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Save me from the nerd obsession with maltheism, please.
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Apr 3, 2020 00:45
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Mors Rattus posted:Save me from the nerd obsession with maltheism, please. Scion, on the other hand......reminds me, I hope we get the Mythos and Dragon books soon.
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Apr 3, 2020 01:06
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:WoD/CoD might be the wrong place to seek refuge from that. See, I don't think CofD is particularly maltheist. (Outside of the Exarchs, because they're the Demiurge and you're the would-be Godhead.) I think at its fundamental core it is humanist, but overall I would say it is mostly just generally not in favor of deifying stuff rather than saying deity exists but is evil.
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Apr 3, 2020 01:12
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Mors Rattus posted:See, I don't think CofD is particularly maltheist. (Outside of the Exarchs, because they're the Demiurge and you're the would-be Godhead.) I think at its fundamental core it is humanist, but overall I would say it is mostly just generally not in favor of deifying stuff rather than saying deity exists but is evil. Part of it's extra-academic for CoD compared to WoD though, which I'll readily agree to, because a toolkit setting means a lack of distinct canon, and a lack of distinct canon means a lack of concrete origin, which means it's harder to say "and THAT'S the thing that created us and hates us and wants us to suffer." At least at a macro level. On a micro level, "created us, hates us, wants us to suffer" could be argued for every splat without a stretch.
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Apr 3, 2020 01:35
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I would say that the Chronicles are humanist, and most gods in them are morally grey and deeply inhuman except the Exarchs, who are both more human than many and worse than almost all (except the Annunaki, probably). Though, there is also the fact that Capital-G God may or may not exist; though there's no absolute evidence for such a being's existence and many deities of varying power between us and any hypothetical higher divinity (other than the Avatar, the Ladder leads the way) - I would say the uncertainty of agnosticism in that respect is more universal than maltheism. There are many bad and wicked gods and angels, and a few that seem benevolent but inhuman; is there one above all? There's no way to know and the lesser divinities certainly don't want people seeking out other gods to worship than them, in any case. It's very Gnostic in a very different way from the also-Gnostic Old World of Darkness. E: One point that's very much present is that a lot of creator-figures for splats are either deeply disinterested in their prodigy, malevolent, or were less malevolent but are now dead. Or other, weirder arrangements.
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Apr 3, 2020 01:42
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The nWoD is incredibly explicit about the fact that you can kill the gods and topple their thrones. The closest thing it has to an eternal divine order is the Supernal, which is basically Platonic idealism with any reference to the Monad carefully removed. "In the beginning was the Word" -- but it very deliberately stops there.
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Apr 3, 2020 01:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The nWoD is incredibly explicit about the fact that you can kill the gods and topple their thrones. The closest thing it has to an eternal divine order is the Supernal, which is basically Platonic idealism with any reference to the Monad carefully removed. Oh yeah, that's the metaphysical humanism. Human potentially is completely unlimited in the Chronicles setting, up to and including having already claimed the throne of the gods. The gameline is a bit more cynical about the potential for humans to not then become tyrants in their own right, of course.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:06
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Part of it's extra-academic for CoD compared to WoD though, which I'll readily agree to, because a toolkit setting means a lack of distinct canon, and a lack of distinct canon means a lack of concrete origin, which means it's harder to say "and THAT'S the thing that created us and hates us and wants us to suffer." At least at a macro level. On a micro level, "created us, hates us, wants us to suffer" could be argued for every splat without a stretch.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:06
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Nessus posted:Yeah but with a little intellectual exercise you can turn essentially every fantasy universe, or indeed any structure or historical situation, as an inescapable, miserable dystopia, and this is a common and tedious parlor game online for everything nowadays. A funny thing I realized though is that the God Machine is actually the one splat-creator that loves its creations the most (other than Beast, which doesn't exist), up until they Fall anyway.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:18
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The Oracles, if they exist, are some of humanity's greatest patrons in the cosmos. The God-Machine makes angels to do a job then abandons them or digests them or repurposes them. I do not think it can be said to love, cherish, or even treat with any degree of concern for their welfare, its biomechanical angels.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:26
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Do the Fae hate Changelings or are they just outlandishly callous?
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Apr 3, 2020 02:26
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Tulip posted:Do the Fae hate Changelings or are they just outlandishly callous? They perform hate sometimes, as a grand passion, but like everything else about them it's an act. Most often though the books frame their perspective as an abusive, sick kind of love.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:38
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Tulip posted:Do the Fae hate Changelings or are they just outlandishly callous?
