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Kinda the problem when you draw too much from one particular spiritual system and historical era is you end up basically upholding a particular status quo and worldview that was being used to enforce. Religion-based magic in general seems prone to that in a lot of settings, but overall it's a pretty common fantasy thing in general. Oddly enough, feels like the whole idea of 'darkness is only evil because the god of darkness is an rear end in a top hat, get a new one and it might change the world' does actually have precedent in related belief systems.
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Jul 5, 2022 05:28
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dnd religion had the extra problem where you had essentialist forces of Good and Evil defined in your setting and associated with one god or race or another. Dragonlance was infamous for being very mormon on its moral outlook so you had poo poo like the gods of law and good blowing the gently caress up out of an entire civilization because they didn't like their pope. the law/chaos axis wasn't much better since a lot of times law was presumed to be good, or presumed that lawfulness was also a cosmic, objective force that the GM was told to enforce extremely rigidly, like in the case of paladins. A cosmic force that approved of killing repentant criminals before they could backslide and thus make sure they go to heaven.
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Jul 5, 2022 05:41
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The best way to handle D&D religion, if you insist on keeping Alignment, is clarifying that it's not what the universe objectively declares is Good or Evil, it's specifically the dogma of long-entrenched deities. Law and Chaos, Good and Evil aren't moral stances, they're factions in the gods' stupidly complex game of political chess. Yes, there are ways to use necromancy and the magic of creating undead for benevolent and even moral ends, but it will never be Good, because the Good gods say it skeeves them out. You have a problem with it, argue with Pelor, not me.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:18
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girl dick energy posted:The best way to handle D&D religion, if you insist on keeping Alignment, is clarifying that it's not what the universe objectively declares is Good or Evil, it's specifically the dogma of long-entrenched deities. Law and Chaos, Good and Evil aren't moral stances, they're factions in the gods' stupidly complex game of political chess. Go with "Light" and "Dark", "Us" and "Them", "A, B, C, etc". Or have these big metaphysical concepts actually sentient and active in the world, and see what the hell that actually means.
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Jul 5, 2022 08:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Kinda the problem when you draw too much from one particular spiritual system and historical era is you end up basically upholding a particular status quo and worldview that was being used to enforce. Religion-based magic in general seems prone to that in a lot of settings, but overall it's a pretty common fantasy thing in general. Religion-based magic in RPGs would be way better if it were based on how polytheism actually worked historically.
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Jul 5, 2022 11:54
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Whybird posted:Religion-based magic in RPGs would be way better if it were based on how polytheism actually worked historically. I read this entire series awhile back and the pre-5e Forgotten Realms matches it very, very well.
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Jul 5, 2022 11:57
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Arivia posted:I read this entire series awhile back and the pre-5e Forgotten Realms matches it very, very well. D&D oddly enough can be pretty close to IRL polytheistic belief at times, possibly by accident. Even parodic stuff. Some people are true believers in a particular god and/or divine order, some are more mercenary and appease the gods as relevant, some accept the existence of gods but don't see why they have to be happy about it, etc. Also I'm pretty sure a lot of religious ceremony is a mix of 'we did this and it seemed to work' and 'this is fun, and the gods seem to like it'. While a lot of what I know is from other RPGs, which is at least on topic, I'm reminded of the Orisha saying that the gods came because they like the smell of the ceremonial cooking and stuck around for the religion. And stuff like not eating meat for Lent and fasting for Ramadan may or may not serve a clear purpose but it becomes a uniting cultural feature, something to work around and exercise some creativity, or just mix things up for a bit.
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Jul 5, 2022 14:24
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Xander77 posted:Why would you do that? What's the point of keeping Good and Evil, Law and Chaos around, but they're not really good and evil, don't worry about it?!
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Jul 5, 2022 14:28
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4th edition threw out most alignment stuff but that was badwrongfun that pissed off all the worst people that WotC immediately went back to pandering to.
