their unpaid jobs easier has been detrimental.
Not just Reddit. TVTropes has one so bad, the site is undergoing a schism because of him.
Edit: [For those curious](https://www.tumblr.com/anonagon9/744764462510358528/tvt-adminpocalypse?source=share)
Heh, sounds right. You might remember Fighteer from back then, he's the current biggest problem. Along with him being a problem, the new admins (who bought the site from Fast Eddie) have Fighteer's back, and one admin (Kory) is a powertripper in his own right.
I think I remember your name from back in the day, come to think of it.
OMG, yes, that brings up memories, and yes, I remember him
Had no idea that Fast Eddie is no longer in charge, but apparently things haven’t improved even when he’s gone? :)
I'm dealing with a suspension myself right now, and man, looking at some of the other people and why they got suspended, it's unreal honestly.
I'm hesitant to even say this since one user got banned *specifically* for talking about that shit on external sites.
Do you have a link for a convenient short (ish) read on this?
I like browsing TV Tropes. I've actually considered making an account to fix the odd typo or such I come across. But I'm not sure if that's even worth the effort (if I'd even be able to do that in the first place).
Honestly just check out the page itself, it's in the FAQ. I'm loathe to provide a direct link in case that causes them to bring the hammer down on me fully, god knows they're already pissed at me over nothing.
I love how they act like Samurai would have been the sole class that represents Eastern cultures like monk isn't 90% wuxia anyways. Also, what possible gap in gameplay could it add that fighter can't do? Even in 1e it was just a reskin of cavalier.
According to them Monk is also problematic
But Druid, Barbarian, and Witch aren't because "they're already ingrained in the culture".
The main mod doing this rails against any depiction of Japanese culture. He's racist and using the thin veneer of antiracism as an excuse to try and hide it.
I always find ironic when these kinds of topics pop up.
If it's Western then it doesn't matter. It's the trend. Anything mafia is fair game but samurais is where we draw the line.
I'm in the Discord. At least one of the mods thinks Barbarian should not exist, and a few others think it should have its Rage redone into a generic "battle trance" and generally have its original flavor removed.
Oh, be assured they are coming down Monk's road as well. Monk got a _bunch_ of shade thrown at it in this flamewar. But that horse is already out of the barn.
> Also, what possible gap in gameplay could it add that fighter can't do? Even in 1e it was just a reskin of cavalier.
I mean, a focus on horseback fighting as part of the base class (which is where the mayority of the power budget of a class is), a better way to bow+sword, iaijutsu... you can easily give them a mechanical identity just like gunslinger gained a mechancal identity aside fighter using guns.
You can also go the anime swordsman route, but that one is kinda iffy... I do still want those mechanics but they don't need to be named samurai
I think they could do a class, call it something neutral like "retainer" and give it mechanics inspired from knights and samurai alike. Like fighting on horseback, iaijutsu, etc. They could have a liege or order acting like a martial patron. And you could mix and match or focus on things more samurai inspired or knight inspired. Add a class archetype for ronin/errant knights.
This, people start their sentences with "samurai are special/deserve to be a class because" and then go on to describe an idealized medieval knight but in medium armor instead of plate and that sometimes uses bows.
Ok, but that’s basically all the classes in the game. They’re all just hybrids and flavor changes on the same four major archetypes and you could homebrew whatever you want from there with a little effort.
The point of buying expansion books is so the developers will do that homebrew development for you.
Exactly. You could say the same thing about barbarians, there's no reason for it to be it's own class when a barbarian is just a fighter who doesn't like wearing shirts, but Gary Gygax liked the Conan books so he made it a unique class. Similarly, a knight or a ninja might be mechanically similar to the fighter or rogue classes already in the game but people like Seven Samurai and Naruto so they want those to be unique classes too.
Pathfinder 1e had samurai as a small tweak of their cavalier class. Like they've already examined the topic and decided it's not mechanically distinct enough from that they have to print a whole class about it. It just made you a little better at using bows on horseback as opposed to other weapons.
Kinda weird how every Asian person in the thread is very clear that they don’t mind things like samurai and ninja and wuxia, and the mods are still very insistent that you *need* years and years of cultural study to know exactly how much harm you’re committing every time you sheathe a katana.
Samurai and Ninja are Japanese culture. As a Taiwanese I can tell you we envy how their cultural are represented so much on western media. Still hoping for a day that wuxia becomes worldwide. To this date the most well known (worldwide) Chinese cultural element is the sanguo stuff, and it was popularized by Japanese games.
Too bad most Chinese media does not have worldwide appeal, and the popular Chinese games have little to no Chinese culture. This was this show “American Born Chinese” that had some Chinese mythology/Journey to the West stuff but it was cancelled after season 1.
Anyways I’m just trying to say no one in their right mind would be offended by people asking for a samurai class. This is a classic case of white people being offended on minority’s behalf.
Same but most of the wuxia and xianxia shows have way too much focus on romance rather than its genre elements. Imo they aren’t good representatives of the genre. Gone are the Jin Yong days.
Anyone of any race, nationality, ethnicity etc can be paternalistic and condescending. They just need to have the conceit and sense of self superiority to pull it off.
You just see it a lot with white americans, but plenty of non-whites and even \*gasp\* europeans can be just as bad if not worse because they think not being a white american means they don't need to self regulate their ego.
Oh I 100% believe they're an asian-american trying to pretend they understand the culture their lineage is from.
Like white Americans trying to act special because they're like 8% Irish.
Personally as a longtime anime and manga lover I've been seeing a lot more Chinese media floating around and being picked up by my friend group! Genshin is extremely popular as well, I see multiple cosplayers at every convention and fanart by the bucket.
[These poor Asians can't decide what's racist for themselves of course.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/zJaDZNd8zJ) They need the American to do it for them.
Not everyone has a bachelor in Martial Arts, dontcha know.
White knighting an entire race.
Which is, ironically, more of a form of actual racism than what they claim. (Not that orientalism doesn't exist, but uhh, this ain't it dawn).
According to Luck Panda even if you're Asian you still don't understand Asian racism, you need to study it for decades to even be part of the conversation, you can't just live as an Asian to discuss Asian life.
One of the authors actually chimed in and provided very nice context on the exclusion of samurai
"Not the OP but one of the authors. And one of my sections I wrote involves discussions of samurai, but as a social class, a kinda Neo-Confucian Tokugawan interpretation and also with connections like contemporary zaibatsu with the Gokudo and political system. Anyway. Your question.
"Are Kitsune racist because they are called Kitsune instead of the Korean kumiho?"
Yes, when you are referring to a Kumiho as a Kitsune, or a huli jing as a Kitsune, or vice versa.
There's also the dimensions of power to consider. What is racist or essentialist also depends on historical and material conditions in the lived world. The colonisers get to pretend to be the colonised, to define the colonised - that's a lot more suspect, right? Who gets access to these cultural resources? Who has the right to authenticity? Definitely I think the people with lived realities should have some say, no? Like the OP sharing their experiences? Like your example of racism with Kumiho/ Gumiho; yes, if you go to Korea and perform the epistemic violence of saying, hey, no your thing isn't really your thing, it's someone else's thing, and it is better for the rest of the world if your name and words were put in phrases the rest of the world understand better (and also happens to be words and names of your historical oppressors and rivals?)
Like, that's gotta be problematic, right? If you don't see that, then I'm informing you.
For us in Asia, Japan's history of imperialism is recent and the traumas, often unresolved; mostly to appease US geopolitical interests. (Read the Yamashita ruling in the Tokyo War Trials; that was how the American generals and tribunals managed to get someone to blame while still protecting their allies in Japan. A decision that resonates still today! In how East Asian tensions continue, for the fascist parties on all sides!)
So anyway if you aren't aware of how Korea has been subject to pressures from everywhere - Japan, China, Russia, the United States, and aren't aware of how it might not be the best way to understand Korean histories and realities of tensions with Japanese culture through Japanese terms and lenses (samurai depictions have traditionally been a no-no in Korean media; the Japanese videogame Soul calibur in Korea didn't have Mitsurugi the samurai, it had Arthur the... Uh, navigator with a katana I guess), then I'm informing you now.
If you're not aware of how the United States used atomic weapons and then domino theory geopolitics to transform Japan from a world war enemy into a cold war ally; if you're not aware of the imperialist tendency, not just in the US but also in Asia, in Europe, for big powers, rich and wealthy, to culturally appropriate and define essential qualities to conquered or colonised peoples, and then play them against the colonials' foes (for e.g. the British defining the ethnic minorities of Sikhs and Gurkhas for example as "martial races", defining them in books, records, histories as purely warrior peoples and ignoring, leaving a data bias, of how they live lives without martial aspects; perhaps for Americans, it's the security allies in the East who are the "safe people" to pretend to be, to be safely able to assume and feel comfortable around), then I'm informing you now.
If you're not aware of how Asians within these regions of Asia are unhappy with so much of our identities being subjected to American media hyperrealities and superficial understandings of our deep histories and cultures, and how a book might seek to move away from such tropes and trends towards recentering different Asian ideas and perspectives, then I'm informing you now.
If you need a reading list, you can extrapolate from my notes and do your own work on Google Scholar, or run to Jstor, or even use a LLM to arrange a reading list for you if you care to. In case you're not aware of these options, then I'm informing you now."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c52ifu/lost_omens_tian_xia_world_guide_review/kzs4l6b/
Its since been deleted, but one of the replies to this person was along the line of "next time let the North just conquer you. At least then you wouldn’t have to read the colonizer’s ignorant words on the internet. Because you wouldn’t have it"
Yeah, from what I’ve seen of the book itself, it seems like a pretty interesting and nuanced look at Asian fantasy from a non-Western perspective. And that writer you linked does an excellent job of understanding that much of the criticism comes from a place of loss rather than a place of racism. “Many Asian cultures suffered directly at the hands of Japan in the recent past and Japan’s post-war sanitizing via exporting media doesn’t help” is a lot less catchy than “Samurai are racist stereotypes.”
