Really a Useful Note: Tabletop Game.Chess

Yes, I agree it's a trope that occurs in the lore of chess, but it's not part of the game itself. The way chess sets look in general is tropable, I suppose.

But my point is that we should keep such tropes apart from tropes about the game.

edited 7th Jan '17 8:18:47 AM by GnomeTitan

That is the game though and fully valid tropes to the game.

Language differences like how Russians call it 'the Runner' are also an example of Dub Name Change which is part of the game as well.

In many cases the lore of chess has become a part of the game. Just google "themed chess sets" see how many variants incorporate religious or clerical imagery for the bishop and feminine qualities for the queen, among other things.

If it exists in one version of the game that's considered official, then it exists in the game. It doesn't need to exist in all languages.

The name "bishop" is official. The Church Militant connection most assuredly is not.

Chess is a strictly regulated game. The official rules say nothing about that.

And even disregarding that, the game is abstract. Even if a player thinks of the bishops as fighting clerics it does not affect his play. It's just a way you think about the game, not the game itself.

But it's definitely a trope that's connected with chess. I just fon't want prople to get the impression that the game is about religious themes, or about royalty vs. peons (pawns), or about the battle of the sexes (king vs. queen), because it's not.

Edited: I suppose you could call tropes like this sort if an audience resction, like an Alternative Character Interpretation.

edited 7th Jan '17 10:22:10 AM by GnomeTitan

It's not any alternate interpretation, it's a bishop and by definition "a senior member of the Christian clergy, typically in charge of a diocese and empowered to confer holy orders." who fights in the game.

edited 7th Jan '17 10:35:34 AM by Memers

That's your fantasy. The official rules say nothing about this.

But the stories people make up about chess - like that the bishop is a fighting cleric - is part of what makes it culture and not just a game. So I think the trope should be mentioned, just not as a gameplay trope.

In what way? That's what the word means in the freaken dictionary...

Indeed. Chess rules don't care about the names.

Now, perhaps, one could cite Xenafication with respect of the queen as chess rules did change to allow her multi-step moves.

I agree that Church Militant looks like shoehorning to me (even though I did include it in my sandbox of tropes from the current page which are actually about the game. As I said, I haven't screened the sandbox for shoehorning yet.

However, if we had a trope about warrior-priests, I might consider that a reasonable fit. Yes, chess is very abstract, but the names of the pieces clearly represent and are intended to evoke certain concepts. Much as blurry blobs of pixels in some video games are intended to evoke certain concepts, even if all you do in the game is shoot at them when they appear. If all you do is shoot them, the rules of the (video) game don't care about the name...

The existing tropes which mention the changes to the queen are Took a Level in Badass and Updated Re-release. I'm pretty sure the latter is a fit (even if the re-release was in the 15th c.), but I'm torn on the former.

edited 7th Jan '17 12:20:16 PM by Xtifr

I think the "warrior priest" trope we're looking for is Badass Preacher.

That's not exactly that as it is not shown to be badass at all and that trope itself will end up on TRS pretty soon with the whole badass index getting renamed.

edited 7th Jan '17 12:37:24 PM by Memers

When I was culling the tropes on that page (The ones I cut are on the discussion page) I left Church Militant because it kind of fits — religious figure as competent fighter. But the Knight was listed as a Cool Horse — that one I cut. I think someone was trying too hard to be clever with the tropes they listed.

Yes, it's just Horse, not Cool Horse. Now, in Germany we say "Springer" ("jumper") but we also use the horse icon.

"If other stuff that have No Plot? No Problem! like Pong, Mario Paint, Minecraft or the original Super Smash Bros. can be a work then so can chess IMO, its exactly the same thing really."

Exactly. Of course chess deserves a trope page like every other tabletop game. This whole discussion is silly. We have an entire namespace dedicated to Pinball, which is by definition tropeless, and chess can't have a page?

Leave it exactly where it is. Nor are the arguments against tropes like Church Militant convincing. It's a bishop. It has a pointy hat. Church Militant it is.

Chess the game is of course an abstraction of war, and demonstrates the tropes of war games. The pawns are foot soldiers. C'mon, people.

As a tournament player I'm definitely unhappy with calling chess a war game or implying that it's a game about the Church Militant going out to slay kings.

Chess may have been a war game originally but today it's so abstracted that the connection has been lost. And the Church Militant trope is limited to English-speaking countries. German players don't think of the Bishop as a bishop, but they are definitely playing the same game, and I challenge anyone to come up with a way that German players play the game differently because the Bishop is called a "Runner". In fact, any serious player thinks in terms of abstract patterns while playing, not about those picturesque tropes.

Also, there's a serious reason not to associate these tropes with the game itself. Because chess has in earnest been called both racist (because it's a struggle between white and black) and a metaphor for class struggle (Pawns vs. Kings). These is a serious matter nowadays and we don't want to give people the wrong idea. Chess may end up being forbidden for not being politically correct or whatever.

At the same time, these tropes exist. They are colourful, interesting, and used all over the place. And the purpose of this wiki is to document trope usage.

So please don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that tropes such as Church Militant as applied to chess should be removed (yes, I did call it shoehorning earlier in the thread, but I've been convinced otherwise). I'm just arguing that we should distinguish between tropes about the game itself (which means, basically, gameplay tropes), and tropes about all the associations, metaphors, flavour, lore, whatever.

So, basically, don't say that the chess piece called "Bishop" is a fighting cleric, because it's not that kind of game, please say that the Church Militant trope is associated with the game because the piece is called Bishop.

edited 16th Jan '17 4:01:02 AM by GnomeTitan

It is a war game though one of the first war boards game ever made. It is still a game of strategy and such but it is no different than say Risk, a Strategy Role Playing Game, the chess inspired Hearthstone or World Of Warcraft level.

