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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8801178" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is contentious.To give a less contentious example, it's not at all clear that one can explain what a pandemic is if one uses as the only, or primary, units of explanation individual states and traits. Of course individuals are infected and transmit the disease, but what makes it a pandemic is not those individual facts. Certain relational facts and "totality" facts figure crucially in the explanation.Neither Marx nor Durkheim believes in magic, but neither accepts that solidarity can be explained simply by reference to facts about individuals. Both also emphasise how economic life is shaped by received understandings and practices (what Marx but not Durkheim calls "relations of production"); and both see this as importantly related to solidarity. And explaining that sort of inheritance at a minimum requires relational facts, but also facts of "totality" or similar so as to explain the difference between what is "received" and what is "deviant".I continue to think that, from the social realist perspective, the most obvious way of implementing that sort of system embodies ideology (in the pejorative sense).For interest, what explains the outcome of Battleship Potemkin is not a subjective mental state like esteem or understood obligation but an objective social state of affairs ("class interest" is one way of beginning to describe it) - the actions of the revolutionaries on the Potemkin causes the other sailors to recognise their interest and thus to radically change their subjective mental states.This is why I say that the technical challenge for social realist RPGing is to find a way of making social structures and social relations into components of action resolution - where the social here is not the same as any particular individual's subjective mental states.Off the top of my head, the only system I know that comes into this vicinity is HeroWars/Quest, though I've never mastered the details of its rules for the relationship between individuals and communities. But [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] did mention them upthread I think.Oddly enough Torchbearer has rules for social transformation based on PC actions but not depending upon the intent of the PCs or anyone else. They're quite interesting! But the sort of social realism they express is a bit more pessimistic than Billy Bragg's!</blockquote>

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