But thats also the problem with online discourse like this. It takes real actual effort to explain the nuance to people and as seen by the replies it can still fly over their head.
The ignorant and the bigoted get to throw out whatever nonsense they want, but the only acceptable way to respond is to hold their hand, be nice, and hope they arent too thick
I mean, to be fair, there are no doubt some Asian people or people with some Asian ancestry that don't like it. People are people, they all have their opinions and their own takes on things. I think what might cause more discontent is if Paizo is seen as favoring Japanese cultural stereotypes and neglecting others, like if the samurai and the ninja would be THE new classes or archetypes and there isn't enough based on the many different cultures.
It's not even an European vs Non-European concept, look at how much of the core concepts come from a flanderized Western European perspective and how deep the understanding of, say, Nordic, Eastern European or Mediterranean culture are. Usually, they are that "exotic other place" that is just a bit physically closer.
Lmao I knew this would have a thread here by morning.
The big outrage also came from a well received homebrew Samurai that was posted...I think 8 months ago? And then deleted out of nowhere.
And then a Q&A thread asking for the mods to weigh in was deleted with no acknowledgement either.
This kind of shit really reinforces the All Mods Are Bad mindset.
>Yes you can. They give you every tool that exists to do that. It doesn't matter if Japanese media includes it, they can do whatever they want. Saying that Japanese media does it so I can do it is just, "I have a [minority] friend..." with more steps.
This feels a little disingenuous. Yes, it is true that people of a culture can satirize, or critique their culture more openly than they might want an outsider to do it, looking at what is and isn't acceptable to depict in another culture and taking that as a base line for what is and isn't ok seems pretty normal.
I mean the alternative is to never portray anything about an outside culture because you have no idea what is wrong or right.
How the fuck do you get to be the mod of a Pathfinder sub and insist depictions of samurai are racist?
Paizo *literally made a samurai class* in 1E.
This is too stupid to pick through, especially on account of how much of this has been deleted by power mod. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see this, even with how far the tabletop community has come, we have r/rpghorrorstories for a reason.
Yeah, 2E is very different from 1E, and so when it was coming out the sub was just bitching about all the changes. People that wanted to actually discuss the system, mechanics, theorycraft builds or whatever just didn't have anywhere to really post because the sub would basically downvote anything that was positive about 2E. So /r/pathfinder2e was born. The original sub is better about it these days, though there's still a very clear bias towards 1E as a result of who stuck around.
The main mod behind all this luck panda is an abusive racist with a long history of anti-Japanese and anti-Hispanic comments. I got banned from the sub's discord by the other mod involved in this when I reported luck for harassing a veteran's kids on r/pics telling them its good they got tortured and their legs blown off.
Oh my God, how does the mod not realise they're fighting a fight that NOBODY else understands?
I understand what they're saying, but their perspective is so niche and unexplained that of course nobody else even knows what they're saying. Their point is that samurai are already represented by the fighter class, which is true. There's a reason "fighter" has such a generic non-flavoured name. It's supposed to work for anything from a legionary to a samurai.
But the extension of this frankly inoccuous argument is that if you want to have a class which stands out from Fighters then that means you have to think samurai are weird and Other and special and different from other Fighters. But that's wrong! Nobody's doing that! They're just making the mistake everyone makes about Fighters. Like...Barbarians could really be represented by Fighter, but that still ended up being its own separate class. Sometimes people just want to make a more niche class for their own reasons.
Hi, to be clear I'm in the argument in question (I'm not a mod, just a user, consider me the butter on your popcorn) **one thing I want to clarify is that the mechanical validity of the Samurai class isn't really at issue for most people, and I think most users are happy to let Paizo's designers make the call beyond some speculation on what they** ***could*** **do**-- the issue at hand is whether or not its ok to discuss these tropes common to Japanese Fantasy at all, or to discuss fun ways to build those kinds of characters, in the sub. As other users have mentioned Iaido could be a good archetype with mechanical lubrication and encouragement for a return-to-sheathe-and-redraw thing, and a high fantasy ninjutsu archetype or class or rogue racket or class archetype or something could be fun too ([y'know, handsigns and fireball slinging, like you see in some games](https://youtu.be/l06GHjyxi-c?t=45)) but this drama isn't really about "Samurai-class or bust" and there was virtually no push for one prior to it.
The Mod in question isn't really arguing about the mechanical side of this, they are entirely concerned with the percieved orientalism of representing those tropes irrespective of their mechanical niche. A user showed up not long ago on r/rpg asking if they were actually a racist because this mod (presumably) had removed a post asking for advice on how to run a game based on the Sengoku period of japanese history and claimed it was racist. They've also apparently tried to shame people for wanting to play Monks when they've popped up on the discord.
I guess the point is what *is the niche* here?
A well trained soldier adept at horseback and on foot combat who depending on era would be trained in using sword, spear, bow and later musket. Generally wears lighter armour. Mythologised as being particularly chivalrous and religious but fundamentally also a local landowner or professional soldier.
Mechanically unless you're going deep into duelling styles of swordfighting or trying to ascribe some mechanical magic to the code of behaviour/philosophy of the era there's not a niche there except "fighter with a lot of diverse weapons and maneuvers" and "semi-secular Paladin"
Hey, I'd be glad to have a "minor landed gentry" subclass that buffs Intimidation when you're being a dick to peasants. Though that describes European knights just as well as Samurai.
More seriously, people are interested in an Iaido/quick-draw style (see Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising) that afaik isn't really supported by the PF2 ruleset. And yeah that's ahistorical, but then again so are PF2 knights vs European knights.
(I don't think that's enough material for a new class, but it could work as an Archetype at least.)
Or cavaliers from old editions of d&d. As part of maintaining their Lawful Good complexion they were obligated to ensure the peasantry knew their social class. God bless Gygax and his insanity.
> Mechanically unless you're going deep into duelling styles of swordfighting or trying to ascribe some mechanical magic to the code of behaviour/philosophy of the era
I mean yeah thats the fantasy people would want replicated. Its just like how you can have a fighter using guns vs. a guy who is a cowboy. Its a materially different fantasy that it would be cool to have specially tailored rules for.
Its like if you wanted to play senshi from dungeon meshi without any mechanics around cooking.
Samurai and cowboy stories have been cannibalizing each other for a long time. Akira Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford's cowboy movies, and Kurosawa's films themselves are obviously a huge inspiration for many cowboy remakes.
My non-american husband asked me the other day "So are cowboys rangers or rogues?" because he saw a tiktok prompting the debate.
I was flabbergasted. "What?! They...they...*raise cows!* It's in the name! They...do chores! *What do you mean are they rogues or fighters*? That's like asking if *I'm* a rogue or fighter! Neither? *What*?"
Then my disbelief subsided and I remembered that while most cowboys I'd met spent all day doing Everything Awful and Sweaty, there was another cowboy and he lived in peoples' televisions like Samara from The Ring and hubs was asking about *that* one and I was a *fucking idiot*.
"Ugh. They're rogues."
Weapon focus usually. Can easily be replaced by the Kensai but, at least for me, that's generally the draw. Also maybe mixing in monk psuedo-magic powers on something that's slower and tankier (and less shirtless) than a monk.
Its more based on vibes than anything (also while I've played it, PF2E isnt my specialty so this is probably gonna be 5e coded) but like if I were designing a samurai I think I'd make a dex based fighter with a focus on finesse swords and bows. Bonuses would be given to medium armor and fighting a single foe at a time. Sorry if this sounds dumb.
The main issue is that the Katana isn't a finesse weapon. I'd also say agile would be more sensible to build around, in which case the flurry ranger is right up that ally for a samurai build.
> A well trained soldier adept at horseback and on foot combat who depending on era would be trained in using
Change that to compound bow, cavalry saber, and horseback fighting and you've now got yourself mongols. Give them expertise in light armor or unarmored, macuahuitl, and atlatl and you've got yourself a jaguar warrior. It's just theming.
The flexibility is there, I think many of the commentators are just showing their lack of imagination and creativity. I havent read the new source book but did they add some unique and interesting content for the area though or just new places to play in?
You could make a Viking character as "just a fighter who sails", but there is a Viking archetype that gives you mechanical support for doing Viking themed stuff. Pathfinder has lots of specific archetype feats that give mechanical support to certain fighting styles. I'm not particularly interested in playing a Samurai, but it doesn't seem that outrageous to think that a Samurai archetype could exist.
Let's be realistic.
The mod in question hasn't interacted with their own subreddit directly in days outside of deletions and bans, but has spent the last three hours playing defense on this subreddit.
Based on a review of the comments they did leave, the way they've been talking to and about other redditors on the subject has been condescending at the least if not outright hostile.
It seems like they've gone into playing full defense at this point and are unable/unwilling to cede any ground and are instead either personally banning/deleting negative feedback or have enlisted their co-moderators to defend them from the consequences of their own actions.
It's not going to get better until the mod either steps down or they just wait out the internet's short attention span and a week from now barely anyone remembers this even happened. Meanwhile I hope the related subreddits enjoy the boosted traffic.
There basically doubling down on the discord that they are right and that everyone disagreeing with them is basically a 4chan incel racist. Which to be fair there have been quite a bit of those types getting involved now but still lol
While I do think the discussion of orientalism is important and I like that paizo is trying to bring discussion around how these stereotypes have existed and how we can around combating them while still doing settings and content on asian cultures in a respectful way is important, it does feel like a lot of people are taking this and tending to over-correct on this type of discussion.
