On 05Apr2022 1156, Cian Witherspoon - amber.narilka at gmail.com (via
tml list) wrote:
> That is the thing as Tim and Ewan keep pointing out ; Marc, or whoever
> put SOC in the game, understood class antagonism - which is rare for
> an American, but I've also noticed that a lot of Vietnam vets seem to
> have picked that up during their time over there (being right up
> against the Good Old Boys club might've helped, along with seeing the
> class antagonism between the French colonial personnel, the local
> collaborators, American military, and everybody else). For more modern
> American gamers, where social class is fairly aggressively ignored,
> the underlying logic can be very hard to grasp - our culture demands
> the ignoring of class (see the way every billionaire tries to portray
> themselves as a hard working everyman), Social Status directly implies
> Social Class, and that clashes with the baseline cultural assumptions
> players bring to the game.
As I recall, Loren was a History major (don't know about the other early
GDW staff), and they were a bunch of historical wargame nerds, so they
likely got an appreciation of the importance of status throughout
history from that and incorporated in into Traveller. Modern US
culture's (and New Zealand's too) aggressive denial of the power of
status in humans is quite atypical.

My players tend to treat social status as a thin veneer over the top,
just a bit of colour, and have gotten quite grumpy in the past when high
status NPCs have treated their PCs as the commoners that they were.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>