D&D 5E (2014) Which parts of D&D came from Tolkien?

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Why the frowny face? If a campaign has to end, I can't imagine a better way than a Great Old One!

Oh that wasn't the end, they were going to have to deal with the fall out starting the apocalypse. But alas...

 

[Celebrim]

Pedantic pet peeve.

Now, those I have a lot of patience with.

It's not slander, it's libel.

You are quite right. I should have been more precise.

I would say that if multiple people are misunderstanding your argument, it is possible that your communication is not perfectly clear.

An entirely reasonable suggestion, but in this case the preponderance of evidence is that the misunderstanding on that point is not my fault. There may be, and probably are, plenty of other areas however where I'm not being clear. But on that point, barring the possibility you can actually show me where the misunderstanding came from, I don't think I'm at fault - since among other things I've plainly stated the opposite multiple times. Rather I think the more likely explanation is you are conflating what I'm saying with what someone else said in some other conversation, and you are responding to me as if I was that other person.

That's great! And as they say, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Now, I could discuss my expertise in textual criticism, the multiple journals I have published in, the time I have spent editing other people's work, or my current job, or it might be self-evident from my history of posts (it is better to show than to tell).* What I can certainly tell you is that while I appreciate your expertise in bioinformatics, it is not transferable. I think that was the point of my post.

Oh, good. Because I was assuming that your desire to not see science and textual criticism compared, was coming from something of the opposite place, that science was 'Science' and that textual criticism was something that could just be dismissed because it was not 'Science'. That you are an expert in textual criticism only makes this conversation easier.

Perhaps when you have spent a great amount of time thinking about, studying, and arguing this particular issue, when you can confidently discuss both the many schools of textual criticism (not just in literature, but generally) as well as understand the great indeterminacy of text (for an example see the canons of statutory construction, see also Karl Llewellyn). I certainly wish that it was a matter of complete objectivity and scientific rigor; it would make my life easier in so many ways. Perhaps, since you have it down to a science, you will publish your methods in journals that do not deal with bioinformatics so the rest of us may learn from them?**

That said, given your earlier statements regarding textual criticism, I do not believe you are as fully versed in the subject as you are in bioinformatics.

Quite. But my point was rather the opposite of what you think it is. Rather than arguing that textual criticism was as easy as science and therefore we could state as much with confidence about a text as we might over a very simple piece of data like a genetic sequence that in fact science shared with textual criticism many of the same ambiguities that textual criticism has, and that therefore it was not insulting science to draw the comparison. On the contrary, I would tend to argue that scientists underestimate the difficulties in dealing with the data (and in some cases do this deliberately, which is a big problem in science right now), and therefore tend to overestimate the strength of their conclusions. Or to put it another way, if you believe science is about complete objectivity and perfectly firm conclusions and absolute rigor, then you probably don't do science.

Perhaps you simply misunderstand that statement, "textual criticism is not a science, and attempting to add the veneer of scientific precision to it does a disservice to both criticism and science." I thought that was sufficiently clear. I do not think you are libeling me- just a failure to communicate, something that often happens since words are imprecise, and miscommunication happens. You know this from Wittgenstein and Gusdorf though.

Actually, as far as Wittgenstein goes, yes - though I've not read Gusdorf. But again, while textual criticism is not science, not being science does not mean it is not knowledge or that it completely lacking in rigor. And fundamentally, we both seem to believe that there is some evidence that can be uncovered and that reasonable people can be convinced by the strength of the argument that this explanation best fits the evidence - which is all that science is, so whether it is science or not isn't really relevant.

*After all, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Also, I mean, c'mon. Argumentum ad verecundiam on the internet between anonymous internet commenters? Is someone's dad totally going to beat up someone else's dad?

Don't assume that I'm going to be in anyway threatened by your expertise. Quite the contrary, knowing who you are helps me understand the context of your statements and makes them clearer rather than less clear. And for that matter, I don't believe that either of us has made an argument ad vercundiam, since neither is asking the other to believe what we say based on our expertise alone. You can validly put forth your expertise in the subject as contributing evidence that you ought to be believed.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Lovecraft and insanity is a feature in all my games. The group in my pre 5e game had just accidentally released a great old one right before the campaign ended to start 5e.

