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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2430819" data-attributes="member: 7240">I could not agree more. I was merely pointing out that LOTR was written by a medievalist who was interested in embodying different medieval things in his story than those things many amateur students of history who write fantasy choose to embody in theirs.I'll accept your idea about power but not possessions. In many of my campaigns, the characters keep losing friends, money and equipment the whole time. Admittedly these are rarely D&D campaigns; D&D's rule system, in fact, assumes escalating material "net worth" over the course of play.I don't think it's just psychologically-based nostalgia that causes us, erroneously, to credit people in the past with greater heroism. Althought it does not appear to be true that people in the past were not heroic, they appear to have produced a literature that was ashamed of different things than our literature is today. My interest in pre-modern people is not so much about exploring the "real" world in which they lived but rather the phenomenological world they inhabited. I am interested borrowing from how they saw themselves and their world.You're dichotemizing something here to get around it. In our culture, if someone did both, we would have an equal or higher opinion of them than if they only did the former. In many other cultures, the latter would detract from the former because, although we retain older criteria for heroism, we have nonetheless successfully added our own. Similarly, in our culture, if the person died poor and celibate, 20 years after bringing peace to the kingdom, while it might not detract from our belief in their heroism and might add a tragic note of pathos, in some other cultures, this additional piece of information would magnify our sense of the person's heroism.While not identical to the point I'm making, it certainly overlaps considerably. Both, related things, are part of my preferences as a GM.Oh yeah. But that is, in a certain way, what being a GM is. That's what we do. We constrain player imagination in order to focus it into a shared space.Well, I'm not sure if you're using D&D definitions of these terms; I find them pretty useless. But, regardless of what kind of person a character starts as (and people often start with stupid, narcissistic or morally tribal characters), I do try to build systems that generate stories in which the characters become better people not worse.Same here. However, when I build a society that is congratulatory about this kind of behaviour, it is not a "good" one.Well, given how many options my style of GMing opens that other GMs close by virtue of their own preferences or, just as often, simple unawareness, I'm just fine with that.</blockquote>

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