Chess tactics are seen as a stepping stone for most real world strategy classes hence why The Chessmaster is a thing and it's not about actually playing chess.

edited 16th Jan '17 4:13:10 AM by Memers

The comparison with Risk is interesting. Risk is also very abstracted, so it's like chess in some ways but not in others. The Risk pieces that look like cannons (at least they do in my set) aren't cannon, and aren't even supposed to represent cavalry; they just represent a number of "armies". So that's a bit like chess Bishops.

On the other hand, even though Risk is abstract, it's still about conquering countries and it's played on a recognizable world map. Chess has lost even that connection to real war.

Look, all I'm really saying is that chess Bishops evoke all these images about militant clergy fighting against an army of peons (Pawns), but it's not about that.

Let's take the Knight as an example instead. If the Knight had really been a Knight, and not just a horse-shaped piece of wood, you'd imagine that the rules would use that fact somehow, wouldn't you? For example, there could be a rule that "Knights are chivalrous and may never attack a Queen". Many games, even quite abstract ones, are like that. But chess isn't.

Googling themed chess sets gives me thousands of guys mounted on a horse usually with a lance or a long cavalry sword, even hundreds of years old chess sets have it. Hell watch the chess games in Harry Potter some time, the life sized one Ron was on a horse with a lance and the game was rather brutal.

And rules are just one among hundreds fully valid aspects of the game. What we do not want is personal experiences and such.

edited 16th Jan '17 5:46:27 AM by Memers

"Knights are chivalrous and may never attack a queen" sounds like Knight in Shining Armor, which is a concept invented long after chess was! I think it dates back to the French troubadours of the 12th c.—and it took a while to spread beyond France. Before that, knights were simply one of the lower ranks of nobility. So the fact that the game doesn't use a trope which didn't exist yet doesn't mean the game isn't using tropes.

The fact that some people (and some languages) insist on referring to the Queen as the Minister or Queen's Champion, because it's "unrealistic" for a queen to be such a powerful fighter, shows that the imagery does affect people's perception of the game. If the names didn't carry meaning, nobody would care about the name of that piece.

And I disagree that the concept of it being a war game has been lost. Lots of modern war games are as abstract or more so. Its nickname, "the Game of Kings" is not a reference to the piece, but to the commonly-held notion that its strategies are important to rulers and war leaders. The fact that contemporary tournament players may generally ignore these aspects doesn't mean the rest of the world does.

edited 16th Jan '17 10:41:42 AM by Xtifr

Actually, Chaturanga goes back to 280-550 and is the earliest precursor of the game. Rules were different back then and settled into the current form by 1500, although some aspects of that chess resemble ours (for example, how kings, rooks and knights operate).

I was just using the knight as an example of what the rules would look like if the names of the pieces actually held meaning.

Actually, I can think of some of the piece names that actually have meaning. The King, because if the King is mated, the game is lost, and the Pawn because it's the least powerful and most numerous piece - a peon, in other words. And the Knight, which is clearly a horse, because it jumps over obstacles. So there's some room for troping here, but it's pretty weak.

As for calling the Queen a mininster or vizier,that name actually predates the name of Queen. People "instisting" on those names probably just want to stress that there's no girl power or feminine wiles involved in how the Queen moves. Or maybe they are anti-monarchists who just don't like queens.

There's a lot of lore and associated tropes in the names of the pieces. Rooks as elephants, for example. But these tropes have nothing to do with the gameplay itself as it is today. If they did, long ago, that association has been lost.

And I'm not implying that people ignore all these tropes. I'm saying that they are ignoring them when playing. It doesn't matter one bit to how a game is conducted what the pieces are called. It does matter a lot to how people think about the game in other contexts - in literature, as a metaphor for something, when crafting chess sets - which is why the tropes are important. But they are not gameplay tropes.

edited 16th Jan '17 2:15:20 PM by GnomeTitan

I guess what I'm really arguing against is not the troping of chess, but the implications of troping chess.

In a medium which tells a story, including most modern games (even boardgames tend to tell stories nowadays), trope usage usually means that the creator is trying to convey a message. For example, if a work uses the Action Girl trope, it's usually interpreted as some kind of message - either a feminist one ("Women can fight and do active things") or a sexist one ("Catfight! Awesome!").

But chess - at least as it is today - doesn't send a message. The fact that the Queen is much more powerful than the King may be perceived as a feminist message, but the game of chess isn't feminist because of that (and the historical fact that the Queen wasn't female and wasn't very powerful for hundreds of years shows that this wasn't the creators' intention).

And to me, saying that the fact that one piece is called a Bishop means that chess exemplifies the Church Militant trope, smacks of saying that the game of chess is about the struggle between church and state or something equally silly. It's not. The Church Militant trope exists in depictions of chess and in people referring to chess, but not in the gameplay. It's not a gameplay trope. And the people who invented the name "Bishop" (long, long after the game itself was invented, by non-Christians who didn't know what a bishop was) may have thought about the trope, but they were not the creators of chess, they were more like the fans who invent nicknames for characters.

Where people keep misunderstanding me is that I don't want to take these tropes away from you. They exist, they are valid tropes, and they should be documented. They just don't say anything about the character or meaning of the game itself.

And, yeah, I'll shut up now. If I haven't made my point by now, I doubt I ever will.

edited 16th Jan '17 2:32:12 PM by GnomeTitan

Gnome, there are definitely tropes currently on the page that don't belong; I'm just not interested in addressing them until after we determine what page(s) chess will be on. Cross Wicking will take several hours to do, and I'm not interested in doing it twice.