D&D 5E Honor & Sanity

[I'm A Banana]

How would you react if you went to the supermarket and saw a grown up man roll around on the floor, screaming like a five year old kid because there is no milk left?

How would you react if the person in front of you on the train started to take off his/her clothes? And I mean all of it, including underwear.

How do you react when you meet a drunk person before lunch?

I live in NYC, so my reaction is usually along the lines of "Ah, it must be Thursday."

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I mentioned a knight rescuing a damsel in distress. Modern people think this is sexist. I was called a sexist on this thread because I had the audacity to defend it as a good stereotype.

not to put words in the young ladies mouth, but she called you sexist when you not to subtle hinted that making the knight a woman was harming fantasy as a whole...

I think the problem is that some how people talk past each other though. See there is a max % of a book, or a movie, or a TV show... and a lot of people are used to 90% (or more) of heroes to be white straight males. SO when someone (Book, movie, TV, what ever) makes a change and makes it even 60% white straight males, some people feel that "Takes away" but without considering that if you relate to any other group, you still feel shorted...

You mention Brave, and it is a great story. It works just as well with anyone in the role.

At gen con 4 or 5 years ago I sat down at a shadow run table to play. The DM had 6 players and 8 pregen characters... 5 male 3 female. The problem was the only woman who sat down wanted to play a combat character, and the two he made (Troll bruiser and human street samari) were both male. The story teller kept asking why she didn't want to play the face, deck, or other face he made. I picked up and wanted to play the decker, but he told me "Oh I have a male one too."

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Despite the fact that Rokugan is obviously not an accurate portrayal of Japan during the 15th and 16th centuries the honor stat is the least of the problems in that regard.

to be fair, I don't want to play in a real world (most of the time). I think Rokugan is a fine fantasy setting, just like I don't think Grey hawk is Europe...

 

[aramis erak]

You're... You're kidding, right?

Lovecraftian horror contains nothing that requires racism. S&S contains nothing--despite what some people would say about rescuing maidens--that absolutely requires sexism. The notion that people who followed in these footsteps aren't writing in the same genre just because they've eliminated those traits is... mind-boggling.

One "leaves" a genre when one stops using fundamental traits of it. Unless you're talking Gor and its ilk, real-world racism and sexism are fundamental to exactly no genres of fantasy.

No, I'm not kidding.

Many of the minor characters in pulp genre material are motivated primarily by racism, religionism (especially death cultists), and even sexism. Hell, so are some of the majors

Barsoom without the sexism isn't Barsoom; Deja Thoris in clothes and in chanrge just ain't the same. (Hell, her marriage to John Carter is predicated upon gender issues. She must needs have a king to reign on Mars; a queen isn't a queen without one. That she also loves him is almost irrelevant - it's clearly a political move that happens to also be pleasant.)

There's nothing wrong with leaving the genre for another; but the awareness of it is important.

And pointing out that several oriental cultures have extensive historical documentation of honor-driven behavior isn't racism in any practical sense. It is history. Of course, the "Japanese" honor code is most properly the Late Shogunate Samurai honor code, and is noted best not for observance by the lesser samurai by by the breaches and their results...

As a game mechanic, Honor Codes are appropriate for several genres, including western depictions of high-samurai culture.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Hmm. No, I can't get behind you on that.

You're right that the Barsoom novels would have to be tweaked, written a little bit differently, to remove the sexist aspects. They wouldn't be exactly the same books as we know them. But I reject the idea that they couldn't be written mostly the same, and certainly that they'd somehow no longer be the same genre.

Also, it's worth noting that it's possible to have a sexist or racist culture in a novel without the novel itself being racist or sexist. It depends on overall portrayal. So even some the examples you've raised could remain, if they were just worked from a slightly different angle.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Barsoom without the sexism isn't Barsoom; Deja Thoris in clothes and in chanrge just ain't the same. (Hell, her marriage to John Carter is predicated upon gender issues. She must needs have a king to reign on Mars; a queen isn't a queen without one. That she also loves him is almost irrelevant - it's clearly a political move that happens to also be pleasant.)

