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Jun 28, 2014 23:47
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All these D&D problems could be easily solved by not playing the system. D&D and its derivatives are flawed games, no poo poo. Yeah there's some people who refuse to even acknowledge the existence of games that aren't D&D, but why are you paying attention to them? Constantly arguing about this problem or that problem with D&D solves nothing. Its a waste of time. In answer to this alignment problem, if the player doesn't like the situation, then the player should stop playing. Tell the DM that you refuse to adhere to whatever dumb notion of alignment they have. Talk it over with the DM and try to come up with a solution that both of you like. If the DM can't be reasoned with, then quit the game. Get the other players to quit too. Don't up with this kind of poo poo. EDIT I realized what the core of this Alignment problem is, its the people involved. There's nothing wrong with alignments. The problem is with people who enforce dumb rules regarding them. Change who's the DM and the problem could go away. For instance, if I was the DM of this game, then I'd say that saving the Orc children and raising them in a good aligned faith would be in keeping with the Lawful Good alignment. Problem solved. DocBubonic fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jun 28, 2014 |
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Jun 28, 2014 23:50
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Eberron is slightly better about the whole "D&D pantheon complete with evil gods" business even though it still has to have alignment because the setting contest it was written for wouldn't allow him to do away with it. Nonetheless it has a pantheon that's nominally split between "good" and "evil" gods but it's also pointed out that while most adherents of that particular religion (which isn't actually the only religion in the setting, because gods in Eberron aren't objectively real things you can point to) don't usually go around openly worshipping the Dark Six they will privately offer up prayers and make sacrifices to the various "evil" gods for things like artistic inspiration (The Fury) or safe passage on a journey (The Traveller) instead of ignoring them entirely. That and there isn't really some big holy war going on between the good god dudes and evil god dudes, people who are super unhealthily into venerating the Dark Six tend to be outliers rather than some sprawling force for evil poised to engulf the world in darkness or something.
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Jun 28, 2014 23:53
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Eberron is probably the most "realistic" D&D setting, because it's not stuck in Perpetual Renaissance Festival mode and does things like "magic would have an actual social effect on the world" and "just because you're an orc doesn't mean you're automatically evil forever".
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Jun 28, 2014 23:58
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And this is why I dig DCC.
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Jun 29, 2014 00:14
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DocBubonic posted:All these D&D problems could be easily solved by not playing the system. D&D and its derivatives are flawed games, no poo poo. Yeah there's some people who refuse to even acknowledge the existence of games that aren't D&D, but why are you paying attention to them? Constantly arguing about this problem or that problem with D&D solves nothing. Its a waste of time. The problem is D&D is so goddamn pervasive that its influence is felt across all manner of genres in all kinds of games, including poo poo like MUDs or other RPGs, to the point that it's almost impossible to get away from. I mean that kind of speaks to the power of D&D that it's managed to root itself so deeply into the general fantasy genre and the arena of RPGs that you have people frequently using tropes it invented without even realizing it. Hell the MUD I play has the D&D Religion problem to a T. Like, you're right, people shouldn't play D&D if it's so drat bad, but it or some shadow of it is often the only game in town. Reene fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 00:19
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Reene posted:The problem is D&D is so goddamn pervasive that its influence is felt across all manner of genres in all kinds of games, including poo poo like MUDs or other RPGs, to the point that it's almost impossible to get away from. I mean that kind of speaks to the power of D&D that it's managed to root itself so deeply into the general fantasy genre and the arena of RPGs that you have people frequently using tropes it invented without even realizing it. Hell the MUD I play has the D&D Religion problem to a T. Yeah, my MUD too. We've been slowly working on fixing that issue, but when you're trying to encourage players to fight each other, and frequently, that's such an easy crutch. And then ask me how many times I see characters who fill in their histories with 'family killed by straw men'...
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Jun 29, 2014 00:22
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It's beautiful.
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Jun 29, 2014 00:23
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neongrey posted:Yeah, my MUD too. We've been slowly working on fixing that issue, but when you're trying to encourage players to fight each other, and frequently, that's such an easy crutch. And then ask me how many times I see characters who fill in their histories with 'family killed by straw men'... Family killed by literal straw men. The Harvest comes
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Jun 29, 2014 01:34
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Tollymain posted:Family killed by literal straw men. The Harvest comes There is a book by Norman Partridge about that, Dark Harvest. It's a quick read and really good.
