BoVD Thoughts

[Omega Lord]

Alright I really have to get this off my chest. As you all probably know there has been a lot of hype about the BoVD. And, as with any controversial subject, there are strong opinions on both sides of the debate. I have just waded throught the better part of the Tracy Hickman thread and ,quite frankly, I think all of us need to take a deep breath, step back for a second, and cool off a little.

One very serious thing that bugs me are the people who state that the BoVD will encourage PC's to be evil and then go on to make disgusting analogies to things like 9/11 and real life crimes. Making examples of real crimes and atrocities only serves to cause a negative emotional response, please make your arguments without reminding us all of how cruel we can be to one another in real life.

Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that the BoVD is ment as a DM's supplament and not something a player will have access to. If a player in my group brought the BoVD to the table and was wanting to use material from it I would probably say no. And if any player of mine became evil or if I ran an evil campaign I would show my players that, like in real life, being evil has grave consequences.

Personally I will use the BoVD to create truly evil villans, and thus increase the versimilitude of my campagin and give my players added motivation to expunge said evil villan. Does this make me a vile violence glorifying hethen? I would hope not.

Also, on the subject of evil campaigns. I believe that the dark side sourcebook for the star wars d20 game handles the subject quite adequtely. Basically it says that evil campaigns should end in a blaze of glory caliber event, and that if players in a campaign are evil that there are consequences.

One final thing, I do believe that a certin fun can be had playing an evil campaign. I realize that I am in the minority here and i probably seem like im contradicting my earlier comments but hear me out. Playing an evil campagin for me would not consist of the usual drivel i hear about in most "evil" campaigns, you know what im talking about "I cut off the head of the dead orc, deficate down his throat, and relieve myself on his corpse. (huh huh huh)". A campaign such as that merely panders to people who never matured past the age of 12. Playing an evil character allows you to explore different realms of thought. It would allow me to explore a differnent method of thinking, I would liken the experience to playing the villan in a play (or playing Grand theft auto 3). Does playing a violent psycopath in a game make me mentally unstable? No, it is just a game and, as such, exists in the realm of fantasy as opposed to how one would act in the real world.

Basically the point of this rant is to defend the BoVD as a ligitamate supplament for mature gamers.

(Dons flame retardant body suit)

 

[the Jester]

Dude, wait til Monday to restart all this. I suspect this thread will be closed before anyone else has a chance to reply. It was just YESTERDAY that no less than a dozen threads on the topic got closed. A few days, Omega Lord, please. You're right, everyone does need to cool off about it. That is why all those threads got closed down in the first place.

 

[Omega Lord]

Really? they had a thread clensing type thing? wasnt aware of that. The main reason i posted this was i just got done reading the tedious thread on Tracy Hickman and sometimes Ive just got to state my opinion on things (for better or worse). Kind of a spur of the moment type thing.

 

[the Jester]

's cool, but don't be surprised if this thread goes the way of the baker's dozen.

 

[Ezrael]

I hope this thread is still here, because I wanted to mention one thing:

I don't *need* the BoVD to do evil. I'm quite capable of DM'ing some frightfully evil NPC's, and I'll do so whether or not anyone outside of my game approves. I don't believe mature audiences = lazy (I've read MAUS, Watchmen and other comics with some graphic and disturbing ideas in them, watched movies with graphic scenes of torture and murder and so on, and even read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, where the main protagonist is a member of the Torturer's Guild) and I don't need anyone's sanction to play my game my way. The only people I consider are my players, because they're the ones who I want to keep coming back so we can keep playing the game.

When I was twelve, I would have found the sealed section boring and tame. I already knew about the myth of Tantalus by then, who'd served a child to the gods to be consumed to determine how divine they really were. I knew about the death of King Edward II of England, who was killed by the insertion of a heated metal rod through an apeture in his body so as to avoid marring his flesh. I knew about the guillotine. I even worked on my family farm and saw the blood and viscera of many a cow, sheep or goat. I knew about the Donner Party, about the Sabine women, and about other, possibly darker issues. I doubt either the BoVD or Dragon 300 can possibly even come close to reaching the depth of human depravity, and even if it did, children are not so fragile that they will shattered into a million fragments if they somehow get their hands on this book. Considering that nursery rhymes often include self-mutilation, cannibalism, murder, abandonment of children by their parents, mass kidnapping of whole villages...considering that, I don't fret much about the BoVD.

There's been a lot of talk about the BoVD serving as some sort of disgusting egradation of the hobby. Well, if the hobby that produced Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Kult, the various and sundry WW games, Deadlands, Tomb of Horrors, etc can be so easily degraded by one book, then that book must be the most ineffably awful collection of evil ever released, and is artistic just for that. I mean, the writings of the Marquis de Sade (not his honest exploration of the philosophical idea of total freedom and how such would require the destruction of any and all powers that could possibly hinder one, but his vulgarities) could be endured by humanity without destroying French Literature, why can't the gaming hobby survive a compendium of evils *that will exist primarily to be overcome?* I mean, that is the stated goal of the book, isn't it? To provide new options for DM's in creating villains and threats for players to defeat? If discussing evil automatically glorifies it, how are we to discuss it? If confronting evil in a role playing game is to be equated with endorsing it, then there's no way to proceed.