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Apr 3, 2020 02:39
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Keepers, beneath every grand drama and elaborate emotional story they tell, feed on Changelings. Changelings introduce something into their stories that they can't make on their own - a genuinely different perspective or personality. Changelings keep Keepers real, or as real as they can manage. Like many abusers who consider themselves creative, of course, Keepers immediately set about constraining, coercing, and controlling Changelings to ensure that while they might be independent from the Keeper, they don't get to act independently. The Gentry need Changelings, and I'm sure at their core they have a variety of relationships with these other beings that they need and have to tacitly admit have real independent existence. But... I imagine Keepers are deeply narcissistic in the context of human behavior, and so see Changelings as necessary but their needs and desires are completely irrelevant except as part of the story.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:52
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I think it's kind of a distinction-without-a-difference situation, between Exarchs, Annunaki, Celestines in WtF (and you could make the argument that the tier of spirits below them are probably godlike-in-power-in-practice within x or y sphere of influence), the God-Machine as a whole. There's plenty of stuff out there that's functionally godlike in scope of power and incomprehensibility (and if you fog the edges enough you can argue that even poo poo like the True Fae count, just that they're Gods who actually follow rules if you know the rules, like some sort of extreme Catholicism), and just because it didn't necessarily create you to suffer, that doesn't mean it doesn't want you to suffer if you fall under its notice. I feel that there's an important distinction, in fact, between humanism and framing the godlike-power of these entities but rejecting them as actual deities and maltheism. Because the thing is maltheism is loving endemic to rpg stuff, and the framing of these beings as not gods qua god, the treating them as something else that, while very powerful, is not a deity per se... Well, between the way actual religion often gets treated in RPGs and the way fantasy deities are often shown to work, I am exceptionally sick of 'all gods are evil, we must slay them all and seize their power for our own' because, like, I've seen this poo poo before. It's been done. It's boring - and worse, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of most religious thought born out of angry internet atheism. The fundamentally agnostic stance on whether deities (as opposed as to 'immensely powerful beings') are a thing in nWoD is different from that, and that matters.
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Apr 3, 2020 03:04
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I don't need every story to be about maltheism, but I'll accept it as "played out" or ignorant or whatever when someone actually proposes a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. 
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Apr 3, 2020 03:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I don't need every story to be about maltheism, but I'll accept it as "played out" or ignorant or whatever when someone actually proposes a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls
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Apr 3, 2020 03:08
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"You do it to yourself" is just atheism, and while that technically is a solution it's not really relevant to the conversation at hand.
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Apr 3, 2020 03:10
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Mors Rattus posted:I feel that there's an important distinction, in fact, between humanism and framing the godlike-power of these entities but rejecting them as actual deities and maltheism. Invoking other RPGs is funny though, because depending on edition/setting, even D&D doesn't have a single concrete stance, because sometimes there's the creator god, and then there's the Evil god, whose portfolio is Evil For The Sake Of Campaign Third Acts (but not in a fun Better Angels way, just a hack writer way), and the creator might love you and be rooting for you every step of the way, but works on the same floor of office-heaven as Evil god, and gosh, you know my hands are tied about his deeds and all.
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Apr 3, 2020 03:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"You do it to yourself" is just atheism, and while that technically is a solution it's not really relevant to the conversation at hand. Not necessarily. "Why does an all loving God allow evil?" is just as easily counted with "Why do you assume God is the problem in this equation?". The answer is and always has been free will, that without choice you are just an action figure God swirls around. And because you are a free being, because your will is your own, you have the capacity to choose evil. This world is your world, made in your image. The Exarchs aren't gods, they are the 1%. They got power and chose to be assholes with it. The end, no moral. Why would any higher power allow that? Why would it do anything? Does it really matter? The end result is the same. No higher power made people be evil. They chose to be. Why is it some God's responsibility to wipe your rear end for you? Were you somehow lacking the tools to do the right thing on your own? Does there always have to be horn blare and an angel coming down on high for you to understand your moral responsibility? There is wide swath between "God as all-loving hippie force" and "God literally invented the erection to metaphysically define their own reaction to watching puppies get leukemia". "Life isn't perfect, guess God is just a dick" doesn't have to be the only response to some finding someone white trash Dracula snacking on sex workers. e: I mean even in some monotheistic religions in our world we are like concern number 4 or 5 of Gods. God is all loving and all powerful, but you aren't really God's major concern. There are other, lesser spiritual forces that manage us and this world. God is a bit too important to be dealing with you. This isn't maltheism, but God also isn't going to do a thing to save you. Doesn't mean nobody is working in your favor, but it's not going to be God. Mulva fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Apr 3, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 03:29
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D&D does have one really good evil godTuxedo Catfish posted:I don't need every story to be about maltheism, but I'll accept it as "played out" or ignorant or whatever when someone actually proposes a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. The problem of evil only really matters in modern monotheisms. It's just not even a problem at all in a wide range of religious contexts. Zeus being an rear end in a top hat who fucks you up because he thinks your wife is hot isn't a theological problem.
