D&D in India ?

[talinthas]

yeah, which is why any attempt to make an rpg out of india would have to stick to the universal classics, aka the mahabharat, the ramayan, and the upanishads. Beyond that, it becomes way too complex to try to properly model. For a bit, i was toying with the idea of making regional feat packages representing various cultural groups, but i stopped because it would be too hard to do without falling into traps of cultural bias. I'm a gujarati; that means that i have pretty well ingrained opinions of other groups in india, based on their historical interactions with the gujus, and transmitted through parents and cultural norms. That sort of thing makes the idea of trying to stat out various groups untenable.

Thusly, it's better to play in the mythology, where everyone spoke classical sanskrit and had clearly defined lines of good and evil =)
I mean, when we look at roman mythology, no one cares that the etruscans and the sicilians were ethinic enemies or anything. Japanese rpgs don't really waste time on the ainu and okinawans, and so on and so on.

And man, you haven't seen diversity till you've been to one of the four big cities of India. every ethnicity in the world is represented, from the white skinned, blue eyed folks from Kashmir, to the pitch black curly haired folks in tamil nadu, to the asian folks from assam and arunchal pradesh, and the "bollywood standard" brown folks from Bombay and Gujarat. it's crazy =)

 

[johnsemlak]

I have never been to India and have little knowledge of the country and culture, but let me make a couple of points.

First, look for gamers in the expatriate community. If you're in the capital, there may be a number of foreigners who are/have gamed. Even people who haven't gamed in a while may greatly appreciate the opportunity to do something with fellow-English speakers.

As mentioned before, whatever the truth of India lacking a gaming culture, I can't believe that there isn't huge potential in a country of a billion poeple and the country which invented both chess and many of the legends that form a basis for fantasy. India does have a large techie community, and we all know techies are receptive to gaming. Obviously, only people with a certain about of affluence can afford to game, so that's a limitation.

 

[shilsen]

dude, when i was a kid, i had a toy bow and arrow, and a toy mace, and i used to run around pretending to be Ram or Hanuman, the way my neighbors would play cowboys and indians =)

You think that's bad? I got into playing Krishna so much that I started calling my mom Devaki and dad Vasudeva (for those not up on Indian myth, that's very roughly equivalent to calling your dad Joseph and mom Mary).

yeah, which is why any attempt to make an rpg out of india would have to stick to the universal classics, aka the mahabharat, the ramayan, and the upanishads. Beyond that, it becomes way too complex to try to properly model.

Even within that small batch of texts, you can't get consistency and have to pick and choose what to put in an RPG. The pantheon in the Ramayana and Mahabharata is pretty close to the same, but not the same as in the Upanishads, which is itself very different to that in the Puranas (which I think would be a huge source for this kind of material) or in the Vedas.

 

[Nisarg]

Just thought I'd add the other big element missed in roleplaying.. just like there's been lots of chinese fantasy settings but no Indian fantasy settings, have you noticed how there's all these Feng-Shui style Wuxia/Hong Kong movies action RPGs out there, but no Bollywood action RPG out there?

We need a Bollywood edition of Feng shui! I could just see it now, instead of things like the "training montage", you could have the "spontaneous burst into song and dance".

Nisarg

 

[talinthas]

god. talk about a railroaded campaign... =)

 

[der_kluge]

India does have a large techie community, and we all know techies are receptive to gaming. Obviously, only people with a certain about of affluence can afford to game, so that's a limitation.

I don't really know how true this is. It is true that India places a lot of value on education and their culture rewards knowledge, but to say that lots of Indians are techies is probably not really justififed.

It's just that everyone else's exposure to people from India is primarily through computer programmers.

As a computer programmer myself, I can only feel ashamed and sorry that the country of India gets misrepresented so poorly.