Cultures in D&D/roleplaying: damned if you do, damned if you don't

I hadn't expected you to be. I'll admit that I had hoped otherwise, But c'est la vie.

I've little energy and even less time to waste on those who wear their lack of empathy as a badge of honor.

By rejecting the very basis of the thread you've demonstrated that you have nothing of actual value to add to this discussion, and are only here to troll, or, as the kids say these days, :):):):)-post. This conversation is not for you. Go away.
LOL. If you're going to PLONK me, at least have the dignity to not flounce around about it trying to get my attention with your drama.
Not really. I think I could explain it to you in a way you'd agree to, although, I do agree that anything as complex as the inaptly named 'Second World War' trying to sum up the causes in a single sentence is always going to come up short.
Oh, I doubt it. I've done a very extensive survey of both not only the causes of WWII, but also the causes of the US involvement in such. The idea that WW2 was fought so that America could admit immigrants, or whatever it is exactly that you're suggesting, is something that you will never convince me of because the primary sources say otherwise.
Celebrim said:
I have my suspicions that you are vastly misapprehending the sentiments, intentions and subtly of thought of the original poster, and in any event, even if you are not, as I've repeated multiple times in this thread, it would be best if we all started off on the right foot of assuming the best of each other. And, once again, I know you don't care and I respect that, but not everyone here thinks the best of tolerance and there is another unfortunate turn of phrase there.
I have my suspicions that I'm, if anything, underestimating the degree to which this plays out, especially at a place like ENWorld, which I've largely ignored for the better part of five years, in part precisely BECAUSE of this kind of thing, which makes substantive discussion about anything like, say, "Hey, how's an interesting way to integrate the Turks as a fantasy culture in my D&D game?" so difficult without someone trying to play amateur hour referee and throwing flags all over the play every time anything is said.

Too bad, too. It'd make an interesting discussion.
I suggest you re-read my OP.
I suggest YOU re-read your O/P. What you say we "all know" we have to avoid because it's "not OK" is exactly what every fantasy setting pretty much ever has ever done. Or does Ed Greenwood somehow get a pass for making the Tuigans a "lazy caricature" of the Turks because he's Ed Greenwood?

Or is the whole premise flawed from the beginning? Hint: yes, it is.
 

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Ancalagon

Dusty Dragon
I suggest YOU re-read your O/P. What you say we "all know" we have to avoid because it's "not OK" is exactly what every fantasy setting pretty much ever has ever done. Or does Ed Greenwood somehow get a pass for making the Tuigans a "lazy caricature" of the Turks because he's Ed Greenwood?

Or is the whole premise flawed from the beginning? Hint: yes, it is.

Well, I did. Maybe I misspoke?

Upon re read, I see that you've mixed two concepts together. "Not ok" was attached to "one dimensional villain". But you instead attached it to lazy caricature. It's a lot easier to attack an argument when you change it to your taste... but that is unkind of me to say, it probably wasn't intentional on your part.

I haven't read Greenwood horde trilogy so I can't comment on that. Was it a lazy caricature?

Anyway, you've seemed to have missed the entire premise, which I helpfully included in the title: damned if you do, damned if you don't. I find it interesting that almost no one spoke of the don't part...
 

Celebrim

Legend
Oh, I doubt it. I've done a very extensive survey of both not only the causes of WWII, but also the causes of the US involvement in such. The idea that WW2 was fought so that America could admit immigrants, or whatever it is exactly that you're suggesting, is something that you will never convince me of because the primary sources say otherwise.

At this point, you are just making yourself look bad, especially since you are engaged in erratic uncontrolled blue on blue fire. But fine, if you want to get into a who knows more about WWII than the other one debate, I'm game.