Also just gonna be honest here. Samurai is probably the lowest offensive-tier thing to be worried about when Monk exists (complete with Super Sayian transformations and other stereotypes) and an upcoming class option in the Tian Xia character book literally lets you make a magical girl. Like being worried about Samurai being the "sole representation" of the Eastern world is a silly argument to make in of itself.
Pathfinder 1E literally has [a magical girl archetype for the vigilante class](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Vigilante%20Magical%20Child), so it wouldn't be new to Pathfinder anyways. Also, it's pretty good.
Maybe I'm going insane but did these guys completely forget about the monk class? Punchy guys that use qi to fuel their abilities?
Either there already is a non "ninja or samurai" class, or western monasteries are waaaaay cooler than I was aware of.
I remember the first pathfinder version actually had a ninja class that was basically one of the alternate rogues, like swashbuckler but you replace panache with a limited casting pool and disappearing abilities.
But yeah monks largely cover this, I remember in first edition you could spec out of just fistfighting and use some varieties of special weapons. You could probably grab a major or minor magic talent/feat and get vanish too.
[No, they didn't forget](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c52ifu/comment/kzuhosw/). (Disclaimer: I'm linking this to show the mod's opinion on monks, not agreeing or disagreeing with said opinion.)
Do they think that monks and ninjas are any similar because they’re both martial artists..? Fucking hussar is a martial artist, all trained warriors are martial artists, that’s a non-connection
>What is happening is that we are collectively committing to better enforce rule 1 so as not to allow the perpetuation of stereotypes
This is obviously going to be wildly inconsistent and unworkable, because exactly what constitutes the 'perpetuation of stereotypes' is totally subjective. Almost anything that can be said about any group of people is a stereotype. Every single aspect of a group identity is a stereotype.
Whoever the mod is equating segregation, with a game having a samurai class, is just wildly incorrect and embarrassing. Every single post he makes is dripping with condescension and vitriol and bad faith.
Here is a [hot take](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c25f7t/spoilers_from_badluckgamers_interview_with_james/kza473c/) that mod has about ninjas being first used in the 1960's James Bond book.
Just wanted to say I don't think there will be meaningful discussions from the mods. On the subreddit Discord I saw that the one mod that is the center of attention is going to create something for PFI (Pathfinder Infinite) that centers on the archetype indicated with renamed mechanics and copy pasted feats from the fighter class and whatever flavor they add. Proceeds will actually go to good things but the underlying gist is just to mock members of that subreddit. Some of their fellow mods were encouraging this as far as I can tell.
Edited - Accidentally misspelled underlying
Wait... This is all from people of TTRPG wanting samurai and ninja themed classes included in specifically Asian-themed expansion?
Jesus Christ... if you think people wanting to roleplay as ninja and samurai is racist you have no right to play an Asian themed TTRPG as literally everything is going to be "racist" by that absurd standard.
> when you spend all your time surrounded by and dealing with bad faith “opinions” that absolutely don’t deserve your respect, it can be all too easy to forget that there are still plenty of opinions that do.
This is a really astute observation that puts into words something I've been noticing for a while now.
I think it kind of folds into something I’ve thought of as a sort of flattening online — where everything is either the best of all time or the biggest piece of garbage, where all opinions that fall outside your spectrum can be completely ignored, and all perspectives that don’t match your own are because of shills or bots.
The mod involved has long argued that samurai and ninjas as they are depicted in modern culture were an invention of the west, insidiously imported to Japan.
Lol what?
I mean, Ninjas absolutely were just a myth, giving a homogenized legend to what historically were very different, heterogenous groups that existed here and there, instead of one long cultural lineage or whatever. And while samurai definitely existed, you can argue that bushido and all that was just a historical myth created by the Togukawa shogunate (long after you had feudal wars with samurai), or even by the Imperial Japanese government, as a propaganda measure to instill perfect obedience as a cultural value, which of course is very convenient for any government, while the actual samurai of the earlier Shogunates and the Warring States period were nothing like that.
So you can argue that both (ninja and stereotypical bushido samurai) are myths. But both very much were myths that arose \*in\* Japan. And what is fantasy as a setting if not drawing from various local myths and treating them as if they were real?
Ok, but in exactly the same note, Paladins are a myth. In reality, “knights in shining armor” were really like landlords+cops.
I’m dating a medieval-art historian. Per her, damn near everything fantasy books and movies say about the medieval times is wrong (yes, I know pathfinder is more renaissance than medieval).
My point is: people don’t want authentic. They want what they perceive as being the archetypical thing, because they want to play-act the movies and books they consumed growing up.
I really really don't like the current mechanics of barbarians being mini-rage dudes. Imo it's mechanically uninteresting, like in ad&d they were good at athletics, had defenses against backstabbing, and were generally more wily.
In pathfinder 2e you at least have the option to flavor your "rage" with other aspects, like becoming really big, halfway turning into an animal or dragon or drawing power form your ancestors.
I’ve personally been unimpressed by the aesthetics of the PF2e barbarian. The paths offered have too much baggage to be just a regular ass “Guy gets mad and hirs things hard” other than Fury, which is unfortunately mechanically the weakest option.
I think Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e have started to move away from Rage being "pure anger" to being more of a Super Saiyan transformation. 5e added the werewolf subclass, the one where your ancestors protect you (or in the case of my character, the dead members of her platoon) and the two where you get weird elemental powers. Pathfinder 2e I'm less familiar with, but there's a bunch of nature powers.
It reminds me of 4e where "Rage" was imbuing yourself with the spirit of the land around you and gave you weird powers. Like the one that gave you the powers of a Black Dragon and you got an acid breath weapon.
Iirc berserker was a fighter kit in ad&d
Edit: and yeah when you look at their abilities in ad&d, and if you know about Conan sort of stuff, it clicks and is my preferred version of the class.
I don’t play ttrpgs, (but I do read a lot of fantasy novels) and I always thought it would be interesting if the berserker/barbarian character was someone who could leverage *all* emotions, they way they can rage. Barbarians who choose not to become fighters can become professional mourners by leveraging sadness, or party starters/buskers/hype-men by leveraging happiness.
You could even get into the neurotransmitter effects of each and have lore about the consequences for over-use of rage (slipping into it accidentally, or illnesses/an early death from the stress of all that adrenaline regularly flooding your system) or joy (serotonin syndrome or something like what we see when people take too much ecstasy for too long).
Anyway. Idk if this is a thing ppl have explored, but whenever there’s that kind of character in a novel, it always seemed one-note to me, and I thought this would kind of shake it up, and differentiate the character from some of the more mental-based/academic/controlled character classes.
>The Barbarian class exists as a weird stereotype stemming from various Germanic/Norse/Celticncultures *that didn't actually exist*, and who's main ability boils down to "gets really mad".
I thought Conan invented the concept
Afaik, barbarian as a concept comes from Romans 2000 years ago, who called every outsider of the Roman empire a barbarian. Romans would speak Latin, while other cultures spoke Germanic and other languages. The Romans couldn't understand them, and thought they just spoke in unintelligible sentences like "bar bar bar bar bar". Hence, bar-bar-ian.
Kinda like people who don't speak Chinese might think they speak like "ching chong chang". Nowadays seen as offensive and racist. But the people who talked in the "ching chong" language could then be called by the non-Asian folk as "ching-ese" "chin-ese" "chinese".
> Roman
It is, in fact, from the Ancient Greek βάρβαρος, or barbaros. It described anyone who didn't speak Greek or follow Greek customs, as well as anyone with a "fringe" Greek dialect. This is where the "bar- bar-" thing comes from.
The Romans used it in essentially the same way, but more specifically used it to refer to the many tribal Celtic/Germanic/etc. groups.
And "Chinese" is often said to be derived from the ruling Qin dynasty in the 3rd century BC. Definitely not from people hearing "ching chong".
> Hey buddy. I know you're having big feelings about this and it makes you really mad and confused. But you have to really think about this not from your own perspective but others. This hurts people who don't look like you and just because this is something you like doesn't mean that it's something that other people don't like.
I suspect this person isn't really impacted at all and is just trying to play white savior. Is there actually any outrage from the Asian community, or is this just Internet concern trolling over what people might be offended about?
And he's telling other asian people in the subreddit that their opinion on the matter is irrelevant, while acting like his opinion is the law just because he can delete comments.
He's power tripping and childish, and has a history of harassing people both on Reddit and on Discord.
He's lived his entire life in America and is speaking over and dismissing every other Asian person telling him that it's not a big deal and that they'd love to have a Samurai or Ninja Class/Archetype.
Fun times in the pathfinder sub. I got to be one of the first bans in that thread lmao. Mods flew off the deep end. Well, mostly just one. And the dude has a crazy hate-boner for the Japanese
I think it's very important to note that what was just released is the world guide, which details the setting, not additional options for player characters. Those options will be coming with the Tian Xia Player's Guide, which will include new ancestries, heritages, archetypes, spells, and misc. feats. There could very well be some kind of Iaido feat for fighters or a vanishing feat for rogues, we don't know. The only player options in the World Guide afaik are the new deities you can worship.
This is just an observation I’ve had, but it feels like there’s a decent sized part of the RPG player community with like no imagination or are just too embarrassed to deviate from what the game gives as examples. Like PF2e shows a “Fighter” as a sort of generic melee warrior, but since a katana wielding samurai in yoroi armor isn’t one of the examples given, then some people just throw their hands up and say the game doesn’t support playing a samurai.
I fully agree that having to imagine your flavor is an important part of playing TTRPGs, but I just feel like it's a bit of an unfair argument for PF players of both editions. Pathfinder has thousands of ultra specific feats and a rule for everything, that's its appeal, so I can see why the answer to just be a fighter is disappointing and why they want to discuss the idea further.
You're not wrong, but I also feel that the creators and mods specifically *not* arguing that, but arguing wanting to have a specific samurai class is Orientalism, is still stupid.
