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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8801643" data-attributes="member: 82106">I respond with something akin to (I say akin as I have no formal training in Buddhist doctrine) the Buddhist view, which is essentially "God is in the details". There is NOTHING BUT the individual situation. There is no overall state, there is only the states of each of the component parts. Any generalization is a process of human cognition. A physicist would state in the sense of "There are only fundamental particles, and planets, stars, people, and dogs, are merely convenient abstractions upon which we can reason." So, I agree with you that collective states are USEFUL and I am not arguing that we shouldn't use them as ways to model things. All I am actually arguing is for a specific set of such measures, nothing else. I proposed some, and I am happy to dig into whether or not they are useful, or to what degree. Thus, ultimately I don't think we are having a substantive disagreement here. I'm perfectly willing to agree to measure the gravitational force between dogs and planets, even though neither exists, and thus cannot have properties, in some fundamental sense.Well, I don't want to crash into the restrictions on debates about current events or politics, but I don't think 'class interest' is a very useful measure in terms of what, say, is happening right now in the politics of the Western world, nor do I recognize its presence in the course of world events! Not to say it couldn't be a factor, but I think you would first have to represent how people view class and interest, and what information they have, and why they act on some things and not others. Clearly there are factors like the formation of in-groups and out-groups, and the perceived relations between them, group signalling, and group identity, which can include things like ritual, obligation, perceptions of allegiance and hostility, repression, etc. I don't think games need to go too deep into these things, its more likely and feasible that they are simply postulated, as in something like BitDs faction relations.I think individual mental states CAN become important at times. For example they seem to factor into the coalescence and disintegration of social groups. Like, people leave 'cults' when their individual mental models of how things are become so conflicted with what they can see around them that it breaks the hold of indoctrination and personality fixation. I mean, in a game sense that could simply come up in terms of some kind of parameter that can represent a point at which a group will decohere or where some of its membership will defect, etc.I don't know about it. I mean, there are SOME bits of this in even AD&D where you have loyalty, morale, and reaction, which all rest on quite a number of factors, potentially. A character can construct quite a large organization, or be part of such, and those factors would presumably, in a canonical rules sense, be applied. I don't know that too many people really did that, or extrapolated it beyond "what happens if I command my hirelings to charge?" but the implication is there.Yeah, I don't think I've read any of that part of the rules, to be honest. We played a number of sessions, and did have a small social impact at one point, but I'm not sure the rules beyond conflict resolution really got much involved. [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] could say more on that (I was thinking of when we recruited people to help clean out the cave full of cultist/cannibals up on the mountain). Maybe the GM was keying off some of those rules, maybe not...</blockquote>

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