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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1985723" data-attributes="member: 7240">What makes you think that the societies I study and the societies I model in game lack these characteristics? But the fact that there is a vast level of complexity and contradiction, some consciously noticed, some not, in every society, does not mean that people live in societies that do not make sense to them; they might feel that their society is failing to be what they want it to -- but that does not mean that the social order does not make some kind of sense to them. You seem to be dangerously close to the postmodernist position that we cannot make any meaningful generalizations about societies in other places and times. I think we can. Are those generalizations "the truth"? No. Are they complete? No. But I believe we can actually know enough to make educated guesses about the thought of people in societies other than our own. So?Then why do people do anthropology, or sociology or intellectual and cultural history? You seem to think that I'm claiming to be able to know with certainty how people other than me think. Of course I cannot. But that does not mean it becomes a valueless exercise to speculate in an educated and entertaining way about other people's thought. I understand Aquinas's position relative to other thinkers in his period too but your own comments betray the fact that you yourself think you know something about elite thought in the 12th century. This suggests that you don't really buy your own unknowability thesis here. Well, that's perfectly fair. Look: we're discussing how, in a game in which we pretend to be people in world full of magic and mythical beasts, we can suspend disbelief so as to enjoy ourselves. For you, the Cosmopolitan approach is the most effective way to do this. For me the Cultural approach is. But there's no objectively "better" here. Some people can enjoy cartoons and effortlessly suspend disbelief when they watch them whereas others have to watch shows with live actors in order to suspend disbelief. But there is no accuracy here -- just believability because Bakishi's LOTR and Jacksons's LOTR are equally fake. The same is true of our respective approaches to D&D. I have speculated about the underlying assumptions that give rise to these different standards for suspending disbelief but I see little point in arguing here about whether one set of underlying assumptions is more correct than the other. Thanks. Same here.Well, the Agharta campaign is set in the near future -- it's a kind of parody of the (post)modern world. But no, I don't run straight historical simulations -- and if I did, I sure wouldn't use D20 to do it. I still actually create cultures but I use enormous building blocks -- by borrowing systems or parts of systems of thought and material conditions, I am able to take a lot of shortcuts. The Fimblewinter game was about a group of characters in an ice age hunter-gatherer culture living at the brink of extinction who undertake a quest, in the course of which they uncover information about the culture that existed before them. The campaign was a qualified success -- about half the players got into thinking like primitives confronting a dead civilization. I'm not plundering these things for narratives (except in the Agharta campaign). I'm plundering them for symbol systems, tropes, social relationships, etc. My games tend to be about finding interesting congruencies between things and building worlds (and thereby stories) out of that process. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my enjoyment of the process itself is main motivation for continuing to do things this way. Like all the GMs here, I like making worlds. I have come up with some unique and eccentric ways of doing that but my motivations aren't really different from other people's.Not if I knit the pieces together successfully -- that's my real work as a GM. That's why I spend a lot of time building my worlds before my games start. The players shouldn't be able to notice easily the consistuent components of what I have assembled. I wish the Archives section were still around. There is a very good, quite lengthy description of what how my worlds work. EDIT: Hey Barsoomcore!, could you edit your post where you list my current campaigns and delete the description of Antilla? Thanks. Sadly, I'm not moving back to Vancouver any time soon but the Agharta campaign is currently being run by my co-GM Philip Freeman and there's space available if you'd like to join.</blockquote>

Verification