cyst13

Re: What is Evil? Phil, I've never seen someone get so worked up about another person agreeing with him. I'm not out to get you, Phil, and everything I write is not intended to be an argument against you. I wished to point out that there are real world reasons why people do what they do. You and I seem to have different opinions about what those reasons are, but we both seem to be in agreement that the reasons do exist. This relates directly to my criticism of the use of evil (def. 7) in RPGs, especially the fantasy genre. Unmotivated evil simply does not make sense. It has no relation to the real world (and I firmly believe that all the best RPGs, even fantasy ones, are relevant to the real world) and it makes for weak, cliched storytelling. As I've said elsewhere, the only option for dealing with unmotivated evil is to destroy it. And stories that revolve around destroying evil get old quick.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? At the risk of Agemegos and I seeming like clones, I gotta say I'm with him again on this point. I'm not sure that you and I can ever come to an agreement on this point, Phil, because we have two mutually exclusive views of human motivations. You seem to believe that your behaviors and attitudes are solely influenced by your conscious beliefs. I'm of the belief that most of what we think and do is influenced by emotions and learned responses that are outside of our conscious awareness. I do think the DA study I cited before is valid. Since race was the only significant variable in the cases studied and since they used a large sample, race was concluded to be the determinate in length of sentencing. I don't think the jurors had to be aware of racist predispositions within themselves in order to be influenced by them. This is the reason why judges ask jurors to excuse themselves from cases if they have some prior involvement with a similar case. People can not consciously will away their biases. While the example you cite of the guy being mugged seemed like racism (and perhaps it was), it may have been that he had developed a phobia of black people. Traumatic experiences can produce feelings of fear in similar circumstances. While this is one possible basis for racism, and can be felt in the form of fear, it is not the only one. As for the guy who's PC stabbed the orc, I asked him about it player to player. (My PC wasn't there at the time, or I would've stopped him) He was not answering as his character and he saw nothing wrong with what he did. As for the idea that if orcs are intrinsically evil, they must be stopped: that's true. Again, I'm simply questioning the point of making the orcs intrinsically evil to begin with. It doesn't make for better storytelling. It doesn't have any relation to real life. And it severely restricts the number of options available to the PCs in dealing with the orcs. The notion of intrinsic evil is one of the weakest tropes of the fantasy genre and I think it's past time that we outgrow it.