I have always felt since I was old enough to make such judgements on my own that people who worry overmuch about the salacious or repellent content in a publication have had little real-life experience with such. I have read books in my life that detail in exquisite detail the horrors of hell (Dante's Inferno) and which explore the mentality of Satan himself (Milton's Paradise Lost) without losing my critical faculties. Franz Kafka's *In The Penal Colony* depicts a scene of a man being crushed and stabbed to death by a malfunctioning device as horrible as anything I've ever read...why is that acceptable, and this is not? How are we to be expected to depict an atrocity *without being atrocious?*

Admittedly, everyone's threshold is different. Also admittedly, in a free country with a respect for freedom of speech and discourse, we will be told what to think and what to feel by others. Objectivity is exceedingly difficult. Yet the old advice by that book out of the middle east to mind the beam in one's own eye before pointing out the mote in anothers is still valid: if you are not willing to be told how to think yourself, it might not be a great idea to command others. For myself, this book is neither some abomination on the face of the hobby nor an automatically immature work. It exists in a continuum of products that have dealt with the same topics, and until it is published we can't judge it. Furthermore, being interested in such topics is not automatically juvenile or immature...or if it is, then the History Channel and Steven Spielberg and dozens of mythographers from Robert Graves to Edith Hamilton and Friederich Nietzsche are all to be consigned to the ashpile of juvenalia?

I admit I find human brutality, human cruelty, and yes, human evil to be fascinating. I see no real reason to censor a discussion of those evil actions; indeed, maybe if more people knew, really viscerally knew what kind of hideous actions real life humans have committed, more empathy would be engendered. For myself and my past games, it has never hindered us to have villains who really *were* as loathsome as I could make them. The players did not emulate them, they defeated them. If I buy this book, I will use it in that spirit. I don't need any help to make my own moral judgements, and when I do make them, it will be by examining the book itself.

 

[thundershot]

The only reason I cancelled my order for BOVD was after reading that issue of Dragon, there is no way I want things that disgusting in my campaign. We may have SOME mature themes, but we don't have gore and ickyness like some of the spells in there... Neither me nor my players want graphic depictions of gore. This was all before Hickman's rant, and I am sure not agreeing with him. The book's just not for MY style of gaming.

That said, I'll take a look at it when it arrives in the book stores, and if it's not as GROSS as the Dragon stuff, I'll probably pick it up.



Chris

 

[drnuncheon]

I just one to remind everyone yet again that the juveline "mature content" spells in the sealed section of Dragon are not by the same person that wrote the BoVD...thus they are not necessarily representative of its content. People seem to forget that a lot.

J

 

[Dinkeldog]

Yes, there was a big thread closing event on Friday with this topic. That's why the Hickman thread was closed.

It might be a little too soon to restart the topic, but with lighter traffic on Sunday, we'll just keep a close eye on this one. Don't be surprised if it goes the way of the dodo at any time people lose civility.

 

[Furn_Darkside]

Basically the point of this rant is to defend the BoVD as a ligitamate supplament for mature gamers.

Have you seen the book or are you stabbing in the dark like the people attacking the BoVD without seeing it?

It seems to me that instead of another set of rants- we just wait and see.

FD

 

[EricNoah]

Here are some ways this thread can continue to live on....

1) Express how you feel. Don't express how others ought to feel.

2) Don't make personal attacks. The anti-vileness people aren't "big babies" and the pro-vileness people aren't "terrorists."

3) I also put it to you that, as in religious and political discussion, there is no way to "win" this argument. So don't expect to go changing minds or hearts here -- express yourself, ask for clarification, etc., but don't expect to win. That might take the edge off of some of the discussion.

This topic needs a lot of discussion, but the discussion can easily break down unless you're careful.

***

Now, as to my opinion.

Evil isn't very "evil" in D&D core. I can see the need for some games to get a little closer to what evil really is. I would be very uncomfortable in a game where the PCs were evil as in "vile darkness" evil, but that sort of thing might occasionally be a useful motivating factor when dealing with NPC bad guys.

Why do we read tragedies? Why do we watch gangster movies? Sure, there's a certain visceral pleasure in seeing someone being bad. But I think it also allows us to vicariously experience what it might be like to make a series of bad choices and then suffer the consequences. I strongly feel that a game that explores evil should ultimately deal with the themes of evil: that evil might bring you strength in the short run but over the long haul it will destroy you, for instance.

My reaction to the "sealed section" was -- wow, that's very tame. And I suspected it would be. On a dial that goes up to 11, this stuff is about two notches higher than D&D core "evil" in my opinion.

Now, as to whether this vileness stuff will be good or bad for the D&D game in general .... I think computer games and music lyrics are in the public eye a lot more than tabletop RPGs nowadays. I don't see this being a big deal. Does it help the D&D image? Probably not. I don't see it doing much of anything, especially as it's a non-core product. We won't see much if any trickle-down from BoVD to future products.