Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9785875" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I absolutely would not consider that a requirement, and would argue that expecting that simply means you think "hope setting" means "really poorly-done black-and-white thinking". Pretty reductive.I run what I would very much consider a hope setting. There isn't a "good kingdom" nor a "bad kingdom". For the vast majority of the game, the party has been doing stuff in the city-state of Al-Rakkah. It has good people...and bad people. The Sultana is a decent person, but only one person. She has to rely on a government that is very uneven in its performance. Or, consider the Raven-Shadow assassin cult. They are very devout and care deeply about their faith....but a group of them are open to change/reinterpretation and it's possible to convince them that they can continue to pursue their faith without needing the "assassin" part.For me, that's what actual hope looks like. "Good people are good and always will be, bad people are bad and always will be, just keep the good people safe and kill all the bad people and everything will be perfect" isn't hope. It's...plastic, hollow, probably fictive and aggressively similar to real-world propaganda BS. "Good people have been good, but might become bad if things go poorly. Bad people have been bad, but some of them can be convinced to change" is dramatically more accurate--and both of those things are the hopeful take, not the despairing one.A setting of despair says, "Everyone good is always at risk of becoming horrible--and they'll all get there, sooner or later. Everyone bad will remain bad forever, and most of them will get worse." And I'm so damned tired of that.</blockquote>

Verification