What We Lose When We Eliminate Controversial Content

[Maxperson]

You are making really bad analogies and getting upset when your analogies are pointed out as being bad.

The analogy was good. Your interpretation was bad. There was no equivalency in it.

You have repeatedly said that slavery is necessary for Dark Sun. You also said that salt is necessary for human life. If you weren't making an equivalence, then you're being an incredibly bad writer here.

How about you take what I say as I say it and don't bring in past words that don't apply? My analogy in that post dealt solely with how planets are called and nothing else. Earth is not a salt planet and Dark Sun is not a slavery planet.

No, that's not an answer. You liking something and that something being necessary for a setting are two incredibly different things--unless you are claiming that your likes and dislikes are the only thing that matters when it comes to a setting.

"It's an integral part of the Realms. It still exists in my game as a result." Do you seriously not understand what being an integral part of the Realms means? That answered your question and it's the only answer you're going to get.

No, you wouldn't have to completely alter how Dark Sun society works. No slaves, then you add serfs or workers or even short-term indentured servants. Make the gladiators there for similar reasons. QED.

Serfs, while somewhat close, don't work to inhabit the same space. Nor do short term indentured servants.

I already said: It's insulting to a real life group that is often, in real life, told that we deserve to be tortured in hell. Do you honestly not understand that?

The Wall of Faithless is not about atheism. That's what I understand. How are you insulted as an atheist by something that isn't about atheism?

So your answer to why slavery is needed is because slavery is needed

No. For the umpteenth time, because you refuse to step back and take a fresh breath in order to stop misrepresenting my words, slavery is needed because slavery is integral to the setting.

 

[Maxperson]

Pretty much....in my own groups back then we all tended to play as we always had, but that often was more good/heroic anyway. In a twist of irony, I recall a game in 1992ish when my group had a guest player. He ran a chaotic evil thief and really aggravated the group, so they tricked him and sold him into slavery and had him Shanghai'd off to some distant kingdom (oh, yeah, welcome to the 90's!). I probably would have handled that differently as a DM today, lol....I'm not very tolerant of inter-party conflicts that are clearly derailing the group anymore.

Yeah. There's a marked difference between someone using evil to be a douche and players genuinely playing evil to explore different roleplaying opportunities. I've seen both and the latter can be very fun and well done.

 

[Thourne]

Yeah. There's a marked difference between someone using evil to be a douche and players genuinely playing evil to explore different roleplaying opportunities. I've seen both and the latter can be very fun and well done.

Yah, there is a huge swath from the old days who would confuse "playing an evil character" and just plain "being a d#@k".

Hell, I get frustrated as ever when playing computer games and they script evil as "smash it all, kill everyone, lie to everyone, etc.
Evil doesn't equal brutal and dumb. It can, but it is far from a pair of ubiquitous traits.

 

[Faolyn]

I don't understand the question?

You quoted my entire post for one statement, which could have applied to anything or even nothing.

 

[Faolyn]

The analogy was good. Your interpretation was bad. There was no equivalency in it.

How about you take what I say as I say it and don't bring in past words that don't apply? My analogy in that post dealt solely with how planets are called and nothing else. Earth is not a salt planet and Dark Sun is not a slavery planet.

No, your analogy sucks. Salt does not, in and of itself, involve treating real people as property. Nor is salt a theme on Earth. If you were to write a fantasy game that takes place on earth, "salt" wouldn't likely be in the top twenty things that you think of. And slavery, especially fantasy slavery, is not something that people would literally die without.

You get rid of salt on Earth, things die. Or rather, would have evolved to not need salt, because evolution is fun that way.

You get rid of slavery on Dark Sun, then you have a thousand potential adventures for the setting, instead of a thousand and two. Big frikkin' deal.

"It's an integral part of the Realms. It still exists in my game as a result." Do you seriously not understand what being an integral part of the Realms means? That answered your question and it's the only answer you're going to get.

So every single Realms book that WotC produces from now one, where they no longer reference the Wall where they previously would have, is not actually about the Realms. It's about something similar to the Realms, but not actually about that. Have you written in to WotC and told them they're putting out books that are wrong?

Serfs, while somewhat close, don't work to inhabit the same space. Nor do short term indentured servants.

Unless you are only capable of running Dark Sun adventures that center around slavery in one way or another, they fulfill the exact same purpose: labor needed to build great big monuments for the sorcerer-kings.

The Wall of Faithless is not about atheism. That's what I understand. How are you insulted as an atheist by something that isn't about atheism?

Your understanding is incredibly off, then. Or else you're re-defining words to fit your definition. Maybe you should read up on the Wall and on atheism?

