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

[Turanil]

I don't want to run either a single-course campaign setting (OA or Nyambe, strictly within a theme) nor a salad campaign setting (with a patchwork of real-world cultures). Instead, I pass everything through the mixer, so I get a cream soup. A single consistency, made of several different flavours, that are all cut in so tiny pieces and recombined in surprising way so they avoid the "Galahad Miyasashi, barbarian from the Frozen North" factor.

You are a real poet Gez, don't you? (I especially like the "cream soup")

 

[fusangite]

My overall point would be that I think it works better for positive proofs, I can demonstrate through Aquinas that this was thought, than negative ones, I cannot demonstrate through Aquinas that this would not have been thought.

Well, first of all, your idea that I base my ideas about medieval thought exclusively on Aquinas is a straw man. I have read extensively not only on the subject of high intellectual medieval thought but numerous articles, primary documents and monographs about how we think both elite and non-elite Europeans thought in the medieval period. I have read anthropological works that have sought to make generalizations about thought in pre-modern societies that existed under similar material conditions.

Now maybe you're right that all of this education is insufficient to determine even what medievals or probably thought like. But surely, it is sufficient to inform the play of an RPG if this is how I choose to play it.

You are essentially making an argument here that the standards of evidence required to engage in cultural simulation in RPG play should be higher than those of university presses, doctoral examining committees and peer-reviewed academic journals. While it may be the case that these are your criteria for suspending disbelief, they are not mine.

There's a world of argument underlying the term 'makes sense,' but regardless I think the application for it in terms of role-playing games is pretty simple.

Its application in role playing games you enjoy is simple. I really don't get how we can even be having this argument.

Once you have entered the realm of the speculative, I think that the argument that 'I can make educated guesses about the thought of people in other societies' is a far cry from the argument that 'Monks don't make sense.'

Well, either something wrecks your suspension of disbelief or it doesn't. I can't actually be wrong when I assert that monks impair my suspension of disbelief. I know whether I'm suspending disbelief. You do not. I have attempted to explain why I believe they damage my suspension of disbelief -- because they clash with the European mythic past on which I base my D&D games.

And I don't buy your idea that because medieval Europeans are unnkowable in absolute terms means that the data we have is in no way prejudicial to the kind of stories we can credibly tell based on their culture.

Finally, of course probable things about which we do not have absolute proof are used in arguments against totally improbable things all the time. Your idea that because they are guesses, educated guesses can be lumped into the same category as fanciful and uneducated guesses doesn't even pass muster in an academic setting. Fortunately, this is gaming -- it's not a medievalists' conference; this is just a strategy for making my RPGs feel real and enjoyable for me and my players.

I mean adventurers of their very nature have a great deal in common with the dissident and the outcaste at the very least they should be near insanely idiosyncratic and odd, particularly given the intrusion of the Fantastic, and for that we need look no further than Aragorn and Bilbo.

Where are you getting the idea that my style of play doesn't permit social dissent? On the contrary, it contextualizes social dissent by placing it in the context of a culture. Simple disagreement with your society does not place you outside of its context. To justify, express and comprehend your own dissent you still have to use the knowledge and intellectual structures of the society in which you are situated. American Communists in the 1950s still existed in the context of American society; the people who went off to create communes and other intentional communities in the 1970s back to the land movement still did so in the context of American society.

All I ask is that my players play their characters in context to the best of their ability.

So to me it makes little sense to make an educated guess as to the thought of a society and then apply it as a limitation to the very segment of society that will most logically, by the best knowing models of society, be delimited.

What do you mean by "limitation" here? Most scenarios technologically contextualize their characters. Lacking gunpowder is a limitation that most people accept because it assists them in suspending disbelief.

But let's leave the fact that I get information about pre-modern thought from history for a moment. Let's suppose we are dealing with a Gamma World game. There, players portray characters living in a post-apocalyptic remnant of civilization -- when my players and I play such games, we speculate about how people in such an environment might think differently and place PCs and NPCs in that intellectual context. As with pseudo-medieval societies, we typically use literature as an inspiration, as well as anthropology. Now, like D&D societies, these are societies that have never existed. But we still strive to make characters who think differently.

In the end the default assumption of adventuring is that one is not so much a customer in the marketplace of ideas as in its center, supplying it, or making do with homecreated resources. And if you assume that the adventuring world is a world in its own right then you have a world that's going to opperate by kitchen sink rules by its very nature.

No. The fact that the fictional world we have created is a reality that has never existed does not mean that it is automatically a Cosmopolitan world.

IRL, I must admit that the Traditionalist viewpoint has always smacked to me of prejuidice and bullying.

