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Worlds of Design: Gun vs. Sword
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7803160" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I don't think there is anything concrete you could say about old school play, nor a blanket description you could give of the motivations. Certainly we know that Greyhawk had guns, and probably a lot of other games had guns. And the motivations of the individual tables for not embracing guns were probably diverse, and did include a desire to stay true to a perceived genre or perceived conventions of history.</p><p></p><p>I think part of the problem has to do with the fact that simultaneously our culture fetishizes guns and fears them, a situation that I think has a lot to do with the decline of practical experience with guns and particularly with practical experience of guns as a tool. I grew up with guns everywhere, but no one I knew romanticized guns either. And the only time I ever saw a gun treated as a snake that might leap up and bite you was when for safety's sake a young cousin had to be traumatized about touching guns after he got one out and treated it like a toy, and that only until he was old enough to understand and put one to practical use (which in many families, started at around age 5).</p><p></p><p>But whatever the larger cultural gestalt might have been, at least at the tables I was familiar with at the time, wanting to bring guns into a game was seen as a very stereotypical sort of Munchkinism - the inevitable thing that a player just cutting their teeth on the game would hit on as a highly original idea likely to lead to the them 'winning' the game. No guns was seen mostly as opposition to a certain immature perspective on the game: a stance that shut down attempts to overcome obstacles in ways that the player thought were 'thinking out of the box' but which were really just banal, metagamey, and attempts to win by getting the table to agree to changing the rules. The older gamer would say something like, "No guns. Gunpowder doesn't work on this world. Beside, read Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. He got there years before you did."</p><p></p><p>Realistic guns aren't the wands of insta-death that the Munchkin's imagine, but they change the game world in ways that are contrary to the Munkchkin's purposes. The characters that get the most out of guns aren't the Heroes, but the Commoners. The ordinary goblin mooks get far more out of a rifled mini-ball caplock musket or an M16 assault rifle than leveled characters ever would. As the old saying goes, "God made men. Sam Colt made them equal." And we could use more inclusive language than that probably. It's not I think a coincidence that women's suffrage and followed after the invention of a weapon that made sheer athleticism not the sole essence of military prowess. After all, the essential truth of male and female equality had been decided on in the West a good 2000 years prior, but no one ever really acted on it until a young lady could shoot the head off a fly at 20 paces. Guns might not be wands of instadeath, but by levelling the playing field they have a tendency to be anti-heroic, and play against those great ape fantasies of being all important and the center of all attention.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7803160, member: 4937"] I don't think there is anything concrete you could say about old school play, nor a blanket description you could give of the motivations. Certainly we know that Greyhawk had guns, and probably a lot of other games had guns. And the motivations of the individual tables for not embracing guns were probably diverse, and did include a desire to stay true to a perceived genre or perceived conventions of history. I think part of the problem has to do with the fact that simultaneously our culture fetishizes guns and fears them, a situation that I think has a lot to do with the decline of practical experience with guns and particularly with practical experience of guns as a tool. I grew up with guns everywhere, but no one I knew romanticized guns either. And the only time I ever saw a gun treated as a snake that might leap up and bite you was when for safety's sake a young cousin had to be traumatized about touching guns after he got one out and treated it like a toy, and that only until he was old enough to understand and put one to practical use (which in many families, started at around age 5). But whatever the larger cultural gestalt might have been, at least at the tables I was familiar with at the time, wanting to bring guns into a game was seen as a very stereotypical sort of Munchkinism - the inevitable thing that a player just cutting their teeth on the game would hit on as a highly original idea likely to lead to the them 'winning' the game. No guns was seen mostly as opposition to a certain immature perspective on the game: a stance that shut down attempts to overcome obstacles in ways that the player thought were 'thinking out of the box' but which were really just banal, metagamey, and attempts to win by getting the table to agree to changing the rules. The older gamer would say something like, "No guns. Gunpowder doesn't work on this world. Beside, read Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber. He got there years before you did." Realistic guns aren't the wands of insta-death that the Munchkin's imagine, but they change the game world in ways that are contrary to the Munkchkin's purposes. The characters that get the most out of guns aren't the Heroes, but the Commoners. The ordinary goblin mooks get far more out of a rifled mini-ball caplock musket or an M16 assault rifle than leveled characters ever would. As the old saying goes, "God made men. Sam Colt made them equal." And we could use more inclusive language than that probably. It's not I think a coincidence that women's suffrage and followed after the invention of a weapon that made sheer athleticism not the sole essence of military prowess. After all, the essential truth of male and female equality had been decided on in the West a good 2000 years prior, but no one ever really acted on it until a young lady could shoot the head off a fly at 20 paces. Guns might not be wands of instadeath, but by levelling the playing field they have a tendency to be anti-heroic, and play against those great ape fantasies of being all important and the center of all attention. [/QUOTE]
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