Worldbuilding, nonhumans, and the inaccurarcy of Earth parallels

[fusangite]

Industry is not just about the technology you have; it is a way of thinking that says that machines can replace men, that speed of production is important, that organisation is paramount etc etc.

Agreed. An industrial work discipline routine would have created a very modern-feeling Roman world even if everything ran on ethanol and charcoal. Ronald Wright mobilizes the term "social technology" to describe such things.

Industry relies upon science not magic, superstition or tradition.

Here, we part company. Irrational superstition about the essential fairness of the marketplace is crucial to get a society to comply with capitalist work discipline routines in the first place. Similarly, "state magic," what sociologists identify as the reification of an entity (the nation state) with no independent existence is necessary for people in a society to comply with authoritarian demands that disadvantage them, even when there is no reasonable possibility that physical force will be used to make them comply.

The fact that our society's superstitions produce a higher GDP than other societies' superstitions doesn't make them non-superstitions, just more functional ones.

It is the point where art (craftsman) becomes science (mass production).

That's certainly not the experience on the assembly line.

An artisan in a workshop must comprehend the processes of production and their outcomes in their totality. Assembly line production is based on the opposite idea -- that no one except the managerial elite do or should perceive the production process as an integrated whole.

THIS I believe, is why industry and even industrial magic are imcompatible with D&D; because it brings with it a whole host of modern thinking that, for me at least, spoils the essence of fantasy.

Again, I agree. Indeed, my biggest frustration with fantasy gaming is the amount of modernity that is already alloyed with popular settings.

 

[Ydars]

A nice post Fusangite! I think all our "disagreements" boil down to the use of the word superstition.

I mean it in the sense of a lack of education, sophistication and understanding about natural laws i.e. everything is attributed to spirits, gods and other "forces". You seem to be talking about the "misinformation" inherent in a particular social system. I think superstition is a natural product of not understanding the world whereas the irrationality you mention is probably the result of indoctrination.

Oh and I meant art (craftsman) becomes technology (mass production). The implies nothing about who knows what; it describes the overall process. Of course craftsmen are more skilled, but their skill is intutative not formally learnt.

 

[fusangite]

A nice post Fusangite! I think all our "disagreements" boil down to the use of the word superstition.

Sounds good to me. I dig your posts too.

I mean it in the sense of a lack of education, sophistication and understanding about natural laws i.e. everything is attributed to spirits, gods and other "forces".

Successful engineers can be highly superstitious in general as long as their worldview has strong predictive power in the specific area in which they are doing work.

A great example of this is a science like accupuncture that is welded to a "superstitious" and clearly false theory of physics and medicine. Nevertheless, through empirical testing, accupuncturists developed an excellent predictive model that allowed them to treat various nervous system conditions with considerable efficacy.

Whereas the West discovered electricity first and discovered its involvement in the nervous system first, the Chinese had built a system for productively manipulating electrical impulses within the system that are only now being scientifically validated. (Present-day Chinese hospitals have large contingents of doctors who practice accupuncture and use MRI and X-Ray machines to assist them in making their work on the nervous system more precise.)

I do see what you mean, though, that a worldview that sees physical events as primarily contingent on the choices of non-existent beings is going to have a rough relationship with empiricism. Interestingly, one of the things that powered Roman engagement with empiricism, in the view of some scholars, was increasingly contractual ideas in relating to the gods. Some great work examining verb tense and mood in Roman prayers has transformed "O Saturn, please care for us. We will sacrifice this bull to you and hope that you don't destroy our crops. Next year, because you love us, we will sacrifice two bulls. But if our crops are destroyed, we won't be able to sacrifice" into "O Saturn, you had better care for us. We will sacrifice this bull to you on the proviso that you won't destroy our crops. Next year, if you love us (ie. haven't destroyed our crops), we will sacrifice two bulls. But if you destroy our crops, you're not getting any more bulls from us. ."

You seem to be talking about the "misinformation" inherent in a particular social system. I think superstition is a natural product of not understanding the world whereas the irrationality you mention is probably the result of indoctrination.

I'm not talking about indoctrination at all. I'm arguing more along the lines of a Max Weber or Frances Yates who suggest that major parts of the emergence of modernity resulted from people adopting new irrational theological beliefs first and these beliefs causing new empirical and work discipline routines to emerge.

Weber argued that Calvinist ideas about material wealth constituting signs of divine election and Calvinist ethics of hard work, continence and condemnaton of public display triggered capital accumulation and built the middle class. Yates argued that widespread belief in magic and Gnostic ideas about sun worship (ie. Hermeticism) produced Copernicus and his successors. The idea of becoming a magus who manipulated the natural world was what early scientific revolutionaries aspired to.