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Jun 29, 2014 01:47
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Many years ago one of my gaming buddies made the worrying revelation that a character background of "a happy life with living family" sounded original and compelling.
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Jun 29, 2014 02:20
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Night10194 posted:It's sort of like how we know Roman emissaries showed up in ancient china. Or how the roman roads and sea routes are what let Christianity spread as widely as it did as a young movement, because people from all over the world were traveling all over since there was money to be had (or curious things to see). I was a huge fan of the depiction of white Christian missionaries coming to tribal Africa in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The missionary learns the native language and gets a meeting with the tribe's religious scholar - the closest thing to a priest in a religion where you shouldn't let a man tell you how to worship God. The missionary explains the concept of God and the tribesman agrees wholeheartedly with him and says that's what they believe as well. When the missionary gets confused and says he was led to believe that his tribe worshipped many gods, the tribesman replies that there are many gods but only one God. They ask the minor gods, mere servants of the one true God, for help rather than the big man himself because he's God and mere mortals shouldn't bother him with their petty problems. Kai Tave posted:Eberron is slightly better about the whole "D&D pantheon complete with evil gods" business even though it still has to have alignment because the setting contest it was written for wouldn't allow him to do away with it. Nonetheless it has a pantheon that's nominally split between "good" and "evil" gods but it's also pointed out that while most adherents of that particular religion (which isn't actually the only religion in the setting, because gods in Eberron aren't objectively real things you can point to) don't usually go around openly worshipping the Dark Six they will privately offer up prayers and make sacrifices to the various "evil" gods for things like artistic inspiration (The Fury) or safe passage on a journey (The Traveller) instead of ignoring them entirely. A thing I liked about Glorantha is that even good, devout tribes would occasionally strongly consider making sacrifices and asking for aid from the evil gods. If your tribe is afflicted by a plague that's killing many people and all your sacrifices and prayers to Chalana Arroy, Goddess of Healing are doing gently caress all, a sacrifice to Mallia, Goddess of Disease asking her to make the loving plague stop already starts to become a more sensible idea. You just had to balance the fact that they might actually help you with the increased scrutiny they would give you in the aftermath, the fact that you've just fed them and the possibility they might get pissy if further sacrifices are not forthcoming. Don't sacrifice to the Trickster God though. You don't want his attention.
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Jun 29, 2014 02:37
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Doodmons posted:A thing I liked about Glorantha is that even good, devout tribes would occasionally strongly consider making sacrifices and asking for aid from the evil gods. If your tribe is afflicted by a plague that's killing many people and all your sacrifices and prayers to Chalana Arroy, Goddess of Healing are doing gently caress all, a sacrifice to Mallia, Goddess of Disease asking her to make the loving plague stop already starts to become a more sensible idea. You just had to balance the fact that they might actually help you with the increased scrutiny they would give you in the aftermath, the fact that you've just fed them and the possibility they might get pissy if further sacrifices are not forthcoming.
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Jun 29, 2014 02:43
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Reene posted:I play an elf in a game where the culture my character is from is based loosely on the Golden Horde. Because I'm a dork I decided to do some reading about that and holy poo poo. The way history is taught in US schools is downright propaganda. It's little more than History of Western Civilization, and a badly truncated and biased version of that. It basically draws a straight line from Athens to Rome to London to Boston, as a heritage of enlightened rationality, and pays a little lip-service to fairness in talking about slavery and the oppression of native populations in the most mealy mouthed way possible so it can whitewash everything else without being completely obvious about it. The feeble units that have been added to cover China and India are almost more insulting than saying nothing at all. Not only does this give a completely hosed up view of history, it makes it dreadfully dull compared to what was really going on. I had no idea just how vibrant and interesting things were in the rest of the world until I got to college and took a few classes on pre-Colombian America and sub-Saharan Africa. I got pretty deeply into the former because of my major, but even a thousand foot survey view of Africa demonstrated just how lacking my knowledge was. Learning more about China and India took years of digging up things and I've only recently learned a little about the numerous empires and peoples of the steppes. It makes me mad, really. And it makes me even madder when some dumb nerd dismisses it all as politically correct revisionism. It's an injustice not just to the people who's stories have been left out, but to everyone. The world is such a richer place than is usually taught, and that's something to be embraced. It's especially galling in this hobby, when people bitch endlessly about how everything is always the same dumb tropes and stories over and over. But when you try to show them that there's this wealth of other sources to explore, they stick their heads in the sand. So yeah, nerds are terrible forever.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:00
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Quarex posted:Many years ago one of my gaming buddies made the worrying revelation that a character background of "a happy life with living family" sounded original and compelling. Thing is, you know, a lot of that stuff is really expedient when you're roleplaying a character. You might not want to have to bother with your dude's family, and it's reasonable enough to not want to have to. But then you have to like answer questions of why they're not a factor, and, well...
