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Night10194 posted:"Why don't we just remove alignment while we're at it!" proclaims one of the Facebook people, thinking this a statement of how mad this is, not realizing that yes, that would be a better idea. Man, it's been multiple editions since I used alignment in DnD. And I don't think we made it through the whole 3E era before I abandoned it.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:21
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| # ? May 25, 2024 02:06 |
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Warhammer really had the right idea where the cultures had different and incompatible goals. (There's also no biological difference between the good elves and evil ones.)
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Jun 15, 2020 23:22
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moths posted:Warhammer really had the right idea where the cultures had different and incompatible goals. yea Warhammer got it right. Why are the Orcs fighting the Wood Elves? Because the Orcs love a good fight and want to use the Elf's trees to build weapons, the Elf doesn't like that much and will kill them for trespassing like they'd do anyone else. There's no 'biological' factor here, Orcs don't NEED to fight, they just fuckin love it, Wood Elves don't NEED to kill everyone who comes in their forests, it's just gently caress those assholes messing up the nice forest the Elves worked very hard to make nice. Also yea, the only difference between the, what we're up to four flavors of elves now? Just where they live and how they view the world. You know, normal poo poo in a high fantasy world.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:33
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 15, 2020 23:35
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Okay, now do Skaven.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:42
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Okay, now do Skaven. they're addicted to magic crack and the whole goddamn world is full of copper wire baby!!!!
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Jun 15, 2020 23:44
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 15, 2020 23:46
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Okay, now do Skaven. Skaven are like regular rats, where if they’re raised in a stressful, tightly packed environment, they grow up to be very aggressive. The Skaven have always lived under situations of extreme scarcity that have made them inclined towards a degree of manic expansion. Couple this with a near-addiction to uranium and a world where everyone hates them, and it’s easy to see how they might turn towards fascism. I’ve always suspected that Skaven that were raised in safer environments would have the same sort of cultural and moral variety as the other species.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:49
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I mean they are canon-wise driven insane by their magic rocks but yea the first one was more accurate
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Jun 15, 2020 23:51
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Meinberg posted:I’ve always suspected that Skaven that were raised in safer environments would have the same sort of cultural and moral variety as the other species. It would also help if they ditched their patron deity, who keeps pushing them towards grand gestures and wunderwaffen because he thinks it's funny when the rats blow themselves up.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:53
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TheArchimage posted:It would also help if they ditched their patron deity, who keeps pushing them towards grand gestures and wunderwaffen because he thinks it's funny when the rats blow themselves up. Thus my desire for a faction of Skaven that worship Ranald.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:54
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Skaven are rats who are also fascist; personally my favorite Skaven concept is the idea of some of them going anarchist or otherwise non-fascist and forming a free, not-awful Skaven society somewhere. I call this concept ‘Homage to Ratalonia.’ Skaven would be much more boring if their society didn’t have to constantly be awful to them to produce rat fascists, because the most interesting parts of Skaven society are all the ways the Skaven leadership and god have to put in effort to maintain the status quo.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:54
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Skaven were also aware that Nagash, a super-vampire guy, was trying to become master of the world, and they intentionally thwarted his plans. Various versions of the fantasy game have had "evil" "good" and "unaligned" factions, for example placing the chaos, vampire, and dark elf factions in the Evil category - but in Warhammer that's not really codified as a defining universal force. Instead there's the gods of Chaos who are probably literal manifestations of thinking people's terror, greed, etc., and then there's the forces aligned against Chaos's attempts to invade and destroy the world, like the high elves and the dwarves and at least some of the human factions; and then there's unaligned factions like the ogres and the orks and the tomb kings, who just have their own agendas that aren't particularly concerned with Chaos one way or the other. While the skaven are all skaven and the orcs are all orcs and thus technically any given skaven or orc is nominally aligned with their faction, the game just doesn't do that racial-determination-of-alignment thing. There's no special reason why anyone can't or shouldn't have a vampire or a orc or even a chaos lord doing things that are "good" morally speaking; what matters are goals and plans and approaches. But you can't take this too far. The skaven are invariably described as vicious and backstabbing and horrible, ogres basically love to eat people like it's the best goddamn thing, and orkish love of warfare does not broach concepts like "maybe peace could be nice?" or being merciful or whatever. Warhammer is better on the whole alignment debate than D&D, but it's not excellent by any means.
