CyberSpyder said:
No, your tautology goes too far. I appreciate you trying to make the peace (although the sarcasm of 'oddly enough' is puzzling). But substituting 'ignorant' when I meant 'modern' is going too far. I never said that, and I never meant it. There were only two individuals that I recall directing that comment to that would have cause to even feel this way - and that's the dude that replied by saying I had too much caffeine (and appropriate response), and Tarchon.
I don't think the first guy is losing any sleep over the exchange. He called me over-caffeinated and I called him a modern person who watches television. I don't think either one of us is reeling from the venom.
As far as Tarchon goes, I already apologized - or rather clarified because I often find it hard to apologize to someone who (a) does not seem to be upset by something and (b) misunderstood what I said anyway. I made the "modern" comment to Tarchon as a theatrical way of pointing out a (should I say instead) "literate" persons bias against oral/poetic knowledge by characterizing a bard's information regarding a certain subject as somehow incomplete or evasive. Now whether or not it was based on a misunderstanding, at worst, I "accused" him (if you will) of being ignorant about the capacity of a person raised in a tradition of oral knowledge to retain facts with precision. But just "ignorant" - that's not anywhere close to what I think or what I meant - if just the word "ignorant" by itself even means anything worth talking about.
The final category of people that got the word modern applied to them was the general group of everyone reading my post. I felt safe doing so because I didn't think any individual would feel putting on the spot or insulted by a post that was so obviously over the top. Who takes seriously a post that ends with a statement that the writer is being haunted by the ghosts of bards!!?
And by saying modern, what did I really mean? I meant that a person who lives in a literate society that, itself, was based on literate socieities would not necessarily have an appreciation for, or understand intuitively the capacities that non-literate people would have for retaining, remembering, organizing, and transmitting non-written information. And that in the "snap-decision" world of DMing, this bias would get transferred into an unfavorable ruling on the bard lore skill (as was already apparently the case in the WLD example).
And I thought it shows. Just look at how many people made some statement to the effect of "so and so bard got his information from such and such document"! So if that's ignorant, then so's the fact that most of you probably do not kill animals for food. So what. If we were discussing the "hunter" character class, and I knew anything about hunting societies, I might point out some of the biases were it warranted. Of course I would do it now in a much more restrained fashion (I hope). But it would never occured to me that anyone would take a generalized post from some lunatic so seriously when it comes to comments about things I could not possibly know about, like their reading habits.
I'm sorry if I've missed some comment that I made in this thread that hurt someone's feelings. I can't think of a single posting that I read that I didn't think was either interesting, funny, confusing, or thoughtful (even the ones in Latin).