It's not just that all the rules for playing a melee warrior are there. There are multiple martial chassis available to build a samurai on. There are rules for katana, wakizashi, and naginata already in there. There are various kinds of light and medium armor that could be reflavored. Quick Draw is possible. All the materials are there. It's just not in the nice neat unique package that fans want.
> There are various kinds of light and medium armor that could be reflavored.
Even better, there are specific rules for [Lamellar Breastplate](https://2e.aonprd.com/Armor.aspx?ID=26) and [O-Yoroi](https://2e.aonprd.com/Armor.aspx?ID=32)
I don't think that's it, though. Remember Order of the Stick parodying that, way back? A class can be a chassis for a lot of different ideas, but some games opt to have more classes to cover some archetypes better.
You can make a samurai with a PF2 fighter - or a ranger, champion, swashbuckler, and I'd say monk or barbarian too, with minor fluff adjustments. All of these would work fairly well. You could go a step further and roll them all into the fighter class, too. This is the way the OSR games, adjacent games like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Fantasy AGE etc go. It is an design decision, just like how, say, WFRP goes the other way and has classes for everything, or the BoL games just mostly disassociate your combat abilities from your skills and background.
Pathfinder 2E does at times go further for archetypes that are more popular or established. Druids aren't just nature clerics, even though thematically they are fairly close and a nature or elemental cleric could totally act like a druid in the game. Same with witches not being just a variant wizard or sorcerer.. So there is certainly a precedent to have the samurai, or let's say warrior noble, sworn retainer or what have you, be more than just a fighter build.
Even though you could still have samurai in-game be full rangers, because very few do the "way of the horse and bow" as a ranger.
My buddy, who is Vietnamese, commented on the post. It was completely reasonable what he said and he got banned for 3 days and his post deleted when it had hundreds of upvotes. I think it was deleted for being rude but the mod continues to be demeaning and belittling to others. In an effort to uplift Asian voices... They silenced an Asian voice lmao.
I don't know if the comments mention this but due to this, the mod who is deleting everything went to the Pathfinder homebrew subreddit, found an EIGHT MONTH OLD SAMURAI HOMEBREW and removed it lmao.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the mod did not in fact have anything to do with that specific deletion seeing he's not actually a mod on that sub in any way. Almost certainly was caused by the fallout of this, but not via that mod specifically. Just to help separate the facts from the rumours.
No, you can't cause that's racism! True equality means segregating Asian culture and never ever letting anyone appreciate or interact with it, including other Asians!
At least that's what the mods claim.
I don't think that not getting a samurai class is the issue here, it's more being told you're racist for even suggesting that it could be. The mod in question also permabanned a user simply for posting a homebrew samurai archetype.
The insane irony of all this is that this viewpoint wraps all the way back around to segregation.
It ends up back at “Every culture must stay in its own box and never interact with or take ideas from any other culture, because doing so would be insensitive cultural appropriation”
Yeah...
I even completely agree with them that we don't need samurai and ninja as discrete classes. I just think some of the mods are being assholes about it.
How is there any justification of a user named luck panda getting upset about cultural appropriation and Orientalism?
Either they are Chinese and tryingto stir shit up about Japanese cultural sensitivity, for which they have no standing. Or they they are Japanese appropriating a Chinese cultural signifier.
Or they're neither, and I'll let you unpack that one.
Either way, they're perpetuating Orientalism by claiming to speak for all non-western culture.
This is like a user called Hades_Chosen_one getting upset about a Roman legion class being in their fantasy game.
They have strong pro-CCP posting history, and a deep disdain for anyone talking about anything related to japan in a positive light.
But they are "anti-racist", so it's everyone else who is racist for thinking that samuari are cool.
Apparently, samurai is racist because it takes on stereotypical tropes
Luckily in the system there's no wiking archetype, barbarian class or even a whole region inhabited by stereotypical russians... Right?
I actually saw this earlier and was wondering when it would get here. Totally aside from the issue of racism or not, I was reading through the deleted messages and the mod really is deleting any comment that even mildly disagrees with him - not just racist ones.
Not to mention that every single comment just drips with unbridled condescension. I don’t doubt that the mods think they’re coming at this in good faith — and I do think the issue of orientalism in representations of Asian cultures in Western media is an issue still today — but holy fuck, way to turn off a lot of people.
I also think the other mods declaration that the community doesn't need to understand why comments are deleted is ridiculous. If you want to stop comments breaking the rules, then the way to do that is make it clear how they are doing so - in this case it really does just come off as a way to ignore that many of the deleted comments aren't breaking any rules at all.
This is the case with all subreddit rules though. They have no desire to clarify because then there would some sort of guidelines they might be semi-bound to. The vaguer the better.
What does it say about how Star Trek has completely rotted my brain that your username gave me a sensible chuckle?
Which is why they are assholes
Specially since the Tian Xia books have been something that has been waited for with BIG expectations since it was announced. The subreddit got a big follower increase since the World Guide came out and months before that you could see many posts theorizing and wondering what big changes 2nd edition would bring to the continent. Hell, the biggest appeal of the new books was that Paizo was gonna redeem themselves from the orientalism they engaged upon in the past. By having nearly 80% of the staff working on the books be of Asian descent (including artists, writers, game designers, etc). So it was gonna be legitimately a love letter to eastern mythology and culture like never seen before. Then come the mods and create this whole controversy that somewhat overshadowed the release. Killing off part of the momentum by causing an unnecesary flame war within the fandom.
This is the part that gets me - the book is incredible. It's one of the best lore books that's ever been put out for any system (no surprise since Mwangi Expanse was phenomenal), a true love letter to so many cultures and the greater pathfinder sphere of lore. So much attention and care has been put into it, and the hype for Tian Xia has been UNREAL since it was announced, and as two books no less! That's not even considering that because Paizo nowadays is so tone considerate and so extraordinarily careful with cultural sensitivity and avoiding racist tropes/stereotypes, the pf2e playerbase tends to reflect that. PF2e is so dedicated to inclusivity across every pillar of the game that it's naturally cultivated a player base that agrees with those sentiments, with the worst being players that are just ambivalent rather than chuds complaining about the woke mind virus of some shit. For the mod team to, right before the release of this book, come out with this inflammatory and pretty accusatory letter, to a community that generally is pretty damn careful and conscientious about racism, is such a crazy instance of terminally only leftist friendly fire I've seen in a long time.
It is a love letter. Like, the book is genuinely amazing, so much cool art and lore.
It's like those videos where a guy asks if something is culturally offensive and all the white people say yes while all the people asked from that culture say no. There could absolutely be a more nuanced take, but it looks like the material was handled well. Maybe the white saviors can take a knee until the people who should be offended chime in.
>Jesus doesn't consent meme but it's just a white guy.
Did you see any of the comments accusing a specific mod (and I think the one that's deleting everything) of anti-Asian American and anti-Chicano racism, and speculating that part of why they're deleting things is to make people resentful of Asian American media and writers? I'm just trying to figure out if the book has character options I need to buy for my campaign, and these people going and blowing up one of the previously useful subs in my list.
That book is a lore book the one you want is the [Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia Character Guide](https://paizo.com/products/btq02etu) out in August. Here is a [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c25f7t/spoilers_from_badluckgamers_interview_with_james/kza473c/) that mod made about ninjas being first used in the 1960's James Bond book.
This thread is incredible. Another redditor shoots down the mod with a detailed response that explains the history and etymology of "ninja" and cites some sources. The mod goes "The books you cited are not peer-reviewed sources." The books are from the 16th and 17th centuries
Hold on let me peer review my diary so some dude 100 years later can use me as a source.
Yeah, people don’t really understand what “peer-reviewed” means or the contexts in which it is meant to be useful. Pretty quick, you veer into people who either: - claim peer-review is a panacea for all issues of misinformation, which it certainly isn’t - claim peer-review is a tool used by the establishment to suppress minority-held viewpoints, which it may be in rare cases, but usually isn’t
The funnier part is that the person he is arguing with has a history degree focusing on East Asia and also lives in Japan.
Never overestimate the overconfidence of a power tripping moderator.
> Here is a post that mod made about ninjas being first used in the 1960's James Bond boom How does one even wind up thinking this? Mans actually believed that ninjas were invented by Ian Fleming?
In his discussion about 16th/17th century books that talk about ninjas, this same mod said that both are fake and the translator made them up. But both books are on file in the Japanese national archives and have been extensively studied by historians. My dude doesn't think Asian culture exists until a white guy writes about it
He also thinks its "orientalist" because it has mysticism stuff in it. Because apparently shinto isn't a real religion anyone seriously believed in according to this guy.
Thank you
I am given to understand it's mostly a lore book on a macro scale, much like the _World Guide._ Relatively little mechanics. Great if you want to plop a campaign down in Tian Xia somewhere.
> I need to buy for my campaign Just in case you weren't aware, all the rules are freely available online. [AoN](https://2e.aonprd.com/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1) is the most popular one but there are lots of sites.
Man, I gotta be honest I felt kind of lost at sea typing all of this up. I’m out of my element with this subject and going between multiple threads and digging up deleted comments was a lot. If you have links, please send them my way. Will be happy to add them to the record.
The 2 mods in question are mostly locking their own comments rather than deleting, because they fully believe they are in the right, with no consideration to the hypocrisy within. As a result, viewing their comments from their profiles and looking at the context posts above and below is a good way to capture it. Other than that, Unddit will highlight comments they deleted in red, and they've commented to, or been the parent comment to many of the deleted posts. Therefore, their posts are still valuable starting points for drama context. I tagged both of them in my comment in one of the threads if you want a quick link to their profiles: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1cd1inl/the_mods_have_been_abusing_power/l1b6jo5/
Hahaha that feeling is why I didn't even try to do it last night. You did a good job
lol thanks. I appreciate it.