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Apr 3, 2020 03:37
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Tulip posted:The problem of evil only really matters in modern monotheisms. It's just not even a problem at all in a wide range of religious contexts. Zeus being an rear end in a top hat who fucks you up because he thinks your wife is hot isn't a theological problem. Yes, but by that standard the Exarchs, the Annunaki, the higher ranks of the Spirit Courts and so on are all absolutely gods. This whole conversation has basically been about smuggling in monotheistic conceits in order to claim that they aren't.
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Apr 3, 2020 04:08
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Mulva posted:Not necessarily. "Why does an all loving God allow evil?" is just as easily counted with "Why do you assume God is the problem in this equation?". The answer is and always has been free will, that without choice you are just an action figure God swirls around. And because you are a free being, because your will is your own, you have the capacity to choose evil. The Problem of Evil isn't really a solved thing and your answer is especially unsatisfying, because there would be no denial of free will involved in making it so that children don't get bone cancer.
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Apr 3, 2020 04:08
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I don't need every story to be about maltheism, but I'll accept it as "played out" or ignorant or whatever when someone actually proposes a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. It’s a difficult question, the problem of evil, but it is also one that mot religions grapple heavily with and spend a lot of time on. That you don’t like or accept their answers is not the same as them not existing. (I don’t like or accept a lot myself, but they’re definitely there and work for some folks. Nerd maltheism seems to grow from the fertile grounds of angry American atheists raised in American Protestant Christian culture, tho, and is almost always hella ignorant of other faiths and of their thoughts on the matter - and indeed almost always seems to be cloaked in the mindset of that Protestant culture, bu5 with the God switch swapped to “bad, doesn’t exist.” Lemme tell ya: as someone not part of Christian culture at all, it is deeeeefinitely played out and ignorant.
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Apr 3, 2020 04:09
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That sounds like a problem with execution, not category.
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Apr 3, 2020 04:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:The Oracles, if they exist, are some of humanity's greatest patrons in the cosmos.
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Apr 3, 2020 04:19
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Mors Rattus posted:Nerd maltheism seems to grow from the fertile grounds of angry American atheists raised in American Protestant Christian culture, tho, and is almost always hella ignorant of other faiths and of their thoughts on the matter - and indeed almost always seems to be cloaked in the mindset of that Protestant culture, bu5 with the God switch swapped to “bad, doesn’t exist.” It makes perfect sense that in a horror game there will be huge awful things that do evil poo poo, and perhaps with mind-bending levels of enormity and depth behind it. It is when things fall into the same familiar tired assumptions and channels that it starts to lose its frisson and its energy, even if those familiar assumptions and channels are in fact useful for a reason, either as dramatic shorthand or due to connection to ideas in the media gestalt.
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Apr 3, 2020 04:20
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There are certainly ways to do Evil Gods that are more interesting.
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Apr 3, 2020 06:08
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, between the way actual religion often gets treated in RPGs and the way fantasy deities are often shown to work, I am exceptionally sick of 'all gods are evil, we must slay them all and seize their power for our own' because, like, I've seen this poo poo before. It's been done. It's boring - and worse, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of most religious thought born out of angry internet atheism. I'm not sure I understand the distinction you're drawing between deities and powerful beings if you intend to contrast with nerd maltheism, because everywhere I've seen "all gods are evil, we must slay them all and seize their power for our own" seems to begin by rejecting deification and defining gods as merely powerful beings. This isn't to say that I define the CofD as a maltheist setting, nerd-type or otherwise, but if it isn't, it's not because of a lack of spiritual divinity, because the nerd maltheism itself rejects true spiritual divinity anyway and simplifies any god down to an upsized supernatural fat-cat to overthrow. As for the patronage of particular immensely powerful beings in CofD, Luna would probably be the one with the healthiest love for her charges. Her lunes are crazy, yes, but not seemingly on the level of the abusive Gentry, and I think the most interesting take there is to interpret Luna and her lunes with a degree of good faith and actual benevolence, at least towards the Forsaken. The agents of the Principle also seem to mean well for the Created in the long stretch of things, though they lack intimacy or accessibility about it. I think that the Oracles are a more difficult argument. Second Edition underlines, after all, that there's little evidence there are Oracles independent of the manifestation of the Watchtowers. The Crone's a jerk if she even exists, the Gentry are jerks, the Judges are jerks, and the God-Machine is a jerk. Hunter and Deviant don't even really have any central higher power. Geist is the interesting one. The Underworld's bad, but the geister that rise from it aren't especially good or evil, and as catabasis progresses, the Underworld and the deathly forces that rise from it are getting better. Very slowly and piecemeal, but it progresses over time.