No. For the umpteenth time, because you refuse to step back and take a fresh breath in order to stop misrepresenting my words, slavery is needed because slavery is integral to the setting.

And you have yet to show how other than "because you say so."

You have not shown a single thing that would make Dark Sun unrecognizable if it didn't exist.

Dark Sun has unusual PC races, environment-destroying magic, elementals in place of gods, bizarre monsters, a post-apocalyptic feel, tremendous wastelands, oceans of silt, psionics everywhere, even weird halfling biotech, which I just remembered existed. Removing slavery doesn't change a single one of those things and makes the game better for a lot of people.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You quoted my entire post for one statement, which could have applied to anything or even nothing.

I was saying there are plenty of campaign setting ideas out there that explore similar genres and themes that don't include things you clearly don't feel should exist in published product, like slavery. Many such ideas have been posited by you and others. Why don't you play one of those and leave Dark Sun back in the past if WotC considers it socially non-viable today? Why this insistence that an established setting be changed?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Because definitionally indentured servitude is serving a period of time with unpaid labor either through a contract or through a judicial sentence.

Except obviously that's not the reality of how it works through history, and your own link says "voluntarily" with hate quotes. As I said, people are forced into them, tricked into them, had no choice, and so on. I would go as far as to say the vast, overwhelming majority of people who entered indentured servitude did so because they felt they had no choice, or literally had no choice. Like upwards of 90%.

It's not the nice neat precise thing you seem to want - there's huge overlap with debt bondage for example, to the point where they're indistinguishable.

Slavery - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm well aware of who Spartacus is, thanks, but you directly implied that was how gladiators were, otherwise your point makes no sense.

As for all the "Well I would feel..." okay, all you're telling us there is that you see systems and approaches that have been around for thousands of years as "modern". That seems like something about you, not something about those systems.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Nor is salt a theme on Earth. If you were to write a fantasy game that takes place on earth, "salt" wouldn't likely be in the top twenty things that you think of. And slavery, especially fantasy slavery, is not something that people would literally die without.

Human bondage whether you call it slavery or not would absolutely 100% be in that top 20 though, if you were looking at human history at all. It would probably be in the top 5. I'm not entirely disagreeing with you but that doesn't seem like a winning argument.

And "people wouldn't die without it" can applied to virtually anything, good or bad, so that's also not a very persuasive argument either way.

 

[MGibster]

Just to be different, in my all Dwarf campaign from a few years back, the evil dwarf city was built into the salt mines that was the source of their great wealth. Technically speaking these dwarfs didn't have slavery, but the wealthy were literally eating the poor. I don't know if that's better or worse though.

 

[Maxperson]

So every single Realms book that WotC produces from now one, where they no longer reference the Wall where they previously would have, is not actually about the Realms. It's about something similar to the Realms, but not actually about that. Have you written in to WotC and told them they're putting out books that are wrong?

Yes. I tell them what I think during the comments sections of surveys. Supposedly they read those.

Unless you are only capable of running Dark Sun adventures that center around slavery in one way or another, they fulfill the exact same purpose: labor needed to build great big monuments for the sorcerer-kings.

This is wrong. There is a difference between slavery and indentured servitude. If there wasn't, they wouldn't be different things with different names. Therefore it cannot be exactly the same. And before you say, "But I said purpose and building things!!!" slavery and indentured servitude are more than just building things. There is a flavor that is significantly different.

Your understanding is incredibly off, then. Or else you're re-defining words to fit your definition. Maybe you should read up on the Wall and on atheism?

So atheism is the belief in a god or gods? Because those in the wall of faithless primarily do. They just disrespect or ignore those gods, which is very different from atheism's lack of belief in gods.

And you have yet to show how other than "because you say so."

It's extremely self-evident. If you can't see it yourself, there's nothing I can do to get you to see it.

Dark Sun has unusual PC races, environment-destroying magic, elementals in place of gods, bizarre monsters, a post-apocalyptic feel, tremendous wastelands, oceans of silt, psionics everywhere, even weird halfling biotech, which I just remembered existed. Removing slavery doesn't change a single one of those things and makes the game better for a lot of people.

Slavery is a fairly common trope in post-apocalyptic movies and shows. So removing slavery does change that one. Not that any of those things on the list are relevant to this discussion. Removing slavery alters the setting, not those pieces of it. I mean, you can remove psionics without changing wastelands, silt, monsters, etc. You could remove elementals in place of gods without changing the rest. You could remove oceans of silt without changing the rest. You could even remove environmentally destroying magic and unusual PC races without changing any of the rest.

None of those things are dependent on any of the others, but togther(along with slavery) they generate a specific feel for the setting. Remove any of those things and the feel of the setting changes.