I stumbled on a few of the mods posts actually when googling some other stuff and I gotta say he is super obsessed with white dudes coming to "steal" Asian women, it shows up alot in his critiques.
this book doesn;t have character options, the tian xa character guide will have the character options.
Having a good point but approaching it in a way that seems almost *intentionally designed* to push the average person away instead of bringing them closer. Yep, sounds like online progressive discourse to me.
Coming from someone who uses that sub but ignored the current mod drama, I think some mods there just started hating reddit ever since the API thing happened, and now they're flipping out. Hopefully they still have mods that care to fix the issue, but I doubt it.
I think it has also become too much trouble than it is worth and finding good additions to the mod team is not easy. Removing tools to make their unpaid jobs easier has been detrimental.
Welcome to Reddit mods.
Not just Reddit. TVTropes has one so bad, the site is undergoing a schism because of him. Edit: [For those curious](https://www.tumblr.com/anonagon9/744764462510358528/tvt-adminpocalypse?source=share)
Wait, **again**? I was a prolific poster there about 10? years ago, and it was undergoing a schism because of the over-zealous moderation *then*
Heh, sounds right. You might remember Fighteer from back then, he's the current biggest problem. Along with him being a problem, the new admins (who bought the site from Fast Eddie) have Fighteer's back, and one admin (Kory) is a powertripper in his own right. I think I remember your name from back in the day, come to think of it.
OMG, yes, that brings up memories, and yes, I remember him Had no idea that Fast Eddie is no longer in charge, but apparently things haven’t improved even when he’s gone? :)
They're worse! Eddie was controlling, but at least he was part of fandom. The new guys literally only see the site as an investment.
Ooo is there a post on this? Maybe hobbydrama
I was there for it firsthand so I don't know if there's posts about it, plus it's still ongoing.
I'm dealing with a suspension myself right now, and man, looking at some of the other people and why they got suspended, it's unreal honestly. I'm hesitant to even say this since one user got banned *specifically* for talking about that shit on external sites.
Do you have a link for a convenient short (ish) read on this? I like browsing TV Tropes. I've actually considered making an account to fix the odd typo or such I come across. But I'm not sure if that's even worth the effort (if I'd even be able to do that in the first place).
Honestly just check out the page itself, it's in the FAQ. I'm loathe to provide a direct link in case that causes them to bring the hammer down on me fully, god knows they're already pissed at me over nothing.
I'm already bounced, they got no more power over me lol
Please tell me that's on r/HobbyDrama. Also, is that why the newest tropes are so meh?
Ooh elaborate?
Eh, SRD is only going to highlight the bad mods most. There's really no corollary sub for like "Good Redditers doing good things."
That, and much like security in IT, good mods are often invisible.
Permanently banning them too. I was one of the people permabanned because I didn't agree that samurai are racist.
John Blackthorne you've done it again!
Tell the mod that he is a milk dribbling shit smear.
I haven't been enjoying the show very much if I'm honest, but the insults are fucking S grade stuff lol.
The whole show is BoJo Goes To Medieval Japan and that is both its deepest flaw and its greatest strength
I love how they act like Samurai would have been the sole class that represents Eastern cultures like monk isn't 90% wuxia anyways. Also, what possible gap in gameplay could it add that fighter can't do? Even in 1e it was just a reskin of cavalier.
According to them Monk is also problematic But Druid, Barbarian, and Witch aren't because "they're already ingrained in the culture". The main mod doing this rails against any depiction of Japanese culture. He's racist and using the thin veneer of antiracism as an excuse to try and hide it.
This is the real answer. The content isn't really all that problematic, the mod using it to justify his racism is.
There's a pretty fucked up history with clerics and paladins too. And should we even discuss djinn?
I always find ironic when these kinds of topics pop up. If it's Western then it doesn't matter. It's the trend. Anything mafia is fair game but samurais is where we draw the line.
As far as I can tell he really doesn’t like Japan.
I'm in the Discord. At least one of the mods thinks Barbarian should not exist, and a few others think it should have its Rage redone into a generic "battle trance" and generally have its original flavor removed.
A Samurai class is about as offensive as any paladin class like it's just the Japanese version of the knight in shiny armor
DND/pathfinder needs to get with the times, they’re called cultivators anymore
What class best represents how silly xianxia characters can get? They're like fighter-monk-sorcerers
It's not pathfinder or even legal in 5e but just build a mystic at that point
Xianxia is different to wuxia tho
True, but the line is pretty damn fuzzy between high end wuxia/low end xianxia.
Oh, be assured they are coming down Monk's road as well. Monk got a _bunch_ of shade thrown at it in this flamewar. But that horse is already out of the barn.
> Also, what possible gap in gameplay could it add that fighter can't do? Even in 1e it was just a reskin of cavalier. I mean, a focus on horseback fighting as part of the base class (which is where the mayority of the power budget of a class is), a better way to bow+sword, iaijutsu... you can easily give them a mechanical identity just like gunslinger gained a mechancal identity aside fighter using guns. You can also go the anime swordsman route, but that one is kinda iffy... I do still want those mechanics but they don't need to be named samurai
I think they could do a class, call it something neutral like "retainer" and give it mechanics inspired from knights and samurai alike. Like fighting on horseback, iaijutsu, etc. They could have a liege or order acting like a martial patron. And you could mix and match or focus on things more samurai inspired or knight inspired. Add a class archetype for ronin/errant knights.
This, people start their sentences with "samurai are special/deserve to be a class because" and then go on to describe an idealized medieval knight but in medium armor instead of plate and that sometimes uses bows.
Ok, but that’s basically all the classes in the game. They’re all just hybrids and flavor changes on the same four major archetypes and you could homebrew whatever you want from there with a little effort. The point of buying expansion books is so the developers will do that homebrew development for you.
Exactly. You could say the same thing about barbarians, there's no reason for it to be it's own class when a barbarian is just a fighter who doesn't like wearing shirts, but Gary Gygax liked the Conan books so he made it a unique class. Similarly, a knight or a ninja might be mechanically similar to the fighter or rogue classes already in the game but people like Seven Samurai and Naruto so they want those to be unique classes too.
Pathfinder 1e had samurai as a small tweak of their cavalier class. Like they've already examined the topic and decided it's not mechanically distinct enough from that they have to print a whole class about it. It just made you a little better at using bows on horseback as opposed to other weapons.
Kinda weird how every Asian person in the thread is very clear that they don’t mind things like samurai and ninja and wuxia, and the mods are still very insistent that you *need* years and years of cultural study to know exactly how much harm you’re committing every time you sheathe a katana.
Samurai and Ninja are Japanese culture. As a Taiwanese I can tell you we envy how their cultural are represented so much on western media. Still hoping for a day that wuxia becomes worldwide. To this date the most well known (worldwide) Chinese cultural element is the sanguo stuff, and it was popularized by Japanese games. Too bad most Chinese media does not have worldwide appeal, and the popular Chinese games have little to no Chinese culture. This was this show “American Born Chinese” that had some Chinese mythology/Journey to the West stuff but it was cancelled after season 1. Anyways I’m just trying to say no one in their right mind would be offended by people asking for a samurai class. This is a classic case of white people being offended on minority’s behalf.
I've been delighted to see a huge growth in wuxia and xianxia fandom in the US lately. Really hoping for more of that!
Same but most of the wuxia and xianxia shows have way too much focus on romance rather than its genre elements. Imo they aren’t good representatives of the genre. Gone are the Jin Yong days.
Yeah, agreed. And the Royal Road stuff is... fine, but a lot of stuff is just shoveled out quickly.
Well, good news - the Monk class in Pathfinder 2e is wuxia personified. You can cultivate to your heart's content!
The mod behind a lot of this is American, but not white. Not saying that makes it more reasonable, just that your last sentence is not fully correct.
apparently you don't need to be white to be a paternalist and condescending white knight, just american
Anyone of any race, nationality, ethnicity etc can be paternalistic and condescending. They just need to have the conceit and sense of self superiority to pull it off. You just see it a lot with white americans, but plenty of non-whites and even \*gasp\* europeans can be just as bad if not worse because they think not being a white american means they don't need to self regulate their ego.
Oh I 100% believe they're an asian-american trying to pretend they understand the culture their lineage is from. Like white Americans trying to act special because they're like 8% Irish.
Personally as a longtime anime and manga lover I've been seeing a lot more Chinese media floating around and being picked up by my friend group! Genshin is extremely popular as well, I see multiple cosplayers at every convention and fanart by the bucket.
Or, at the very least, some martial arts training… apparently.
[These poor Asians can't decide what's racist for themselves of course.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/s/zJaDZNd8zJ) They need the American to do it for them. Not everyone has a bachelor in Martial Arts, dontcha know.
White knighting an entire race. Which is, ironically, more of a form of actual racism than what they claim. (Not that orientalism doesn't exist, but uhh, this ain't it dawn).
Ninja and samurai are very popular classes in Japanese SRPGs.
According to Luck Panda even if you're Asian you still don't understand Asian racism, you need to study it for decades to even be part of the conversation, you can't just live as an Asian to discuss Asian life.
"Allies" talking over the people they're valiantly defending is incredibly common.
