Draw Steel the MCDM RPG!

[Ruin Explorer]

Why did you leave that out of your assesment?

Because he doesn't display any awareness whatsoever of the specific ways in which their mores are dangerous and oppressive.

A disclaimer that you don't agree isn't the same as showing you understand the problems something would cause in a society, or how negative a god's behaviour might be. Particularly when you do explicitly show awareness of precisely that with Nekros.

It's funny because had he not mentioned Nekros, not highlighted this god was a BAD god and the others were not, I think it would have been easier to assume he was just highlighting the negatives of these gods. But he did effectively say "these gods are normal, this god is bad", which is uh, questionable to put it mildly.

Do you just want a paragraph after each entry definitely states whether thr designers think this god is good or bad as a whole?

When the designer themselves is describing something, and clearly not just reading paragraphs, but rather also talking about it, I absolutely want to hear about what the designer thinks about the god and the impacts they'd have on society and so on. This is essentially the "Director's Commentary" to some significant extent.

I also particularly want to hear why he's putting in these seemingly Dark Fantasy-style gods into a consciously heroic fantasy-style setting, when he quite correctly argued against doing that with classes! That's kind of my main problem here. If this was a consciously dark and oppressive setting, where progress and positivity were fought against, where no-one trusted anyone different to themselves and so on, I could see these two gods as described fitting right in. But he's describing a heroic fantasy setting - not a dystopian "dark world"/"World Where Sauron Won"-style deal. One of the defining traits of HEROIC fantasy as opposed to mere "fantasy" or dark fantasy or the like is that it's not that grey, it's not all "different perspectives". There is good, there is evil, and so on. It's not Joe Abercrombie-style stuff.

 

[overgeeked]

Matt is fully aware that Adune's (don't know how nits spelled) beliefs and the culture they influence may cause issues. In fact right before reading that entry he states,

"This is a cultural mores, you don’t have to agree with this. You should not take the things these gods believe as things that I believe or that everybody here believes. No no no. Gods are fickle and have weird beliefs. But the people believe this, the people of this area believe this."

Why did you leave that out of your assesment?

Plus this whole thing is written as if it were just a historians descriptions of various cultures. Do you just want a paragraph after each entry definitely states whether thr designers think this god is good or bad as a whole?

People do this really weird thing where they mistake fiction for reality. GRRM must be a misogynist because misogyny exists in Game of Thrones is one example of this nonsense. An actor from Furiosa being harassed online for playing a nasty character in the movie is another example. People believing that every word that falls out of a comedian's mouth must be a pure and true reflection of their actual beliefs is another. There's an endless stream of people not being able to distinguish fiction from reality.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

People do this really weird thing where they mistake fiction for reality. GRRM must be a misogynist because misogyny exists in Game of Thrones is one example of this nonsense. An actor from Furiosa being harassed online for playing a nasty character in the movie is another example. People believing that every word that falls out of a comedian's mouth must be a pure and true reflection of their actual beliefs is another. There's an endless stream of people not being able to distinguish fiction from reality.

Yet that's not what's happening here, and using the passive voice isn't going to change that.

I don't think Matt believes these guys are "good", especially not in real-world morality. I think he doesn't realize the full implications of how oppressive they'd be, in-setting. These are very different things. If you can't distinguish the two, that's just as big a problem as the behaviour you're describing.

 

[TiQuinn]

Because he doesn't display any awareness whatsoever of the specific ways in which their mores are dangerous and oppressive.

A disclaimer that you don't agree isn't the same as showing you understand the problems something would cause in a society, or how negative a god's behaviour might be. Particularly when you do explicitly show awareness of precisely that with Nekros.

It's funny because had he not mentioned Nekros, not highlighted this god was a BAD god and the others were not, I think it would have been easier to assume he was just highlighting the negatives of these gods. But he did say "these gods are normal, this god is bad", which is uh, questionable to put it mildly.