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Jun 29, 2014 03:01
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History is an amazing thing, as long as you're learning something real. I love European history as well as Mesoamerican, African and other histories. My big loves will always be the golden age of Islam and pre-modern China, but it should be understood that everywhere can be fascinating. England, France, Spain, Korea, Egypt, China, Mongolia - though of course many of these modern nations were very, very different in the past. The trick, basically, is that to get at the real stuff you have to take college-level courses taught by passionate teachers, or else find your own learning. And, unfortunately, outside of the more popular fields (World War II and Rome, for example) that can take some hunting. Good god, though, you can find so many loving books on World War II, Rome or...basically anything that has ever happened to the US. (I personally tend to find history less interesting somewhere around the 1600s to 1800s unless it's really weird stuff like the history of mysticism and its ties to 1800s rationalism.)
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Jun 29, 2014 03:08
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When you get down to it, we still refer to a period of history were the underpinnings of basically all our math and science was being invented, much less the insane advancements in poetry, medical care, education, and so much more...as "The Dark Ages," because white people forgot how to take a bath.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:17
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The thing that really pulled world history together for me was this site, right here. http://www.worldhistorymaps.info/maps.html History is usually compartmentalized, and these maps tear that down.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:20
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ProfessorCirno posted:When you get down to it, we still refer to a period of history were the underpinnings of basically all our math and science was being invented, much less the insane advancements in poetry, medical care, education, and so much more...as "The Dark Ages," because white people forgot how to take a bath. Even the "white people forgot how to take a bath" isn't strictly true, I don't think. I could be wrong, but people cleaned themselves in the Middle Ages. There were baths and stuff.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:21
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Speaking of all of our RPG history being lies...
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Jun 29, 2014 03:22
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ProfessorCirno posted:When you get down to it, we still refer to a period of history were the underpinnings of basically all our math and science was being invented, much less the insane advancements in poetry, medical care, education, and so much more...as "The Dark Ages," because white people forgot how to take a bath. Speak for yourself, the 1000s were the height of Irish civilisation. 
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Jun 29, 2014 03:34
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"Dark" was supposed to refer to the dearth of written material that emerged from that period, and then a whole bunch of written material emerged from the period.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:36
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Someone looking to learn a more international, but still US-perspective take on World History in easily digestible, ten-minute bites could do worse than Crash Course World History. If you learn one thing, it's that the Mongols were the exception to everything. Except the one time they weren't.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:49
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Gau posted:Someone looking to learn a more international, but still US-perspective take on World History in easily digestible, ten-minute bites could do worse than Crash Course World History. Yeah but then you have to listen to John Green, which is a pretty huge sacrifice.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:01
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neongrey posted:Thing is, you know, a lot of that stuff is really expedient when you're roleplaying a character. You might not want to have to bother with your dude's family, and it's reasonable enough to not want to have to. But then you have to like answer questions of why they're not a factor, and, well...   "
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Jun 29, 2014 04:05
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homerlaw posted:Yeah but then you have to listen to John Green, which is a pretty awesome thing. I know this is what you meant to say, your fingers must have slipped.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:14
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ProfessorCirno posted:When you get down to it, we still refer to a period of history were the underpinnings of basically all our math and science was being invented, much less the insane advancements in poetry, medical care, education, and so much more...as "The Dark Ages," because white people forgot how to take a bath. Thing is, the Middle Ages in Europe were just as industrious and progressive, if not more so, as the Renaissance. I have no idea why people portray them as some horrible period of time where everyone smelled like poo poo and burned the local women to death at the stake for witchcraft. I suppose the bubonic plague was really bad, but that wasn't exactly a thing anyone wanted or asked for, and eventually it stopped because people, using science, figured out where it was coming from and rectified the problem.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:22
