Did I discover the Left Wing and Right Wing of D&D gaming styles?

[Calico_Jack73]

I'm afraid that I am very Traditionalist in my views... if it doesn't fit the story I want to tell and the setting I've chosen/created I don't allow it. Players can be plenty creative within the confines of my setting... if they get pissed off it is because they are already set against it and won't turn their creativity towards creating something positive. I'm certainly not going to allow a Paladin or a non-Legate Cleric in my Midnight campaign because those classes just don't fit the setting. If a player really pushed the issue then I'd agree but they'd be essentially be running a Fighter with either d10 or d8 for Hit Dice and no Bonus Feats.

 

[fusangite]

But maybe what we've unearthed is yet another distinction: the difference between the consistency inherent in the setting, and the consistency of the PCs with that setting. That is, one could define a perfectly consistent setting and yet allow a PC who is inconsistent with it. I tend to worry more about PC-consistency-with-setting than setting-consistency-with-itself.

Now of course those two things are co-related as well, inasmuch as a setting of less internal consistency will be more forgiving of PC types and therefore will probably be more likely to allow PC inconsistency. But I would say that myself, I'm more concerned that the PCs fit into the world than that the world itself makes sound logical sense. I tend to create a world full of stuff I think is cool, and worry about the justifications (if any are required) later -- but I work very hard to make sure the PCs fit into the list of cool stuff I've selected.

Could you please try expressing this again? Your point seems interesting but for some reason I can't quite figure out what you mean here. Perhaps you could rephrase. I tend to think more in terms of context than consistency but do we mean the same thing? I need my players' characters to exist within the context of the character's culture but I'm not sure if this is what you mean by consistency with setting.

I suspect that you tend to work in the opposite direction, getting interested in a system or worldview or culture and building up a setting from that.

That's right. Usually the way I make a world is by getting interested in two or three such things and then pairing them.
Fimblewinter Campaign: Taoist Alchemy + Aztec Cosmology

Spoiler

Antilla Campaign: Mormonism + Grail Quest

Agharta Campaign: Fairy Myth + Postmodernism/Critical Theory + Gnosticism/Sufism

EDIT: Forgot one of my players uses the boards now. The description of my Antilla campaign is now hidden.

 

[Remathilis]

Of course, this depends heavily on what kind of Game your Players are looking for; many of mine have no issue with having a cosmopolitan society that caters to authurian knights, samurai and freaky sorcerers because that makes everyone diversified and caters to the unexpected. As long as the sun rises and sets and normal gravity is in play, few of my players care how monks got this far west or why drow live in the abandoned caves near town.

Then again, there are players who do. Hence this...

 

[Fieari]

How come nobody ever claims that the British have the best food?

Well, you have heard the old...

"Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians."

Right?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Gosh, I had no idea that D&D was supposed to be played as a real world historical simulation. All those spells and monsters made me think it was a fantasy game. I appreciate the OP for correcting me on that mistake.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I don't find that to be a problem too often. But I can certainly see what you mean here.

Societies make sense to the people in them. What I try to do in my games is get my players far enough into the game world's cultures so that they can perceive these cultures' own peculiar unique brand of rationality.

See, this is what I mean. I really don't know that you can claim that societies make sense to the people in them. Certainly, people do try to make some sort of sense out of it all, but that results in a vast variety of opinions on the one hand and ignores the vast level of complexity and contradiction inherent in any society. Even should an individual have the most accurate opinion possible it would still deal with difficulties of ignorance and disagreement.

Even cataloguing the variety and sensibility of those opinions is more or less an impossible task. Certainly, you could theoretically develop some sort of comprehensive trans-mental and temporal census that would create an accurate map of medieval opinion given the limited number of minds available at any given time, but even that would be more a tool of coincedence for the given time than a listing of what was and wasn't possible.

I mean, you turn to Aquinas to understand the medieval mind, and while that's generally useful it's far more limited when attempting to develop a standard for role-playing behavior. In fact he will almost certainly be an awful standard as he is more or less on the cutting edge of opinion making today, at least in certain circles, much less during his own period and he is very unrepresentative of the sort of social groups we normally expect to see in adventuring either realisticly, literarily, or fantasticly.

To my mind the cosmopolitan view actually does a better job treating basic inconsistencies of the genre and situation than the traditional simply by avoiding any attempt to create such a standard, and I still stand by my assertion that it's truer to the genre in its own right.

But all that aside I certainly didn't mean to cast any general aspersions on your work Fusangite, even where I disagree with them I find your posts interesting and well thought it.

 

[Mallus]

That's right. Usually the way I make a world is by getting interested in two or three such things and then pairing them.
Fimblewinter Campaign: Taoist Alchemy + Aztec Cosmology
Antilla Campaign: Mormonism + Grail Quest
Agharta Campaign: Fairy Myth + Postmodernism/Critical Theory + Gnosticism/Sufism

That's fascinating, and utterly confusing... You post too quickly. I'd meant to respond to your idea that a Cosmopolitan (boy I have problems with the assumptions behind that term...) view leads to considering culture in merely decorative terms and now you move on to the snippet above...

I though your position centered on "gaming as an exercise in cultural simulation and immersion" and now you describe these campaign inspirations that sound an awful lot like postmodern gamemanship; the cultural supercolider designed to break different narratives down into their component quarks... What are you trying to achieve (and I ask that with no small amount of admiration)? Wouldn't the primary purpose of such an exercise be to reveal the 'universal' structures present in the diverse elements you glommed togther? Doesn't the disparate nature of the parts parts work against character immersion? Doesn't this approach encourage the view of culture in more aesthetic terms?

I hope this continues for awhile. I need to drive home, have my wife drive me to a bar, and drink bourbon (its rather cold here) for several hours with some friends...

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Well, you have heard the old...

"Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians."

Right?

Holy moly!

Yoink!

 

[ivocaliban]

You got one thing right about calling this "left" vs "right", we got the pundits arguing like an episode of Crossfire.

No kidding! Where's Jon Stewart when you need him?

As it stands, however, D&D is like so much Cold Duck. A mixed bag of cultures and mythologies. And that's how I like it.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This is only true if you accept that a world's physics has nothing to do with its culture or metaphysics. If you see all these things as interrelated, the "fluff" vs. "crunch" debate is falsely premised.

How could anyone dispute that fluff and crunch are interrelated? I've never seen anyone propose this notion.