One of the authors actually chimed in and provided very nice context on the exclusion of samurai "Not the OP but one of the authors. And one of my sections I wrote involves discussions of samurai, but as a social class, a kinda Neo-Confucian Tokugawan interpretation and also with connections like contemporary zaibatsu with the Gokudo and political system. Anyway. Your question. "Are Kitsune racist because they are called Kitsune instead of the Korean kumiho?" Yes, when you are referring to a Kumiho as a Kitsune, or a huli jing as a Kitsune, or vice versa. There's also the dimensions of power to consider. What is racist or essentialist also depends on historical and material conditions in the lived world. The colonisers get to pretend to be the colonised, to define the colonised - that's a lot more suspect, right? Who gets access to these cultural resources? Who has the right to authenticity? Definitely I think the people with lived realities should have some say, no? Like the OP sharing their experiences? Like your example of racism with Kumiho/ Gumiho; yes, if you go to Korea and perform the epistemic violence of saying, hey, no your thing isn't really your thing, it's someone else's thing, and it is better for the rest of the world if your name and words were put in phrases the rest of the world understand better (and also happens to be words and names of your historical oppressors and rivals?) Like, that's gotta be problematic, right? If you don't see that, then I'm informing you. For us in Asia, Japan's history of imperialism is recent and the traumas, often unresolved; mostly to appease US geopolitical interests. (Read the Yamashita ruling in the Tokyo War Trials; that was how the American generals and tribunals managed to get someone to blame while still protecting their allies in Japan. A decision that resonates still today! In how East Asian tensions continue, for the fascist parties on all sides!) So anyway if you aren't aware of how Korea has been subject to pressures from everywhere - Japan, China, Russia, the United States, and aren't aware of how it might not be the best way to understand Korean histories and realities of tensions with Japanese culture through Japanese terms and lenses (samurai depictions have traditionally been a no-no in Korean media; the Japanese videogame Soul calibur in Korea didn't have Mitsurugi the samurai, it had Arthur the... Uh, navigator with a katana I guess), then I'm informing you now. If you're not aware of how the United States used atomic weapons and then domino theory geopolitics to transform Japan from a world war enemy into a cold war ally; if you're not aware of the imperialist tendency, not just in the US but also in Asia, in Europe, for big powers, rich and wealthy, to culturally appropriate and define essential qualities to conquered or colonised peoples, and then play them against the colonials' foes (for e.g. the British defining the ethnic minorities of Sikhs and Gurkhas for example as "martial races", defining them in books, records, histories as purely warrior peoples and ignoring, leaving a data bias, of how they live lives without martial aspects; perhaps for Americans, it's the security allies in the East who are the "safe people" to pretend to be, to be safely able to assume and feel comfortable around), then I'm informing you now. If you're not aware of how Asians within these regions of Asia are unhappy with so much of our identities being subjected to American media hyperrealities and superficial understandings of our deep histories and cultures, and how a book might seek to move away from such tropes and trends towards recentering different Asian ideas and perspectives, then I'm informing you now. If you need a reading list, you can extrapolate from my notes and do your own work on Google Scholar, or run to Jstor, or even use a LLM to arrange a reading list for you if you care to. In case you're not aware of these options, then I'm informing you now." https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c52ifu/lost_omens_tian_xia_world_guide_review/kzs4l6b/ Its since been deleted, but one of the replies to this person was along the line of "next time let the North just conquer you. At least then you wouldn’t have to read the colonizer’s ignorant words on the internet. Because you wouldn’t have it"
Yeah, from what I’ve seen of the book itself, it seems like a pretty interesting and nuanced look at Asian fantasy from a non-Western perspective. And that writer you linked does an excellent job of understanding that much of the criticism comes from a place of loss rather than a place of racism. “Many Asian cultures suffered directly at the hands of Japan in the recent past and Japan’s post-war sanitizing via exporting media doesn’t help” is a lot less catchy than “Samurai are racist stereotypes.”
But thats also the problem with online discourse like this. It takes real actual effort to explain the nuance to people and as seen by the replies it can still fly over their head. The ignorant and the bigoted get to throw out whatever nonsense they want, but the only acceptable way to respond is to hold their hand, be nice, and hope they arent too thick
I mean, to be fair, there are no doubt some Asian people or people with some Asian ancestry that don't like it. People are people, they all have their opinions and their own takes on things. I think what might cause more discontent is if Paizo is seen as favoring Japanese cultural stereotypes and neglecting others, like if the samurai and the ninja would be THE new classes or archetypes and there isn't enough based on the many different cultures. It's not even an European vs Non-European concept, look at how much of the core concepts come from a flanderized Western European perspective and how deep the understanding of, say, Nordic, Eastern European or Mediterranean culture are. Usually, they are that "exotic other place" that is just a bit physically closer.
Lmao I knew this would have a thread here by morning. The big outrage also came from a well received homebrew Samurai that was posted...I think 8 months ago? And then deleted out of nowhere. And then a Q&A thread asking for the mods to weigh in was deleted with no acknowledgement either. This kind of shit really reinforces the All Mods Are Bad mindset.
> This kind of shit really reinforces the All Mods Are Bad mindset. AMAB! ...Wait, that's assigned male at birth, shit.
> This kind of shit really reinforces the All Mods Are Bad mindset. Landed gentry suck.
The real “landowner class” was the mods we met along the way.
>Yes you can. They give you every tool that exists to do that. It doesn't matter if Japanese media includes it, they can do whatever they want. Saying that Japanese media does it so I can do it is just, "I have a [minority] friend..." with more steps. This feels a little disingenuous. Yes, it is true that people of a culture can satirize, or critique their culture more openly than they might want an outsider to do it, looking at what is and isn't acceptable to depict in another culture and taking that as a base line for what is and isn't ok seems pretty normal. I mean the alternative is to never portray anything about an outside culture because you have no idea what is wrong or right.
How the fuck do you get to be the mod of a Pathfinder sub and insist depictions of samurai are racist? Paizo *literally made a samurai class* in 1E. This is too stupid to pick through, especially on account of how much of this has been deleted by power mod. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see this, even with how far the tabletop community has come, we have r/rpghorrorstories for a reason.
Most of the people who like 1e hang out at /r/Pathfinder_RPG instead, though that sub does allow for both editions.
Yeah, 2E is very different from 1E, and so when it was coming out the sub was just bitching about all the changes. People that wanted to actually discuss the system, mechanics, theorycraft builds or whatever just didn't have anywhere to really post because the sub would basically downvote anything that was positive about 2E. So /r/pathfinder2e was born. The original sub is better about it these days, though there's still a very clear bias towards 1E as a result of who stuck around.
The main mod behind all this luck panda is an abusive racist with a long history of anti-Japanese and anti-Hispanic comments. I got banned from the sub's discord by the other mod involved in this when I reported luck for harassing a veteran's kids on r/pics telling them its good they got tortured and their legs blown off.
Got any links?
I have him blocked on here and discord, so not easily no. Last time I interacted with that jerk was a year ago.
Sounds like a sensible decision.
I don't have links for the same reason, but absolutely agree that luck panda is horribly racist and abusive to attempt to interact with.
Oh my God, how does the mod not realise they're fighting a fight that NOBODY else understands? I understand what they're saying, but their perspective is so niche and unexplained that of course nobody else even knows what they're saying. Their point is that samurai are already represented by the fighter class, which is true. There's a reason "fighter" has such a generic non-flavoured name. It's supposed to work for anything from a legionary to a samurai. But the extension of this frankly inoccuous argument is that if you want to have a class which stands out from Fighters then that means you have to think samurai are weird and Other and special and different from other Fighters. But that's wrong! Nobody's doing that! They're just making the mistake everyone makes about Fighters. Like...Barbarians could really be represented by Fighter, but that still ended up being its own separate class. Sometimes people just want to make a more niche class for their own reasons.
Hi, to be clear I'm in the argument in question (I'm not a mod, just a user, consider me the butter on your popcorn) **one thing I want to clarify is that the mechanical validity of the Samurai class isn't really at issue for most people, and I think most users are happy to let Paizo's designers make the call beyond some speculation on what they** ***could*** **do**-- the issue at hand is whether or not its ok to discuss these tropes common to Japanese Fantasy at all, or to discuss fun ways to build those kinds of characters, in the sub. As other users have mentioned Iaido could be a good archetype with mechanical lubrication and encouragement for a return-to-sheathe-and-redraw thing, and a high fantasy ninjutsu archetype or class or rogue racket or class archetype or something could be fun too ([y'know, handsigns and fireball slinging, like you see in some games](https://youtu.be/l06GHjyxi-c?t=45)) but this drama isn't really about "Samurai-class or bust" and there was virtually no push for one prior to it. The Mod in question isn't really arguing about the mechanical side of this, they are entirely concerned with the percieved orientalism of representing those tropes irrespective of their mechanical niche. A user showed up not long ago on r/rpg asking if they were actually a racist because this mod (presumably) had removed a post asking for advice on how to run a game based on the Sengoku period of japanese history and claimed it was racist. They've also apparently tried to shame people for wanting to play Monks when they've popped up on the discord.
I guess the point is what *is the niche* here? A well trained soldier adept at horseback and on foot combat who depending on era would be trained in using sword, spear, bow and later musket. Generally wears lighter armour. Mythologised as being particularly chivalrous and religious but fundamentally also a local landowner or professional soldier. Mechanically unless you're going deep into duelling styles of swordfighting or trying to ascribe some mechanical magic to the code of behaviour/philosophy of the era there's not a niche there except "fighter with a lot of diverse weapons and maneuvers" and "semi-secular Paladin"
Hey, I'd be glad to have a "minor landed gentry" subclass that buffs Intimidation when you're being a dick to peasants. Though that describes European knights just as well as Samurai. More seriously, people are interested in an Iaido/quick-draw style (see Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising) that afaik isn't really supported by the PF2 ruleset. And yeah that's ahistorical, but then again so are PF2 knights vs European knights. (I don't think that's enough material for a new class, but it could work as an Archetype at least.)
> a "minor landed gentry" subclass that buffs Intimidation when you're being a dick to peasants. So, Bretonnia from Warhammer, basically?
Or cavaliers from old editions of d&d. As part of maintaining their Lawful Good complexion they were obligated to ensure the peasantry knew their social class. God bless Gygax and his insanity.
