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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 544906" data-attributes="member: 537">What on earth are you rabbiting on about?Why, yes.Fantasy roleplaying is, at its heart, a way for the participants to recreate the hero's journey, as described by Joseph Campbell (among others). This journey, or "quest" might be a more familiar term, can be summed up as: the hero ventures forth from a world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.Under such a paradigm, fantasy races such as elves, orcs, demons and so forth represent different facets of the human psyche. The conflict between different races represents the internal conflict within ourselves, between our creative and destructive halves. The alternate paradigm, where races are cultural rather than psychological metaphors, is diagnostic of science fiction. (Thus I classify a setting like Planescape as science fiction, albeit with swords rather than spaceships. It's a fair cop, since Star Wars is often characterised as fantasy with blasters.)Under this paradigm, moreover, there really is no need for multiple cultures to muddy the waters. A setting like Rokugan, for instance, is entirely self-contained. It doesn't need gaijin to make things interesting, not when you already have a richly detailed clan history, plus demons, dragons and all the other archetypal creatures of Japanese myth. Which aren't really that different to the archetypal creatures of Western myth, when you look deeply enough.This isn't to say that having regional variations on one underlying culture doesn't make for good gaming. But mixing character types from multiple sources can just as easily 1) make for a bland chickenpot gameworld, where variety is pursued for variety's sake; and 2) introduce uncomfortable real-world issues to the gaming table, since all fantasy cultures will usually be based on real-world counterparts, and it's all too easy to start translating real-life prejudices into the game world. In a world where good versus evil is a dominant theme (see previous), this just results in muddying the waters in terms of identifying what exactly is meant by "good" and "evil". This is as undesirable a result as having spaceships and blasters in a game that's meant to be swords-and-sorcery.I'm sorry. Did I break your concentration? Please continue. I believe you were saying something about "number crunching exercises [sic]".Hong "bad motherbleeper" Ooi</blockquote>

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