Almost all great wars are fought over ideology, and WWII is no different. First, as you would well know, WW2 was not a single war. It was a series of colonial wars that merged together over time as the great powers of the day were drawn into it. There were five major participants and many minor participants and not every participant was even fighting the same war. Of the major participants, Germany had colonial and imperial ambitions in Europe, but really over the entire world. Part of that was the chip on the shoulder Germany had from its late unification compared to England or France, and the fact that it's central position in Europe meant that it didn't have easy ocean access to the rest of the world. Part of that was the crushing of Germany's imperial ambitions in WWI. Italy was a mid-sized participant and also got late to the colonial party again because of its late unification compared to England and France. Japan on the other side of the world had its own colonial ambitions, because it had a chip on its shoulder owing to discovering that the barbarians it had dismissed, had outpaced it technologically beyond its ability to imagine while it was in isolation and its own identity as one of if not the great nation of the world was in serious jeopardy. And meanwhile, Russia acting as the Soviet Empire, was engaged in a slightly novel ideologically driven colonial and imperial expansion.

That ideological novelty was however central to how WWII would play out. The five great powers could be and were aligned in two manners. Those that saw the word 'nation' primarily in its classical definition as what we would now call an ethnic group. In the minds of Germany and Japan there was fundamentally no difference between the nation the political entity and the nation the ethnic identity. Furthermore, it was inconceivable to them that nations could be arranged in really any other way. To them, the powers of Russia, Great Britain, and most especially the truly bizarre United States were mongrel nations made of an unhappy blend of many other lesser nations. To varying degrees, Russia, Great Britain and the United States on the other hand had adopted a view of the world that a political entity could transcend the traditional idea of nation, and that a nation could be united not be shared ethnic identity but primarily by a shared ideology to create a sort of super-nation. While the notion of empire, multiple nations united under one sovereign was very old, these three nations had really taken it further than that. Of the three, the United States was the least like any empire that had gone before, and the most willing to transcend racial identity completely provided you accepted the basic cultural values that the United States was founded on it.

Ultimately, both sides saw the other side as an existential threat. These super-empires would eventually in their minds gobble up all the worlds land, homogenize it underneath their cultural identity and eventually destroy any traditional national identity in their way. To leaders in Germany and Japan this result was unthinkable, and it required them conquering a vast area to secure the resources they felt they need to protect their ethnic identity from cultural and racial pollution and relegation to second class status. And in the minds of the leaders of Germany and Japan, the fact that they had ethnic and racial purity, and ethnic and racial supremacy meant that they could overcome the racially inferior mongrel nations that would oppose them. At that level, WW2 was fundamentally testing whether racially diverse nations united by a common ideology could successfully oppose nations organized by more traditional means. Hitler, on the basis of his ideological views, actually completely dismissed the potential economic, technological might of the USA despite the fact that it was actually the largest single homogenous culture the world had ever seen to that point, simply because in his mind moral resolve and unity of purpose could not possibly stem from an ethnically diverse people - a people that in his mind couldn't really be called a nation at all.

None of this has really anything to do with your fever imaginings except that as a matter of actual fact, the USA had been settled by diverse European immigrants many of whom did not like each other and held prejudices against each other back in the old country and had by that time fought a great war to settle the question for itself whether a nation so composed and found could long endure, and whether people so diverse could be a single nation. None of this has anything at all to do with my opinions regarding the modern immigration debate which are probably closer to yours than you imagine, much as just at the moment I'm guessing we have very very different reasons behind those opinions.

But some people you can't actually get to open their eyes and avoid running into a brick wall no matter how much you warn them.

I have my suspicions that I'm, if anything, underestimating the degree to which this plays out, especially at a place like ENWorld, which I've largely ignored for the better part of five years, in part precisely BECAUSE of this kind of thing, which makes substantive discussion about anything like, say, "Hey, how's an interesting way to integrate the Turks as a fantasy culture in my D&D game?" so difficult without someone trying to play amateur hour referee and throwing flags all over the play every time anything is said.