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Jul 5, 2022 14:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:D&D oddly enough can be pretty close to IRL polytheistic belief at times, possibly by accident. Even parodic stuff. Some people are true believers in a particular god and/or divine order, some are more mercenary and appease the gods as relevant, some accept the existence of gods but don't see why they have to be happy about it, etc. I don’t think Ed Greenwood is on Greg Stafford’s level but it was definitely intentional. The thing that really shows how religion works in the Realms for me is at the end of Death of a Dragon, when Azoun IV is on his deathbed. The Cormyrean high priest of Malar shows up like many others to pray, and everyone expects something evil. But no, the Malarite explains - he is my king too, and I want to give him succor like everyone else here.
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Jul 5, 2022 14:58
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Tiler Kiwi posted:Dragonlance was infamous for being very mormon on its moral outlook so you had poo poo like the gods of law and good blowing the gently caress up out of an entire civilization because they didn't like their pope. I thought that Dragonlance's whole thing was "good can be just as authoritarian as evil, the pendulum swings" etc etc. I read dozens and dozens of those paperbacks and mostly just recall 1a) Kaz the minotaur is badass, 1b) the engineer draconians are cool and good, 2) that one green dragon that switched colors after being a slave to gutter dwarves, and 3) that one gnome who was evil and tried to sell the knight of the skull a literal nuke. As for paladins, any game where i can't play a good ol' boy spreading the gospel of moonshine and gunpowder is one i don't want to play. The talk about 'is it ok to play this game' brings to mind the Mormon dude who worked on Doom, who justified working on something with demons and hell by pointing out that you spend your time shooting them in the face with a shotgun. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 15:08
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citybeatnik posted:The talk about 'is it ok to play this game' brings to mind the Mormon dude who worked on Doom, who justified working on something with demons and hell by pointing out that you spend your time shooting them in the face with a shotgun. That's always the part that has me scratching my head over these moral panics. Yes, D&D/Doom has demons. They're also explicitly the baddies and your job is usually to send them back to hell. Sure, there are some exceptions, but those tend to be of the "This character is explicitly the exception to the rule" types.
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Jul 5, 2022 15:22
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Xander77 posted:Why would you do that? What's the point of keeping Good and Evil, Law and Chaos around, but they're not really good and evil, don't worry about it?! "Law and Chaos" have been used as distinct godly political factions of no overt moral bearing in fantasy for quite a while. This was actually how they were originally presented in D&D. Ghost Leviathan posted:4th edition threw out most alignment stuff but that was badwrongfun that pissed off all the worst people that WotC immediately went back to pandering to. The moral certitude of D&D is absolutely a selling point for many people.
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Jul 5, 2022 15:39
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Schwarzwald posted:"Law and Chaos" have been used as distinct godly political factions of no overt moral bearing in fantasy for quite a while. This was actually how they were originally presented in D&D. It was so much of a team allegiance thing that early D&D had "alignment languages" you could use to communicate with others of your alignment regardless of species, as I recall.
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Jul 5, 2022 15:47
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Randalor posted:That's always the part that has me scratching my head over these moral panics. Yes, D&D/Doom has demons. They're also explicitly the baddies and your job is usually to send them back to hell. Sure, there are some exceptions, but those tend to be of the "This character is explicitly the exception to the rule" types. Extremely little of the moral panic around games has ever been based on any of the actual content.
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Jul 5, 2022 16:01
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Killer robot posted:It was so much of a team allegiance thing that early D&D had "alignment languages" you could use to communicate with others of your alignment regardless of species, as I recall. That isn't that weird when actual gods, angels, demons, etc exist. Less weird than every race having one language exactly plus "common". Everything about stock fantasy races is weird tbf, that's like babby's first tabletop politics. You could make something interesting about common. It reminds of independent Indonesia choosing malay as the national language. It was a local trading lingua franca almost no one used as their first language, so you avoid the bad look of using dutch without elevating one ethnic language like javanese. A chaotic good linguist's choice. Common is usually like "elf derived, language of the good guy human kingdom" type poo poo
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Jul 5, 2022 17:37
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Randalor posted:That's always the part that has me scratching my head over these moral panics. Yes, D&D/Doom has demons. They're also explicitly the baddies and your job is usually to send them back to hell. Sure, there are some exceptions, but those tend to be of the "This character is explicitly the exception to the rule" types. All they needed to do was say his name was The Reverend John Doomguy and that he had gone through the proper channels of being trained as an exorcist before joining the UAC as a space marine and methods had simply changed between now and The Year of Our Lord Twenty-Two Exty-Ex. Also they weren't able to fit a "the power of Christ compelled you" midi onto the floppy discs.  Ghost Leviathan posted:Extremely little of the moral panic around games has ever been based on any of the actual content. Well, yes, that too. Wait, poo poo, John Doomguy is canonically descended from William Blazkowicz, right? Hmm... Maybe he isn't descended from Blazkowicz' daughter(s)?
