D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Stormonu]

Errr... in what way does MTG compete, in any way other than literal time usage, with D&D? They're completely different and I'm willing to bet the vast majority of MTG players are also people who play D&D.

I'll step in here, considering my wrath against Magic. It stole players away from D&D, because it did a thing better than D&D could - the magic duel. And it did it quick. D&D is five players, the DM and four players he divides time between. A player is only active approximately 1/4 of the time over a span of 4-6 hours in a weekly campaign that lasts a few years. A game of magic is two people throwing down for maybe 20 minutes at a time, no requirement to return to the same table and you can change your entire deck between games. I watched as droves of former D&D players left to play MtG, or turned their nose up at the commitment to a D&D game where you play one character (of four or so) over a much longer period.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, you mention the obvious way around I saw in multiple places: two PCs a pop. When you had 12 classed characters walking out, at least some of them would go home; at the first couple levels that might look like a DCC funnel, but it still didn't look much like the way the game was apparently written to be.

Well..... I don't disagree with you guys that the style of 'Troupe Play' with lots of PCs and henchmen and so forth was necessarily typical of other places. OTOH starting out with 2 PCs each, how is that really different from starting out with one PC each and a henchman for each one? I mean, the original game doesn't actually discuss henchmen, except to note how many a PC can have based on his Charisma (even that maybe is a Greyhawkism, I'd have to look). So I think it was just a bit different way of parsing the same thing to a degree. Gygax clearly intended that henchmen get 'promoted' to full PC status when convenient anyway. Hirelings OTOH, I don't know really for sure how many were used by players in Gary's game, probably a lot, but who knows? Sometimes players in games I was in bought them too. They were a two-edged sword though, because GP was a key gating factor in advancement, and when you had to pay pay pay for those hirelings, you didn't advance as fast, or you were short of important equipment. So its more there were different strategies to the game, and Gary maybe favored some that other later GMs were less interested in.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Thats more of a book report than an analysis - I mean that's just stuff that's verbatim in the book as far as I know.

I'm absolutely sure most of that will be changed in the new book. I assume its sections on Kraghammer and Syngorn won't include subheadings labeled "Prejudice" like the original book.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Lmao we're also talking about a guy who was buddies with Lovecraft - who I love - but he wasn't exactly a civil rights progressive, amirite?
(He was super duper racist)

Well, and REH himself was a 'failure to launch' weirdo living in his mom's attic in the 1920's. He certainly got his ideas from the wider culture, but he was not always particularly representative of it. This is probably one reason he was able to invent a whole genre of fantasy almost whole cloth, he was just that weird!

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, and REH himself was a 'failure to launch' weirdo living in his mom's attic in the 1920's. He certainly got his ideas from the wider culture, but he was not always particularly representative of it. This is probably one reason he was able to invent a whole genre of fantasy almost whole cloth, he was just that weird!

I think it is no coincidence that someone who felt pretty powerless gave us a character like Conan. At the same time, I feel like there is something genuinely sad about the guys life. He ended up shooting himself after his mother died. His story seems very human and tragic to me.

In terms of how much he reflected the culture. In a lot of ways his thinking seems more advanced than I would expect of someone living at that time and place. But also very much a product of his time. I am no expert but a lot of what he says in his descriptions, aligns with stuff I see in other books from around that period. It definitely stands out at moments when you read it now.

Personally I like his writing a lot. The Conan stories especially are something I find myself going back to a lot, and always I find something to extract for gaming from them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Also when people say that what they really mean is the medium of TTRPG, its big strength is this idea that you can do anything, you can imagine anything, you can go beyond the predetermined field of play. Obviously video games have improved a lot since then so this is likely not as much an apt point (I haven't played video games regularly since the game cube so I am extremely out of touch with what is possible now when it comes to MMOs----I am just assuming they've advanced a lot and that it is likely there is some clever way you can get beyond whatever the programers laid down initially). So the statement "This feels like a video game" or this feels like "Wow": I think is a statement that it feels like I am more constrained or I feel like a set of buttons I can push. I can see how some might be insulted by that but I also think it expressed something people genuinely felt about the change (and a sentiment people have about the medium itself). And true, many of us making that comparison were making it quite casually. I was never into WOW and I only played magic a handful of times. So for me at least, I was comparing it to my impression of those things (and on my experience playing video games through the 90s and into the very early 2000s).

