Building fantasy cultures underuses scientific knowledge - Discuss

Most on em, few rare gems i've mostly already mentioned.

 

Well, you mentioned "usual tired old ARPG shit". That's quite specific and barely covers "most" RPGs and is most likely the sub-division of the genre where you wouldn't expect all of that anyway, hence the moniker of "action"...

 

You tell me. You said it. You wrote about "uninformed players". So you don't even know what you are talking about yourself ? Why i am not surprised.
You said that most games* being made are good enough for - again - "uninformed" (read = retarded and/or without education) players. So the question is - why does it matter ? Why do you care about those kind of players ? Why aren't You questioning if games for "informed" players are being made instead ? And why not.

* CRPGs remember ? Pay attention this time, it's the genre in question. I won't help you every time a word is used with a meaning that is obvious from the context.

 

That was AwesomeButton who wrote about that, I'd rate you Participation Award but I've had that rating removed from my options for reasons unknown. So I'll just go with the good old fashioned

 

I am not interested in AwesomeButton opinion on the subject but in Yours. I asked You what You meant by using those words in Your post. Your stance in this thread was - as i understand it - consistently that all this world building using actual knowledge and education is bullshit and unnecessary and CRPGs don't need it. Or did i misunderstood You this whole time ? If i did then please try to make one non-"hurr durr i am an idiot" answer and help me with my confusion about it. Or is it too much to ask ? Pretty please.

 

Are you a spastic?

 

What - what are you quoting. Where did i say this ? Instead of quoting something i haven't said - please could you make a real answer. You just made another "hurr, durr, me be idiot" one. Despite me specifically politely asking you not to.

 

I've already answered that question. And without you giving examples of games that don't meet your world building criteria I have nothing to address. I have never said world building is unimportant or not needed, what people have to do, and what I'm saying, is that "what's actually wrong with current world building standards?" You might think a game is 'better' because you think XYZ sub-culture within the game is supposedly 'more fleshed out', but this is utterly subjective. Further, the whole point of fantasy is to get away from cultures that represent too much realism, so overstating a lack of something that's both subjective and largely irrelevant is ludicrous. But the conversations start when you mention some games, and if your only example is some AAA well known garbage-tier RPG then that hardly represents an 'issue' within the whole genre.

 

Yes, superb editing there, shame I caught you in the act, eh...

 

Not "superb editing" - i corrected my mistake instantly and since it didn't show as "last edited" under my post i thought it wasn't seen by anyone. Most of the time it works like that unless someone is REALLY quick to read and answer. Still, sorry about that - ok ?
Besides, that doesn't explain why you concentrated on my irrelevant nitpick instead of answering the question at that time. Which - you finally did now, so kudos to you.

 

For the record, I too don't know what IncendiaryDevice's argument is. Every time he looks like he is trying to make an argument, he goes off on some tangent, and the argument gets lost in the eloquent shitposting and personal insults.

 

I just want a PC RPG set in Tekumel

thank you

 

I agree in principle, but I wouldn't shy away also using experts if budget allows it. I would like to return to something I wrote early in thread. I think it would be beneficial if management commits to this too and there are positions where just 'excel guy' may not be enough. If for nothing else, we may be talking quite different cultures here and I don't know, just thinking out loud here. Going in environment where there are people whom culture is influenced a lot by fantasy books, comics, other games, it might be tempting to give 45 min presentation which would be very easy going, very good experience, only that intellectual substance would be like 5 minutes.

And there is other side of the coin too. Like we had static game worlds in 80's. Not there's been computers for quite a long time, yet, even minor improvements has happened, for me it still looks like settings are mostly static. Makes one wonder why is that?

 

Knowing publishers, they will listen to the presentations and proceed to ignore them.

 

Considering every tabletop version of Tékumel sold poorly, it's not surprising that no-one ever attempted a CRPG Empire of the Petal Throne. The combination of influences from Pre-Columbian Central America, ancient Egypt, and the Indian subcontinent are simply too alien to the foundations of D&D in classical mythology, medieval legends, faery tales, and the fantasy literature derived from them.

 

Morrowind sold really well though despite being alien as fuck.