Well, first of all, "Traditionalist" is a terrible term. Your style of gaming is the mainstream tradition in D&D. Mine is not. In my understanding, Cosmopolitan=Traditional. I don't bully anyone to play within a cultural context. When I recruit people to play in my games, I make it clear that this is the kind of game we play. And I have had a waiting list to join my games for most of GMing career. I don't need to bully anyone because people line up to play in my style of game.

All too often a tool by which one may take pleasure from others rather than enjoying the pleasure they provide.

That's really sad. It sounds like you have had some bad experiences in the past. But my game give people real enjoyment -- we have fun enhancing our suspension of disbelief by developing a cultural context for the characters' thought. If this were not fun for me and my players, we would play different games.

And though that may be my own prejuidice, I would submit that it has some real merit.

I can't speak to other games that care about cultural context. I have only worked with two other GMs who work this way. I didn't find either of them abusive in their GMing style.

And since, for me, the narrative matters more than the content it's far more important to me that the players are willing to run and jump and play around than it is that they do so in the perfect playground.

If I felt that supplying cultural context damaged the narrative, I wouldn't do it. I supply cultural context because it enhances the narrative by making the PCs and NPCs feel more real.

And an emphasis on the running, jumping, and playing around should be kitchen sink.

Where is this "should" coming from?

I got aesthetic reasons for thinking the way I do as well.

Who said you didn't? You seem to be trying to have an argument with me that I don't see us having. I'm not telling anyone else to play my way; I am not telling anyone that Cosmopolitan play is inferior to cultural play; I'm simply offering some possible explanations for why the two styles exist. That stated, perhaps I should clarify that the explanations I have offered are not posed in order to exclude or invalidate other explanations; no doubt there are other reasons for these two types of play to exist.

Overall, I don't think it matters one way or another as long as someone isn't going to be a jerk about someone else's well intentioned efforts as a means of preserving his or her overarching ones.

I think this is a good not to conclude on and an area where we concur.

 

[Wolv0rine]

Or the monks are totally medieval and do kung-fu, which in my game world could have been invented by Merlin and taught to some folk to help defend the saints' relics in Arthur's times (they weren't -- I run a fairly "straight up" traditional game, but I could easily have shoehorned the monks in and made them consistent).

As far as that goes, you could say that word of the grail has travelled to china, and the Emperor has sent people to claim it for him, while the temples have sent monks to take it and guard it against those who would abuse it. That way you don't have to change any of the 'flavor text' of the monk, even.

I'm all about throwing as many Interesting ideas as I can into a world, but I'm also all about doing so with internal consistency.

 

[fusangite]

However, most players play RPGs for escapism, so most players don't like having to "learn" too much about a world to play in it,

It depends on what their main escapist priority is. Some people can't really enjoy escapism until the thing into which they are escaping achieves a certain level of credibility/reality. While those people are in a minority, I haven't had too hard a time finding them.

Any RPG campaign has to involve compromises between the DM and the players.

Or they are based on shared priorities and prior agreement. That's what I prefer.

1) Many of these settings have a stereotyped view of the history (or traditional stories) they model or draw inspiration from. Here are some examples...

Eyebeams, that was one gorgeous list. I could not agree with it more strongly. I've pasted your message into an MSWord document as the most succinct expression of the fallacies that present themselves when people do my style of game badly.

Instead, many "realistic" settings are self-consciouly ignoring the variety that real history, historical myth and the supernatural offers.

If I didn't need my signature line to explain my handle, this quote might occupy it for a week or two.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

I don't think what the original poster calls consistent, like Dragonlance, are really consistent in D&D rules. Or is it feasible to have ordinary castles and warfare with wizards around?

Dragonlance, IIRC, addressed this by having the three wizards' guilds all basically agree on one point: no interference in politics. Wizards meddled in the affairs of wizards, at least in the War of the Lance era (read those books, never played the game). Not a bad way to handle it. Now you could get the player who says "But you're infringing upon my creative freedom by not letting me play a self-taught wizard who doesn't follow their stupid laws!" Given the setting's internal consistency, given the fact that there are this finite number of wizards in the world and 99% are Order members and these are the laws of the Orders, what will happen is that every single Order wizard in the land will be looking to capture or kill him.

What is frustrating as a DM is when you've said "Okay, the game world consists of the following kingdoms, cultures, and races. Within these, the following classes are available," and the player says "That's nice. I want to play a Maori-type shaman." DMs put a lot of work into designing worlds and players should normally be able to find something within the world that works for them. At least IMO, players should not walk into a new setting with a pre-conceived idea of the character they're going to play - they should be ready to take a look at the DM's descriptions of cultures and kingdoms.