Re: Implications of single-aspect magic on game worlds I can see why you would liken your scenario to a telegraph, but I'm not so sure it would provide incentive for the peasants to learn to read. Since the peasants would not be capable of sending people or large items through the gates, it would likely be of limited use for them. Their lives would likely continue to center on their native village, the rest of the world being a mere interesting curiosity. Literacy among the lower classes would require not only the incentive to read, but the resources to teach. All said, though, you've done a remarkably fine job of extrapolating onto a richly imagined world. I applaud you, sir.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Doc Democracy, I received your message about discussing species. I don't know how to send private messages, so I'll just say I'm always willing to talk biology. I'm not a scientist, but I try to stay informed. If you start a thread on the NGD board, give me a heads-up. I don't spend much time there and am not likely to notice your thread on my own. Thanks for the interest.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Neither do I, but that is an interesting insight.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Doug, Frankly, I'm thoroughly sick of the entire concept of alignments. If you posit an imaginary race or species with roughly human-level intelligence, then the individual members of that species should be capable of acting individually. If there are cultural factors involved that encourage the members of a species to conform to one set of values, that's fine. But those cultural factors should be described. The game should explain why most orcs are driven to act in a way that could be described as chaotic evil. If those conditions were changed, would they continue to be evil? Stanley Milgrom conducted a famous sociology experiement in the 70s in which he had volunteers administer electric shocks to a human being under the guidance of a professional scientist in a white coat. Unbeknownst to the volunteer, the subject was an actor who was not actually being shocked, but he acted as if he were. If I remember correctly, 60% of the volunteers followed the orders of the scientist and continued administering electric shocks to the point where they had apparently killed the human subject. I mention that experiement because I think it shows that essentially good people can get caught up in a perverted institution and commit acts which would be considered evil. To show orcs being caught up in such a situation provides nuance to a game and allows the PCs to interact with the orcs in ways other than simply killing them. If the PCs can manage to remove some of the orcs from their cultural institutions or if they can convince orcs within those institutions that they are doing something wrong and they have alternatives, they would be able to save both orcs and their potential victims. Even if you don't believe that having evil races in a game can promote real life racism (and I'm not fully sure I do), I think it's just a good thing to imagine the PC's adversaries richly with real motivations. Just being evil doesn't cut it for me. Not only does dealing with realistically motivated adversaries allow for a wider range of PC strategies, but it encourages all the real life humans involved in the game to think of creative not-necessarily-violent solutions to the problem of "evil" groups. This carries over directly to our current war on terrorism. Is attacking terrorists militarily always the best way of stopping terrorism? Or are there non-military strategies that we could use to complement military force that would help solve the problem? This is the sort of creative thought process that RPGs can encourage if they allow for honestly motivated adversaries. End of rant.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Phil, I empathize with your gag factor in having to read this entire post. I'm about ready to ignore it altogether myself. After 200 posts, I feel I've seen this argument from every angle there is to see. But you raised a good point. I haven't, as yet, offered an example from my own gaming experience, so here goes: I was playing in a guy's homebrew fantasy game that had a humanoid race that were basically orcs, though he named them something else to appear creative. All of these guys that we had met had been bad news and were impossible to reason with under any circumstances. When we were visiting one city, we saw one of these "orcs" leaning up against a wall and whistling to himself, minding his own business. The thief w a dagger PC stealths up and stabs the guy in the throat, killing him. When I asked him why he did that, he told me that they were all scum and deserved to die. To me, that's rehearsing racism. And that incident is not unique to my gaming experience. As to whether I feel myself becoming more racist when I play games with orcs, no I don't. But then I don't have the slightest idea how becoming more racist would feel. One's judgement of one's own personality is notoriously unreliable. I live in Portland, OR, which is a liberal bastion. Other than the skinheads, you'd be VERY hard pressed to find a white person in this city who admits to being a racist. Yet when the DA's office conducted a study of Portland juries, they found that white juries routinely gave longer sentences to black criminals than white criminals for the same crimes. If you interviewed any of the white people on those juries and asked them if they felt themselves being racist when they were deliberating, I doubt any of them would say yes.

Re: What is Evil? Phil, I think you and I are actually on the same page, we're just getting tripped up on an undefined term: Evil. The Webster's dictionary I have at home defines evil as: 1. morally wrong or bad, immoral; wicked: evil deeds, an evil life. They follow that with six other definitions which are just more synonyms for 'bad'. Then come definitions seven and eight: 7. the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin. 8. the wicked or immoral part of someone or something. It's the definitions seven and eight (especially seven) with which I take issue. I don't believe there is any force in nature that causes people to do bad things. I think people have mundane reasons for doing what they do and there is no need to appeal to metaphysics to explain that. It is common in the fantasy genre to use the #7 definiton of evil. Orcs, demons, Satan and other evil beings do bad things simply because they are motivated by the force of evil. It's uncommon to see this trope outside of the fantasy genre. (although it's in Star Wars) I'm not sure that a society can choose its values since a society is not a single organism (eg. there were Germans who did not adopt Nazi values), but I agree with you that there were real world reasons for why the Nazis chose and were able to do what they did. I used that example to argue against the idea that the Nazis had no motivations other than the force of evil. From what you've written, it doesn't seem you believe this either. However, this is common in the fantasy genre where evil races come together simply to cause evil. You're right; simply knowing there are reasons why bad things happen doesn't mean you can just put you head in the sand and allow them to go on happening. I don't like to get into arguments of moral responsibility because they quickly slip into metaphysics. I do believe, though, that every society has to regulate the actions of its citizens in the best interests of the society as a whole and with respect for individual rights. Fortunately, this belief does not require a belief in evil as a force of nature. The only part of your last post with which I disagree is the idea that we do not need to understand why people do bad things in order to stop them from doing bad things. Police departments are continually working to find the best way of doing their jobs. How important are community relations to effective police work? Does promoting job skills in low income neighborhoods help to reduce crime? Does imprisoning people who commit crimes deter them from committing further crimes upon release? These and other questions are all important to understanding how best to encourage people to obey society's laws. I've just been researching early 19th C. England for a game and it is startling to read how the House of Lords had no concept that the rising crime rates in England were connected to the rampant unemployment and grinding poverty in the country. They just kept expanding the bounds of capital punishment. If you don't understand the causes of any disease (physiological or social), it becomes very difficult to develop an effective treatment or cure. In sum, I agree with most everything you've written (with the above exception). Our disagreements arose from using a word like 'evil' which has at least two different connotations (mundane and metaphysical). If there were a term to describe people or societies who do bad things for mundane reasons, I'd be all for it.