 

I really dont think unusual settings are off-putting with regards to sales, particularly long-term sales, just off-putting to excessive sales, the 10million sales target, but even then thats not a factual position to take, its just one thats assumed by overly paraniod number crunchers. Unusual settings have made lots of people wealthy over the years.

 

Few things discussed in this topic earlier.

Bar fights
How does bar fight differ from other fights? What people expect from bar fights.

This is something fellow DM once told me from one of his P'nP campaign.

So his group of adventurers had completed some minor quests. They were celebrating their victories and getting drunk in some tavern. For a reason or another there is a provocation or something, fight happens.
At some point one of the players decided to take a chair and hits one of the villagers with it, villager drops to the floor. Pretty soon there is silence. Party's cleric goes to check the situation, villager is dead, side of his head fractured. There is nothing he can do, small village, no priest there who could help either. I don't recall for sure what happened next, villagers starting to panic, yells outside, some of villagers trying to gather a mob and reach for whoever was the law there, maybe but anyway party realises that they better leave, fast and so they escaped to the night.

So what happened in the fight. When guy took the chair as weapon, it became in AD&D terms short club. So successful attack was 1d4 for damage and +1 or 2 to damage from characters strenght. Villager might have survived from it (2-6 damage), but they had house rule to use (unofficial) critical tables if attack roll was natural 20 (on d20) so after the attack roll DM rolled for critical, which was pretty high, x2 or x3 for damage. So even if damage roll were been just 1+(1-2), it became x2 or x3. In this case much more. NPC's like villagers or well, general folks in AD&D had 1d6 or 1d8 hitpoints.

Guy who told me this, said that it was quite interesting turn. Party of beginning adventurers were now fugitives, wanted for murder wondering how to deal with the situation. I never get to know how their campaign ended, but it was interesting situation indeed. I hope it also tells something about freedom of pnp.


There is also something regarding magic. This was just a rumour that was circulating back in the day. Guys were starting to play AD&D Ravenloft. DM had teleported mid to high level party there. So he describes surroundings and players get interested about the castle. One player starts to get very interested, pesters DM from lot of questions about the surroundings and people are start asking if we could start getting inside or something.
No, says the player whom had asked lot of questions, whom happened to be a mage. We should rest, I need to memorise my spells.

So they do, and mage says, we should take another look at the cliff. So they do that and then he tells the DM and party, that he is going to drop the castle to the sea. So everyone is like that's silly. So he had rock to mud spells and quite some other stuff memorised. DM says, cliff is too solid, this is silly. Player crafts the note, gives it to DM, it's math about how much he can convert rock to mud. Guys math appears solid. So game sessions ends. DM says he get back to it, then nobody sees him for moths.

It was a rumour, but there were that sort of players. It's not something that happened because of computer games and I would actually be surprised if nobody didn't tried something like that.

To sum this up:
- Some scenarios in cRPG's in comparison to pnp might be difficult to achieve. For bar fights, contextual ruleset for brawling could be used in theory. However, then brawling should be available for every encounter. It's silly considering UI design. Same way people drawing weapons in tavern is quite difficult scenario too. How to solve this?
- Freedom where players entire campaign changes because of one decision or even an accident is interesting but I don't see how to make it work on cRPG without making it shallow.
- Spells, items or abilities that look pretty harmless can actually cause lot of trouble. I have mentioned Shadowrun games many times, I think their set was quite balanced, then I didn't paid that much attention.

 

I think these two posts illustrate this whole cultural battle very well.

I don't think either that everything has some political motive. But everything we do, how we act and what we say is an expresssion of internalized ideology. Everything is inherently ideological. Gamergate is a very nice example of that. Anti-gamergaters realised that a lot of the content in gaming opposes their political standpoint, so they are challenging this status quo. But the status quo is not apolitical since the status quo has been achieved through political means. Not wanting to change the status quo is, of course, not inherently bad, but it's also a political stance, even if you don't recognize it immediately This itself is even more proof that the status quo is some sort of political consensus. What many perceive as being political is changing the status quo and direct politics i.E. laws etc. This makes it difficult to talk about how ideology influences our culture, because subversiveness is a lot easier to spot, especially if you're status-quo-blind. It's interesting to see how some people on the Codex complain about the inclusiveness of Bioware RPGs as politically charged but idealize a game like Age of Decadence even though both have very distinct approaches to ideology. The latter glorifying distrust and a Hobbesian But it seems to some Codexers that only Bioware RPGs seem to be influenced by ideology.