Leaving all that aside, I'll just come out and say it because it seems likely we are going to get locked down now. It seemed pretty obvious to me that this thread was to some extent conceived as a protest of the very things you are here protesting. Only the OP is a lot more diplomatic, charitable, and thoughtful than you are here presenting yourself. To me it seemed like a cannon blast against the very ideology that annoys you, because it was an attempt to make the trouble makers live up to their own rules, something that I've repeatedly stated that they cannot in fact do because their rules as hypocritical and self-contradictory and they cannot themselves outline them because they are subjective, and I will say again racist. This seemed to be the premise behind the OPs challenge in the title of the thread.
 
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Ancalagon

Dusty Dragon
I wouldn't put it as strongly as you [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] , but I do thank you for the kind words. And you are correct that I am troubled by a set of "rules" that seem limiting and short sighted.

If a goal is to be respectful of others (and this seems laudable), and the pursuit of that goal results in gaming/fiction/etc that pretends others don't exist... then we have failed to attain that goal.
 
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Ovinomancer

No flips for you!
At this point, you are just making yourself look bad, especially since you are engaged in erratic uncontrolled blue on blue fire. But fine, if you want to get into a who knows more about WWII than the other one debate, I'm game.

Almost all great wars are fought over ideology, and WWII is no different. First, as you would well know, WW2 was not a single war. It was a series of colonial wars that merged together over time as the great powers of the day were drawn into it. There were five major participants and many minor participants and not every participant was even fighting the same war. Of the major participants, Germany had colonial and imperial ambitions in Europe, but really over the entire world. Part of that was the chip on the shoulder Germany had from its late unification compared to England or France, and the fact that it's central position in Europe meant that it didn't have easy ocean access to the rest of the world. Part of that was the crushing of Germany's imperial ambitions in WWI. Italy was a mid-sized participant and also got late to the colonial party again because of its late unification compared to England and France. Japan on the other side of the world had its own colonial ambitions, because it had a chip on its shoulder owing to discovering that the barbarians it had dismissed, had outpaced it technologically beyond its ability to imagine while it was in isolation and its own identity as one of if not the great nation of the world was in serious jeopardy. And meanwhile, Russia acting as the Soviet Empire, was engaged in a slightly novel ideologically driven colonial and imperial expansion.

That ideological novelty was however central to how WWII would play out. The five great powers could be and were aligned in two manners. Those that saw the word 'nation' primarily in its classical definition as what we would now call an ethnic group. In the minds of Germany and Japan there was fundamentally no difference between the nation the political entity and the nation the ethnic identity. Furthermore, it was inconceivable to them that nations could be arranged in really any other way. To them, the powers of Russia, Great Britain, and most especially the truly bizarre United States were mongrel nations made of an unhappy blend of many other lesser nations. To varying degrees, Russia, Great Britain and the United States on the other hand had adopted a view of the world that a political entity could transcend the traditional idea of nation, and that a nation could be united not be shared ethnic identity but primarily by a shared ideology to create a sort of super-nation. While the notion of empire, multiple nations united under one sovereign was very old, these three nations had really taken it further than that. Of the three, the United States was the least like any empire that had gone before, and the most willing to transcend racial identity completely provided you accepted the basic cultural values that the United States was founded on it.

Ultimately, both sides saw the other side as an existential threat. These super-empires would eventually in their minds gobble up all the worlds land, homogenize it underneath their cultural identity and eventually destroy any traditional national identity in their way. To leaders in Germany and Japan this result was unthinkable, and it required them conquering a vast area to secure the resources they felt they need to protect their ethnic identity from cultural and racial pollution and relegation to second class status. And in the minds of the leaders of Germany and Japan, the fact that they had ethnic and racial purity, and ethnic and racial supremacy meant that they could overcome the racially inferior mongrel nations that would oppose them. At that level, WW2 was fundamentally testing whether racially diverse nations united by a common ideology could successfully oppose nations organized by more traditional means. Hitler, on the basis of his ideological views, actually completely dismissed the potential economic, technological might of the USA despite the fact that it was actually the largest single homogenous culture the world had ever seen to that point, simply because in his mind moral resolve and unity of purpose could not possibly stem from an ethnically diverse people - a people that in his mind couldn't really be called a nation at all.

