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a pun that bad/good deserves a better game than something derived from 5E
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Jan 28, 2018 07:27
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Self-loathing vampire was more Engels's thing than Marx's, I would think. 
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Feb 6, 2018 18:46
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Selachian posted:And don't forget Alan Dean Foster's "Spellsinger" series; it's a portal fantasy where the protagonist, an amateur guitarist, is transported to a fantasy world and discovers he can do magic by performing Earth music. No, absolutely do forget them if you can. Save yourselves.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:43
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I like the Lunar Empire and the Red Goddess but basically everything else about Glorantha bores me at best. I have a particular dislike for "consensus reality"-based settings and while Glorantha is up there with Unknown Armies in terms of settings/systems that do the best they can with the concept it's not enough to overcome my distaste. Someone once described to me all the ways that Exalted borrows from Glorantha and I'm like "yes, that's good, that's the stuff I want without the stuff I don't" but of course Exalted has all kinds of mechanical and flavorful problems of its own.
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Mar 1, 2018 16:53
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, it's less "the consensus is right" and more "it turns out nobody is wrong". It was a poor choice of phrase, then; what bugs me is belief influencing reality. (Or reality being cleverly set up by the writer so that "nobody is wrong," as you say, even if the in-fiction mechanism is a little more roundabout.) It goes against both positivism and the idea of any single transcendental truth if what is true depends on the subjective experiences of human beings. It makes us too important as compared to the gods, laws of physics, or anything between the two, while still being subject to them. As a fantasy it makes the fictional universe way too small and as a metaphor for how reality actually works it's abhorrent. Josef bugman posted:Mhm, it is that there isn't a single truth at all and we have to live with that. Kind of like real life, but with more shooting lightning from your eyes. Or in other words, I couldn't disagree with this more. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 19:49
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Foglet posted:I think Gloranthan positivists are called the God-Learners. Yeah, and the God-Learning being portrayed as both a practically and morally horrible idea, inseparable from a colonial attitude, and also a nearly-extinct one is basically a big neon sign saying Glorantha isn't for me. Josef bugman posted:Why, if you don't mind me asking? I don't want to turn this into a philosophy discussion but I would like to discuss this. I would describe the problem more in terms of our lack of access to the truth, and while I suspect that some epistemological problems are unsolvable, I would prefer to be mistaken.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:07
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I mean, I imagine speaking words and breathing air are fashionable among conquerors, as well. All you need to discredit the monomyth is all the evidence that it's wrong.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:30
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Wapole Languray posted:Wow guys. Should I continue with the heroquest thing? I was gonna finish the core book then go I to Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes which is all about the lower end adventuring stuff, maybe do a short about Anaxial's Roster which is basically the Glorantha Monster Manual. Absolutely, that's what the thread is for, I'm just here grousing in the margins about the abstract underpinnings of a game I'll probably never play.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:37
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Mors Rattus posted:Do what you want. People getting mad that a setting designed by an anthropologist and actual shaman treats historical anthropologically colonialist attitudes as bad, or getting mad that it explicitly runs on a different logic and set of rules than a world governed by science, is nothing you can do anything about. I'm more "angry" that it doesn't validate the internal narrative of any particular religion or worldview. I don't really care that much which one, I just think a handwavey acceptance of contradiction is unbecoming, and in fact undermines the same reasoning that allows you to say, for example, "colonialism is bad because it killed a shitload of people." Mors Rattus posted:The basic premise - that multiple things can be true simulanteously, even if they seem to be mutually exclusive, because that which is physical is less important than that which is metaphysical - is fundamental and if you can't accept that, Glorantha isn't for you. Well yeah that's exactly what I'm saying.
Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 21:05
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, people will get mad no matter what you do.
