D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with this apparently-upcoming reboot of Dark Sun in terms of whether (and how much) its rather edgy morality gets nerfed.
I know exactly what you mean about Dark Sun. I am very interested to see how they square that particular circle.

Speculatively, what I think could result in a good take would be to present the in-world morality as something players are intended to rebel against. I suspect the designers would need to spell that out in the game text for it to succeed. It could even conceivably come with an age rating (which may even improve rather than constrain uptake.)

Would you agree? Or where do you think they should take it?
 

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I know exactly what you mean about Dark Sun. I am very interested to see how they square that particular circle.

Speculatively, what I think could result in a good take would be to present the in-world morality as something players are intended to rebel against.
That's a reasonable guess, but it IMO would also be disappointing if that's where they went with it.
I suspect the designers would need to spell that out in the game text for it to succeed. It could even conceivably come with an age rating (which may even improve rather than constrain uptake.)

Would you agree? Or where do you think they should take it?
Leave it as a nasty place full of nasty people of whom the PCs have the opportunity to be the nicest, the nastiest, or anything in between.

In other words: there's no heroes here, just survivors. (which would be a pretty good tag-line for the setting, come to think of it :) )
 

I'm not certain I fully understand it either. I have a real-world ethical concern related to colonialism and its supporting tropes. One of the more egregious has been the depersonalization and mass slaughter of peoples. Usually I find myself able to sustain separateness between such compunctions and play. That I don't in this case potentially relates to the concept of "bleed" as defined in Nordic LARP.

Bleed is experienced by a player when her thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of her character, or vice versa. With increasing bleed, the border between player and character becomes more and more transparent. It makes sense to think of the degree of bleed as a measure of how separated different levels of play (actual/inner/meta) are.​
Bleed is instrumental for horror role-playing: It is often harder to scare the player through the character than the other way around. An overt secluded dice roll against a player's perception stat is likely to make the character more catious.​
A classic example of bleed is when a player's affection for another player carries over into the game or influences her character's perception of the other's character.​
...games rely on bleed either to influence player's actions or to achieve higher purposes in the premise. For example, Fat man down uses bleed to encourage the players to reflect over society's treatment of fat people. Playing Doubt close to home regularly causes bleed as a consequence of using own experiences in the game and re-living relationship situations or reflecting on relationships. Sometimes, the entire purpose of a game is to create bleed.​

The purpose of the 4e minions mechanic in the designers' own words is that "The players get to enjoy carving through the mob like a knife through butter, feeling confident and powerful." For me that produces "bleed" somehow connected with my real-world ethical position: I find myself paying a price that I don't wish to pay to sustain the lusory attitude of separateness.

It seems possible that my morally-motivated preference has revealed something that can be seen in TTRPG and not in traditional authored linear narrative. Roughly that through bleed a player can feel compunction about what they will pretend to do; and this arises on account of their being author, actor and audience. So here it is not the worry that the fiction will have real-world moral consequences, but that one doesn't want to imagine and pretend to do some sort of thing one finds immoral in real-life. As other posters have stressed, morality stays firmly located in the real-world.

The above might not be right in every detail, but it seems directionally accurate to me based on the conversation thus far.
I can certainly understand the minion mechanics feeling like they deserve special consideration, since they are so clear as to their purpose and reason for inclusion in the game. Other mechanics may accomplish similar goals, but are less transparent as to intent.
 

I'm not certain I fully understand it either. I have a real-world ethical concern related to colonialism and its supporting tropes. One of the more egregious has been the depersonalization and mass slaughter of peoples.
You know you can use minion rules with things like zombies and constructs, right? Things that have no sentience or culture. When used like that, it's not really any different from using a swarm of rats instead of rolling for each individual rat.
 

I don't really see how killing minions is much different than a high level AD&D Fighter cutting down a dozen kobolds in one combat round or a Wizard obliterating half a goblin tribe with a Fireball chucked into their warrens.

The only thing the minion mechanic does differently than 1 HD or less creatures is allow them to be a conceivable threat to characters who have entered Paragon-tier play or beyond.

Simply put, obliterating scores of enemies is deep in the game's DNA. If make-believe genocide concerns a person (and I'm not saying it shouldn't, mind), then that's something that should have been fixed long ago, and I don't really see how 4e is any more or less at fault than any other edition in this regard.

Much inspiration for D&D warriors are pulp heroes of the past, your Conan's and your John Carter's, who routinely slaughter scores of foes to achieve their goals. If that's not ok nowadays, I can see asking D&D to change- but saying the minion mechanic encourages this more than anything else? Feels like a stretch to me.
 

You know you can use minion rules with things like zombies and constructs, right? Things that have no sentience or culture. When used like that, it's not really any different from using a swarm of rats instead of rolling for each individual rat.
Thank you, but I am not looking for a workaround. I'm happy to do without the mechanic.
 


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