Elves and dwarves are probably hated often in games because discrimination of race is an omnipresent occurence in human history. Western studios are bound to draw from themes from their own culture and history in some ways, because stuff doesn't just appear out of thin air. Wars, race politics and other conflicts simply were there as long as humans are on earth. And RPGs are always conflict scenarios. Most of those conflict scenarios are inherently political, see for instance Dragon Age: Origins. A power struggle, electing kings, animosities in face of greater adversities. If that's not politics I don't know what is. The only reason why it wasn't more political was that the Darkspawn are the most cliché enemy ever.

The viking thing is also easily explainable. Vikings are worshipped by conservatives because the romantiscised version of vikings in literature has always been that of manly men with beards, of women as mothers and homemakers, of easy conflicts (you die or you don't), of hero cults and so on. Vikings have always been a conservative favourite power fantasy. Now when, for example, there are suddenly more female warriors in a game about vikings, this counters the conservative interpretation of viking culture. To them, a traditional family structure is more important than other features of viking culture. Maybe leftists on the other hand just like the aesthetic of viking symbolism or the fact that vikings were an oppressed people in times of christianization. It's always a struggle of what's more important to your interpretation of the world, what's more ingrained into you ideology-wise. A culture is complex and you can draw vastly different conclusions. A leftist interpretation of a viking culture is just different from a rightwing interpretation. And no fictional interpretation will ever be close enough to reality to have a debate over what interpretation is more correct, since we weigh facts very differently.

Since fantasy settings are based on historical settings, it's a lot easier to explain prevalent conservative values with "historical accuracy" even though it's not really about accuracy. This is why I want to rebuke the claim that leftist entertainment is "devoid of complex imaginations". Leftist imaginations simply take place on a different level than the imaginations of a rightwinger. I'm not even saying there's one that's better than the other, inherently. Entertainment is, in one way or another, always a reflection of us. Building RPGs first and foremost aesthetics, and secondly needs, yearnings, hopes and emotions of our current time.

 

I disagree completely with everything after your first paragraph, and partially with that.

Vikings are. Period. They are worshipped by conservatives. Where did you get this nonsense? I don;t know many conservatives but most of them are not Viking loving madmen. The fact you think this makes you either retarded or so brainwashed it literally makes me sad.

Vikings of various periods had specific cultures and mindsets. Any attempt to acrostically to impose modern morals on this historical culture is political. AoD was an attempt to create a more realistic culture based on history and common sense. How would things have been if x and y happened. Not how should things be if my politics ruled this make believe world. From what I've read Tolkien set out to create a rich mythology for his British culture which was mythologically poor compared to that of other cultures. Even though his age was filled with crazy racial issues, he still managed to create vast works without Elves and Dwarves being crushed under the boot heels of the Evil White Man.

Howard was a Southerner in a very racist time and his Conan works still paint a far less racist world. Cimmerians were barbarians but white. Picts the same but considered dark. Then there where the black countries, some worshipped Set, others were still civilized and filled with tougher people than the Mitra worshipping white pussies. And he used black in the most offensive way in sentences for modern sensibilities.

Since left-wingers are indoctrinated to believe skin color is super important and a super relevant issue, and that conservatives hate people of different skin color, you can't help but to impose your enlightened truths into anything made - the same as all left-wingers. For all the real conservatives I know, skin color isn't an issue. It isn't a big deal. It is like eye or hair color. Superficial nothing that means nothing and has no magic properties. All these little kids on this sight spewing racist gibberish and left-wingers. The will grow up unemployed, or underemployed, and nothing to society, and think the thoughts of retards and left-wingers about skin color and it's perceived importance.

Conservatives, real first world conservatives, believe in merit and culture. There are good and bad people and good and bad cultures. Bad cultures treat women as second class citizens and kill gays for being gay. Them not wanting people from bad cultures who do not accept the culture of their own country to move to their country isn't racist - it is normal. No sane person wants a person with savage views on pretty much everything to move to their land in great numbers. Anyone, of any skin color, who wants to bust their ass to achieve a dream, and accepts their new culture as correct, that women are equal, and no one should die over religious beliefs or gender preference, is welcome and expected to be mannerly and thankful. Or at least not huge pricks that whine and take and do shit to earn shit.