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Mors Rattus posted:You'd have some trouble in modern anthropology or even just general history. See, the internal worldview and beliefs of a culture need to be accepted from the internal viewpoint, which is just as important as the outsider's viewpoint. Questioning the beliefs of your subjects is unethical when dealing with them as insiders, even if those beliefs seem to contradict your own, such as if they believe in magic in our world. History, likewise, is not simply about just raw factual data, because interpreting those facts is an act that involves viewpoints. Mutually exclusive interpretations can both be valid. There's a moral and practical necessity to question perspectives, and approach truth with humility about our biases and the possibility that absolute certainty is not a realistic (or even possible) standard, but that's precisely because perspectives aren't the same thing as truth. Interpretations can be "valid" in the sense that we lack the ability to distinguish between them, but that's not the same as being correct. On a more personal note, I'm the son of a Holocaust denier. If the world view I was raised in was accorded the respect that you describe here -- if the approach you're describing were commonplace and not just the realm of a few academic disciplines -- it would have been a disaster for my moral development as a person. In addition, learning to recognize and mistrust ideologies that tolerate internal contradictions (which isn't exactly the same as what you're describing, but it's closely related) was a big part of what helped me turn away from fascism and delusion. I couldn't now live my life honestly if I were to deny people the right to tell me that I'm wrong. I also come from an English literature background so I'm more or less on board with the idea that subjectivity is a thing and you have to have some way to deal with it that isn't just pretending otherwise, and I'm not actually a positivist. But this doesn't excuse us from the practical and moral need to discern between incompatible ideas, it just makes it incredibly difficult and may at times require us to decide and act without certainty.
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Mar 1, 2018 22:50
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Also this isn't even dealing with the next issue, which is that Glorantha, Unknown Armies, Mage: The Ascension, etc. don't just respect perspectives, they reify them, which isn't actually the same thing and probably has even weirder implications. (Not least of which is that there is some absolute reality distinct from perspectives, which is subject to perspectives via heroquesting or whatever, rather than perspectives being subject to reality.)
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Mar 1, 2018 22:55
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Mors Rattus posted:Where the gently caress do you go from 'there can be mutually exclusive but still valid interpretations' to 'Holocaust deniers are a valid interpretation' It isn't a valid interpretation, that's my point. But neither is "magic is real" or, debatably, "the Tapir-men cheated."
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Mar 1, 2018 23:02
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Mors Rattus posted:e: also, do you understand how loving offensive it is to conflate 'there can be multiple truths' with 'oh, so you think Holocaust deniers have a valid viewpoint' Frankly, no, I don't. What I'm describing to you is why I find the idea of multiple truths so offensive and ridiculous. Moreover, I'm not actually accusing you of thinking Holocaust deniers have a valid viewpoint. I'm just saying that it's incoherent to believe in multiple truths and to then reject "truths" on the basis of how evil and wrong they are; evil is an unusable criterion because it depends on the existence of a particular moral truth, and wrong because it depends on the existence of a particular factual truth.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:10
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I've managed to hold this conversation without calling you names despite feeling pretty strongly about this myself and I'd appreciate it if you could do the same. What are you criteria for determining what truths are acceptable and what truths aren't?
