Afrodyte said:
I discussed something similar
on another forum.
I think that's some of the best, most accessible stuff I have ever seen Chris Lehrich write.
However, there is a basic problem with the world he recommends you create. While the world would be more vibrant, exciting and real-feeling than any world I would create, it would be very difficult to communicate this world to one's players. While I would love to game in the world Chris recommends you create, I can think of, at most, two other players who would be able to comprehend it to the point of playing within it in a realistic way.
Essentially, what would happen is that without a really solid understanding of the social science on which Chris's model is premised, a player would be continuously mystified by how people reacted to his particular opinions. The main reason we reify clusters of beliefs into worldviews is to aid us in expressing and comprehending them, effectively producing a kind of reductive shorthand for clusters of shared beliefs. A world resistant to this strategy, while more realistic, would be harder to communicate to someone who was not a student of the social sciences.
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.
I agree that this can be a problem. However, I think it arises because of the above phenomenon. I give players things that are more monolithic and coherent than a real culture would be because this exercise in shorthand enables people to better apprehend my world. If we assume that a world is not a parody of modernity and is sufficiently "other" to be a unique fantasy world and it has the non-monolithic characteristics you want, how do you give your players enough of a sense of what it is like in order for them to be able to play authentically?
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.
But here's the problem: if there is no coherent cosmological model for the whole world, what do the rules represent? The rules are a game's physics, or portion thereof; the various cosmological models in the game therefore have to share elements at least insofar as the rules speak to those elements.
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.
What do you mean by "outsider" here? Do you mean dissident?
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,
But at some point, again, you have to look at system here. In D&D, heroism is inherently violent, in part because the experience mechanic causes the universe to reward people for effectively employing deadly force; and the form of this reward is typically to increase people's capacity to exert deadly force. System, therefore, plays a considerable role in defining what heroism is. Fortunately, there are many cultures that correlate heroism and violence so this isn't too much of a problem. But it does speak to my point that one cannot create a game world that is silent on objective cosmology.
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?
This question seems premised on the idea that these elves collectively believe there is an afterlife. What is their evidence for this? Is this belief correct? Correct or not, is this belief monolithic amongst elves?
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