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Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

So in the game we get to play Bladerunners, which are slave-catchers of the future--except their job is to murder the slaves who escape. It's weird to me that 30 years later people still don't understand that the whole point of the movie is that the Bladerunner is the replicant slave of the bad guys and the other replicants are slaves fighting for their freedom. I love the thought-provoking Bladerunner universe and this looks like it may be a thoughtful production, but playing a slave-catcher is seriously problematic.

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First, it is clear that the genre of "table top RPG" is littered with thieves, assassins, slavers and criminals. Hell, there is a trope that players are often little more than "murder hobos". Playing as a slaver, slave catcher, slave, escaped slave would be nothing new.

Specifically to replicant blade runners, I think there is lots of room for soul searching and meaningful play in coming to grips with potentially being a tool/the tool of your own oppression.

Maybe you start as a blade runner but come to champion the replicant cause. Maybe you smuggle the weak and sick off world. Maybe after your day job ticketing replicants for minor infractions you conduct corporate sabotage against the Tyrell Corporation. Maybe you play as a replicant member of an off-world kick-murder squad or captain a replicant gunship off the shoulder of Orion. Maybe you run a chop shop helping replicants bypass retinal scans. The world of Bladerunner is ripe with RP options. In my opinion, it would be a shame to dismiss the opportunity because you can only see problematic themes.

To paraphrase Roy Batty

You saw a slave narrative, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

> Bladerunners, which are slave-catchers

That's a very reductionistic view of material. Blade Runner was always asking a question what makes someone a human.

And how can you be sure you are a human?

https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html

Philip K. Dick's stories are everything but simple. In link above there is a story was about man undergoing surgery only to discover he has a punch tape inside him. He finds out he's an Android. So he starts messing with the tape, punching out pieces only to discover it materialized a flock of geese. In anger he tears the tape causing entire world to disappear.

Being "less than human" was a key justification for a lot of slavery, so it is quite plausible that this "reductionist view" was deliberately engendered by Dick.

> The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?”

Philip K Dick.

To boil it down to slavery is a modern take. His other story Roog about a dog defending his home has a similar premise.

His question is closely related to whether you could figure out you are a copy, whether your could tell actual reality from perceived reality, etc.

> the whole point of the movie is that the Bladerunner is the replicant slave of the bad guys

This is far from being a settled canon. Ridley Scott claims it is so, but what does he know? Movie makers often create lore that forces fans to go great lengths to explain coherently. Remember that Kessel run in 12 parsecs?!

> playing a slave-catcher is seriously problematic

Whew, glad that playing a murderous grave robber necromancer isn't.

It's a game, you make your own rules and stories. I'm glad I could live through the 80's playing "offensive" RPG like Berlin XVIII,In Nomine Satanas or Paranoia without anybody telling me they were "problematic".

That's why these are called "dystopia" and you're not necessarily playing the good guys, there is nothing "problematic" with it.

I think the new "safe, diverse and inclusive" D&D version is aimed at people concerned by "problematisms". See? there are RPG for everybody.

Well, according to the description of this game, you don't actually know whether you're a replicant and you're watching the dawn of a new age of replicants.

I feel that, with the right GM, it's a very nice setting to discuss slavery.

So if you view the replicates as slaves, how do you view AI? And what does that make programmers that are working on AI?

Neuromancer had the "Turing police" monitoring AIs. Watts Blindsight universe has the "Cloudkillers", who turn off AI that gets too smart. It's becoming a more common trope in sci-fi.

It was a pretty significant part of the plot that it's nontrivial to distinguish replicants from humans, and every replicant Deckard kills is trying to escape confinement. There's also a replicant that is indistinguishable from a human. A chess playing neural network isn't anywhere close to being comparable to a slave.

And IMO, merely creating such an AI isn't even immoral, as long as we don't force it into labor it wants to escape from.

"every replicant Deckard kills is trying to escape confinement"

I guess that is true at some level depending on how one defines "confinement".

It is not clear to me that Roy or Pris are looking to escape their professions rather, they are in love and about to die of "old age". As Roy bluntly states "I want more life".

If we program the AI to want to serve us, is that moral? This path pretty quickly gets you to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe levels of discomfort[1]

1: https://remotestorage.blogspot.com/2010/07/douglas-adamss-co...

As someone on the autism spectrum, there are AI-y tasks that I would enjoy as a job but which would to most people feel as, at best, unbearably tedious. If you view "AI programmed to enjoy doing boring computer tasks" as vaguely adjacent to an autistic person, then I would say that it's perfectly moral to create such an entity, as long as we treat it well by its own standards. I'm sure there are situations that could get me to second-guess that rule of thumb, but the golden rule feels adequate.

Starting out with a horrible character that tries to turn good and undo their evil while battling their past is a common trope. So is the "the world is broken beyond fixing it". Be it movie, video game or tabletop RPG. I am not sure how that could be "seriously problematic" in this case.

Remember, the world just acts a backdrop. A horrible person can still try to let their character murder-rape everyone in a Teletubbies RPG. In the end how the story unfolds depends a lot on the party & game master, and what kind of characters/game they want to play.

Slavery isn’t just early pre civil war American south slavery. Slavery is surely bad but so are a lot of institutions controlling the poor, and I’m not sure the moral disgust with it scales to the concept of slavery generally.

Gladiators, drafts, totalitarian states, etc.

A lot of them are really just slavery under a nuanced scheme that we’re all fine role playing.

The great thing about tabletop RPGs, though, is that you're ultimately free to do whatever you want. It's the job of the dungeon master to roll with whatever the players do and possibly even change the entire narrative on the fly. In that way, tabletop RPGs are typically much less constrained compared to video game / computer RPGs.

So it's entirely possible that you could start the game as a slave catcher, but if that's not something that you actually want your character to be, then you could definitely try to escape that role! And it would be up to the DM to decide how to respond to your actions...

> giving players the choice to play as either human or Replicants

True, although if GP's analogy about slave-catchers is accurate, I think we'd also look askance about a board game that pitted US slaves against slavers, allowing you to play both sides.

Wouldn’t the same apply to scenarios in the Second World War?

Edit: Writing this I just thought maybe not since I can’t think of any that focus on running a PoW / Gulag / Concentration camp, whereas this focus on the slave catching.

Escape from Colditz has one player acting as the PoW guards, and the other players acting as prisoners trying to escape. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/715/escape-colditz

There are always people looking askance at one thing or another, especially nowadays when it's so fashionable to be that person.

I'm sure you could make an absolutely offensive game about the topic, but you could also make a game that treats the subject carefully. Do you look askance at Secret Hitler?

One of the best board games (not an RPG) that I have ever played is "Liberty or Death". In it, you can play as American Patriots, The French, The British or the Indians. It is asymmetric with each faction having their own objectives. I have never run into a match were people had a problem playing any of the factions or that the game was problematic.

>but playing a slave-catcher is seriously problematic

Then don't play it?

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