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Mar 1, 2018 23:16
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Sampatrick posted:Can anyone describe what God Learners do that makes them bad? They mess with other people's gods and myths in ways that have immediate, real-life effects on those people. One example is that in an effort to prove that the various Earth Goddesses around Glorantha are all really the same being, they swap two of them -- and it works, but it causes a famine for one of the two cultures and a massive surge in divorces for the other.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:48
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Mors Rattus posted:You loving accused me of believing Holocaust deniers had a valid viewpoint. I did not. I assumed that neither you nor anyone else here would think that, and in fact that's the only way my comment makes sense, because if you did think that then it wouldn't make sense for me to say "here's a belief you obviously disagree with, but I don't see how you can square that with other things that you do believe." It was insensitive of me to use that as an example and I should have anticipated it would make you angry; I'm sorry for that. On the other hand, I'm not lying when I describe that as the reason why this matters to me so much. Mors Rattus posted:You are being an intolerant shithead - you just think that because you've put being a Holocaust denier behind you, that's fine. You still believe there's only one right way - it just wasn't the one you were raised with. It's less "one right way" and more "objective reality exists, and our interpretations depend on it." That objective reality may not look anything like I think it does; I suspect that it begins and ends with literal physical things and events and doesn't include things like standards of morality or beauty, but I don't know that for sure. However, this means there's a very important difference between, say, "eating meat is wrong" and "magic exists." The former (in the absence of some objective morality, at least) is a matter of opinion. On the other hand, I might politely refrain from arguing with someone who told me the latter, but unless you argue the definition of "magic" until the statement is almost meaningless, one of us would be wrong about that. Mors Rattus posted:But since you brought up literary criticism, here, maybe an example from that will work: This would be akin to morality; when you talk about theme you're basically making a statement about something that doesn't have a truth value, and maybe referencing some (actual) facts that you think support your interpretation. If you describe your interpretation of a subjective experience based on a common reality, and I describe my interpretation of a subjective experience based on a common reality, and we agree on the common reality but not on the interpretation, then that's not actually mutually exclusive, because you're describing your experience and I'm describing mine. But this is a different problem than if you told me the book was called Large Gods, or that it was written by J. K. Rowling. (And to be clear, that's the kind of "multiple truths" that I'm objecting to -- and why I would find it bizarre to apply the exact same approach one takes to literature to history, even if some suspension of judgment is necessary when you can't be sure what account is reliable and don't want to make unfounded assumptions.)
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Mar 2, 2018 00:22
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Mors Rattus posted:Again: gently caress off. You don't get to pretend you didn't say this thing. I'm not pretending anything. Mors Rattus posted:I have no idea what you think Glorantha is about if you think that the fact that it treats faith, religion and myth as the basis for physical laws rather than physics means that it has no truths or that every belief is equally valid. You have moved your goalposts. I am not moving the goalposts. I came at it from the opposite direction: I saw a setting where physical reality had the characteristics of myth, interpreted it as a statement about physical reality, and didn't care for that. I hadn't actually thought to interpret it as a statement purely about myth, and that's a pretty cool way of looking at it and might actually help rehabilitate Glorantha for me.
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Mar 2, 2018 00:35
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Sampatrick posted:Then I am not understanding where the issue is that Catfish is bringing up. The Godlearners weren't practically or morally bad; they were wrong that you could universalize down to singular classes of Gods because there are small differences between them. This then caused knock on issues which had negative effects on the world. Even groups of people having different beliefs doesn't actually change an aspect of reality; only HeroQuesting does, which is essentially a highly ritualized form of magic. I really don't understand the issue. This is like saying you don't like D&D because D&D has magic and magic isn't real. It's mostly the idea that trying to formalize and understand the physical laws of your world is wrong, by way of analogy from the idea that Campbell trying to formalize myth was wrong. It's not evil for a wizard to want to understand magic and make it work for them in D&D, but in Glorantha (as I understand it) the people who made the most progress in that kind of understanding don't just happen to be evil, but are evil because that kind of formal understanding is both inherently tainted and also error-prone. If you just take it as a statement about the dangers of formalizing myth, then there isn't a problem.
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Mar 2, 2018 00:44
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Sampatrick posted:Disliking something based on a specific interpretation of the text seems weird to me given that there are other, equally valid interpretations of the text. Disliking something because of, for instance, lacking female characters with agency seems quite different from disliking something because of it's allegorical connection to an external text. Atlas Shrugged isn't bad because objectivism is bad or w/e, Atlas Shrugged is bad because the book is too long by far and the prose is boring. Basing a critique on an allegory just leads to critically analyzing books as good or bad based on if you agree or disagree with those allegorical connections. I don't see why you would only want to do one or the other! Atlas Shrugged is bad for both of those reasons, and as I mentioned earlier I think Unknown Armies and Glorantha both do about the best job you could taking a premise that I don't much care for to its logical conclusions. Similarly, I don't see the possibility that someone could come up with a different interpretation and convince me of it and improve my enjoyment of a work of fiction as a problem -- if anything, it's a feature.