Still, if a player has a really cool idea or has their heart set on something that is not too disruptive, the DM should find a way to make it work. IMO, the best way is to start small with your world. Don't describe everything all at once - have a circumscribed area defined, and add new lands as needed.

 

[Afrodyte]

DMs put a lot of work into designing worlds and players should normally be able to find something within the world that works for them. At least IMO, players should not walk into a new setting with a pre-conceived idea of the character they're going to play - they should be ready to take a look at the DM's descriptions of cultures and kingdoms.

I agree with this on principle, but (and this is an important but), oftentimes GM-created settings are too narrowly focused to create something that allows for that kind of diversity. I discussed something similar on another forum. Too often the "game worlds" that GMs create are aesthetically and culturally monolithic, even to the point where it contradicts the consistency they were going for. It's one thing to say that one culture in an area or adventure locale is dominant, but quite another to say that the cultural and cosmological model for the entire world defaults to one paradigm.

I agree that if the thematic and plot focus is centered around a single culture or idea, the introduction of too many outside elements can inhibit the focus. However, I think this has less to do with the existence or non-existence of other cultures and creatures than it does with player assumptions about the role of adventurers in society. People assume that adventurers exist outside society, that they can only impact and be affected by it if they choose to be. As a result, they don't think very carefully about wanting to be "special," thinking nothing of having minotaurs, half-dragons, and the like as characters. Having seen this too many times, GMs try to reverse this trend by being exclusionist as opposed to just focused, and this makes it difficult for players (like myself) who find it intriguing to roleplay with the idea of the outsider in society.

Overall, I prefer games where there is thematic focus, but I think there is always room for diversity within that focus. If you want heroic fantasy, there are many cultural ways to implement that. Western cultures do not have the monopoly on heroism or fantasy, and an intriguing way to deal with something like this would be to provide various cultures who define heroism in different ways, and to see how they interact within the context of a single campaign. What would happen if Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Eshu, Sun Wukong, and Krishna formed a party? To introduce a more traditional fantasy element, take elves. For a people who are eternally young and beautiful, for whom death is not inevitable, who may even welcome the change that death brings, what becomes the meaning of ultimate sacrifice? What kind of lives do their heroes lead?

 

[Aaron L]

Well I apparently greatly misunderstood the argument, I thought it was about historically modelled games vs fantastic settings.


In my games I NEED a consitent background, I cant play a game where I dont know the history and cultures of the world. I just dont like to limit those cultures to real world analogues, though I do tend to use some as a beginning, sometimes mixing several together and altering to make logical.

 

[Gez]

You are a real poet Gez, don't you? (I especially like the "cream soup")

Ça correspond à ce qu'on appelle, en bon français, du velouté.

 

[Von Ether]

Dragonlance, IIRC, addressed this by having the three wizards' guilds all basically agree on one point: no interference in politics. Wizards meddled in the affairs of wizards, at least in the War of the Lance era (read those books, never played the game). Not a bad way to handle it. Now you could get the player who says "But you're infringing upon my creative freedom by not letting me play a self-taught wizard who doesn't follow their stupid laws!" Given the setting's internal consistency, given the fact that there are this finite number of wizards in the world and 99% are Order members and these are the laws of the Orders, what will happen is that every single Order wizard in the land will be looking to capture or kill him.

What is frustrating as a DM is when you've said "Okay, the game world consists of the following kingdoms, cultures, and races. Within these, the following classes are available," and the player says "That's nice. I want to play a Maori-type shaman." DMs put a lot of work into designing worlds and players should normally be able to find something within the world that works for them. At least IMO, players should not walk into a new setting with a pre-conceived idea of the character they're going to play - they should be ready to take a look at the DM's descriptions of cultures and kingdoms.

Still, if a player has a really cool idea or has their heart set on something that is not too disruptive, the DM should find a way to make it work. IMO, the best way is to start small with your world. Don't describe everything all at once - have a circumscribed area defined, and add new lands as needed.

In theory, that's how it should be.

It seems that most games end up with the GM saying he's running something and then the players all stat up something that they want to play without even asking (or having the GM provide) a context of how that PC may or may not work.

Hell, most players don't even talk to each other to figure out the PCs will work as a team. No one communicates and each work as they are in a vacum.

This may actually be the type of "World Cusine" mentioned in the first post, which is actually the chaos caused when everyone is just thinking of themselves instead of trying to work with each other to make sure everyone will have a good time.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Well, first of all, your idea that I base my ideas about medieval thought exclusively on Aquinas is a straw man. I have read extensively not only on the subject of high intellectual medieval thought but numerous articles, primary documents and monographs about how we think both elite and non-elite Europeans thought in the medieval period. I have read anthropological works that have sought to make generalizations about thought in pre-modern societies that existed under similar material conditions.