Oh and I meant art (craftsman) becomes technology (mass production). The implies nothing about who knows what; it describes the overall process.

I don't know what you mean here. I can no longer extract meaning from your sentence.

Of course craftsmen are more skilled, but their skill is intutative not formally learnt.

Ummm... that's just dead wrong. Artisanal production is associated with a highly formalized learning process of long duration, hence terms like "apprentice" and "journeyman." One of the reasons that assembly line work kicked the out of artisanal systems was the fact that the capital cost of creating employees was a tiny fraction -- an artisan took a decade or more to train, during which time his trainers gave him food, lodging, drink, etc. as well as hours of training. Assembly line workers didn't even need to speak the local language, you could just pull them off boats in New York harbour and send them into the factory.

 

[Afrodyte]

Then again, would fantasy be any fun if it was diluted too much with sensitivity and nuance?

Let's spin this a bit, shall we?

Would fantasy be any fun if it were stripped of the fantastic? Of course not. A lot of the best fantasy concepts take an idea and crank it to 11.

But would fantasy be fun if we could inject more subtlety and more layers of meaning? Definitely. It's not easy, but it's certainly worth it.

 

[gizmo33]

But would fantasy be fun if we could inject more subtlety and more layers of meaning? Definitely. It's not easy, but it's certainly worth it.

Hmmm, apparently I should have injected more nuance into my post. I agree with what you're saying and I don't see it as being incompatible with what I'm saying - you can add layers of complexity to some elements of the campaign and still retain cliches in other areas.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Would fantasy be any fun if it were stripped of the fantastic? Of course not. A lot of the best fantasy concepts take an idea and crank it to 11.

Actually, I think a lot of the very worst and least interesting fantasy concepts do that, if we're talking about literary fantasy or the like. You could argue that some AD&D settings managed that without getting into the realms of the retarded though, and I think it generally works better for games than it does other media.

You could say that Planescape took the idea of doorways between the planes and "cranked it up to 11", and that Dark Sun took the idea that "magic has to come from somewhere" and "cranked it up to 11".

On the other hand, Al-Qadim was a great setting by avoiding "cranking it up to 11", I think, and keeping things on a somewhat more even keel, and for my money, Spelljammer certainly "cranked it up to 11" with "space + magic", but that made the setting so loud and over the top that it completely lost coherence and meaning.

Still, in literary fantasy? I'm drawing a blank trying to come up with examples of actually good fantasy that "cranks it up to 11" with any idea. I can think of lots that stress an idea, but not to that degree.

 

[Andor]

An artisan in a workshop must comprehend the processes of production and their outcomes in their totality. Assembly line production is based on the opposite idea -- that no one except the managerial elite do or should perceive the production process as an integrated whole.

I'm gonna nitpick here. That was a pervasive idea in the early days of assembly line work, but modern quality improvment cycles rather unsurprisingly make use of the idea that the guy actually doing the job may actually have a batter idea of how to do it.

Again, I agree. Indeed, my biggest frustration with fantasy gaming is the amount of modernity that is already alloyed with popular settings.

My big pet peeve is the unbelieveable pervasiveness of monotheistic thought and themes in supposedly polytheistic fantasy. Unfortunately that's a point that is hard to get across to anyone who isn't an anthropology major.

On an unrelated note, when did you move to Toronto? I have plenty of relatives in Toronto. Maybe we will get to argue some of this stuff out over beer one of the months.

 

[Afrodyte]

You could say that Planescape took the idea of doorways between the planes and "cranked it up to 11", and that Dark Sun took the idea that "magic has to come from somewhere" and "cranked it up to 11".

Nah. They took the idea of alternate dimensions and cranked it up until it blew up the dang speakers.

 

[taliesin15]

afrodyte writes:

Would fantasy be any fun if it were stripped of the fantastic?

That was part of my point earlier about magic and how one defines it. Magic, as it is usually used in RPGs, and *definitely* the case more and more in D&D, is nothing more than a kind of technology. Really its pretty boring. Like making love to a slot machine, or a cigarette pack dispenser. There's very little magic in the magic, and, I would say, not as much fantasy.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Gizmo33 wrote:

If it makes you feel any better, fantasy is chok full of ideas that were used to justify the torture and murder of millions of people over the centuries. In fact, the concept of evil itself as it is represented in fantasy could probably be seen as a root cause of religious wars, inquisitions, cruelty towards the mentally ill, cruelty towards people who are disfigured, etc. One could become uncomfortable if you took note of how often villains' physical appearances were evocative of certain ethnic physical types (though it changes at times based on current fashion - Nosferatu I'm looking at you). Or think about how often wolves, sharks, etc. are stereotyped as evil creatures and the consequence to how people relate to their environment and the extinction of species.

No. No it really doesn't.

sigh.