If you want to PM me your email address, I'll send you the dropbox link to the PDF of Felk Mor. It's a campaign I wrote in 2012 meant for 5e that has strong Lovecraft influences and the 80s feel

 

[Celebrim]

**And I'm not being snarky. If you have it, share it. You could transform several different fields! Machine learning is increasing at rates that, at times, we don't fully understand (just look at what happened recently with Go), and combined with the increased digitization of the entirety of the corpus of English literature, I am sure that if you had a great insight into the subject matter, I would be eager to read it.

I couldn't even revolutionize bioinformatics, and it was much easier for one of us to get out of academia and since she was the one that really had a passion for it, it was me.

That said, I'm quite sure that textual analysis is going to be a big thing in the future, because determining the meaning of actual natural language speech is a huge area of inquiry right now. And I'm sure someone will come up with ways to revolutionize many fields as AI researchers learn from other fields how meaning is created and are able to apply that to looking at things in new ways. I just don't think I'm going to be the one to do it. That said, the information in natural language really is much more difficult to get at than something like genetic code with its very long sequence lengths and its four basic carriers of information and its ultimately precise mapping between itself and something physical and tangible in the real world (even if we can't yet do that mapping because its too computationally expensive). There often is going to be situations where there simply isn't enough information in the text to come to definitive conclusion, which is something you well know, but which I think will become a measurement with more and more rigor as we come to understand language more and more.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Well, not exactly. There is this thing called 'genetic drift' were chunks of code leap between species. Particularly in the case of plants and microorganisms 'descent' is no more easily traced than it is in a body of text as there can be multiple parents.

Off topic a bit, but: I myself used to be a biologist. This concept of genetic drift differs sharply with common usage thereof....Genetic drift typically refers to random variation in allele transmission between generations (eventually leading to particular genes being weeded out), not horizontal transfer between species.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science...d-genetics/a/genetic-drift-founder-bottleneck

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0/evo_24

ge·net·ic drift
noun
Biology

noun: genetic drift

variation in the relative frequency of different genotypes in a small population, owing to the chance disappearance of particular genes as individuals die or do not reproduce.

 

[Celebrim]

Off topic a bit, but: I myself used to be a biologist. This concept of genetic drift differs sharply with common usage thereof....Genetic drift typically refers to random variation in allele transmission between generations (eventually leading to particular genes being weeded out), not horizontal transfer between species.

Cool. It's been 12 years since I had to speak the language on a daily basis. Yes, it was 'horizontal transfer of genes' between species (among other things) that I was referring to. Also the problem that in reality, 'species' is a very fuzzy term, and you can have genes introduced into the heritage of a species by multiple parent species so that those nicely perfect trees* with nodes having lines pointing in just one direction toward descendants and species having but one genetic parent probably exist only in high school textbooks - not the real world.

*simple directed graphs

 

[pemerton]

Poul Anderson. Sure, Gygax always nipped, tucked, and added. But the clear antecedent and "inspiration" is Anderson. I have a clear conscience when I place the blame.

Yes, Three Hearts and Three Lions if I'm remembering properly.

But I stick by my claim - given that the archetype has roots and content that goes beyond Anderson's particular interpretation, I think that one of the best literary expressions of it is Aragorn in LotR. Whereas you hate paladins, I nearly always play a paladin when I play (rather than referee) - and Tolkien, together with John Boorman's Excalibur, is what I draw upon. (That I draw upon them of course isn't eivdence that they're good interpretations; it's because they're good interpretations that I drraw upon them.)

 

[pemerton]

Not CoC, a fantasy RPG. I need to look at Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. But the 2e books is 80 bucks and one of those all in one huge tomes that will undoubtedly fall apart. I should have grabbed the boxed set.

But I'm getting off topic.

Burning Wheel would support what you want. The rules include very Tolkien-esque dwarves and elves, but they can be excluded without loss to the coherence of the rest, which can be very S&S.

 

[Yaarel]

(Textual criticism is a science. Albeit it is a ‘human science’, like history and psychology, as opposed to a ‘physical science’.)