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Jul 5, 2022 17:47
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LashLightning posted:All they needed to do was say his name was The Reverend John Doomguy and that he had gone through the proper channels of being trained as an exorcist before joining the UAC as a space marine and methods had simply changed between now and The Year of Our Lord Twenty-Two Exty-Ex. Also they weren't able to fit a "the power of Christ compelled you" midi onto the floppy discs. Canonically he's descended from William's grandson, Billy Blazes, aka Commander Keen. Edgar Allen Ho posted:That isn't that weird when actual gods, angels, demons, etc exist. Less weird than every race having one language exactly plus "common". Everything about stock fantasy races is weird tbf, that's like babby's first tabletop politics. I like the take where alignment-based languages have a IRL equivalent; ideological jargon.
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Jul 5, 2022 18:21
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Alignment languages are just extremely online.
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Jul 5, 2022 18:37
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:That isn't that weird when actual gods, angels, demons, etc exist. Less weird than every race having one language exactly plus "common". Everything about stock fantasy races is weird tbf, that's like babby's first tabletop politics. good news, there are two very developed human language models for the forgotten realms depending upon how much complexity you want. common is a watered down version of chondathan, replacing thorass as the lingua franca because the chondathan peoples ended up making the central trade routes and mercantile projects of Faerun.
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Jul 5, 2022 18:51
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Schwarzwald posted:"Law and Chaos" have been used as distinct godly political factions of no overt moral bearing in fantasy for quite a while. This was actually how they were originally presented in D&D. I don't think that's really true to be honest, the latter bit. The original rules referred to Law and Chaos as the two alignment extremes, but the creatures listed as being on the side of "law" were things folklore and fantasy associates with goodness and virtue like unicorns, pegasi and treants, while creatures on the side of "chaos" were things Ghouls, Vampires, Medusae, and tellingly, Evil High Priests. I think there's a fairly clear moral implication there. As to alignment languages, I believe Gygax mentioned somewhere that he viewed these as liturgial languages, things like Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic and Hebrew. Things you might not speak in in everyday speech with those close to you, but if you were a traveller from Spain in Poland you could maybe ask for food by reciting the part of the Lord's Prayer that goes "Give us this day our daily bread" in Latin. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 19:29
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Reveilled posted:I don't think that's really true to be honest, the latter bit. The original rules referred to Law and Chaos as the two alignment extremes, but the creatures listed as being on the side of "law" were things folklore and fantasy associates with goodness and virtue like unicorns, pegasi and treants, while creatures on the side of "chaos" were things Ghouls, Vampires, Medusae, and tellingly, Evil High Priests. I think there's a fairly clear moral implication there. The purpose was to tell a DM who rolled an encounter on a wandering monster table whether the creatures would attack on sight. Dwarves and elves won't; vampires and demons will; animals might.
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Jul 5, 2022 19:37
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Fuschia tude posted:The purpose was to tell a DM who rolled an encounter on a wandering monster table whether the creatures would attack on sight. Dwarves and elves won't; vampires and demons will; animals might. That just reinforces that there were clear moral implications to Law and Chaos, and they weren't some Moorcockian cosmic forces of Order versus Change.
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Jul 5, 2022 19:53
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I thought they came from early pre-D&D miniature games like Chainmail/Swords & Spells, where Law/Chaos/Neutral made up the factions and limited what kinds of monsters/characters you could build your army out of.  The alignment languages were there to explain how basilisks, orcs, and wraiths could fight as a single, cohesive army.
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Jul 5, 2022 19:57
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FMguru posted:The alignment languages Like, yeah, no poo poo that even characters with the same language but different political & philosophical bents will draw from alternate reference pools and slang/jargon, that’s a neat way to handle information gathering and confidence work within the limited framework D&D provides. Couldn’t some classes learn opposed alignment “languages” for sneaky purposes, or am I remembering incorrectly?