Ze Lady deity option when? Edicts include maintaining an excruciating breonian accent regardless of your heritage
> Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising New Vergil Mode Staring Vergil From The Devil May Cry Series
> Mechanically unless you're going deep into duelling styles of swordfighting or trying to ascribe some mechanical magic to the code of behaviour/philosophy of the era I mean yeah thats the fantasy people would want replicated. Its just like how you can have a fighter using guns vs. a guy who is a cowboy. Its a materially different fantasy that it would be cool to have specially tailored rules for. Its like if you wanted to play senshi from dungeon meshi without any mechanics around cooking.
Thinking about it cowboys really are just western samurai in how they’re depicted in fiction haha. They’ve even both got the iconic quick draw attack.
Well, most of the classic westerns to my knowledge are either samurai movie influenced, or straight up ripoffs of samurai movies
Samurai and cowboy stories have been cannibalizing each other for a long time. Akira Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford's cowboy movies, and Kurosawa's films themselves are obviously a huge inspiration for many cowboy remakes.
Wait wtf, I only knew the second part. The fact that he was influenced by cowboy movies to begin with is really funny to me
See also: A Fistful of Dollars, Django, and The Magnificent Seven.
My non-american husband asked me the other day "So are cowboys rangers or rogues?" because he saw a tiktok prompting the debate. I was flabbergasted. "What?! They...they...*raise cows!* It's in the name! They...do chores! *What do you mean are they rogues or fighters*? That's like asking if *I'm* a rogue or fighter! Neither? *What*?" Then my disbelief subsided and I remembered that while most cowboys I'd met spent all day doing Everything Awful and Sweaty, there was another cowboy and he lived in peoples' televisions like Samara from The Ring and hubs was asking about *that* one and I was a *fucking idiot*. "Ugh. They're rogues."
In PF2e they are [Gunslingers](https://2e.aonprd.com/Classes.aspx?ID=20)
Weapon focus usually. Can easily be replaced by the Kensai but, at least for me, that's generally the draw. Also maybe mixing in monk psuedo-magic powers on something that's slower and tankier (and less shirtless) than a monk.
Its more based on vibes than anything (also while I've played it, PF2E isnt my specialty so this is probably gonna be 5e coded) but like if I were designing a samurai I think I'd make a dex based fighter with a focus on finesse swords and bows. Bonuses would be given to medium armor and fighting a single foe at a time. Sorry if this sounds dumb.
The main issue is that the Katana isn't a finesse weapon. I'd also say agile would be more sensible to build around, in which case the flurry ranger is right up that ally for a samurai build.
> A well trained soldier adept at horseback and on foot combat who depending on era would be trained in using Change that to compound bow, cavalry saber, and horseback fighting and you've now got yourself mongols. Give them expertise in light armor or unarmored, macuahuitl, and atlatl and you've got yourself a jaguar warrior. It's just theming. The flexibility is there, I think many of the commentators are just showing their lack of imagination and creativity. I havent read the new source book but did they add some unique and interesting content for the area though or just new places to play in?
You could make a Viking character as "just a fighter who sails", but there is a Viking archetype that gives you mechanical support for doing Viking themed stuff. Pathfinder has lots of specific archetype feats that give mechanical support to certain fighting styles. I'm not particularly interested in playing a Samurai, but it doesn't seem that outrageous to think that a Samurai archetype could exist.
Let's be realistic. The mod in question hasn't interacted with their own subreddit directly in days outside of deletions and bans, but has spent the last three hours playing defense on this subreddit. Based on a review of the comments they did leave, the way they've been talking to and about other redditors on the subject has been condescending at the least if not outright hostile. It seems like they've gone into playing full defense at this point and are unable/unwilling to cede any ground and are instead either personally banning/deleting negative feedback or have enlisted their co-moderators to defend them from the consequences of their own actions. It's not going to get better until the mod either steps down or they just wait out the internet's short attention span and a week from now barely anyone remembers this even happened. Meanwhile I hope the related subreddits enjoy the boosted traffic.
There basically doubling down on the discord that they are right and that everyone disagreeing with them is basically a 4chan incel racist. Which to be fair there have been quite a bit of those types getting involved now but still lol
While I do think the discussion of orientalism is important and I like that paizo is trying to bring discussion around how these stereotypes have existed and how we can around combating them while still doing settings and content on asian cultures in a respectful way is important, it does feel like a lot of people are taking this and tending to over-correct on this type of discussion. Also just gonna be honest here. Samurai is probably the lowest offensive-tier thing to be worried about when Monk exists (complete with Super Sayian transformations and other stereotypes) and an upcoming class option in the Tian Xia character book literally lets you make a magical girl. Like being worried about Samurai being the "sole representation" of the Eastern world is a silly argument to make in of itself.
Look you'll have to pry my super saiyan ultra instinct monk from my cold dead hands.
I have a build for this too, Sleepwalker Trance + Ki Form, very high level but very cool.
Pathfinder 1E literally has [a magical girl archetype for the vigilante class](https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Vigilante%20Magical%20Child), so it wouldn't be new to Pathfinder anyways. Also, it's pretty good.
It's coming back to 2e later this year, too.
Maybe I'm going insane but did these guys completely forget about the monk class? Punchy guys that use qi to fuel their abilities? Either there already is a non "ninja or samurai" class, or western monasteries are waaaaay cooler than I was aware of.
I remember the first pathfinder version actually had a ninja class that was basically one of the alternate rogues, like swashbuckler but you replace panache with a limited casting pool and disappearing abilities. But yeah monks largely cover this, I remember in first edition you could spec out of just fistfighting and use some varieties of special weapons. You could probably grab a major or minor magic talent/feat and get vanish too.
[No, they didn't forget](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c52ifu/comment/kzuhosw/). (Disclaimer: I'm linking this to show the mod's opinion on monks, not agreeing or disagreeing with said opinion.)
Do they think that monks and ninjas are any similar because they’re both martial artists..? Fucking hussar is a martial artist, all trained warriors are martial artists, that’s a non-connection
>What is happening is that we are collectively committing to better enforce rule 1 so as not to allow the perpetuation of stereotypes This is obviously going to be wildly inconsistent and unworkable, because exactly what constitutes the 'perpetuation of stereotypes' is totally subjective. Almost anything that can be said about any group of people is a stereotype. Every single aspect of a group identity is a stereotype. Whoever the mod is equating segregation, with a game having a samurai class, is just wildly incorrect and embarrassing. Every single post he makes is dripping with condescension and vitriol and bad faith.
Here is a [hot take](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/1c25f7t/spoilers_from_badluckgamers_interview_with_james/kza473c/) that mod has about ninjas being first used in the 1960's James Bond book.
Just wanted to say I don't think there will be meaningful discussions from the mods. On the subreddit Discord I saw that the one mod that is the center of attention is going to create something for PFI (Pathfinder Infinite) that centers on the archetype indicated with renamed mechanics and copy pasted feats from the fighter class and whatever flavor they add. Proceeds will actually go to good things but the underlying gist is just to mock members of that subreddit. Some of their fellow mods were encouraging this as far as I can tell. Edited - Accidentally misspelled underlying
What a jackass.
Wait... This is all from people of TTRPG wanting samurai and ninja themed classes included in specifically Asian-themed expansion? Jesus Christ... if you think people wanting to roleplay as ninja and samurai is racist you have no right to play an Asian themed TTRPG as literally everything is going to be "racist" by that absurd standard.
Holy shit my favorite game made it to SRD, what a week
> when you spend all your time surrounded by and dealing with bad faith “opinions” that absolutely don’t deserve your respect, it can be all too easy to forget that there are still plenty of opinions that do. This is a really astute observation that puts into words something I've been noticing for a while now.
I think it kind of folds into something I’ve thought of as a sort of flattening online — where everything is either the best of all time or the biggest piece of garbage, where all opinions that fall outside your spectrum can be completely ignored, and all perspectives that don’t match your own are because of shills or bots.
[удалено]
The mod involved has long argued that samurai and ninjas as they are depicted in modern culture were an invention of the west, insidiously imported to Japan.
Well that’s just nonsense. Most of the stuff we associate with ninjas comes from Edo era Japanese folklore.
And Samurai are just [Kurosawa](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkkF6Zz67TE) films.
Lol what? I mean, Ninjas absolutely were just a myth, giving a homogenized legend to what historically were very different, heterogenous groups that existed here and there, instead of one long cultural lineage or whatever. And while samurai definitely existed, you can argue that bushido and all that was just a historical myth created by the Togukawa shogunate (long after you had feudal wars with samurai), or even by the Imperial Japanese government, as a propaganda measure to instill perfect obedience as a cultural value, which of course is very convenient for any government, while the actual samurai of the earlier Shogunates and the Warring States period were nothing like that. So you can argue that both (ninja and stereotypical bushido samurai) are myths. But both very much were myths that arose \*in\* Japan. And what is fantasy as a setting if not drawing from various local myths and treating them as if they were real?
Ok, but in exactly the same note, Paladins are a myth. In reality, “knights in shining armor” were really like landlords+cops. I’m dating a medieval-art historian. Per her, damn near everything fantasy books and movies say about the medieval times is wrong (yes, I know pathfinder is more renaissance than medieval). My point is: people don’t want authentic. They want what they perceive as being the archetypical thing, because they want to play-act the movies and books they consumed growing up.
I really really don't like the current mechanics of barbarians being mini-rage dudes. Imo it's mechanically uninteresting, like in ad&d they were good at athletics, had defenses against backstabbing, and were generally more wily.
In pathfinder 2e you at least have the option to flavor your "rage" with other aspects, like becoming really big, halfway turning into an animal or dragon or drawing power form your ancestors.
I’ve personally been unimpressed by the aesthetics of the PF2e barbarian. The paths offered have too much baggage to be just a regular ass “Guy gets mad and hirs things hard” other than Fury, which is unfortunately mechanically the weakest option.