None of this has really anything to do with your fever imaginings except that as a matter of actual fact, the USA had been settled by diverse European immigrants many of whom did not like each other and held prejudices against each other back in the old country and had by that time fought a great war to settle the question for itself whether a nation so composed and found could long endure, and whether people so diverse could be a single nation. None of this has anything at all to do with my opinions regarding the modern immigration debate which are probably closer to yours than you imagine, much as just at the moment I'm guessing we have very very different reasons behind those opinions.

But some people you can't actually get to open their eyes and avoid running into a brick wall no matter how much you warn them.



Leaving all that aside, I'll just come out and say it because it seems likely we are going to get locked down now. It seemed pretty obvious to me that this thread was to some extent conceived as a protest of the very things you are here protesting. Only the OP is a lot more diplomatic, charitable, and thoughtful than you are here presenting yourself. To me it seemed like a cannon blast against the very ideology that annoys you, because it was an attempt to make the trouble makers live up to their own rules, something that I've repeatedly stated that they cannot in fact do because their rules as hypocritical and self-contradictory and they cannot themselves outline them because they are subjective, and I will say again racist. This seemed to be the premise behind the OPs challenge in the title of the thread.

There's some great stuff in here, but I differ with you on the premise: most wars are fought due to population pressure. Germany started WWII largely because it had a surplus of young men without gainful use. This made them susceptible to an ideology, yes, but no other country that had plenty of gainful use for their young men fell under the sway of that ideology. The Crusades were fought for various religious and secular reasons, but the timing was keenly associated to a build-up of noble sons without land to inherent.

In other words, peoples don't go to war if they have enough at home. Peoples go to war if they cannot currently support their populations and need to bleed off the excess, either through conquest and victory and new land/resources or casualties. Ideologies come in to provide a support and mode for the aggression, but people just aren't that aggressive when they have enough already. Every war can be traced back to a pressure on the population for resources and a surplus of citizens.

At least, that's my working theory in a nutshell. Extremist and/or violent ideologies have a hard time taking root in prosperous peoples.
 

Celebrim

Legend
There's some great stuff in here, but I differ with you on the premise: most wars are fought due to population pressure. Germany started WWII largely because it had a surplus of young men without gainful use. This made them susceptible to an ideology, yes, but no other country that had plenty of gainful use for their young men fell under the sway of that ideology. The Crusades were fought for various religious and secular reasons, but the timing was keenly associated to a build-up of noble sons without land to inherent.

In other words, peoples don't go to war if they have enough at home. Peoples go to war if they cannot currently support their populations and need to bleed off the excess, either through conquest and victory and new land/resources or casualties. Ideologies come in to provide a support and mode for the aggression, but people just aren't that aggressive when they have enough already. Every war can be traced back to a pressure on the population for resources and a surplus of citizens.

At least, that's my working theory in a nutshell. Extremist and/or violent ideologies have a hard time taking root in prosperous peoples.

This theory reminds me of the 'all wars are religious' theory, in that you can sort of sustain it by providing a couple of examples if you don't squint too closely, but as soon as you list out every war and start checking it off and looking closely at the causes, the theory starts looking absurd. The Civil War wasn't fought over population pressure. The American Revolution wasn't fought over population pressure. If we listed out the all the armed conflicts in the world since 1800, most of them would not be fought over population pressure.

Population pressure can contribute to a war being fought and it is certainly the reason that stone age tribal bands of hunter-gathers go to war but it's not the singular explanation for all wars.

And you'll notice that I gave myself a bit of an out in that I didn't actually say all wars had an ideological basis; I said that all great wars have an ideological basis (or I could have just as well said a cultural basis, because IMO that amounts to much the same thing). Wars with only an economic basis tend to be more limited in scale.

