Draw Steel the MCDM RPG!

[Ruin Explorer]

The idea that there is a correlation between a hard, honest day's work and virtue is not especially weird or surprising. I mean, there are actually existing, important national cultures in the world where this is a part of the national self-conception.

I'm well aware.

You should watch to the stream.

That needn't mean that those who can't labour are despised within such cultures.

And yet they sometimes have been, historically (and even in the present day), and once that starts, things tend to go downhill rapidly. Just look at Victorian-era workhouses and attendant attitudes.

Generally it is is those who won't labour who are more suspect.

Also not a good thing that leads to good places. Particularly as a religious tenet. At least cultural beliefs tend to be only so strong because they're culture, but once you add the force of religion to a belief like that, you're absolutely on the road to Pol Pot-type stuff, or at the very least the same attitudes that lead to the worst excesses of Victorian workhouses and their like.

And just to elaborate on @mamba's point about trial by combat - just as trial by combat can include the notion of a champion to represent someone not themself capable of engaging in combat, so presumably the same could be the case for trial by tree-felling.

It could be - or not - historical trial by combat did not generally allow champions except in civil cases and even then only for certain people, note. Instead you sometimes got people just forced into obviously unfair situations (most of the time) and/or bizarre handicaps were used (this kind of seems to have been 1500s/1600s thing).

Civil disputes were handled differently from criminal cases. In civil cases, women, the elderly, the infirm of body, minors, and—after 1176—the clergy could choose a jury trial or could have champions named to fight in their stead. Hired champions were technically illegal but are obvious in the record.

Note that infirm of body is a pretty high bar - someone who was just short or weak isn't "infirm".

Here's a quote for you from the Wikipedia article on trial by combat btw:

The Kleines Kaiserrecht, an anonymous legal code of c. 1300, prohibits judicial duels altogether, stating that the emperor had come to this decision on seeing that too many innocent men were convicted by the practice just for being physically weak.

So let's abandon any silly ideas that people all got cool Game of Thrones-style champions to fight for them, shall we? Most people just got put in unfair situations.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That depends. Is this a god of knowledge, or a god of secrets? Because it's totally the kind of things I could see a god of secrets favoring. Of course, that would mostly apply to things that actually are secrets – probably not things like a new design for a plow that would improve farming, but secret spells that give an advantage in warfare? Definitely.

Matt was 100% clear it absolutely did apply to things like a new design for a plow.

Specific examples were - techniques for forging a sword (not only special ones, just techniques at all), techniques for building buildings, and so on. And he explained that if a sword broke, followers of this god would insist that was because the techniques used for making it had been spread too much, equally if a building collapsed (even if obviously due to time/lack of maintenance or the like, given the example he used was of passing some ruins), said followers would claim the architectural/building techniques had been spread too widely.

(I feel like the latter example was intended to paint followers of this god as kind of stupid/irrational, but that doesn't make them less dangerous!)

You should go back & listen to the times he's talked about stuff like why the draw steel paladin equivalent is given the name of "censor" to deliberately invoke feelings of uncertainty & wariness about an individual who is devoted the whims & codes of a deity in NPCs by providing enough grey area that it revokes the blanket automatic "oh paladin is always my friend" card.

Paladins have never been everyone's friend. What RPGs have you been playing? In 1/2/3E Lawful Stupid was the default alignment most people played Paladins as, and Stick In The Mud was the personality of like over 50% of them! Since 4E you've been able to have Paladins of good or evil gods, too, so... Even in earlier editions you had Paladin-style classes which were not LG or G at all.

I love the name Censor but I'm sorry, I don't think "Everyone thinks the Paladin is their friend!" was an actual heroic fantasy issue lol.

 

[mamba]

That depends. Is this a god of knowledge, or a god of secrets? Because it's totally the kind of things I could see a god of secrets favoring.

finally got to that part (at about 1:40:45 hours), it’s the god of secrets and knowledge, and sharing is not bad in itself, but sharing with the wrong people is. The example was a blacksmith sharing how to forge a sword with someone outside the trade, as a punishment his swords rust quickly (or at least that is the belief)

It’s not far off medieval guilds

 

[pemerton]

And yet they sometimes have been, historically (and even in the present day), and once that starts, things tend to go downhill rapidly. Just look at Victorian-era workhouses and attendant attitudes.

<snip>

So let's abandon any silly ideas that people all got cool Game of Thrones-style champions to fight for them, shall we? Most people just got put in unfair situations.

I understood your initial claim to be that the god of labour is unrealistic, or not grounded in actual human experience. Now you seem to be arguing that it is grounded in unhappy human experience. In doing so, you seem to me to be reasoning from an atheistic premise - that is, from the premise that who will be rewarded for their labour, or that who will win in a trial by tree-felling, is purely a matter of the human capability that a person brings to the situation.

But when, in the film Excalibur, King Arthur proclaims that by the law of God, no knight who is false can win in combat with one who is true he is not making a scientific conjecture about the correlation between honesty/sincerity and fighting skill. He is expressing his faith in a providential deity, who has made (and will continue to make) things thus-and-so.

