D&D General D&D Assumptions Ain't What They Used To Be

[Reynard]

I don't understand what you mean. Is Star Wars Lucas-only to you? Because that would exclude the sequel trilogy and include at least the concept behind the Clone Wars TV series.

No. I am talking about what the actual text of what Star Wars is. it is the Skywalker Saga, and the things that means and talks about. That is why it has struggled so hard to produce anything of lasting impact and cultural importance outside of the Skywalker Saga.

 

[CreamCloud0]

No, because it isn't written that way. Anakin's childhood as a slave is not built into his character. His last for control and power doesn't emerge from slavery, it emerges from his mother's senseless death.

agree to disagree?

but that doesn't remove the fact that qui-gon had to wager and bet for anakin as property, anakin was a slave, slavery is a plot point in star wars, you can't say 'well it wasn't enough of a plot point to actually count'

edit: and that's not accounting for the masses of secondary media that i'm not aquainted with in which slavery probably pops up in more than a few times.

oh yeah, and leia being a slave was a thing for a moment there too.

 

[Necropolitan]

I didn't make that claim, only that the actual evil we see in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars is big and operatic, rather than banal.

The movies or the books?

Sauron's use of slavery in Mordor's and The Scouring of the Shire are both pretty big deals in the The Lord of the Rings books.

And slavery's an important plot point in Attack of the Clones and the Sequel Star Wars trilogy where it's made clear that the Storm Troopers are basically enslaved troops.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Personally I feel that if a fantasy society draws heavily from a particularly culture or cultures for its inspiration, the parts that are unpleasant to modern sensibilities shouldn't be ignored. But then I tend to look at most fantasy as a sort of "history +", where you're still trying to be coherent from a real world point of view where practical.

I mean, I absolutely sympathize with your position and do like some settings which roll that way, but if we honestly and without favour apply that rule, huge numbers of well-established fantasy societies fail that test (including like, 90% of those in the FR, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and so on - hell there are places in Ravenloft which fail this test even in the 1E/2E takes on Ravenloft!). Pretty much 100% of "fantasy Vikings" in all settings fail this check (and probably good that they do because otherwise oof). In practice my experience is that "exotic" (ugh) i.e. non-Western societies tend to have this "don't edit the bad parts" lens applied to them in games/setting where Western-esque societies do not (there are exceptions, of course).

Pretty every medieval and renaissance-inspired fantasy setting fails the test of not ignoring unpleasant parts, for example - not so much because of a lack of sexual violence or slavery or whatever, but because there's far too much class mobility, far too much freedom to travel, churches are usually far too weak, there's usually far too much law enforcement and laws are far too clear (ironically), there's pretty much never enough starvation or disease or general privation, and so on. And on the flipside, it's very easy to get into grimdark or edgelord territory where stuff is excessively played up.

And some societies are just... complicated. Like classical Athens, where you've got the upper class forcing full-body and head/facing coverings on upper-class women (I mean forcing, not voluntarily wearing as part of a faith, even!) and locking them in their houses, and punishing them terribly for any perceived failing, whilst not applying the same standards to working-class women, nor non-Athenians, and let's not even get into some other elements of Athenian society good grief. Talk about mixed feelings good lord. If you really played it straight I think about 90% of players would finally snap at some point from the sheer ultra-misogyny and constant child-assaulting and so on and just be like "NOPE THIS IS OVER!" and end up just destroying the Athenian way of life and replacing it with something less "JESUS WEPT WHAT?!?!".

 

[Staffan]

I don't recall "significant" slavery in either setting. Can you articulate it?

Both Anakin and Shmi Skywalker were slaves. The Clone Troopers were a slave army. And you could make a pretty good argument that droids are enslaved as well.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And you could make a pretty good argument that droids are enslaved as well.

Yeah that is one HELL of a thread to potentially pull on. Because a lot of droids appear to have free will and also appear to not want to be told what to do with no compensation. And Star Wars still treats that like that's a funny joke (c.f. S3 I think of the Mandalorian). I don't think Star Wars will age well after we finally get actual artificial general intelligence (which many droids clearly are).

 

[CreamCloud0]

Yeah it’s a fine line but one ripe with opportunity. Once you get past evil meaning steal all babies candy and kick every puppy. Sometimes it just requires pulling back and looking at a bigger picture.

i think it's such a loss that so many people will only consider characters to be 'evil' when they're commiting atrocities and war crimes, i wonder just how many popular moraly grey characters would be evil but still socially acceptable(is that the right judgement to use?) if judged unbiasedly?

 

[Chaosmancer]

What do you do with captives prior to the end of a war? Just keep them somewhere? Kill them all?

Read my post. I answered this.

In fairness to your point, you are clearly positing a world with much more prevalent magic than I would ever run. To me, there simply isn't enough magic broadly available to completely upend society, and if there were, said society would in no way resemble what we tend to get in D&D. I therefore tend to err on the side of reality when a choice of this kind must be made.

Sure, I guess if you don't have active gods or infernal powers making warlocks, then you wouldn't consider those aspects. But, um.... those are pretty common things in the worlds we have in DnD. They just always seem to have absolutely no effect on anything. Which is silly and wrong, but that's just my opinion.

You can of course do differently, and that's fine. Thank you for explaining your position to me.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I tend to see the presence of evil in our RPG worlds as a tool to define what is good. More specifically, the evil that is present is often what the heroes of the story are likely to be fighting against.

I get the appeal of having a world in which injustice is pervasive and the protagonists just accept it as part of their world. There is a verisimilitude to that, and it can feel viscerally real to have Conan shoulder his way through the slave markets on his way from the docks to the gambling halls.

However, even though I understand the appeal, I am not much interested in playing that, or forcing my players to experience that world. I am much happier and more comfortable with the big operatic evils of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars than the banal evils of Conan and Game of Thrones. I just like my heroes heroic in the modern sense.

Yeah, this is much more how I handle things, which makes it really weird when people take that and twist it into "so you want a utopia with no evil anywhere". One of my games featured a Cult to Orcus unleashing a zombie plague upon the world, interrupting multiple decades of battle between two countries. I'm fine with evil in the world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No. I am talking about what the actual text of what Star Wars is. it is the Skywalker Saga, and the things that means and talks about. That is why it has struggled so hard to produce anything of lasting impact and cultural importance outside of the Skywalker Saga.

Where is that written? Literally, since you keep mentioning "text". Rogue One is higher on many lists than several other Star Wars films, and it has nothing to do with the Skywalker Saga. Ditto the Mandalorian. Beyond that, why does cultural importance determine what something is?