 

I'm not saying every conservative worships vikings. What I was trying to say is that a certain breed of conservative worships vikings because it's easy to see vikings as an embodiment of qualities and you deem virtuous and desireable. So certain aspects of viking culture get undoubtedly overexaggerated and romanticised. The same happened to Native Americans that are instrumentalised by certain eco-lefties.

I never said otherwise. Every interpretation of a world and culture is inherently ideological. Cultures are complex and that it's nearly impossible to weigh which things are important to a cultural representation and which things are not. Again, ideology is the determining factor. There are a lot of things wrong with the fictional representation of vikings. Yet most complaints come from the morals and gender department. You could complain about various other things too. The reason why these get singled out: ideology. It bothers people with conservative values to see something go against their values, even moreso if they concern things that they believed to be strongholds of their ideology. Same goes for leftists, I just don't have a good example. And vikings are really easy.

Common sense sounds so easy but try to define that.

I don't see ANY difference here. Especially because imagining "how things happen" is always a product of your ideology. You can't escape it, even if you think you do.

Though, in fairness, there is a lot of criticism surrounding the depiction of race in Tolkien's world. Some people don't take to kindly to the Easterners/Haradrim/and so on being inherently evil. Elves were an embodiment of the good, Dwarves are basically a direct port from nordic mythology.

I honestly can't comment too much on Conan because I haven't read enough of it.

Well, maybe you're brainwashed to think it's a non-issue? Maybe you just don't see it?

Come on.

But conservatives do exactly the same. Exactly the same. And it's okay! It's okay to portray fiction in whatever way you like. You will ALWAYS be subjected to criticism. But it's still fiction. I don't see whya Fantasy game with women and black people in there is so freaking bad so people throw a tantrum about it.

Wow, now you're completely off the rails. I mean what does this have to do with anything? I simply wanted to say that people of all political beliefs will have their fiction influenced by their ideologies.

 

What breed of conservatives? Do you mean dumb, young people with no real education other than revised history and indoctrination? I think you mean a certain type of liberal. Conservatives want to conserve their own heritage and culture, and since the only countries beheading people for being heathens and treating women live slave shit are loved by liberals there is literally no country that can have a breed of conservatives that love Vikings. Vikings are raiders, pillagers, slave takers, and rapists. None of those are conservative values even a little. I think the breed of conservative you are talking about are the young dumb racists of northern and western Europe, and study after study shows these fucking morons either grow out of it to liberals by slightly changing their mindset, or become criminals and vote liberal and think only slightly different than main stream left-wingers.

Actual conservatives do not give a shit about skin color. Period. It is culture. The far right religious conservatives are the same but get most of their disagreeable nonsense from a book instead of reason. Left-wingers get it from brainwashing and forth estate one ideology controlled media propaganda and infiltrated educational institutes.

As a part-black I had to unbrainwash the brainwashing society forced on me, and that is constantly bombarding everyone with. This is how liberals get votes. What I see is me and other people of darker skin hues excelling when we apply ourselves. Malcom X said real men don't ask for anything. They take it. I've taken by hard work and sacrifice. Same with the Orientals in my country. The same with the Indians and African immigrants and all peoples of all superior mindsets. We take because we can. Its ours, earned by our own blood, sweat, and tears. We have far more in common with hard working whites and Mexicans in Rural America than we do with the lazy ass whiny bitches that have taken over US cities. When I've lived in Red States no one talked about racism or cared. The only issue was people being overly nice to me to show how non-racist they were. In my home city I'm more of an Other block checker since we have tons of super dark immigrants that kind of skew the scale. And I'm telling you, go to Massachusetts or RI. You will meet a ton of black immigrants from all over the world doing exactly what the Orientals and Indians have been doing. Taking the wealth from lazy ass whiny whites and the true victims of their racist propaganda campaign. The left-wings racism is our gain, be we all want to live in the dream MLK where skin is recognized for being as irrelevant as it is. Left-wingers now hate MLKs dream. I wonder why that is?

 

Nonsense. That is what any fair, non-indoctrinated mind does. That is the difference between science and nonsense. Things were. If there are lots of literature from that time period any fair minded person can try and figure out their general beliefs and mindsets without imposing their own on it.