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Apr 3, 2020 06:31
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Joe Slowboat posted:The God-Machine makes angels to do a job then abandons them or digests them or repurposes them. I do not think it can be said to love, cherish, or even treat with any degree of concern for their welfare, its biomechanical angels. Quibbling, but I think the G-M can be said to absolutely have a "degree of concern" for angels' welfare. Like, a small degree, but a degree nonetheless. It absolutely reacts to things happening to angels, especially on a large scale. I get the sense that if the G-M is conscious in any recognizable sense it realizes angels are needed to act on / understand the human level and if it's not it is a system set up to respond to a change in angel activity the way say a living human would react to a massive change in white blood cell activity. The problem of evil is pretty interesting but also strikes me as fundamentally western and Christian. But that's okay! Both WoDs (although unbearably especially the oWoD) are distinctly western and quasi-to-literally Christian. The thing is evil is a problem mostly from the assumptions of the Christian conception of God, as being both all-loving and all-powerful. You "solve" it through fun/tedious theology, depending on how you feel about theology, or by ditching one or the other qualifications of God. I've always enjoyed the take that the Manichean or Zoroastrian take on the problem of evil - that the creator is all-loving but not all-powerful, and that evil comes from an entirely separate and opposing force that hates creation - is "the most elegant solution to the problem of evil." Not sure where I picked up that phrasing, but it stuck with me. CoD seems to me, as a toolkit setting, to have "solutions" that tend towards rejecting the all-powerful premise, or tweak it. The Principle is all-loving and might be sort of all-powerful but also is kind of incompetent at acting directly on creations. The Oracles might be all-loving and close to all-powerful, but also choose because of their assumed great Wisdom, to act on the world as little as possible - and implicitly that's the most helpful thing they can do. This makes sense to me because it rejects the idea that the lovely way things are is correct (one possible way to "solve" evil) because that would uh, lead to some fairly boring characters. So something like "if there's good out there - and there might very well be because your PC might want a role model - it can't win this fight on it's own." Which may or may not have good theological grounds but IMO absolutely has good narrative grounds.
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Apr 3, 2020 08:18
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Even if all the Oracles are is literally just the Watchtowers, those are still entities (or architecture) that exists solely to allow humanity to seize upon the Supernal in some small degree, empowering humans. They’re not under the control of the Exarchs and while they aren’t particularly active (and perhaps have no agency) outside of Awakening people, I think it’s fair to say that the ‘Mage splat creator figures’ are benevolent in the sense of being the ones yanking people out of the Matrix so they can learn Adamant Hand and challenge the gods of this world.
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Apr 3, 2020 09:14
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LatwPIAT posted:The Problem of Evil isn't really a solved thing and your answer is especially unsatisfying, because there would be no denial of free will involved in making it so that children don't get bone cancer. It's all the same bullshit, why aren't we just perfect immortal beings that never suffer or experience loss? If God is all loving why would they allow suffering? The answer is the same as it's always been, because without change and challenge you would never grow or develop understanding of the world around you. "But we could do that without genetic birth defects and strokes", says the species that has shown no evidence it can do it at all. The problem of evil is someone saying they got a bum rap, and someone else saying no you didn't. It never ends. And this is just from a Western monotheistic perspective to maltheism, in plenty of religions the answer to "The world is cruel and designed to make us suffer" is "Yep". Your goal is to rise above it. This world is imperfect, and you have to remove your ties to it to truly reach perfection. It is very much tying your soul down and keeping you in a cycle of pain and ignorance. Plenty of religions have a spiritual nature but do not necessarily have a single divine will directing everything. And of course there is always the easiest answer that has been mentioned. "Why would an all powerful God allow suffering?": Because God isn't all powerful, and isn't the only force in existence. All this to say there is an entire spectrum of religious experience in this world and fantasy in general that can be minded beyond "All spiritual forces are pricks".