As for prosperity, nothing in history is more aggressive than a newly prosperous nation. Newly prosperous Republics tend to be particularly bad.
 

Ovinomancer

No flips for you!
This theory reminds me of the 'all wars are religious' theory, in that you can sort of sustain it by providing a couple of examples if you don't squint too closely, but as soon as you list out every war and start checking it off and looking closely at the causes, the theory starts looking absurd. The Civil War wasn't fought over population pressure. The American Revolution wasn't fought over population pressure. If we listed out the all the armed conflicts in the world since 1800, most of them would not be fought over population pressure.

Population pressure can contribute to a war being fought and it is certainly the reason that stone age tribal bands of hunter-gathers go to war but it's not the singular explanation for all wars.

And you'll notice that I gave myself a bit of an out in that I didn't actually say all wars had an ideological basis; I said that all great wars have an ideological basis (or I could have just as well said a cultural basis, because IMO that amounts to much the same thing). Wars with only an economic basis tend to be more limited in scale.

As for prosperity, nothing in history is more aggressive than a newly prosperous nation. Newly prosperous Republics tend to be particularly bad.

The Civil War was fought over population pressure. The South was exerting under influence over the nation, and the North had lots of new people that wanted their fair share in the burgeoning industrial revolution. Political pressure was brought to bear, which threatened the wealthly land-owners of the South's ability to continue dividing their resources as they wished to their population. It threatened to take away their gainfulness in their system. Extra population being at hand, the South left the Union. The North could not afford to let the resources of the South go (although, in a few more years, the industrial revolution would upend that) and, having extra population, pressed war to prevent it. Ideology only had teeth because of the impacts to populations -- the North would be destitute absent the resources and money of the South, so they HAD to reclaim that or their population would be severely pressured.

I'm not trying to blame the North for the Civil War. The South had no moral foundation for their beliefs and are not the good guys. There are no good guys in the Civil War, only those with a more repugnant society and those that needed the resources of that more repugnant society enough to go to war over them.

The American Revolution is, however, a harder sell. The Americans wished to be free of the pressures of the British, which limited their ability to have their own freedoms. The British needed the Americas as a convenient place to dump excess, undesirable population and provide new lands for noble sons. Further, the British empire at the time absolutely relied on the ability to project it's power to protect it's population and to provide for that population, so persecuting the nascent American revolution was a step they had to take to continue to protect their incomes, which goes to the prosperity of their peoples. Britain had leapt to the top of the world stage by engaging in very successful wars of acquisition, which greatly enhanced their population's security. Challenges to those acquisitions was a direct challenge to the safety and prosperity of Britian's populace.

Your note on prosperity isn't something I'll agree with. Newly prosperous nations by way of acquisition have been taught a lesson, but there are many examples of newly prosperous nations that do not immediately wage war. China, for one, is a good modern example. Most of SE Asia, as a matter of fact, has had rapidly blooming prosperity but not yet erupted into war. I don't think this is a useful maxim.
 

Celebrim

Legend
The Civil War was fought over population pressure. The South was exerting under influence over the nation, and the North had lots of new people that wanted their fair share in the burgeoning industrial revolution. Political pressure was brought to bear, which threatened the wealthly land-owners of the South's ability to continue dividing their resources as they wished to their population. It threatened to take away their gainfulness in their system. Extra population being at hand, the South left the Union. The North could not afford to let the resources of the South go (although, in a few more years, the industrial revolution would upend that) and, having extra population, pressed war to prevent it. Ideology only had teeth because of the impacts to populations -- the North would be destitute absent the resources and money of the South, so they HAD to reclaim that or their population would be severely pressured.