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Jun 15, 2020 23:59
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It also did have normal Alignment in the 1st edition of the RPG but dropped it by 2nd.
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Jun 16, 2020 00:02
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Ilor posted:"You fuckers think we're vermin who spread plague and disease and always try to push us underground into the margins of society. But we have a lot of loving mouths to feed, so if you won't give us access to the resources we need, we'll take them. Also, Warpstone is a hell of a drug." "But, but you DO spread plague and disease! You have a religious order called the Plague Monks, for goodness sake!"
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Jun 16, 2020 00:17
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Seriously though, Warhammer is no shiny example here. It would be easy to argue that, by making an entire species that loves fighting above everything else, you might not make them directly evil, since fighting is arguably morally neutral, but you sure are putting them on the fast tract for various atrocities.
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Jun 16, 2020 00:28
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 00:32
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My favorite warhams thing was when they did one of their big international story campaigns for Order vs Chaos, they put Orcs on the side of Chaos. And Orc players everywhere basically went "Uhh, no, that's dumb" and universally revolted and did nothing but fight the other Chaos factions. I think they acknowledged it in universe by having the Orcs loot poo poo off Khorne's champion.
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Jun 16, 2020 00:38
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Kurieg posted:My favorite warhams thing was when they did one of their big international story campaigns for Order vs Chaos, they put Orcs on the side of Chaos. And Orc players everywhere basically went "Uhh, no, that's dumb" and universally revolted and did nothing but fight the other Chaos factions. I know during the End Times the biggest Orc warlord Grimgor beat up Archaeon himself, Chao's Champion.
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Jun 16, 2020 00:53
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The orcs want to cut down forests for its lumber, and the elves live in the forests and want to protect it, is a pretty good angle for conflict because it's a material basis. IIRC this is even how the initial fighting between Orcs and Night Elves in Warcraft 3 was portrayed: the Orcs had just landed in th new continent of Kalimdor after having finally escaped the humans of Azeroth, they start rebuilding their society, then the Night Elves attack because the Orcs's shredders have been cutting down their sacred/ancient forests.
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Jun 16, 2020 02:03
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What's funny is that alignment in the Chainmail wargame that D&D grew from was basically just a red jersey/blue jersey situation for Law and Chaos without much metaphysical or philosophical bullshit. Gygax took that and intentionally made it worse!
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Jun 16, 2020 03:29
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It wasn't that long ago that you had black hat / white hat cowboy morality. It's a useful shorthand for "this is the villain, this is the hero" and it works when your story is limited in scope to a train robbery and a shootout. I think when people say they want evil orcs to kill, what they're articulating is that they want that clear-cut instance of good guys vs bad guys. They don't want to fight dehumanized Native Americans, they want to take on Bad Bart the 6-gun king and his Rootin' Tootin' Rowdy Outlaws. You could look into it and realize that Bart is a product of his time, and is almost assuredly a better human than the rail barons he robs. And I think that's more than people want, but that's where you get into group expectations. It's a fantasy game and it's sometimes ok to pretend that the that morality is clear-cut. The frontier lawmen PC are the unquestioned heroes, the villains are no-good bad guys bent on exploding orphan trains. But where you get into seriously terrible poo poo is when you start mixing in real world analogies. The bandits are Mexican? No, that's just being racist. The orcs appropriate indigenous cultures? Jesus, no don't. Humanizing goblins makes them seem more deep, but it also takes away what makes them goblins. Now you've got small green humans, which is more ambiguous to stab than a hateful green bastard. I get what's being said about "evil races" being a toxic idea, and for the most part I agree, but I feel like making them playable characters closed more doors than it opened. Instead of monsters, they became different looking people with different perspectives, which is probably more hosed up.