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Mar 2, 2018 02:41
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Sampatrick posted:Doesn't this conflict with your own position that there is no truth value for literary analysis? Or I suppose your position could instead be that this particular position is the right position but there are also other position which are valid but wrong (at least in your opinion)? I think it's inconsistent to think that there are multiple right ways to interpret a text but also to criticize a text based on one particular interpretation of the text. I suppose then you could go into issues with authorial intent and if you agree with or disagree with using it in analysis so I suppose even that isn't necessarily true. I just don't think a philosophical disagreement, as opposed to an aesthetic disagreement, has much of a place in critical analysis. There's no absolute truth value for literary analysis but any kind of communication is based on having certain shared assumptions -- even if it's just the language you're speaking and nothing else. Arguing about literary interpretation is basically just figuring out where your last points of shared assumptions are and then seeing whether and where someone is willing to bend. Plus, sometimes you're just mistaken or misremember the factual contents of the fiction, or would agree with something had you thought of it or noticed it and just need to see it for the first time.
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Mar 2, 2018 02:54
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Angrymog posted:Owlbears for me are one of the quintessential D&D monsters, because they follow the mythological mashup style, but are something new. I imagine this has probably been posted before in this very thread, but the Owlbear, along with a lot of other classic D&D monsters, was basically Gygax's table's interpretation of these beautifully lovely plastic toys: http://diterlizzi.com/essay/owlbears-rust-monsters-and-bulettes-oh-my/ The Owlbear is the third one from the right in the first image. You can also spot a Rust Monster on the lower left, and a Bulette front and center.
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Oct 8, 2018 15:15
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I'd much rather have weirdoes making games for themselves than chasing what has a marketing niche. This is by no means a recipe for consistent quality, but who cares? The occasional Nobilis is more than worth a couple dozen Alpha and Omegas or RIFTS or whatever. e: this doesn't negate the observation about hooks and space for players to actually do something being important, just that the two concepts needed to be teased apart Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Oct 10, 2018 |
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Oct 10, 2018 16:19
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Quick point of order -- the Epic Level Handbook wasn't unprecedented by any means. AD&D 2E had "Dungeon Master Option: High Level Campaigns" which is almost a 1:1 model for the content in Epic Level Handbook.
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Jun 26, 2019 16:23
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Promethean's basic premise is brilliant and works perfectly, though. It's also not actually angsty at all, the entire theme of the game is essentially hopeful.
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Jul 6, 2019 02:49
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I mean, among other advantages, regular human beings are the only people who can become Mages.
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Jul 6, 2019 04:53
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EimiYoshikawa posted:Are there rules for bursting out of a Beast's forehead in a shower of indeterminate gore after it sucks you into its lair, Zeus and Athena style? there's nothing of value there that couldn't be done with, say, a True Fae, an Abyssal entity, or just some original critter of your own design Jerik posted:Like I said, I don't know much about nWoD, and I admit I've maybe been negatively disposed toward it because I'm enough of a traditionalist that I kind of had a knee-jerk reaction against completely rebooting and reimagining all the World of Darkness lines (even though I was never a huge fan of oWoD either), but if Night Horrors is typical of nWoD books I guess I ought to rethink that. The nWoD is so different from the oWoD that it doesn't really function as a replacement, it's its own animal entirely. This is slightly less true of the three core lines (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage), which definitely all have moments where it's like "okay this is definitely a response to / commentary on what the author liked or didn't like about the oWoD version", but this gets less and less true as you get into the minor splats, as well as something all the gamelines distanced themselves from more and more with their 2E versions and with more recent supplements. And yeah, Shunned by the Moon is a solid entry in the generally-excellent Night Horrors series of antagonist/adventure hook books but it's definitely not unique or some kind of weird outlier. Werewolves are one of my favorite nWoD splats and their rogues' gallery is a big part of that, but if you really want to see the imaginative range of the nWoD at full blast check out Demon: The Descent. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Sep 2, 2019 |
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Sep 2, 2019 04:02
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