Guacamole's relentless crusade against sorcerors and bad poetry!

[Guacamole]

Ok here it is kids, the message of the original thread, flame away:

irst of all, I like the class books, I think they are cool and even if I don't end up using the classes inside, they give me ideas to use. That said, I hate how the classes are grouped together for the splatbooks. I know, I know, mucho dinero for a book for each class, but that would be better than having to split things and do a half-a**ed job for each class! Plus that way I wouldn't have to read about sorcerers and bards, my least favorite classes, when I want to read about wizards and thieves, my favorite classes.

I hate that Sorcerers get pimped out prestige classes like dragon disciple while wizards get.... um... guild mage and uh.... teleport guy! Cool! The pro-sorcerer bias in the game is starting to make me hate sorcerers as much as I hate bards, who somehow, have more historical knowledge and arcane lore than the bona fide academics in the game, the wizards... go figure... which is relevant because bards get some cool feats in song and silence that are like metamagic feats for music except they have no draw backs (that I remember off hand).

One more rant and then I'm done. I hate that ALL the books keep comparing the way sorcerers shape magic to the way a poet writes poetry... inate talent, which is such BS! IT TAKES LOTS OF PRACTICE USING QUANTAFIABLE LIGUISTIC EFFECTS TO WRITE POETRY! No Im not talking about the friday-night-poetry-slam-written-on-a-knapkin-full-of-angst-poetry, Im talking about real poetry, in which a poet writes something, labors over it for hours, puts it away for months, gets it out again, and labors over it more.

Ok, Guacamole will get back in the bowl with the chips

 

[KDLadage]

What he said.

 

[Darkness]

Cool rant...

 

[Sodalis]

! IT TAKES LOTS OF PRACTICE USING QUANTAFIABLE LIGUISTIC EFFECTS TO WRITE POETRY! No Im not talking about the friday-night-poetry-slam-written-on-a-knapkin-full-of-angst-poetry, Im talking about real poetry, in which a poet writes something, labors over it for hours, puts it away for months, gets it out again, and labors over it more.

who ever said that poetry (literature in general) had to be laborious? I know you think REAL literature are stuff like Thoreau's Walden Pond, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass , both of which went through several drafts (all of which were printed) and revised until they died...

But you are forgetting a really famous Poet/playwrite that wrote almost all his things on the fly: Shakespeare. His poems are written from insiration that comes and flees in a second, and if he takes time later to revise, the initial emotion that he had coming into the poem is lost.
True, he revised his plays a lot before hitting final print, but can you honestly say that his plays are good and poems are crap because he took time to reread and edit his plays, and not his poems?

i feel some of the best works are made in the spur of the moment- that is when the meotion s captured at its purest. now don't get me wrong- I am not saying that all works written ad hoc is good... rather they are mostly crap- but there are great works that were written without forethought, and those are the ones that speak to the heart...

 

[Rune]

Quite right!

 

[Wolfspider]

But you are forgetting a really famous Poet/playwrite that wrote almost all his things on the fly: Shakespeare. His poems are written from insiration that comes and flees in a second, and if he takes time later to revise, the initial emotion that he had coming into the poem is lost.
True, he revised his plays a lot before hitting final print, but can you honestly say that his plays are good and poems are crap because he took time to reread and edit his plays, and not his poems?

Where did you get this information about Shakespeare? As far as I know, his poetry was the only thing that he actively tried to get published. He didn't really consider his plays to be that worthy of being remembered. If anything, he probably revised his poetry carefully and painstakingly, since he considered it to be his true legacy....

 

[Echoes]

If this is turning into a poetry debate, I need to speak up, cos that's what I'm studying in college. Yes, I'm studying poetry and fiction. Studying writing it, as a matter of fact. And yes, I'm fully prepared for the McDonald's job after college, so don't even ask.

But I think that as far as poetry written on the spur of the moment vs. poetry that's written after laborious work goes, each has equal merit. I don't think it's true that the sentiment is lost if you don't speak of it right away. I wrote a horrible poem on the spur of the moment two years ago about being on a bus going home, put it away, and pulled it out a couple of months ago. I found that my feelings about the incident had grown even STRONGER, and was able to write a much better poem using that fragment as a base.

