Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8274738" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think I am misremembering, to be honest. I was in those thread and on the same "side" as you, and I'm sure evidence will relate but I don't you're characterizing them correctly, and further, you're talking about a pretty small subset of D&D players even by the standards of the time.I mean, if we're talking ENworld post-4E, post-2008, anyone posting about 4E is going to be either:A) Someone who plays/runs 4EorB) Someone who doesn't, but is very keen to interact - probably negatively - with people who do.B is going to be a tiny group of people, and I'm pretty sure trawling through threads from that era will confirm that we're talking about a very small number of people. People who might be very loud, but who preferred, by and large, to come and tell 4E DMs/players they were wrong, to either talking about what they were playing, or other activities.I think we're talking about two different things.You're describing editions wars, on ENworld, during the 4E period, which was basically the WW1 of flamewars.I'm describing a much broader milieu, where ENworld was only part of that.Okay, so I'll take this at face value. I think the implication is "this would never happen", but maybe it's an honest question? Obviously it does happen. History is absolutely rife with lazy, corrupt, and foolish guards. Top to bottom. And looking at heists IRL, they're absolutely packed with them. Not all guards are, but an awful lot are, at least the ones who show up in the records (and based on personal experiences through my life I'd say most still are pretty lazy, esp. those over about 30).People tolerate lazy guards because they have a limited pool of people to choose guards from and/or they don't know or sometimes even care about the laziness.They're not recruiting from millions. Or even hundreds of thousands, in most cases. Or even tens of thousands. They're recruiting from who is available, and who is allowable. Unless you have vast resources and are willing to start burning them, your recruiting pool is basically whoever lives in your city or village and thereabouts. Maybe people coming through. And you want people who are reasonably healthy, probably on the large side physically (or at least fit, and rough-and-tumble), and who hopefully lack the cunning and imagination to exploit their position in terms of theft or the like. It would be nice if they'd been in one of the various citizen-militias your country has, but it's unlikely there's a standing army to draw from (and if there is, you're getting people who are aging out of it, leaving with injuries, getting thrown out and so on - unless you're paying more and offering better benefits). So you're probably getting a lot of people, mostly men, who are used to getting their way (due to their size or rough-and-tumble nature), who are signing on for a job that mostly involves standing around, walking around, and menacing people. It's not usually a job that goes anywhere (bodyguards are different), so you're not likely to get ambitious people, er, unless they're ambitious to steal your stuff.You're probably not paying super-well, and it's unlikely you're paying for a lot of elaborate drills and practises and so on. You don't have any security cameras to see the malfeasance. Your only source of information is essentially other personnel who work for you. You probably can't afford to employ anyone but the guards 24-7, and no-one works 24-7. You've probably got some people in charge of the guards, but it's a bit of a toss-up as to whether they're actually disciplined, or just somewhat better than the rest at pretending that they are.Anyway, TLDR, obviously people do tolerate lazy guards, historically, for a wide variety of reasons.I mean, as an aside, it's a strange bit of logic, because humanity constantly tolerates things it shouldn't, particularly including low-grade work, and ill-disciplined soldiery. Usually the answer comes down to "they didn't have much choice" and or "it was too much effort to do otherwise". Both apply here.Sigh, you literally can't stop with the strawmen, can you? It's kind of funny/sad. I didn't say that. I didn't call anyone "stupid". That's you - repeatedly - you're arguing with your own claim. You are defining what a strawman is here, by making up things that I didn't say. I see that you don't know what a strawman is, because you're claiming that the idea that modern people are more disciplined is one:No.[URL unfurl="true"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man[/URL]I might be wrong or I might be stupid about an idea. It still wouldn't be a strawman, ever. Because a strawman has a specific meaning.It only becomes a strawman if I said "[USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] is saying people in the past were way more disciplined than now!!!" now. I.e. lying about what you were saying, or putting words in your mouth, that benefit your argument. You are doing that with all this talk about "stupid".I have access to them but I don't run them.What I'm saying is "facts not in evidence". You haven't been giving examples, just making sweeping unsupported claims. Now you've given some examples,, but they're really vague and imprecise. Can you give me some examples? Like page numbers even? Otherwise this just vague claims on your part.As I said, the last person who talked about this, made similar claims, then walked them back during his post with examples, because he realized they didn't actually show catastrophism, they showed "no guidance".And It's easy to believe you might be doing the same - treating weak or no guidance as catastrophism. You are the one who has to prove this, because you are the one asserting it to be fact. Sneering at me and claiming I don't know them, or I'm implying I'm weird (lol obviously) isn't an argument, it's a cheap ad hominem. Drop some page numbers or the like and I'll go look because I'm pretty sure my bro has all of those.</blockquote>

Verification