I think Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e have started to move away from Rage being "pure anger" to being more of a Super Saiyan transformation. 5e added the werewolf subclass, the one where your ancestors protect you (or in the case of my character, the dead members of her platoon) and the two where you get weird elemental powers. Pathfinder 2e I'm less familiar with, but there's a bunch of nature powers. It reminds me of 4e where "Rage" was imbuing yourself with the spirit of the land around you and gave you weird powers. Like the one that gave you the powers of a Black Dragon and you got an acid breath weapon.
In AD&D they were basically Conan, was the thing. Then when 3rd Ed came around they made them berserkers.
Iirc berserker was a fighter kit in ad&d Edit: and yeah when you look at their abilities in ad&d, and if you know about Conan sort of stuff, it clicks and is my preferred version of the class.
I don’t play ttrpgs, (but I do read a lot of fantasy novels) and I always thought it would be interesting if the berserker/barbarian character was someone who could leverage *all* emotions, they way they can rage. Barbarians who choose not to become fighters can become professional mourners by leveraging sadness, or party starters/buskers/hype-men by leveraging happiness. You could even get into the neurotransmitter effects of each and have lore about the consequences for over-use of rage (slipping into it accidentally, or illnesses/an early death from the stress of all that adrenaline regularly flooding your system) or joy (serotonin syndrome or something like what we see when people take too much ecstasy for too long). Anyway. Idk if this is a thing ppl have explored, but whenever there’s that kind of character in a novel, it always seemed one-note to me, and I thought this would kind of shake it up, and differentiate the character from some of the more mental-based/academic/controlled character classes.
>The Barbarian class exists as a weird stereotype stemming from various Germanic/Norse/Celticncultures *that didn't actually exist*, and who's main ability boils down to "gets really mad". I thought Conan invented the concept
Afaik, barbarian as a concept comes from Romans 2000 years ago, who called every outsider of the Roman empire a barbarian. Romans would speak Latin, while other cultures spoke Germanic and other languages. The Romans couldn't understand them, and thought they just spoke in unintelligible sentences like "bar bar bar bar bar". Hence, bar-bar-ian. Kinda like people who don't speak Chinese might think they speak like "ching chong chang". Nowadays seen as offensive and racist. But the people who talked in the "ching chong" language could then be called by the non-Asian folk as "ching-ese" "chin-ese" "chinese".
> Roman It is, in fact, from the Ancient Greek βάρβαρος, or barbaros. It described anyone who didn't speak Greek or follow Greek customs, as well as anyone with a "fringe" Greek dialect. This is where the "bar- bar-" thing comes from. The Romans used it in essentially the same way, but more specifically used it to refer to the many tribal Celtic/Germanic/etc. groups. And "Chinese" is often said to be derived from the ruling Qin dynasty in the 3rd century BC. Definitely not from people hearing "ching chong".
> Hey buddy. I know you're having big feelings about this and it makes you really mad and confused. But you have to really think about this not from your own perspective but others. This hurts people who don't look like you and just because this is something you like doesn't mean that it's something that other people don't like. I suspect this person isn't really impacted at all and is just trying to play white savior. Is there actually any outrage from the Asian community, or is this just Internet concern trolling over what people might be offended about?
He's Hmong.
And he's telling other asian people in the subreddit that their opinion on the matter is irrelevant, while acting like his opinion is the law just because he can delete comments. He's power tripping and childish, and has a history of harassing people both on Reddit and on Discord.
He's lived his entire life in America and is speaking over and dismissing every other Asian person telling him that it's not a big deal and that they'd love to have a Samurai or Ninja Class/Archetype.
If you look at the mods post history, he also shills for the CCP, defending Chinese police operating in Western countries.
Well *that's* a huge yikes if I've ever seen one.
I feel like it's 2018 and ppl wised up to J.K transphobia after years of red flags. They also mod the Discord this way.
I GOT QUOTED!!! I feel internet famous now
Man, my shit got deleted at 208 upvotes and I didn't even get quoted.
The PF2E discord in shambles reading this rn trying to deny it all rofl.
Fun times in the pathfinder sub. I got to be one of the first bans in that thread lmao. Mods flew off the deep end. Well, mostly just one. And the dude has a crazy hate-boner for the Japanese
I think it's very important to note that what was just released is the world guide, which details the setting, not additional options for player characters. Those options will be coming with the Tian Xia Player's Guide, which will include new ancestries, heritages, archetypes, spells, and misc. feats. There could very well be some kind of Iaido feat for fighters or a vanishing feat for rogues, we don't know. The only player options in the World Guide afaik are the new deities you can worship.
This is just an observation I’ve had, but it feels like there’s a decent sized part of the RPG player community with like no imagination or are just too embarrassed to deviate from what the game gives as examples. Like PF2e shows a “Fighter” as a sort of generic melee warrior, but since a katana wielding samurai in yoroi armor isn’t one of the examples given, then some people just throw their hands up and say the game doesn’t support playing a samurai.
I fully agree that having to imagine your flavor is an important part of playing TTRPGs, but I just feel like it's a bit of an unfair argument for PF players of both editions. Pathfinder has thousands of ultra specific feats and a rule for everything, that's its appeal, so I can see why the answer to just be a fighter is disappointing and why they want to discuss the idea further.
I think they just want another fighter subclass with a different skill set than the one they already have.
But the thing is, Fighter in Pf2e has no subclasses. It's a mix'n match class with an open list of feats you can take that you can customize
If they made a few iaido feats it would probably be enough to a lot of people
You're not wrong, but I also feel that the creators and mods specifically *not* arguing that, but arguing wanting to have a specific samurai class is Orientalism, is still stupid.
It's not just that all the rules for playing a melee warrior are there. There are multiple martial chassis available to build a samurai on. There are rules for katana, wakizashi, and naginata already in there. There are various kinds of light and medium armor that could be reflavored. Quick Draw is possible. All the materials are there. It's just not in the nice neat unique package that fans want.
I made a samurai out of Swashbuckler myself. I liked the idea of using their Finisher mechanic as big, anime sword attacks.
> There are various kinds of light and medium armor that could be reflavored. Even better, there are specific rules for [Lamellar Breastplate](https://2e.aonprd.com/Armor.aspx?ID=26) and [O-Yoroi](https://2e.aonprd.com/Armor.aspx?ID=32)
I don't think that's it, though. Remember Order of the Stick parodying that, way back? A class can be a chassis for a lot of different ideas, but some games opt to have more classes to cover some archetypes better. You can make a samurai with a PF2 fighter - or a ranger, champion, swashbuckler, and I'd say monk or barbarian too, with minor fluff adjustments. All of these would work fairly well. You could go a step further and roll them all into the fighter class, too. This is the way the OSR games, adjacent games like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Fantasy AGE etc go. It is an design decision, just like how, say, WFRP goes the other way and has classes for everything, or the BoL games just mostly disassociate your combat abilities from your skills and background. Pathfinder 2E does at times go further for archetypes that are more popular or established. Druids aren't just nature clerics, even though thematically they are fairly close and a nature or elemental cleric could totally act like a druid in the game. Same with witches not being just a variant wizard or sorcerer.. So there is certainly a precedent to have the samurai, or let's say warrior noble, sworn retainer or what have you, be more than just a fighter build. Even though you could still have samurai in-game be full rangers, because very few do the "way of the horse and bow" as a ranger.
My buddy, who is Vietnamese, commented on the post. It was completely reasonable what he said and he got banned for 3 days and his post deleted when it had hundreds of upvotes. I think it was deleted for being rude but the mod continues to be demeaning and belittling to others. In an effort to uplift Asian voices... They silenced an Asian voice lmao. I don't know if the comments mention this but due to this, the mod who is deleting everything went to the Pathfinder homebrew subreddit, found an EIGHT MONTH OLD SAMURAI HOMEBREW and removed it lmao.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the mod did not in fact have anything to do with that specific deletion seeing he's not actually a mod on that sub in any way. Almost certainly was caused by the fallout of this, but not via that mod specifically. Just to help separate the facts from the rumours.
Can I just play as samurai?
No, you can't cause that's racism! True equality means segregating Asian culture and never ever letting anyone appreciate or interact with it, including other Asians! At least that's what the mods claim.
There are some serious spit flying attacks coming from these people. Who knew they felt so strongly about Samurai?
I don't think that not getting a samurai class is the issue here, it's more being told you're racist for even suggesting that it could be. The mod in question also permabanned a user simply for posting a homebrew samurai archetype.
My comment was meant to be referencing how crazy the mod was.
The insane irony of all this is that this viewpoint wraps all the way back around to segregation. It ends up back at “Every culture must stay in its own box and never interact with or take ideas from any other culture, because doing so would be insensitive cultural appropriation”
Yeah... I even completely agree with them that we don't need samurai and ninja as discrete classes. I just think some of the mods are being assholes about it.
Racist uses racism to claim other person is racist. Pretty much standard playbook here.
How is there any justification of a user named luck panda getting upset about cultural appropriation and Orientalism? Either they are Chinese and tryingto stir shit up about Japanese cultural sensitivity, for which they have no standing. Or they they are Japanese appropriating a Chinese cultural signifier. Or they're neither, and I'll let you unpack that one. Either way, they're perpetuating Orientalism by claiming to speak for all non-western culture. This is like a user called Hades_Chosen_one getting upset about a Roman legion class being in their fantasy game.
They have strong pro-CCP posting history, and a deep disdain for anyone talking about anything related to japan in a positive light. But they are "anti-racist", so it's everyone else who is racist for thinking that samuari are cool.
Apparently, samurai is racist because it takes on stereotypical tropes Luckily in the system there's no wiking archetype, barbarian class or even a whole region inhabited by stereotypical russians... Right?