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Jul 5, 2022 20:09
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:You could make something interesting about common. It reminds of independent Indonesia choosing malay as the national language. It was a local trading lingua franca almost no one used as their first language, so you avoid the bad look of using dutch without elevating one ethnic language like javanese. A chaotic good linguist's choice. Common is usually like "elf derived, language of the good guy human kingdom" type poo poo Pathfinder has been doing some work with that actually in their default setting; "Common" is generally treated as a localized thing, what counts as "Common" for a character generally depends on location as most continents have their own "common" tongue. They also have other human languages that pretty much match up to the various cultural groups and still get used by preference among themselves, the "common" tongue is generally one of those cultural tongues corresponding to a group that previously dominated most if not all of the region it's used in. Basically like Latin in Europe; Rome didn't stay forever but it had enough influence for its language to stick around afterwards. They've been specifying a lot in the more recent adventure paths what "Common" counts as since every PC starts with it by default (but what particularly language that is depends on the game setting). girl dick energy posted:The best way to handle D&D religion, if you insist on keeping Alignment, is clarifying that it's not what the universe objectively declares is Good or Evil, it's specifically the dogma of long-entrenched deities. Law and Chaos, Good and Evil aren't moral stances, they're factions in the gods' stupidly complex game of political chess. To be honest the "creating undead is evil" thing makes sense to me just because it's always been a thing in D&D undead can break control and uncontrolled undead always attack because the negative energy powering them is anti-life by definition. Even with consent to use the body, it's kind of reasonable to argue your creepy robot equivalents having a default "kill all humans" setting makes it unethically reckless to use them as tools. Sentient undead as a rule tend to involve feeding of some kind on mortals, and frequently enough a wild character change that makes them quite willing to toss ethics out the window to do so no matter what they felt in life (i.e. even a former saint that gets turned into a vampire will cheerfully drain kids dry for lunch). Also they tend to go for power, political and otherwise, around them and the only thing worse than a gerontocracy is one where the old out of touch bastards at the top lack the courtesy to die and get out of the way. About the only moral undead options I recall were certain elven undead in Eberron and Forgotten Realms that didn't use the typical negative energy (so no feeding/anti-life attitude by default) and were mostly there as immortal protectors or advisers not direct rulers. Obviously this applies mainly to games that follow D&D rules, other settings could have those things be creepy but possible to do without moral issues.
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Jul 5, 2022 20:16
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RuneQuest/Glorantha has the best treatment of Common tongue - it is literally an invention/blessing of the god of trade and communication, designed to accommodate basic mercantile activity and simple traveler's needs. Called "Tradetalk", it's magically easy to learn or pick up by osmosis, is the same across all of the world, but isn't very good at communicating ideas more complex than "how much for this dagger?" or "where is the nearest inn?". If anyone points out that some feature of it is unrealistic, the response is "well, duh, it's not a normally developed language, it's a literal magical gift from the God Of Trade (hail Issaries)."
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Jul 5, 2022 20:26
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The undead elf that rules over the Sundered Hand in the Icewind Dale game was specifically an elven "not-lich" and was kept about by divine fiat until he learned his lesson. Then you have Crypt Things, neutral grave guardians that go "RETURN THE SLAB" if you fiddle about in there. As for languages, "Common as pidgin, Elf/Dragon as equivalent of Latin/French" was always enough for me. The last 5e game i was in had "common is pidgin, the-place-beneath/TOTALLY NOT THE UNDERDARK GOSH is monsterous-pidgin, this nation of atheists so extreme that they can cancel both arcane and divine powers have a scientifically advanced language that is both highly precise and good for arguing minutia, and this theocratic calvanistic slave state has a flowery poetic language". And yeah, it's nice that the technologically advanced egalitarian gunpowder state that seems morally correct until you realize that they're just as oppressive to anyone that doesn't act like them literally talks/expresses themself differently than the "our living saint said that he has a pet mouse once so now we kill cats on sight because they kill mice" state. But in the loving end I just want to roll dice and hit things with my PC, not go through some deep philosophical debate about whether you're making the world a better place by your actions.
