Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6623906" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Regarding your 1st and 2nd paragraphs, I agree that such overt perspective is generally alien to your average American player.  However, my guess is those same American players covertly (to their conscious mind) live many aspects of their life with primary (if not total) concern for the letter of the law and just trust in the machinery that said law is married to/stems from.  I think your anecdote is a fair instance of "upholding the letter of the law over the spirit."  The girl's concern regarding nuptials is disconnected from the American interests and nuance of spontaneous romance and courtship and the fanciful notion of destiny's hand yet to be played.  She can however, connect with the American (and worldly) sense that rites of passage (regarding nuptials) are important.  She can connect to to the kindred spirit inherent to fulfilling tradition and the security that lasting, strong culture and families have been enabled (to one degree or another) by functional marriages.  It is probably fairly natural for her to logically couple the inputs of these traditional practices with the outputs of lasting culture and strong families.  It is probably fairly natural for her to trust in the cultural protocol and the judgement/directives of her parental unit.  It might be quite unnatural for her to consider the 2nd and 3rd order effects that manifest due to her cultural protocol or to consider those effects' implications on liberty...and to then prioritize the 1st order as still having value primacy.  That doesn't necessarily mean she is intellectually shallow or totally unconcerned with liberty.  It probably means that to whatever degree her evaluative judgements have been rendered on the machinery of her culture, they've perceived that "it works"...meaning it has a history of spitting out functional families and a tested value system which she can believe in and pass down to her children.That is Dungeon World's Lawful alignment statement that you can choose (or not...this isn't D&D where you have to follow each statement...you pick one and attempt to fulfill/test it in play...the inspiration was BW's beliefs);  Uphold the letter of the law over the spirit.  It isn't intended to mean that the two, letter and spirit, are going to inevitably be mutually exclusive (possibly with some tension in application...thus maybe requiring prioritization...like everything else in the world) or that you're wholly disinterested in the spirit.  It just means that you're trustful in the cultural protocol, in the power structure of chain of command, and in the judgements/directives of those tasked with managing the machinery (whatever that machinery might be).  I don't think that is uncommon at all.  In fact, I would say that you see that in every walk of life from family units, to social circles, to work, to governance, to faith.  Is there an American tendency towards skepticism of power?  Well, obviously.  But that doesn't stop everyday people, every single day, from subordinating their own free will and ceding their authority, very willfully, to unit-moving infrastructure or other people (even peers!) for one reason or another (even for something as simple as personal insecurity).  I believe that we've had a conversation about this in the past (when we were discussing Dogs) and you've outlined a similar position.  From memory, your dislike for such is due to your sense that it comes from a position of bigotry against people of faith.  I can certainly understand that position and there is definitely bigotry embedded in some peoples' usage of it.  However, the two players in particular here are both people of deep faith and both are intellectually vigorous people.</blockquote>

Verification