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Spells that "ruin" your campaign setting
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6291540" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>No, not at all. The success of your average mindless action packed summer blockbuster or of a setting like Forgotten Realms shows that most people don't give a flying fart about internal consistancy and logic. They are too busy having visceral fun to care about tangental intellectual integrity and those settings are meeting the needs they actually have in a way they approve of. And that's pretty much how it should be. We would be nothing less than pretentious to demand a setting prioritize internal consistancy when 95% of the settings audience doesn't care and in fact would probably enjoy it less if it did provoke that sort of thought. It's only worth demanding internal consistancy when the person himself has said, "I wish things were more internally consistant." Yeah, me too.</p><p></p><p>But it's not the systems fault if that doesn't happen. The EnWorld forums are visited by some of the most creative minds in gaming, demanding some of the highest artistic standards in gaming. So if the setting isn't what you like and your posting around here, you've got no one to blame but yourself. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>See, it's that part that bothers me. On the one level you are (rightly) demanding that as an experienced gamer, things hang together at a deeper level than visceral fun because well, there is more that an RPG is capable of than that. You want them to bear scrutiny and to provoke further thought upon inspection. Great. But now you are saying, "I don't want to be bothered"? That I don't get at all. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>It's worth noting that most people feel internal consistancy is one of those things that they feel has ramifactions that they don't approve of and so just pitch it. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Which is true, but I don't agree that it is a wash. There is relatively little value in my opinion in speculative fiction that is striving for realism. The really interesting thing about simulationism is unreality. I admire the ability of speculation to hold up mirrors to our own world not by looking like imperfect copies of the world, but rather by highlighting the differences so we can better understand what makes this world like it is that we otherwise never think about.</p><p></p><p>A mythic world were the important people all come back from the dead doesn't strike me as internally consistant, but it's a lot more interesting than a mythic world where it happens so rarely that the implications of raising people from the dead aren't that different from this own. I'm not sure I believe your world were you can reliably raise people from the dead but only if you act quickly actually does hang together as being more like, rather than less like, the world we know. In fact, I would postulate shortening the duration made the role of raise dead and its social impact more extreme rather than less extreme. In such a world there would be no time for deliberation about the morality of doing it, and no safety net in place where people would know that, if found dead within a few days time (or even longer in some cases) they might be restored. Instead, the wealthy and powerful who wanted to hang on to their life would know without a shadow of a doubt that if they died in an untimely fashion, they'd require immediate intervention... and as a result its likely the wealthy and powerful who cared would arrange their entire life (and with it, all of society) around this fact.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6291540, member: 4937"] No, not at all. The success of your average mindless action packed summer blockbuster or of a setting like Forgotten Realms shows that most people don't give a flying fart about internal consistancy and logic. They are too busy having visceral fun to care about tangental intellectual integrity and those settings are meeting the needs they actually have in a way they approve of. And that's pretty much how it should be. We would be nothing less than pretentious to demand a setting prioritize internal consistancy when 95% of the settings audience doesn't care and in fact would probably enjoy it less if it did provoke that sort of thought. It's only worth demanding internal consistancy when the person himself has said, "I wish things were more internally consistant." Yeah, me too. But it's not the systems fault if that doesn't happen. The EnWorld forums are visited by some of the most creative minds in gaming, demanding some of the highest artistic standards in gaming. So if the setting isn't what you like and your posting around here, you've got no one to blame but yourself. See, it's that part that bothers me. On the one level you are (rightly) demanding that as an experienced gamer, things hang together at a deeper level than visceral fun because well, there is more that an RPG is capable of than that. You want them to bear scrutiny and to provoke further thought upon inspection. Great. But now you are saying, "I don't want to be bothered"? That I don't get at all. It's worth noting that most people feel internal consistancy is one of those things that they feel has ramifactions that they don't approve of and so just pitch it. Which is true, but I don't agree that it is a wash. There is relatively little value in my opinion in speculative fiction that is striving for realism. The really interesting thing about simulationism is unreality. I admire the ability of speculation to hold up mirrors to our own world not by looking like imperfect copies of the world, but rather by highlighting the differences so we can better understand what makes this world like it is that we otherwise never think about. A mythic world were the important people all come back from the dead doesn't strike me as internally consistant, but it's a lot more interesting than a mythic world where it happens so rarely that the implications of raising people from the dead aren't that different from this own. I'm not sure I believe your world were you can reliably raise people from the dead but only if you act quickly actually does hang together as being more like, rather than less like, the world we know. In fact, I would postulate shortening the duration made the role of raise dead and its social impact more extreme rather than less extreme. In such a world there would be no time for deliberation about the morality of doing it, and no safety net in place where people would know that, if found dead within a few days time (or even longer in some cases) they might be restored. Instead, the wealthy and powerful who wanted to hang on to their life would know without a shadow of a doubt that if they died in an untimely fashion, they'd require immediate intervention... and as a result its likely the wealthy and powerful who cared would arrange their entire life (and with it, all of society) around this fact. [/QUOTE]
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