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Jul 5, 2022 20:43
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citybeatnik posted:The undead elf that rules over the Sundered Hand in the Icewind Dale game was specifically an elven "not-lich" and was kept about by divine fiat until he learned his lesson. Then you have Crypt Things, neutral grave guardians that go "RETURN THE SLAB" if you fiddle about in there. Just fyi "a pidgin" is a kind of reduced language with a specific history and certain qualities, it's not actually a language. And confusingly, because pidgins are rarely stable, most languages with "pidgin" in their names are not actually pidgins and have since evolved out of that stage.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:05
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I deep dived the haitian créole wiki and it makes more sense than real french spelling. Occasionally have to read it phonetically to get a word but murdering all the slavers, banning white people, and fixing french is a big resume for a nation so abused.citybeatnik posted:
Depends on the game and group really, but DnD murderhobos is still the easiest/default
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Jul 5, 2022 21:12
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Phonetic spelling is your friend, yo.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:Phonetic spelling is your friend, yo. What do you do about dialects and accents? I guarantee that your phonetic spelling will be different to mine, and now we have lost mutual intelligibility.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:18
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MadDogMike posted:Pathfinder has been doing some work with that actually in their default setting; "Common" is generally treated as a localized thing, what counts as "Common" for a character generally depends on location as most continents have their own "common" tongue. FMguru posted:RuneQuest/Glorantha has the best treatment of Common tongue - it is literally an invention/blessing of the god of trade and communication, designed to accommodate basic mercantile activity and simple traveler's needs. Called "Tradetalk", it's magically easy to learn or pick up by osmosis, is the same across all of the world, but isn't very good at communicating ideas more complex than "how much for this dagger?" or "where is the nearest inn?".
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Jul 5, 2022 21:26
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I once had a Dark Ages: Vampire group where we made characters separately and then discovered there wasn’t a single shared language in the party; the ST ended up going with the “well, everyone speaks some Romance language, let’s pretend that’s good enough so we can move on”
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Jul 5, 2022 21:29
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Occasionally have to read it phonetically to get a word but murdering all the slavers, banning white people,* and fixing french is a big resume for a nation so abused. * Not all of them! The Polish Haitians were granted citizenship and allowed to settle after independence because they came over as the Polish Legionnaires in Napoleon's expedition to recapture the colony, looked around and said "what the gently caress, these rebels are freedom fighters", and defected. Of the 8% of the Legionnaires who survived two years of combat and yellow fever, nearly half of them had defected by the end of the war.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:33
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AmiYumi posted:Okay, but this kinda sucks rear end in playability terms when Common is the “who cares if it’s realistic” DM handwave to “okay Dave speaks Dwarf and Elf, Rachel speaks Elf and Orc, Tom speaks Orc and Goblin, and Pat only speaks Minotaur”. Again, to poo poo on Forgotten Realms, it’s like when 3e split “Common” into something like 8-10 different regional variations and told you to spend cross-class skill points on “Speak Language”; sure it’s more realistic but how many groups want to play charades for the entire session? It can actually be a lot of fun to have communications issues be an important adventure point. You can leverage that to, say, make one or more of your characters matter because you're the only ones who can mediate between two hostile factions who otherwise have no way of communicating with each other.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:41
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Absurd Alhazred posted:It can actually be a lot of fun to have communications issues be an important adventure point. You can leverage that to, say, make one or more of your characters matter because you're the only ones who can mediate between two hostile factions who otherwise have no way of communicating with each other. As someone who's been through a campaign where this came up a lot with a single plot-important language that only one PC spoke (and no real downtime for anyone else to pick it up), I recommend using this sparingly because it's real easy to get overdone, though.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:44
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Xiahou Dun posted:Phonetic spelling is your friend, yo. You can't spell phonetic without fun!
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Jul 5, 2022 21:48
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AmiYumi posted:I once had a Dark Ages: Vampire group where we made characters separately and then discovered there wasn’t a single shared language in the party; the ST ended up going with the “well, everyone speaks some Romance language, let’s pretend that’s good enough so we can move on”
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Jul 5, 2022 21:52
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disposablewords posted:As someone who's been through a campaign where this came up a lot with a single plot-important language that only one PC spoke (and no real downtime for anyone else to pick it up), I recommend using this sparingly because it's real easy to get overdone, though. Yeah, if languages are important in your game you're also going to want to have a way for characters to learn new ones.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:56
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