That's some serious squinting you are doing there. Square peg into a round hole. Although neither side necessarily sold the war on these terms, the American Civil War was fought over slavery. And by "fought over slavery" I mean specifically that it was fought over the ethical and normative value of slavery, which happened precisely because the national cultural value was supposed to be "all men are created equal...". The north would have had no problem with slavery as an economic institution if it did not have a significant population that opposed it for moral and religious grounds.

You can't put two different cultures into the same nation, so by 1860 you had a situation where you had two nations trying to live under the same political umbrella and the South's move to secede only was a final acknowledgement of that reality. It wasn't fought over population pressure, and none of your evidence actually links up. You gave a series of stand alone sentences that neither support each other or your thesis. The South wanted to expand into the Western territories, not because it was feeling crowded, but because it needed additional leverage in the democracy. The South was perfectly willing to forgo all Western territories if by doing so it could secure it's culture from political intrusion. The burgeoning population of the North wasn't an economic crisis for the South, but a political crisis because it gave the North more votes and it knew that eventually those votes would be used to try to forcefully dissolve the South's economic institutions. But it wasn't like the South feared the North wanted it's land or the South thought that more Northerners was a bad thing in and of itself, because the North was among other things a market for its goods.

It's absolutely ridiculous to assert the North would have been destitute without the South. The Civil War itself proved that. The North could have afforded to let the South go from an economic perspective. The North's economy was massive compared to the South, because the South for a variety of reasons from slavery itself to climate had not industrialized (the South didn't actually explode in prosperity until air conditioning came along). New York alone had a larger economy than all the states of the Confederacy. Nothing the South provided was irreplaceable, because the economy was global. The North could have and did import cotton and beef and so forth from other suppliers without so much as blinking. Your assessment of the war seems grounded in the Southern leaders pre-war assessment of the war, and not the war as it actually was. I think it is very valuable to teach the American Civil War from a Southern perspective, but you seem to take that a bit too far.

Your note on prosperity isn't something I'll agree with. Newly prosperous nations by way of acquisition have been taught a lesson, but there are many examples of newly prosperous nations that do not immediately wage war. China, for one, is a good modern example. Most of SE Asia, as a matter of fact, has had rapidly blooming prosperity but not yet erupted into war.

You are speaking too soon. China is well on its way to picking a fight. It's just looking around for a good excuse and a likely target. It's pretty much acting just like I'd expect a newly prosperous nation to act. It's trying to acquire assets in Africa, trying to gain overseas territory for naval purposes, and expanding its hitherto primarily defensive military assets into more and more aggressive assets that you need to assert military supremacy far from your homeland. The only reason it hasn't tried to take Taiwan already is its concerned the USA would intervene, but it's trying to box the US Navy out of the area in an attempt to gain enough 'breathing room' to do an invasion quickly and force the USA to accept it as a fait accompli.

But let's try to stay away from modern examples, and stick to history. Some of the most aggressively expansionistic nations in history were the Athenian Republic, the Roman Republic, the British, and the USA. Athens was the aggressor nation in the Peloponnesian War. Rome was the aggressor nation in the Punic Wars, and let's not forget that Carthage was itself a product of a highly expansionistic and aggressive Phoenician Empire. Most people, including most Americans, looking at American military history get things exactly backwards. Pretty much every war the USA was involved in during the first 100 years, the USA was the aggressor in. We started pretty much all of them. After the US Civil War, the explosion of prosperity directly led to America's most blatantly imperialistic behavior in the Spanish-American war. The USA certainly wasn't short of land to exploit at the time. However, almost every war that the USA has fought since the beginning of the 20th century has been defensive in nature. Most people get this backwards, treating the young nation as simply defending its interest, and the more developed nation as being aggressively imperial. The facts go exactly the other direction. In point of fact, newly wealthy nations try to dominate less wealthy nations simply because they can, and newly wealthy Republics tend to look for excuses to go to war. France became much more aggressive as a Republic than it had been as a Monarchy, leading "World War 4" (if you count actual global wars) and between 4.5 and 7.5 million deaths (depending on your sources).
 
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