A world in which a god of labour is the providential deity will not be one in which workhouses house victims of enclosure, in which bullies use their skill at tree-felling to get what they want, etc. If those things were occurring in such a world, that would be a sign that the divine order has been upended - perhaps some heroes are needed to restore things to rights!

 

[Arilyn]

If your heart is true, even if you are the weakest person in the village, you'll definitely win that "court case" with sudden prowess gifted by the God of labour. Gods love that kind of drama.

 

[Nikosandros]

I understood your initial claim to be that the god of labour is unrealistic, or not grounded in actual human experience. Now you seem to be arguing that it is grounded in unhappy human experience. In doing so, you seem to me to be reasoning from an atheistic premise - that is, from the premise that who will be rewarded for their labour, or that who will win in a trial by tree-felling, is purely a matter of the human capability that a person brings to the situation.

But when, in the film Excalibur, King Arthur proclaims that by the law of God, no knight who is false can win in combat with one who is true he is not making a scientific conjecture about the correlation between honesty/sincerity and fighting skill. He is expressing his faith in a providential deity, who has made (and will continue to make) things thus-and-so.

A world in which a god of labour is the providential deity will not be one in which workhouses house victims of enclosure, in which bullies use their skill at tree-felling to get what they want, etc. If those things were occurring in such a world, that would be a sign that the divine order has been upended - perhaps some heroes are needed to restore things to rights!

I agree with your points, but if the system doesn't provide a way for God (or the gods) to favor someone, then in the setting the "atheistic" premise becomes correct.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I understood your initial claim to be that the god of labour is unrealistic, or not grounded in actual human experience. Now you seem to be arguing that it is grounded in unhappy human experience. In doing so, you seem to me to be reasoning from an atheistic premise - that is, from the premise that who will be rewarded for their labour, or that who will win in a trial by tree-felling, is purely a matter of the human capability that a person brings to the situation.

But when, in the film Excalibur, King Arthur proclaims that by the law of God, no knight who is false can win in combat with one who is true he is not making a scientific conjecture about the correlation between honesty/sincerity and fighting skill. He is expressing his faith in a providential deity, who has made (and will continue to make) things thus-and-so.

A world in which a god of labour is the providential deity will not be one in which workhouses house victims of enclosure, in which bullies use their skill at tree-felling to get what they want, etc. If those things were occurring in such a world, that would be a sign that the divine order has been upended - perhaps some heroes are needed to restore things to rights!

This "providential deity" stuff seems very um, Christian-specific or at least Abrahamic to me. I don't think it really has any place in a polytheistic setting where the gods are real and active and in conflict and with overlapping portfolios and so on. Nor does it jive with what Matt actually said, which I only seemed to have actually listened to. Seems like everyone would prefer to make up their own version instead of that. I don't think there's any reason to believe said god is going to turbo-boost some skinny guy so he out-chops a burly one to ensure the truth outs (not unless one of his priests/conduits is lurking in the bushes).

Also, "atheist", that's both insulting to me personally (I am not), somewhat sophomoric in its thinking and utterly blind to history, frankly, was the Holy Roman Emperor an atheist?

The Kleines Kaiserrecht, an anonymous legal code of c. 1300, prohibits judicial duels altogether, stating that the emperor had come to this decision on seeing that too many innocent men were convicted by the practice just for being physically weak.

He was not, I assure you. But the idea of a "providential deity" in that sense that they'll always cause the right thing to happen is a pretty specific viewpoint and not one shared by all religions or even all believers in Abrahamic religions (It's sort of come in and out of favour in Christianity, as it can be dangerously close to the pop-culture conception of karma, and has some Biblical support but not all the time - this isn't the place to discuss that beyond it not really being a universal religious concept in general). I suggest you re-think calling thinking "atheist" merely because it's not in terms of gods who literally turbo-boost people to make them succeed every single time that's needed.

Also - I don't think there is a "divine order" in the sense that you mean in this setting - the gods are in competition, there are loads of them, and they don't seem to respect each other. Further there are separate pantheons even (with the gods of the pre-human races being separate from the human ones, and seemingly more powerful but less numerous).

 

[pemerton]

I agree with your points, but if the system doesn't provide a way for God (or the gods) to favor someone, then in the setting the "atheistic" premise becomes correct.

In a D&D-style game, isn't this mostly about the GM's narration? Perhaps in combination with the use of clerical and paladin spells.

 

[mamba]

I agree with your points, but if the system doesn't provide a way for God (or the gods) to favor someone, then in the setting the "atheistic" premise becomes correct.

there won’t be a rule where the weaker character reliably lifts heavier weights or something, divine intervention is mostly DM fiat

Whether there actually is any divine intervention is also far from clear, so one less reason for an actual rule… people believe things without them actually being true all the time

 

[Malmuria]

For those that have played it is this game more or less complex than 5e?