A lot of people believe that spontaneity is better because we are very influenced by the ideals of the Romantics, who themselves did heavy revising of their poems at times, and were not quite as spur of the moment as one might think. I agree, though, that sometimes just getting something right out of your system can channel it into a wonderful poem--it happens all of the time, and in literary work there are more than a few instances of this. Take Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," written immediately after a dream (and only stopped because a business man came to his door (or so he would have us believe)).

Anyway. Yeah. I'm just throwing in my two cents. It's an interesting debate that often comes up in my writing classes.

To bring this back on topic, I think that if sorcerors had to sit there for several rounds and "revise" their spells, they'd be pretty useless, wouldn't they? Heh. I think the "poetry" metaphor was for...hmm...poetic effect.

Laters,
-John-

 

[Guacamole]

And to continue....

Ok, in response to the criticism of those from this thread and the other thread (the "splatbook" thread was the germination for this discussion) I admit I made a mistake. I should not have used the vocabulary of real and fake when describing poetry and its application to sorcerers in the PHB and other places. I should have used the aesthetic quantifiers of good and bad. Good poetry is laborious, no ifs, ands, ors, buts. Bad poetry is the kind where you write your feelings down on paper, without a thought to anything other than your feelins, and call it talent, or what not. It is not. It is drivel masquerading as poetry (which would make what sorcerers do drivel masquerading as magic). How can something be called poetry when not a thought has been given to the elements that make it poetic.

Let me put it this way. I have never met a person who wrote effective poetry without taking a formal course to discuss the elements of poetry. Even if they don't use them, they are aware of them and have made a conscious choice of rejection. Even if they do not edit their work, consider graphical elements, puzzle over word choice, they know that this is a part of good poetry and that they have made a choice not to do so. Some people got off on the tangent assuming I was talking about number and kinds of feet, like Iambic pentameter. I was not. I meant things like, but not limited to meter, things like, alliteration, enjambment, syntax, accent, etc. I would say you would be foolish to think that massive modern heavy-weight poets like Elliot, cummings, Pound, Buroway, etc., wrote the first thing that came to mind and called it poetry. Actually, revision and craft are essential elements of good poetry, or what I reckon, real poetry. It's what real poets do as opposed to pretend poets.

The fallacious comparison to poets, of which I am one, is just reason I hate sorcerers. They are munchikin/power-gamer equivalent of wizards, or what to be when you don't want to think and just blast things to smithereens. If the munchkin fighter says " I kill it", the sorcerer says " I blast it".

SO to recap:

So far Guacamole hates sorcerer's because:
1. because they are compared to poets, mocking the poets labor and art.
2. because it doesn't take much effort... just point... and shoot...

Later...sorcerers and bards get fixed......heh!

 

[Charlie Killme]

THis topic got me to thinking about a really cool kind of sorcerer, a guy whose spells all take the form of a poem.
A cantrip would be a few words maybe even a full line of poetry, higher level spells or spells with long casting times would take longer to recite. Metamagic feats would add lines to the poem.
YOu could give him the SPell Thematics feat because it would be harder to decipher what he's doing. In addition because it would fit and I am nice I 'd give him Eschew Materials for free but say that all his spells had a verbal component and he couldn't use Silent Spell, like a Bard.
The player could even write out the little poems for him to recite when he casts spells.

Sorry for more divergence.

 

[Guacamole]

Hmmmmm.....

THis topic got me to thinking about a really cool kind of sorcerer, a guy whose spells all take the form of a poem.
A cantrip would be a few words maybe even a full line of poetry, higher level spells or spells with long casting times would take longer to recite. Metamagic feats would add lines to the poem.
YOu could give him the SPell Thematics feat because it would be harder to decipher what he's doing. In addition because it would fit and I am nice I 'd give him Eschew Materials for free but say that all his spells had a verbal component and he couldn't use Silent Spell, like a Bard.
The player could even write out the little poems for him to recite when he casts spells.

Sorry for more divergence.

They have that already..... s'called a bard! I hate those too!