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Apr 3, 2020 14:07
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I think this talk of what can and cannot be seen as evil, whether by scripture or personal belief, goes to show that every CoD splat having it's own Integrity variant is much better than every splat remodeling Morality. I think it is legitimately more interesting for the setting that a Werewolf doesn't so much sins as it "breaks" towards its 2 halves, or that a Mage of The Eleventh Question will never suffer a moment of self doubt when breaking social contracts and digging deep into someone's life. It feels like an extension of what WoD tried to do with Paths as an alternative to Humanity, but without just having the players pick which groups of terrible acts do you not want to roll Humanity for.
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Apr 3, 2020 14:32
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Baby Broomer posted:I think this talk of what can and cannot be seen as evil, whether by scripture or personal belief, goes to show that every CoD splat having it's own Integrity variant is much better than every splat remodeling Morality. I think it is legitimately more interesting for the setting that a Werewolf doesn't so much sins as it "breaks" towards its 2 halves, or that a Mage of The Eleventh Question will never suffer a moment of self doubt when breaking social contracts and digging deep into someone's life. It feels like an extension of what WoD tried to do with Paths as an alternative to Humanity, but without just having the players pick which groups of terrible acts do you not want to roll Humanity for. It also does a good job of driving home that anyone with a major template (and thus, not Integrity) doesn't view the world in terms of human morality anymore, no matter how you slice it---as much as they're probably the least physically-changed, a Mage isn't fully human anymore (and hoo boy, their newest Night Horrors goes into what happens if a Mage still has Integrity and it's not great for them, or you). It really helps put you in a frame of mind that just about everyone's got an alien mindset.
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Apr 3, 2020 14:50
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Yeah, I like this a lot. CoD/2e Integrity-alikes are a lot more "how are you holding your poo poo together for what you are and what you do" which varies wiiiiildly, and because they're at least the same thing on a per-splat basis, does a much better job of actually encouraging/discouraging a set of behaviors than the Paths, exactly like you're saying. Also, Integrity works much better as a CoC Sanity 'brain HP' type thing than Morality ever was. From the perspective of gothicpunk roleplaying I really can see what they were thinking in terms of Humanity, but it mostly just seemed to punish players for acting according to the assumed behavior of the game. It was just so weird to read VtR 1e corebook describe the Vampire mafia, while also saying that a starting PC could gain a mental disorder from shoplifting.
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Apr 3, 2020 15:12
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I actually prefer Morality to Integrity because Integrity doesn't work well enough as a sanity meter. If it's not going to have specific and consistent experiences pegged to various ratings then I want to see it fluctuate up and down just like your health gauge might, maybe with something like Changeling's mild vs. severe Clarity damage.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:04
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Ferrinus posted:I actually prefer Morality to Integrity because Integrity doesn't work well enough as a sanity meter. If it's not going to have specific and consistent experiences pegged to various ratings then I want to see it fluctuate up and down just like your health gauge might, maybe with something like Changeling's mild vs. severe Clarity damage. I was so relieved when just about every CofD game went back to tiers of breaking points. I think only Demon didn't and that actually makes sense since it measures how much surveillance has exposed your false life.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:07
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I just mostly appreciate that it doesn't simply exist as a tool to punish PC's for acting like PC's. I also agree that it isn't a very good Sanity replacement, since it's replenished with xp instead of ingame actions or skill rolls. Which is why Cover rules, because there are specific subsystems that exist just to feed xp directly into Cover.
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Apr 3, 2020 20:55
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Frankly I think it punishes PCs much more for acting like PCs than Morality did, because not all PCs are going to brutalize or murder people but pretty much all PCs are going to be exposed to stuff that's weird, scary, or traumatic. Integrity amounts to a somewhat stochastic "how long has this character been in active sessions" meter as opposed to a "how willing is this character to gently caress people up" meter like Morality was in 1E.
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Apr 3, 2020 21:20
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There's a quick hack for Mage, based on something it already requires: If you want to increase Wisdom, you need to make 'increasing Wisdom' one of your Obsessions. So I just directly tied the Beats from that Obsession to Wisdom, and voila - a mechanic that limits your magical growth while you're engaging in it, but is fully self-contained and doesn't require actually choosing whether to pay EXP into Wisdom or more Arcana except on the broad character level of Obsession. I never had more than one player pursuing Wisdom at a time, but I bet you could have a collective Wisdom pool of beats the way one can do group Beats with other kinds of EXP.
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Apr 3, 2020 21:24
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