Qualifier for the following: propaganda doesn’t mean lying. It means that a message is intend to win over the audience. Some of the most effective propaganda has always been the truth - people check out the claims they can verify, find they’re right, and give more trust to the rest. Voice of America did this well for decades, until running into political oversight from people who cared much less about the truth than their own personal greed and delusions. This parts graph is itself propaganda for the notion that propaganda doesn’t mean lying.
Thst said: in some grumpy moods, I think that the single most effective thing OSR propagandists could do now is for Pete’s sake, stop calling modern D&D characters superheroes. They’re not. They’re not even close. They are simply individually in ways just like the vast majority of characters in fantasy fiction, folklore, a legend, and mythology. Characters who pass through a level of weakness comparable to early low-level D&D characters are in fact quite rare and when they do appear are usually present for others (in the story and in the audience) to mock and deride.
That doesn’t make them wrong, at all. It does make them unusual, and not something many people will come to thinking “Yeah, I want to play the guy who can cast one spell a day.” Jokes about wizards and clerics being vulnerable to one lucky cat were well established by the time I came to D&D in 1977. But the fact is that a pack of 3-6 feral cats take down a fighter, too, unlike, say, me at 15 the time I accidentally literally stumbled onto a feral cat pack having lunch. I still have two small scars from the encounter, but I was never at risk even of rabies.
D&D characters aren’t just comparable to typical fantasy characters of today, but to fantasy characters of the ‘70s (consider the heroes of the Land with whom Thomas Covenant deals), and of decades before: the Knights of the Round Table, the Outlaws of the Marsh, the guys who fought the Trojan War, and so on back. Nothing says anyone has to want that, but trying to dismiss it all as superheroes is just stupid, even if you the arguer are in other ways a smart person. OSR tastes are worth more respect than they’ve often gotten, (including me in times of more ignorance, sorry) but when does it ever flow the other way, with non-stupidly-insulting terms built in?
Superhero is a term with meaning, about both characters and their environments. You can have people with powers without the milieu,, and what you get is pretty much always either science fiction or horror. Or both. I like many such things - Elementals, Espers, Watchmen, etc - but they’re distinct. Superheroes are partly about worlds where doing the heroic thing pays off more reliably, where cliches like secret identities get respected, and where only certain kinds of villainy are possible. And D&as characters aren’t like that, never have been, and I don’t think many people seriously ever even proposed it. AD&D2 made space for chivalry, but chivalric more,it y heads off in different directions.
So please. We’re supposed to be inventive people. Invent a smarter, more relevant term than “superheroes”. As a suggestion, consider simply “stronger” versus “weaker”, or some good antonym for “vulnerable” like…damn, I dunno. “Resistant” sounds like a care product, not a character. Anyway, I hope you get the idea. Thank you for time. Buy bonds where you work or bank.
Thst said: in some grumpy moods, I think that the single most effective thing OSR propagandists could do now is for Pete’s sake, stop calling modern D&D characters superheroes. They’re not. They’re not even close. They are simply individually in ways just like the vast majority of characters in fantasy fiction, folklore, a legend, and mythology. Characters who pass through a level of weakness comparable to early low-level D&D characters are in fact quite rare and when they do appear are usually present for others (in the story and in the audience) to mock and deride.
That doesn’t make them wrong, at all. It does make them unusual, and not something many people will come to thinking “Yeah, I want to play the guy who can cast one spell a day.” Jokes about wizards and clerics being vulnerable to one lucky cat were well established by the time I came to D&D in 1977. But the fact is that a pack of 3-6 feral cats take down a fighter, too, unlike, say, me at 15 the time I accidentally literally stumbled onto a feral cat pack having lunch. I still have two small scars from the encounter, but I was never at risk even of rabies.
D&D characters aren’t just comparable to typical fantasy characters of today, but to fantasy characters of the ‘70s (consider the heroes of the Land with whom Thomas Covenant deals), and of decades before: the Knights of the Round Table, the Outlaws of the Marsh, the guys who fought the Trojan War, and so on back. Nothing says anyone has to want that, but trying to dismiss it all as superheroes is just stupid, even if you the arguer are in other ways a smart person. OSR tastes are worth more respect than they’ve often gotten, (including me in times of more ignorance, sorry) but when does it ever flow the other way, with non-stupidly-insulting terms built in?
Superhero is a term with meaning, about both characters and their environments. You can have people with powers without the milieu,, and what you get is pretty much always either science fiction or horror. Or both. I like many such things - Elementals, Espers, Watchmen, etc - but they’re distinct. Superheroes are partly about worlds where doing the heroic thing pays off more reliably, where cliches like secret identities get respected, and where only certain kinds of villainy are possible. And D&as characters aren’t like that, never have been, and I don’t think many people seriously ever even proposed it. AD&D2 made space for chivalry, but chivalric more,it y heads off in different directions.
So please. We’re supposed to be inventive people. Invent a smarter, more relevant term than “superheroes”. As a suggestion, consider simply “stronger” versus “weaker”, or some good antonym for “vulnerable” like…damn, I dunno. “Resistant” sounds like a care product, not a character. Anyway, I hope you get the idea. Thank you for time. Buy bonds where you work or bank.
