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Arivia posted:The Wall of the Faithless is basically the theological (NOT thematic) equivalent to Christian Hell - believe in a God or face eternal suffering for not doing your part. If I'm not mistaken, it's actually weirder than that. The eventual fate of every dead person is eventually becoming part of the (spiritual) landscape. Being faithful to a God might mean you become a nice rock on top of some holy mountain instead of a literal brick in a literal wall, but eventually everyone turns into something.
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Mar 11, 2022 22:29
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Telsa Cola posted:Every god in the all the pantheons lining up to pull divine pranks on the one atheist in the world's longest two boats and a helicopter joke. I'm pretty sure this was a Fritz Leiber story.
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Mar 12, 2022 03:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:also there's a giant bat demon in the mix. well why not, really
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Mar 12, 2022 19:13
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KingKalamari posted:So you end up with this conundrum where the rules are rewarding players for doing things that, while not necessarily evil per se, are not what most people would define as virtuous alongside a morality system that says that says some of the people delving into this dungeon are going to be lawful and virtuous. So what you end up with is a game that needs to justify how going into a dungeon, murdering the guys who live inside it and clearing out all the shinies is actually an act that a lawful good character would totally do... For the longest time, the big joke with paladins was that their alignment restrictions functionally meant they couldn't play the game in the same manner as other characters. Either they'd be played like a murderhobo, which by the rules meant they should fall and lose their powers, or they'd get stuck policing all the murderhobos...which incentivized finding an excuse to make the paladin fall so that everyone else could get back to having fun. So as you said, the solution to this dilemma is to stress that murderhoboing can be perfectly lawful good. Adding good and evil to D&D really was its original sin. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 29, 2022 23:49
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SirPhoebos posted:On the topic of 40K (but also sci-fi/fantasy in general) I've always found the the conceit of "these space racist humans aren't prejudice against ethnicities because they're too busy being space racist towards aliens" to be rather dubious (even if totally understandable from a marketing perspective). That concept (like many things from 40K) originated in the magazine 2000 AD, which was a little less subtle about it.
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Apr 1, 2022 01:16
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Tiler Kiwi posted:
That's Mickey.
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May 29, 2022 17:53
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Tiler Kiwi posted:I think the problem with a lot of the "superman turns BAD oh no" stories is just that the only real 'fix' undercuts the entire premise - you have the superhero lose to some other superhero or get talked down, which doesn't really address the fundamental problem, or you have them lose to mundane forces, in which case they weren't really 'super' in the sense of being able to essentially veto the entire political apparatus at any time with their sheer power. Plus the problem isnt the superhero going 'evil' at all, rather just the problem being the unaddressed question of 'what if the political dimension was entirely replaced by superhero fiat'. The one comic series that I know of that sort of went into it was Fist of the North Star, where the states of post-apocalyptic world are basically just cults organized around people who can explode people with their fists. Its not a great world to live in if you can't do that. It's not that the political dimension is replaced by superhero fiat, but rather that superhero fiat is an analogy for the political dimension. Like, ultra powerful entities that we sort of have to work around with ritual and contracts in order to survive in this world already exist. That's any given bureaucracy.
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Jun 15, 2022 23:48
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Tiler Kiwi posted:I will say the different there, as minute as it can be when you're dealing with such entities, is that governments and states are bound and chained by the very things they have to implement to sustain their own power. Genghis Khan famously decided to not murder every peasant since, if he was going to sustain his new empire long term, he'd need a tax base. You can fight and eek out real victories even against a plutocratic state since, as it is far cheaper and efficient to rule by law than by force alone, you can take those very laws and use them against them. This sort of relationship and ongoing series of developments was what gave Marx confidence that the capitalist state would destroy itself in the end. You can espouse a lot on why bureaucracies fundamentally fail to address your needs,, but the entire political theory of why the superhero decided to give you your stolen purse back as opposed to creating new subatomic particles by hitting you in the face really hard just amounts to "well I guess they felt like it". This seems too fine a distinction to make if you also want to argue that the Otters in Root are capitalists or whatever. If I were to posit that real world ideologies are based on material circumstances while the entire political theory of cute board game animals was "well I guess they chose to play by the rules of the game" you wouldn't find that very convincing. Stories about superheroes are as much defined by their narrative as games are defined by their rules. I think the largest distinctions between the two are largely downstream of the fact that valuable superheroes IPs are more constrained by market forces than indie table top games.
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Jun 16, 2022 01:31
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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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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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WotC has been embarrassed by its own allegations the past
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Sep 15, 2022 15:16
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The two options aren't "100% serious book" and "satire." There are other things.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:14
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That kind of follows previous editions of D&D. Traditionally, if you wanted good reading you didn't pick up the Player's Handbook or the Dungeon Master's Guide, you took the Monster Manual.
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Dec 20, 2022 01:02
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This wouldn't be a problem if modern schools still taught card shuffling.
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Dec 21, 2022 17:48
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thought to myself "is this the fox rock?" before I clicked the link
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Aug 3, 2023 06:04
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Orcs are just elves that fight for the other guy.
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Oct 18, 2023 23:19
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Mechanical Ape posted:How many aliens/nonhuman races could be replaced with humans of the same coded culture without losing anything significant? Like, if your setting has dwarves who are basically just Fantasy Scots, you might as well eliminate the middleman and have Fantasy Scots in your setting. Same with Orcs who are Fantasy Huns: just use people with a Hunnish culture and put the extra effort elsewhere. To bringing this back to Conan, for all Robert E Howard's original stories have some truly odious and racist poo poo in them, they're mostly consistent in that the different races are still (some variation of) the same base human animal. It's not hard to make the argument that D&D style fantasy races are a step down for not only laundering the racism but making it more factual to the setting.
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Oct 19, 2023 01:00
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girl dick energy posted:My favorite LotR theory is that "the Eagles" were a Gondorian censorship/propaganda, and everything done by "The Eagles" was actually done by factions of orcs who were fighting against Sauron. It was only after the war was over that their contributions got swept under the rug in order to make a clean, politically-convenient narrative. Okay, that rules.
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Oct 19, 2023 19:27
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