Right, this is exactly how I always understood the criticism, that people were equating a game with an MMO, which is a hard-coded system where the PCs can only execute moves coded into the game, only face hard-coded situations, and where any 'role play' is purely 'frosting' because it CANNOT have any actual influence on the game beyond the mere fact that you did or did not command your PC to do mechanical thing A, B, or C for "role-play reasons" (and the culture of MMOs will mostly frown on such unless it also happens to be maximally advantageous play in a tactical sense).

Thus TTRPGs are, at least in this view, much 'deeper' than any MMO or CRPG could even theoretically be (though modern tech may alter that equation before too long). Of course the alternative view exists as well, that MMOs, by virtue of the sheer scale of player-player interactions, have their own unique attributes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it is no coincidence that someone who felt pretty powerless gave us a character like Conan. At the same time, I feel like there is something genuinely sad about the guys life. He ended up shooting himself after his mother died. His story seems very human and tragic to me.

In terms of how much he reflected the culture. In a lot of ways his thinking seems more advanced than I would expect of someone living at that time and place. But also very much a product of his time. I am no expert but a lot of what he says in his descriptions, aligns with stuff I see in other books from around that period. It definitely stands out at moments when you read it now.

Personally I like his writing a lot. The Conan stories especially are something I find myself going back to a lot, and always I find something to extract for gaming from them.

Yeah, his life was certainly characterized by some sort of feelings of disconnection from mainstream society and such. I think his correspondence with Lovecraft and other people in that circle was a big thing for him. Perhaps he got some of his ideas from HPL, lol. More likely they were just the normal tropes of his day. Anyway, it stands out now to a large degree because most of the rest of what was written in that period has faded into near oblivion.

 

[Krachek]

I'll step in here, considering my wrath against Magic. It stole players away from D&D, because it did a thing better than D&D could - the magic duel. And it did it quick. D&D is five players, the DM and four players he divides time between. A player is only active approximately 1/4 of the time over a span of 4-6 hours in a weekly campaign that lasts a few years. A game of magic is two people throwing down for maybe 20 minutes at a time, no requirement to return to the same table and you can change your entire deck between games. I watched as droves of former D&D players left to play MtG, or turned their nose up at the commitment to a D&D game where you play one character (of four or so) over a much longer period.

Magic offers challenge and competition, smart thinking, that DnD cannot offer and should not try to offer. When I read some post on balance, ruling, challenge I hope that those go play Magic or the equivalent for some time. There is no fun try to satisfy the feeling of a good magic deck build and play in a DnD game.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes, but this turns into a sticky wicket, since "Native American" is an umbrella term representing hundreds of tribes, with many different languages and cultures, whose subjugation happened in different ways, by different European groups, at different time periods. Add to the mix that they didn't all get along with each other, and it gets pretty complicated. I think Zardinar (?) mentioned that the Crow and Sioux were enemies back in the 1870s and that the Sioux army had invaded their land. That's true--the Crow were allied with the US Cavalry (they served as scouts), and the Little Bighorn Battlefield is currently on their Reservation in Montana--that's where the Sioux set a trap for Custer, and wiped him out.

This doesn't diminish the tragedy experienced by Native Americans, or make mocking them right at all. But IMHO, the basic oppressor-oppressed narrative isn't always adequate to explain the complexities of history, once you start taking a deep dive into it.

Using the Crow to act like the "narrative" of oppression and genocide "isn't that simple" is pretty gross. There were women who argued against Women's Suffrage. That doesn't actually complicate the ethics of that struggle at all. The history of the Crow is complex. The ethics of U.S. actions toward Native Peoples is not.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm absolutely sure most of that will be changed in the new book. I assume its sections on Kraghammer and Syngorn won't include subheadings labeled "Prejudice" like the original book.

Maybe, though I'm not sure what's wrong with having a section that shows some flaws in the social order of some closed off, insular, societies. Both places are there, in part, to not be nice places for most people.

If the product showed them as the good guys, it would be a problem.

But vanishingly few people think that it's wrong to criticize xenophobia. There are folks who prefer for the media they consume to not focus on xenophobia as a challenge in the story, and instead focus on other conflicts and get to lose themselves in a story that has nothing to do with bigotry, but I doubt may of them think a game setting is bad because it doesn't present a world without sin.