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Rulebook Heavily posted:"Dark" was supposed to refer to the dearth of written material that emerged from that period, and then a whole bunch of written material emerged from the period. EDIT: I'll read this article tomorrow but it seems like by the early 1900's any historian worth his salt just flat out abandoned the term in its entirety. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 04:22
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Mors Rattus posted:Good god, though, you can find so many loving books on World War II, Rome or...basically anything that has ever happened to the US. (I personally tend to find history less interesting somewhere around the 1600s to 1800s unless it's really weird stuff like the history of mysticism and its ties to 1800s rationalism.) Even that though - I recently read a series of books on the Second World War that pulled off the rose tinted glasses and took a hard look at what actually happened. Lots of information on things that get glossed over - the British fighting the Vichy French in Africa and the Middle East, for example. And then there's how much there is to learn about World War I, which is right in the Eurocentric wheelhouse but gets very short shrift in the US.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:25
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Kai Tave posted:Eberron is slightly better about the whole "D&D pantheon complete with evil gods" business even though it still has to have alignment because the setting contest it was written for wouldn't allow him to do away with it. Nonetheless it has a pantheon that's nominally split between "good" and "evil" gods but it's also pointed out that while most adherents of that particular religion (which isn't actually the only religion in the setting, because gods in Eberron aren't objectively real things you can point to) don't usually go around openly worshipping the Dark Six they will privately offer up prayers and make sacrifices to the various "evil" gods for things like artistic inspiration (The Fury) or safe passage on a journey (The Traveller) instead of ignoring them entirely. I plan on doing an F&F on it after I finish Spears of the Dawn, but the Midgard Campaign Setting for Pathfinder did a pretty cool thing with their own gods. Basically Midgard gods literally have no alignments; they are like the classical gods in that they can be nice folk as well as colossal dicks. Clerics can not only pray to multiple deities and take two domains from any of them, they can choose to follow a different deity for a week and be bound by their dogma. Deities do not really champion things such as Law and Good so much as the weather, war, magic, and important societal concepts. Additionally, all the gods wear "masks" which obscure their true identities, allowing them to take different portfolios and names among different cultures. To that end there's knowledge on who the really popular gods are, but nobody truly knows how many of them there are, or whether or not Deity A is actually Deity B in disguise. Take Mavros the war god, for example. He doesn't care about whether you're a Lawful Evil jackbooted tyrant or a Chaotic Good freedom fighter, he'll grant you divine favor as long as you regularly engage in combat and test your strength. Even priests of Mavros on opposite sides of the conflictfight and kill each other all the time, for it is the way of things. Although the setting doesn't go far enough (it provides "sample alignments" for groups insistent on it), and some of the deities are indeed evil, but it's nevertheless a cool concept. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 04:27
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MadScientistWorking posted:No. The term as coined meant exactly what most people associate with the Dark Ages. That definition only really started to creep into usage after people started realizing they were full of poo poo. Oh I dunno quote:The Dark Ages is a historical periodization used originally for the Middle Ages, which emphasizes the cultural and economic deterioration that supposedly occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.[1][2] The label employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light".[3] The period is characterized by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians. What wikipedia doesn't tell us is that the reasoning presented here is actually backwards: The reason it was considered degenerate, backwards and unenlightened by scholars (and at the time this was the period between the sixth and thirteenth centuries) was because there was so little written material compared to the "height", "light" and "glory" of Rome. Petrarch invented the term as a criticism of the dearth and perceived lack of quality of late (and vulgate) Latin writing in comparison to his own enlightened times and the time of Rome, and from there conflated the lack with a dearth of moral, intellectual and spiritual character - surely only a degenerate people would produce such crap. Then it stuck with historiographers as a term for degeneracy, but the origin of the term is pretty well understood.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:32
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I cannot vouch for how true it is, but I recall reading at some point that in I think Victorian times there was a push towards thinking of the Medieval period as being way worse then it actually was in order to glorify the current era.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:36
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Not just worse, they actively reimagined it to push their own ideals. The whole image of the damsel in distress is a Victorian fabrication. Terry Jones (yes the Monty Python one) did a full series on medieval England and touched on this one in particular.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:37