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Jun 16, 2020 04:14
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 04:35
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Absurd Alhazred posted:The problem is half-measures. If these are intelligent beings, why are they a monoculture? We aren't! Why aren't there several cultures that are made up of members of several species? Why are there stigmatized half-breeds between "species" that can procreate? Those things are all reproductions of historical colonialism and race theory in fantasy form. What really drives me nuts is that you'll have like, moon elves, sun elves, night elves, star elves, wood elves, high elves, dark elves, underground-but-not-drow elves, sky elves, wing elves, mer-elves, four seasonal varieties of faerie elf, wild elves, etc. Then like, Orcs. Who are evil and live in their own filth. EDIT: Warcraft actually tries to have variety between the Orc clans, but it's pretty much a scale of yikes to unbelievable racism. GreenMetalSun fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 04:46
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 04:52
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Absurd Alhazred posted:All these elves being distinguished by measurable subracial differences, too. What if elves were dogs
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Jun 16, 2020 04:54
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The takes on skaven here are reasonable and honestly pretty compelling. I like them a lot, and it fits into my personal interpretation of skaven. That being said, the argument is weakened by the fact that we never actually see that. There are no good skaven, so far as I'm aware. There are no examples of "Here's what skaven would be if they weren't raised in fascist hellworld." It's similar to the issue with the Imperium in 40K. In that setting, you never see an example of a human society surviving without fascism, so it makes it easy to come to the conclusion that fascism is necessary to survival. In this, you never see an example of skaven not being fascist and horrible, so it becomes easy to come to the conclusion that fascism is inherent to the nature of skaven.
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Jun 16, 2020 05:20
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40k has some human enclaves who joined the Tau. Some editions undercut this by hinting that the Tau are an entire culture run by mind control but I think recent editions kind of buried that thread.
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Jun 16, 2020 05:22
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JackMann posted:That being said, the argument is weakened by the fact that we never actually see that. There are no good skaven, so far as I'm aware. There are no examples of "Here's what skaven would be if they weren't raised in fascist hellworld." Skaven that humans would call "good" wouldn't survive their childhood. Which I guess is something of the point. You're framing them in a human viewpoint, ascribing them human motives and failings. I keep mentally coming back to old star trek, where every alien culture and species were basically "humans, but..." with one or more sci-fi tweaks. And I guess the reason for that is that "rats, but nazis" is harder to relate to. People can easily identify with "humans, but rats" and then transition into "humans but rats and fascists." (But I repeat myself.) I think fundamentally the role of something like the skaven isn't to be related to. They're monsters. Human-defined "Good' skaven undercut that, making them "humans, but..." which breaks the narrative identity of skaven. If you go that direction, why have skaven at all? If they are going to have human minds, human intelligence, and human values, just make them humans.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:08
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:40k has some human enclaves who joined the Tau. Some editions undercut this by hinting that the Tau are an entire culture run by mind control but I think recent editions kind of buried that thread. 40k Orks remain pretty much "generic barbarians" though, right?
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Jun 16, 2020 06:09
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moths posted:Skaven that humans would call "good" wouldn't survive their childhood. Which I guess is something of the point. You're framing them in a human viewpoint, ascribing them human motives and failings.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:16
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moths posted:Skaven that humans would call "good" wouldn't survive their childhood. Which I guess is something of the point. You're framing them in a human viewpoint, ascribing them human motives and failings. Well part of the bigger issue is that it's hard to have a group of creatures that are sapient, think radically differently from humans, and also contain anything like human-like diversity. And most of these people end up interacting with humans in-setting, who have all that diversity. So you have humans, who are very messy and diverse and weird, and then you have a bunch of species that just seem like a narrowed down part of humanity, for the most part. And that, of course, quickly gets into trouble, both specifically (you are likely to end up with parallels to actual humans that get sticky) and philosophically (the lack-of-choice problem). I think there's nothing wrong with stuff that's just evil and you feel fine killing it, but species-wide evil in sapient creatures is super messed up, because it's just a beacon to people who want to treat other groups of humans like that. And it's completely unnecessary to boot - just make them Vampires or Skeletons if you want human mechanics, or make it their choice to be evil if you for some reason want evil people. Make them Nazis or whatever. There's no reason to say "this species are all Nazis" because Nazis advertise themselves just fine by wearing and doing Nazi poo poo.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:17
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40K Orks are masters of ingenuity who can make any random poo poo they thought up work through the sheer power of wanting it to work. Experimenting and failing is normal for them. Meanwhile the loving dumbo humans keep using the same poo poo they used ten thousand years ago and dont actually know how any of it functions because theyre too afraid of trying to come up with new things or trying to understand the technology they have.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:24
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Absurd Alhazred posted:All these elves being distinguished by measurable subracial differences, too. Ultiville posted:40k Orks remain pretty much "generic barbarians" though, right?