Now maybe you're right that all of this education is insufficient to determine even what medievals or probably thought like. But surely, it is sufficient to inform the play of an RPG if this is how I choose to play it.

You are essentially making an argument here that the standards of evidence required to engage in cultural simulation in RPG play should be higher than those of university presses, doctoral examining committees and peer-reviewed academic journals. While it may be the case that these are your criteria for suspending disbelief, they are not mine.

At no point did I state that you based your opinion of the middle ages solely on Aquinas, I simply used him to demonstrate the relative value of a form of proof since you had done the same and he is a good example. I assure you Fusangite, that your ethos as an educated, respectable, and, yea, even brilliant interpreter of culture is not under question let alone attack. To me, with my admittedly easy standards, your character is unassailable if I have taken too many liberties based on that assumption I apologize. And though I have no proof I would testify based on intuitive assesment alone that your games are a world of fun and good times. So rest assured that where I use the term you here I use it generally and bearing in mind that we have set up a deal of straw men in order to make this general, and fun, argument possible. For instance, I use the term traditional partially because I don't know that I've seen a term that fits the stance better but mostly because it's the term we've been using and we all know enough what it means by this point in the conversation to use it safely.

But, yes, I would argue that the standards of evidence for engaging in cultural simulation in RPG play should be higher than those of university presses, doctoral examining committees, and peer-reviewed academic journals, but primarily because you are engaging in very different form of argument not because the standards of evidence used by those insitutions is poor. For any of the above things the burden of evidence is simply to prove that a good argument can be made for a thing having being real. A far smaller burden of proof than proving what may or may not have been possible given the parameters of the time period.

You can make fine arguments for the probable and general content of thought for a period and its a fine, fun, and useful activity, but, firstly, it is simply an argument and always was simply an argument and thus bears within it a great deal of flexibility and, secondly, it's a far cry from an determination on the range of the possible or the strength of the necessary.

In terms of suspension of disbelief, I think that the real argument is that the parameters need to be set by genre in the larger and mechanical sense not by content. To my mind any other standard is one that is essentially built on prejuidice, again little p sense, and probably not as useful to the greater sense of the performance. You need to realize where you are and what you are doing before you forget it.

Poetic license isn't simply a fiat, it's a recognition of the inherent difference in the type of argument that is being made and the manner in which it reflects reality differently. And RPGs exist in the realm of the poet, however far removed from Keats they may be.

Bottom line I think cultural simulation is a poor activity for the realm of the speculative which RPGs participate in, and I think the genre resists it. Now, I'll yell at movies for botching the armor all the dang time I'm watching it, but that's because a lot of movies are making a different sort of thing than RPGs do. Cinema on Alexander the Great is making a statement on an adventure and building a piece of intellectual history, a movie about Indiana Jones is actually having an adventure.

There's a level at which what your doing with cultural simulation makes a big difference, I'll grant, so that you can use anthropological monographs perfectly appropriately either to justify a specific thought with a general one or to dispel a general myth that might stand as the justification for a specific thought, but I don't think that you stand on good ground when you use such a monograph to tramp down on the capacity of an individual author to create an individual instance.

Basicly, if someone comes up with a 'Roman' character who has a highly developed theories of secular government, inviolable individual liberty, and believes in the presumption of innocence then I don't think anyone is much in a position to say, "Hey, that doesn't make sense." On the other hand, if someone were to say that those were beliefs widely held by Romans and their families or that the Romans came up with those ideas to give to us then I think it would irresponsible not to try to correct that misconception.

And, on the far other hand, there is a level at which the speculative, fantastic, adventure genre is perfect for cultural simulation, but it is a kitchen sink sort of cultural simulation. One that takes into account the fact that cultural simulation really only results from speculation that occurs outside of the culture in question necessarilly breaking the fourth wall that novels try so desperately to achieve.

In fiction, I think I would point to Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy as the near perfect example of this. A very fine literary treatment of history, one that is absolutely culturally simulationist in its approach to academic material and the thought of the time period, yet one that perfectly fits those three categories of speculative, fantastic, and adventurous by breaking apart the simulationist mode so that samurai Irishmen end up in North America, a puritan builds a computer, and Newton is ressurected by the power of Solomon's gold. All of those elements serve the approach to history by demonstrating the power of the larger system and generality that is history's strength beyond its work toward accuracy. I might also say something about satire, big S, here, but it's a whole nother argument.

And further it makes it fun, not just in a 'this is neat' sense but in a damning, exalting, honest to goodness literary aesthetic sense.