Guacamole's relentless crusade against sorcerors and bad poetry!

[tsadkiel]

Poetry and stuff

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.

(tsadkiel waves his degree in English Lit. around for emphasis)

The English Romantics would tend to disagree with you on this point - "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion," and all that.*

As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I've taken my fair share of poetry classes (and edited my college's literary magazine for a while) and I've seen some really crappy poetry that was the result of laborious effort. I've also been present when some fairly good poetry was created on the spot. Hard work and revision is a good thing. So is inspiration.

* Though the Romantics talked a lot about how poetry is spontaneous, there are a lot of surviving revisions that show they put a lot of work into their poetry after the initial burst of inspiration. The two are not mutually exclusive.

 

[BenBrown]

I don't know that sorcerors are so munchkiny as you make out. Oh, sure, they _can_ be. There's no denying that, but so can just about any class if you don't pay attention to its limitations.

the main thing is that the thinking is all done at once. I'm playing a bard (okay, different, but close) in one campaign, and I agonize for days over spell choice when I go up a level.

Yeah, it's rather more straightforward than the wizard, but hardly munchkinny, or even necessarily one-dimensional (I've thought of some nifty stuff I could do with a sorceror whose principal spell is "animate rope")

Plus, even if you hate 'em, the sorceror's a nice answer to all those folks who complain about the spell preparation rules.

 

[Echoes]

Re: And to continue....

[B

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.

[/B]

Very true. I should have qualified what I was saying about writing spur of the moment poetry by noting that it is VERY hard to write a good poem without knowing about certain poetic elements. Also, I was going to bring up Eliot and Pound, etc. but I didn't want to get TOO into it. But now that we have, yeah. "The Wasteland" took incredibly long to write, it was a labor, and Pound helped Eliot immensely. And because of all this it is one of the best pieces of poetry ever written.

But if you have a great command of poetry you can write a semi-decent poem pretty quickly, at least when the occasion strikes. It's almost like a trance, you know? I'm not sure how to describe it, but there are times where I'll sit down for an hour and end up with a very well done 60 line poem. Now, it won't be perfect, but it'll be serviceable. All poems take time to perfect, though.

NOW, back to the game Heh.

As far as sorcerors being "point and shoot" munchkins, I think that you need to have SOME intelligence to play one. After all, you do have to pick the right spells. I think being a munchkin is not the fault of the class as much as the player. I've played a sorceror with very little in the way of damage spells who ended up being a great asset to the party. I think it just depends on the kind of character you want to play. Granted, there will always be the pyro evoker/sorceror types whose sole contribution to in character conversation is, "I burn it." But I suppose the same could be said for any class, right?

Laters,
-John-

P.S. Guac, are you going to school in Chicago? I'm just up the road, so to speak, at Northwestern. At any rate, just curious.

 

[BenBrown]

Re: Re: And to continue....

Very true. I should have qualified what I was saying about writing spur of the moment poetry by noting that it is VERY hard to write a good poem without knowing about certain poetic elements. Also, I was going to bring up Eliot and Pound, etc. but I didn't want to get TOO into it. But now that we have, yeah. "The Wasteland" took incredibly long to write, it was a labor, and Pound helped Eliot immensely. And because of all this it is one of the best pieces of poetry ever written.

But if you have a great command of poetry you can write a semi-decent poem pretty quickly, at least when the occasion strikes. It's almost like a trance, you know? I'm not sure how to describe it, but there are times where I'll sit down for an hour and end up with a very well done 60 line poem. Now, it won't be perfect, but it'll be serviceable. All poems take time to perfect, though.

it doesn't take a great command of poetry even to blather off something which scans and is recognizable as poetry (or at least verse). I've been in a group that's sat around composing limericks on the fly before. But to get anything more than doggerel, you'll have to put at least a little work into it. Rarely is something, even a single line, going to come to you that's absolutely perfect. When that happens, you then have to build the poem (or story, or song, or whatever) around it to maximise it's effect. That takes work.

 

[Pielorinho]

I'm assuming, Guac, that you're not a big fan of Jack "That's not writing, it's typing" Kerouac.

FWIW, neither am I. But that doesn't change the fact that he was one of the more influential writers of his generation. And he famously never revised his writings.

Most sorcerer characters I've seen have high spellcraft scores; you could interpret this as their study of magic.

Consider, though, that sorcerers aren't creating "poems" on the fly: they're simply reciting, over and over, the very few "poems" that they know.

It may be their passion that fuels them, but it's not their creativity. If you want a creative spellcaster, you'll need to go to a system outside of D&D.

There. Them's my three unrelated points in five unrelated paragraphs.

Daniel

 

[el-remmen]

Revision is the key to good poetry.

 

[nadir]

Once upon a workday dreary
While I desk-grazed borded and fatty
Overy many a bad emoted socerous spore
While I ploded, almost working, suddenly there came lurking
An ominous shadow over my work-place floor:
Who is this, I shuddered, shadowing my cubicle floor?
'Tis my boss, and nothing more!

Hey man, don't you have anything better to do with your time rather than rant and rave like some lunatic over obscuria?! Are you at work now?--you probably are--are you one of those munchins who surfs the net all day and does nil?

Socerers suck! OK, so don't play them! Bards suck! OK, don't play them. But don't put down those of us who feel differently. What's next? Chicks and hobbits are blacklisted? Yes, I see your vision now: an all-male world of magic academia and seedy rougish back alleys, okokok

Believe it or not, I've been recovering for years from various mental problems and have found great inspiration in my soceror Ineluki--seeing what high charisma he has gives me courage to have a little charismas of my own.

So tone down, Guac, or you're gonna get some hot salsa shoved your way you won't be able to handle!

 

[trentonjoe]

Re: Poetry and stuff

This is the best rant since the mad, drunken, irish, carbooming ninja guys monologue on rangers. Can't remember what his opinion was but it was funny.

 

[Darkness]

Revision is the key to good poetry.

This also goes for RPGs, it seems (*cough* Star Wars d20 *cough*).

 

[Wild Karrde]

This also goes for RPGs, it seems (*cough* Star Wars d20 *cough*).

Now that just hurts...that really hurts man. You really know how to kick a Star Wars fan where it counts.