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Jun 16, 2020 06:24
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Ultiville posted:40k Orks remain pretty much "generic barbarians" though, right? Sentient fungi hooligans on an intergalactic rowdy pubcrawl, but yeah.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:25
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It's important to remember that really iconic monsters are often - maybe usually - metaphors for some particular human fear. Vampires aren't really about garlic and bats, and skaven aren't really about backstabbing rat people. When you humanize them as part of making them playable, or more sympathetic, or even just to have enough depth to be believable, you often necessarily dilute the metaphor. We have a cultural memory of the Black Plague and the Skaven effectively evoke it, I'd guess as a foundational reference on which the earliest games workshop lore for them was built. Vampires are about precious innocent female virginity and its loss. Sometimes the metaphors and cultural references are more complicated; elves reference sidhe, and rusalka, and svartalfar, and a dozen later influences, and then of course Tolkein's conception of them dominates... and he was referencing a human sense of the loss of ancient synergy with nature, the long-lived first people listed in Genesis, etc. etc. So skaavik the friendly skaven member of your WHFRPG game who likes carrot stew, purple velvet outfits, warpstone, and long walks along the wharf... kinda isn't so much about evoking the horror of the bubonic plague, anymore. He may be an interesting character to play, but the power of the metaphor is subsumed. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 06:37
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Ultiville posted:I think there's nothing wrong with stuff that's just evil and you feel fine killing it, but species-wide evil in sapient creatures is super messed up, because it's just a beacon to people who want to treat other groups of humans like that. Again, if you're applying human-defined concepts of good and evil to an alien / monster / robots /whatever, why not just make them humans? Monsters fill a role as "other" which is a terrible place to file people but is ok for make-believe monsters. People who want to treat groups of humans like that will do that anyway. I feel like humanizing your monsters makes it easier to draw lovely comparisons as-is, because you're already taking the monster halfway to being a person. E: Others as a proxy for base fear is a perfect comparison. Skaven darkly reflect humanity at its absolute worst - #NotAllSkaven dilutes that and confuses the imagery, and then you just have "humans in rat bodies" instead of a symbolic representation of what can go wrong with society. moths fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jun 16, 2020 |
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Jun 16, 2020 06:38
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And fwiw when the fear that's embodied by the monster is "foreign people" you've got an irredeemably problematic poo poo mess of a concept. Dungeons and Dragons, I'm looking directly at you.
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Jun 16, 2020 06:55
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Atomic Robo is relevant to this discussion https://www.atomic-robo.com/atomicrobo/game-night-03
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Jun 16, 2020 07:02
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| # ? May 25, 2024 02:06 |
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I tend to fall back towards Hobgoblins, mostly because they're the only "monster" that has a detailed warlike culture. They don't have to be -evil- to be an enemy to your PCs, or to the society those characters exist in. They can just want what that Kingdom has. Land to live off of and expand across, access to resources. Nothing the Volo's book describes about Hobgoblins is particularly unnatural, real humans have done much the same all through history. Connects back to another concept, that I think Matt Colville once talked about regarding campaign settings. The question was if the various kingdoms... both human and not, within your world aren't at war. Why is that? Because peace isn't an easy thing to keep, it can take a lifetime of work from multiple people and depending upon political climate within the setting, one of those people being removed can cause things to fall into chaos. Not what everyone wants to do in regards to running a game, but it can create an interesting environment for the players. And it kinda reminds me of a clip from some comic, where a human dude is asking his elf companion if he knows any elven songs to sing while they travel. "Most of them are about killing humans." He asks the dwarf among them the same... "Nay, also mostly about killing humans."
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Jun 16, 2020 07:46
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