There's nothing wrong with leaving the genre for another; but the awareness of it is important.

so as someone who has female players (girlfriend sometimes, neice a lot, friends from time to time) I wonder what you would have me tell them if they wanted to play in a John Carter game?


edit: this whole thing is so insane it makes me think of my neice so much... she constantly gets told she 'can't play X' because she is a girl... infact she is one of the toughest kids I know and her brother 2 years and 60lbs on her is frightend by her from time to time... last Christmas there cuisins (not my side of family) got toy guns and the three boys envited my nephew to play but told my neice she would not get it... she physicly took the gun from her 10 year old (she was 5 at the time) cusins and pulled the trigger aiming it at his face saying "I get it, head shots to win..."

just this last week after a school x-mas show I saw a girl in my nephews class push down his best friend and threaten to step on him... I ran over to interced and my Nephew told me his friend had told her that girls can't be wrestlers they just wear skimpy outfits and look good, because his dad had told him that... My nephew told me "I warned him, atleast my sister was around to hear it"

My nephew is planning on trying out for football this summer, and his mother (my sister) asked my neice if she wanted to try out for cheerleading, she asked "Why, I can't tackle people in those skirts."

 

[I'm A Banana]

There's a bit of weird nuance going on here that I think might be leading to a bit of talking past each other.

You can make, for instance, the case that HP Lovecraft's racism is at the foundation of how and why he wrote about what he did and how he did. If nothing else, it was used by him to heighten the "fear of the Other" in his (presumably also pretty racist) intended audience. Lovecraft isn't Lovecraftian without bein' crazy racist.

Authors don't control their imitators, though, and as society has moved on and has to some degree at least put the idea of racism into a corner and shouted at it to quiet down, those who work in a mode of "Lovecraftian Horror" might choose other elements from contemporary society to highlight the fear of the Other that leads to some of the horror in that genre. In fact, they kind of have to, because race isn't code for the Other in the same way that it was back in HP's social circle. An example of that being done pretty well is how Welcome to NightVale demonstrates how the people of Desert Bluffs or the people of StrexCorp are distinctly "Other" (while treating the more traditionally Lovecraftian Glow Cloud and Station Management as benign horrors).

So, you could say that the genre owes its very existence to a deep and abiding racism, and also say that the genre has outgrown its roots and needs to keep recent if it is to remain relevant, which means, as of today, either omitting overt racism or being very subtle about it.

As D&D players, we do this all the time, of course. Every time I play my monthly game with my 6 interracial irreligious gay friends and with a woman playing the fighter, I am probably making Howard and Leiber and Lovecraft and maybe even granddaddy Tolkien all spin in their graves like kids on a teacup ride. The game undoubtedly would not exist without these influences, and it's easy to trace the lines of the game back to some really awful racism present in many of those old works (or the racism that is always present in ancient myth and legend, at least!), but that doesn't mean their disembodied ghosts get veto power over what my group thinks is a good time.

And if we decided to use honor mechanics in our samurai game, it wouldn't be because Asians Are Exotic, it would be because we liked what the mechanic added to our gameplay that we wanted to highlight in that particular campaign, same as any other mechanic (and not ignoring the fact that part of the reason it exists is because of people being racist).

Y'know, Nitrogen fertilizer feeds the world and Fritz Haber was a horrible, horrible human being. A things origins shouldn't limit them, but they shouldn't be ignored, either.

 

[aramis erak]

so as someone who has female players (girlfriend sometimes, neice a lot, friends from time to time) I wonder what you would have me tell them if they wanted to play in a John Carter game?

I's suggest they consider the role they want to play and play a character of the correct gender for that role, at least at first. Exactly the same way I handle it for Pendragon and any Samurai game other than L5R (which has explicitly reduced, but retained intentional, the traditional Samurai gender roles restrictiveness, specifically to allow Samurai-kō and house husbands).

 

[Hriston]

thanks for the info folks. it piqued my interest when I heard it and wondered if i could rig it up to work for something like a Middle-earth setting...

For middle-earth sanity could be used for coming into contact with dark powers like hearing the cries of winged nazgul or looking into a palantir controlled by Sauron.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I's suggest they consider the role they want to play and play a character of the correct gender for that role, at least at first. Exactly the same way I handle it for Pendragon and any Samurai game other than L5R (which has explicitly reduced, but retained intentional, the traditional Samurai gender roles restrictiveness, specifically to allow Samurai-kō and house husbands).

inless you have a spare room I can hide out in, I could not say that to half the women I know...