And how does this apply to dwarves and elves? The main bad guy was an elf. I don't see anyone criticizing that.

I think, do to the nature of the indoctrination, non-left-wingers have an easier time creating anything that isn't imbued with their moral and ethical beliefs. My moral and ethical beliefs are fluid. The more I learn, the more I experience, the more they change. Left-wingers are like religious conservatives. Different God, but it holds the same center of importance and all the righteous indignity.

How so? You started off saying conservatives love and hold on a pedestal Vikings because they love to hate women and rape and pillage and behead and other horrible things.

And I say a non-left winger, non-religious-conservative have a very easy time understanding that things are or could be and don't have to be their personal view of good or moral. I can think the Predator is awesome without thinking that travelling the galaxy hunting sentient life is moral. If I were to create the culture and norms and mors of the Predator home world I would want to explicitly not have my personal morals and ethics influence it. I would want it to be sensible and interesting and believable and completely alien. Completely devoid of what my current ethical and moral leanings lead me to think something is right or wrong.

This is exactly what separates independent thinkers from cultists. Are there smart cultists? Sure. But just as some great thinkers throughout history have been blunted and shackled by the oppressive beliefs of their time that they also subscribed to, they all wear the yoke of THE RIGHTOUES TRUTH!!!!!

The only truth is that everyone is wrong and everyone is fucking stupid. The only difference is a few people like me come up with our own stupid, and everyone else gets their stupid relegated through their brain dead, retarded cult of sycophancy. At least my stupid is mine and fluid and I know it well.

 

Man Roqua, I wish you'd make more posts like this and less of your usual pent up hysterics.

I feel like I'm reading an entirely different persons post reading your calm, honest insight.

After replying to the above quote I saw this above once posted, forgive me if it's coming out of left field and missing the point.

To equate the Norse with only those qualities is the equivalent of Leftists who only see the history of the West as one of colonial pillagers and slave holders when there's far more of it than that, as there is with the Norse.

Hell, even Islam is the same, the problem is it's so much more intermeshed with aspects like what your describe because of the issues revolving around their religious archetype being Muhammad and their desire to emulate him.

I also take issue with your characterization of conservatives that way with regard to their heritage and the warts on it. My own revolves a lot around my close connection to the Scottish ancestry I have and the odd bit of pride I have over the ancestral clans delinquency that revolved around "murder, blackmail, thief and tyranny", all the things that eventually got them expelled from Scotland long before the English and Union.

One particular incident always brings a beaming smile to my face, one where they raided a neighbouring clans domain and took the hundreds of cattle they had. Trying to make off with so many cattle they quickly realized they weren't going to be able to outrun the aggrieved clan and their allies, which had time to gather their forces and go after them. Rather than abandon the cattle and make it back home without a skirmish or stand and fight for them and pay in blood, they instead chose to slaughter all the cattle before fleeing to make sure that if they didn't benefit neither would their enemies. The end result left their enemies destitute because they'd invested most of what they'd had in the cattle.

Now would I approve of others doing that today, much less do that myself? Hell no, but like I said, something about it makes me smile in pride because I can see that obstinate impishness and knack for provocation and teasing I and my family have and this doesn't include the island castle we'd retreat to when we caused too much trouble nor the legendary ominous reaction the full moon brought many Scots, since it was the "lantern" that signaled a coming nightly raid of ours somewhere.

That is sadly what many are in the "Alt-Right", they oppose Leftists out of contrarian impulse to sneer and mock what they view as the mainstream careful to try to never be that, because having values and principles are only for those they deride in their nihilistic safety bubble.

They don't care, or think they don't unwilling to admit it, about anything, just wanting to take the piss out of anyone who does that takes center stage in society.

You assume they'd be anything without them, like a spirit freed from a shakling body. I don't think you realize that is that medium with which we can be anything, and without it we are as freedom and adrift as a man floating through space without gravity or any surface with which to ground himself upon.

It is the dark mirror we eternally struggle to see through, but the alternative is blindness.

To put it another way in the context of this threads discussion, nothing is ever truly original, everything comes from something else, but that doesn't mean original doesn't exist, it needs something preexisting to rest in.

That is ultimately the mythological root of fantasy as a genre, and I'd say for RPGs too due to the heavy inheritance they have from fantasy.