Again, I kind of go back to Twitch stream Matt is the enemy of MCDM Matt. What you're hearing is his unfinished work as he's writing it or while it's being edited. His rationalizations have not passed through any kind of review. No other designer has necessarily had a chance to say "Ehhh, have you considered this though?" It's not quite stream of consciousness but he really is going down a rabbit hole on an idea and hasn't had the opportunity on the stream to think "Wait, why might this be a bad idea."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Again, I kind of go back to Twitch stream Matt is the enemy of MCDM Matt. What you're hearing is his unfinished work as he's writing it or while it's being edited. His rationalizations have not passed through any kind of review. No other designer has necessarily had a chance to say "Ehhh, have you considered this though?" It's not quite stream of consciousness but he really is going down a rabbit hole on an idea and hasn't had the opportunity on the stream to think "Wait, why might this be a bad idea."

Yeah I'm hoping that's exactly what this is, I was just rather surprised at him being all heroic fantasy hell-yeah (which I agree with!) and then handing us these jerks! At least the other two (the fertility/health goddess and errr one I'm forgetting) seemed more reasonable - no coincidence perhaps that it seemed like he'd thought about them more.

 

[tetrasodium]

Because he doesn't display any awareness whatsoever of the specific ways in which their mores are dangerous and oppressive.

A disclaimer that you don't agree isn't the same as showing you understand the problems something would cause in a society, or how negative a god's behaviour might be. Particularly when you do explicitly show awareness of precisely that with Nekros.

It's funny because had he not mentioned Nekros, not highlighted this god was a BAD god and the others were not, I think it would have been easier to assume he was just highlighting the negatives of these gods. But he did effectively say "these gods are normal, this god is bad", which is uh, questionable to put it mildly.


When the designer themselves is describing something, and clearly not just reading paragraphs, but rather also talking about it, I absolutely want to hear about what the designer thinks about the god and the impacts they'd have on society and so on. This is essentially the "Director's Commentary" to some significant extent.

I also particularly want to hear why he's putting in these seemingly Dark Fantasy-style gods into a consciously heroic fantasy-style setting, when he quite correctly argued against doing that with classes! That's kind of my main problem here. If this was a consciously dark and oppressive setting, where progress and positivity were fought against, where no-one trusted anyone different to themselves and so on, I could see these two gods as described fitting right in. But he's describing a heroic fantasy setting - not a dystopian "dark world"/"World Where Sauron Won"-style deal. One of the defining traits of HEROIC fantasy as opposed to mere "fantasy" or dark fantasy or the like is that it's not that grey, it's not all "different perspectives". There is good, there is evil, and so on. It's not Joe Abercrombie-style stuff.

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.

 

[Shardstone]

The god that gets in the way of information transmission needs to be slain. If I run this system, that's the first campaign I'm doing.

 

[Staffan]

The god that gets in the way of information transmission needs to be slain. If I run this system, that's the first campaign I'm doing.

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.

 

[mamba]

Matt reading and discussing license for the backerkit packet starting around 24 min in.

sounds like he is creating his own CC-BY, which I like from an openness perspective, but I am not sure why he needs to reinvent the wheel here

 

[pemerton]

Like, the supposedly-super-popular farming god believes physical strength denotes honesty and goodness, and has people have tree-cutting competitions to show who is telling the truth, etc., which is obviously horrifically ableist, sexist, ageist, arguably racist, and so on, and I felt it was a little weird he didn't like, nod at that, he seemed to think this was just a belief one might reasonably have (AFAIK, no known historic human god has ever had anything even close to this belief

trial by combat?

The problem isn't celebrating stuff some people lack. That's fine. I explicitly said so and gave an example with they Physical Labour god.

You could very easily make him basically positive. Instead of having him think physical labour capability == truthfulness and goodness, and anyone who can't/won't do it should be distrusted, you could have him think physical labour capability == coolness and awesomeness, and that it should be used to help people who can't/won't do physical labour to exalt this god and show how cool he is.

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.

That needn't mean that those who can't labour are despised within such cultures. Generally it is is those who won't labour who are more suspect.

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.