Oh come on, enough with the cheap shot, "you're low brow", psychobabble name-calling snootiness.
I'm sorry that's what you get from it. I didn't attempt to say any of those things.
If we were interested in exploring "sociopathy" we'd be playing something like V:tM (and that's not being fair to V:tM players, I object to your use of such terms when applied to your opponent in an argument rather than to insane criminals, IMO it's just not called for and trivialises a serious term in a shallow attempt to demonise someone).
Whoa, whoa, easy on the trigger there! I said sociopathic
PCs, not sociopathic
players.
Very different things. I've never implied that a person is probably sociopathic if they laugh at Belkar from Order of the Stick, or 75% of the PCs from Knights of the Dinner Table, or that guy from Looking for Group. But the
characters are. That's the joke: that they can behave horribly in ways that the creators and audience wouldn't. They can be an outlet without reflecting real people. There's even a meta-joke in there about how some killers behave the way they do out of solipsism, believing that their targets and victims aren't really "real" -- and in the context of a gaming comic, they're doubly right. If that demonizes the imaginary chaotic evil halfling whose sadistic shivving sprees are played for yuks, I guess I'm okay with that. The author's almost always okay with that too.
I suspect that this at least partially comes back to issues of trust. You can trust Bioware not to do anything vulgar with a Dark Side plot hook in KotOR, but not the general public at large, but take that away and it's gone from the game by default unless put back explicitly by players who overlook what the disneyfied rules suggest and notice it's absence. So RPGs are on something of the horns of a dilemma.
Particularly because bad behavior has driven many potential players from RPGs. That's something that game designers are particularly sensitive to. Some of it isn't going to be rules-related, of course; the classic bit of a new female player having her character raped as kind of an "initiation" is pure player skeeviness. But when you hear enough stories about potential players being driven away because, say, a couple of people in the group point at the alignments on their character sheets and say "I'm just playing my character", then as a designer it's easy to really start to wonder about the value of evil PCs to the game as a whole.
The trouble is, of course, that in attempting to mitigate that bad behavior you're certain to lose people who wanted more responsible takes on the subject matter supported by the rules. But I absolutely sympathize with the designer who says "You know, I really don't want anything I write to be something a player can use to justify being a disruptive jerk." Doesn't mean they can't mess up the execution, but the sentiment is wholly sympathetic where I'm concerned.
These elements can be part of a world just for depth, and not supporting them, in say, the PHB, DMG or MM for politically correct objectives is by default going to remove that depth.
Conversely, including them for lurid appeal has its drawbacks as well. Which is why the decisions generally stem from motivations somewhere between "politically correct" and "lurid pandering" -- usually a mix of what the designers think is going to sell books and modeling the way they like to play games. You can see that attitude affect everything in the game, such as how 3.0 was clearly written by people who think spellcasting should be really cool.
I realise that you are just arguing that they shouldn't be built into the rules,
Not quite. The original statement I made way back there is that "they're less important to me." That's it. If the author and I find the same sort of things funny, great; but that's essentially a gamble, compared to the sure bet that is my players. And honestly, I appreciate the Meepos and Splugs of the hobby. I personally prefer spontaneous humor to pre-planned comic relief, but I do understand that it's impossible to teach spontaneity. You can only give examples.
One of the things that attracts audiences of all ages - from teen up - to AD&D 1E is that it had this depth. And please don't argue that these elements haven't been intentionally removed from the scope of the game, as it is written and in terms of what the rules suggest.
I get that they're intentionally removed. I have rather different opinions about the whys and wherefores, though.
They're also about 40 years old, and extremely tired, which make them very useful for pretending that all humour in games is tired. I mean, come on...
I'm not pretending anything of the sort, and I'm not quite sure where you're getting "all humor in games is tired" from "I don't find it important to have rules systems that bring whimsical elements into the game." I'm saying, again, that humor is subjective.
Set aside the Monty Python for a moment and consider puns. Yes, legions of puns are old and tired, but new ones come into play; consider a dwarf named Badrock O'Bomber opposing an elf named Slayrah Palewyn, for instance. Even if it's a brand spanking new reference compared to the Death Leopard secret society in Paranoia, some people find Badrock and Slayrah's presence less funny than their absence would be because it's a
pun, full stop. Whether it's puns, slapstick, P.G. Wodehouse pastiches or non sequiturs, humor's a gamble. And I've simply, for my money, found that it's less of a gamble among long-standing friends than it is for an author who has no idea what my DVD collection looks like. The friends have a very understandable advantage, and I'm not embarrassed to rely on it.