Any of that comes from PCness viewing having Africans and Middle Easterners as bad guys as being inherently bad when they never should be at all.

What I mean is that Tolkien's world is very clearly modeled on history with a distilling of various threats to Western civilization and Christianity into an overarching Enemy in the Satanic sense because his entire work deals with Western exceptionalism and the forces that have antagonized it roughly.

To put it in historical terms, the Haradrim and Easterners are a part of the Enemy's legions because many of their real life counterparts were with the summoning and emassing and various different groups of people into one large army. This reflects the practice of the Ottomans to call for men from all over their empire when they planned to go on the warpath. If they planned to go East they'd camp across from Constantinople and wait for the numbers to collect, if they were going into the Balkans they'd camp just outside Constantinople before setting off. The composition of the army was for the most part a random collection of militia that could number as much as a couple hundred thousand centered around of a core of Jannissaries numbering only a few thousand to tens of thousands that actually did most of the real fighting, the rest were there because they were summoned and wanted to pillage while they served their masters. Such people came from all over the Ottoman Empire, and yes they included Africans, Middle Easterners and Orientals.

All of that is presented as how Sauron's empire and army operate right down to the cannon fodder Orcs and the core of Uruk-Hai professionals.

The issue with what you posted though is that the Haradrim and Easterners aren't "inherently evil", they are human beings under the dominion of a evil political and spiritual entity to which they have spent centuries serving. They don't know any better and are the object of pause and pity by Sam in the book when they stop to see a group of Haradrim passing by them.

Almost no one is "inherently evil" in Tolkien's work, not even Sauron who once served the Valar Aule before he became tempted into joining the Enemy. Only two could be countered as "inherently evil". One is Melkor, the Valar which effectively emulates Satan in his desire to be God and directly lord over Creation in that the God of Tolkien's cosmology made him the way he was with his love and desire for power even if it was his choice to do what he is doing and use his innate affinity for power in that manner that will eventually wind up depriving him of all of it.

The other are the Orcs and Trolls, in that their origins are from captive Elves and Ents that were twisted by Melkor to suit his ends. Effectively, they have no free will in that we are never presented through the entire length of Tolkien's work with examples of them being anything but the evil-filled servants of the Enemy while the examples of Men through Tolkien's history show they were simply human beings, being humans before Melkor and Sauron established their rule over them and twisted their societies. This is reflected in the diplomatic and vassal relationship many Haradrim had with Gondor at its height and the fact that the Roharrim are themselves "Easterners", a horse people who migrated out of the East but chose friendship and cooperation with the Dunedin instead of antagonism and so were ceded land to establish a kingdom in exchange for an alliance and a duty to guard the the plains of Gondor's northern flank.

 

I'd take that more as a first step.

Such a state of being is completely alien to human nature and how our mind is built.

What would the nature of a beings that lived that long be like? IMO, a good start would them being not so much risk adverse but slower to act and perceive the world, seeing the passage of time pass quicker and so appearing to live slower (A 1000 year life time feeling what a normal 80ish year human life time is to us) to humans and humans to them would be like flies quickly buzzing rapidly and confusingly.

I mention that last bit that's howflies perceive the world, it is so quick that everything appears more like it's in slow motion. It's what makes them and most other wing insects so damn hard to catch.

The film industry is much older than the gaming one.

A game like Arcanum would be like a classic movie from the 70s and maybe older, especially give how much quicker games have developed compared to film.

World building wise you can't either. The Conjunction of the Sphere's that is blamed for the emergence of monsters could not exist in a D&D setting where all worlds and planes are somehow connected where the strange and threatening can never be truly other-worldly.

It's a big reason why I don't like the world building of D&D, which I find oddly has coloured my dislike of it since I was a kid and before I even knew of world building.

Everything is so mashed together and interconnected, nothing is truly remote and distant because the cosmology is so broad and encompassing, it feels almost incestuous.

That also doesn't even touch on the ever changing nature where everything is mutable, even things like deities that come and go that makes it feel like comic books and completely sucks any sort of tension and stake out of any setting. It's why I found the ides of the Nameless One being a threat to all reality by slowly destroying it one lifetime at a time, intriguing in that it introduced a chance of finality into the world(s).