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Even that though - I recently read a series of books on the Second World War that pulled off the rose tinted glasses and took a hard look at what actually happened. Lots of information on things that get glossed over - the British fighting the Vichy French in Africa and the Middle East, for example. Even the term Eurocentrism is lovely and misleading. The history taught is specifically Rome-England (maybe a little France)-US. Europe is a really big continent that often gets ignored, especially Eastern Europe and the Scandinavian regions, despite the importance of their traditions in modern society. Even inside of the countries we do talk about there's a clear good guy/bad guy delineation that generally ignores social upheaval. It's really bad in literature as well - American Lit ignores pretty much the entire post-civil war to WWI period of literature (the Cynics and later Dark Romantics), European Lit either ignores people talking about actual social conditions or sanitizes them by focusing on their other works (Almost all of the Romantics, but especially William Blake) and aside from a few token instances high schools completely ignore non-"European" literary traditions. You'll see Haiku, for example, but nothing about other forms of Japanese literature, nor will you see any of the Islamic literary moves and shakers like Rhazes and Ibn Arabi.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:42
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There's also the fact the Renaissance era thought that the Classical Period was the best period ever and viewed the fall of it as the most horrible thing to happen ever!
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Jun 29, 2014 04:43
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ProfessorCirno posted:I cannot vouch for how true it is, but I recall reading at some point that in I think Victorian times there was a push towards thinking of the Medieval period as being way worse then it actually was in order to glorify the current era. Not just Medieval period, either. Every high school history teacher who breaks out the old chestnut about the Roman Vomitorium is repeating shoddy scholarship from that era.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:43
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Robindaybird posted:There's also the fact the Renaissance era thought that the Classical Period was the best period ever and viewed the fall of it as the most horrible thing to happen ever! In fairness, not a new thing for European academics. Rome and the classics were considered the pinnacle of thought basically from the moment that medieval universities were founded.
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Jun 29, 2014 04:46
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Even that though - I recently read a series of books on the Second World War that pulled off the rose tinted glasses and took a hard look at what actually happened. Lots of information on things that get glossed over - the British fighting the Vichy French in Africa and the Middle East, for example.
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Jun 29, 2014 05:03
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Quarex posted:True, it would not surprise me if that backstory emerged in some ways as a reaction/safeguard against gamemaster evils. "Oh, I see here you have a family in Sharn! There's actually a thread on RPGnet right now, something like "In Defense of the Murderhobo," where the OP is basically asking why so many characters have no family ties of any sort and are instead just wandering adventurers/vagrants pillaging tombs and killing monsters without end, and a lot of people have brought up the usual "well it's a reaction against GM fuckery in killing all your character's family/friends/loved-ones/pets/etc." but I think that when you boil it down the fundamental reason a lot of RPG characters don't bother with that sort of backstory is simply that the games themselves don't reward that sort of thing in any meaningful sense. Your D&D character can have a rich woven tapestry of a backstory that's ten pages long and full of information on his life and family and hopes and dreams and ambitions but at the end of the day D&D rewards being the biggest, baddest murder-machine (and/or spellcaster depending on edition) on the block and not much else, so there's not a lot of inherent encouragement on the game's part to care about that stuff, but there's a lot encouraging you to care about how many spells you can cast or your damage output or how much money you need for that new magic item. If and when backstory like that matters it's entirely down to how much emphasis an individual GM/gaming group puts on it. Otherwise D&D doesn't give a poo poo whether your last 50 characters are all conveniently orphans, there are dungeons to loot. Of course there are games where stuff like this does matter and is explicitly emphasized by the game itself, which means you're more likely to see characters with these sorts of backstories that don't require prodding and poking by the GM. Pendragon immediately springs to mind. But they aren't super-common compared to games where a character's family is something the game largely doesn't care about.
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Jun 29, 2014 05:31
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| # ? May 20, 2024 00:42 |
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The next book out for Ars Magica seems to be Faith and Flame: the Provencal Tribunal. It looks amazing, and oh my god it's going to be years before they put it out in PDF and I can actually read it.
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