Re: What is Evil? I wanted to add a bit more. Using evil in games also constricts the range of action available to PCs as well as the range of stories available to tell. For instance, there are numerous RPGs set in WWII in which PCs fight evil Nazis, but I do not know of any RPGs set in Weimar Germany in which the PCs attempt to change the social conditions that allowed the Nazis to come to power. If you have monolithically evil groups who have no motivations other than evil itself, all you can do is destroy those groups. If individuals are given to have realistic motivations, though, you can attempt to change the conditions in which they exist to prevent them from doing the things you do not wish them do. If the victors in WWI had given Germany a better chance to recover its economy after being defeated, the Nazis would not have had such fertile recruiting ground. That's an analysis that only applies to humans, not "evil" creatures.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? The last paragraph of the above post is directed to Captain Obvious. Thanx Cpt.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Phil, This is a VERY long thread and I don't blame anyone coming to it now for not reading all the posts. As a heads-up, though, the argument made a subtle shift of emphasis about page five or six. I acknowledged that it is possible to create a game world in which it is valid to view entire categories of being as evil (e.g. demons, orcs, etc). The question then changed to "Does pretending that entire classes of intelligent beings can be evil encourage racist beliefs in real life?" If you're interested in the arguments for yes on that question, I recommend starting at about page five and reading the posts of myself and Agemegos. Almost everyone else answered no, in one way or another. Doc Democracy, You're right. All known microbes are classified as genus and species. There really isn't much alternative available now. The question, though, is if you define species as a group of organisms that are able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, how does this apply to single celled organisms? They don't interbreed and fertility has little to no relevance to them. There is a huge range in physical characteristics among domestic dog breeds. If you didn't know better, you might assume a chihuahua to be a different species than a St. Bernard, judging by looks. But since you can cross the two animals and produce fertile offspring, that qualifies them as belonging to the same species. You can't do this with asexual microbes. Doing DNA testing is slippery also. Little known fact: many microbes can actually establish a tube from one microbe to another and transfer as much as 20% of their genetic material from one organism to the other. This just shows how difficult it is to really nail down microbes into categories. Which, I believe, is intrinisic to the mecurial nature of microbes themselves. They adapt fiendishly fast. Come up with a drug to kill them and a few years later they're all resistant. Are the resistant bacteria now a new species? Who knows? If you're really interested in this topic, the scientist who first opened my eyes to this conundrum was the biologist Lynn Margulis. She has a number of widely available and accessible popular science books that address issues of microbial lilfe. Also, I appreciate your enthusiasm for and contributions to the "orcs after the fall of the Dark Lord" idea. (I hesitate to claim it as my own for fear of further offending Phil) I probably won't be able to work on that campaign for a year or so. But it is something I've been thinking about in my spare time ever since the Rwandan genocide. I would definitely need the right players, though. One guy stuck in hack-n-slash mode could ruin the entire campaign.

Re: Implications of single-aspect magic on game worlds I'm wondering how the gates would affect population distribution. Let's assume you have to get somewhere the traditional way first, and then create a gate there. So you can't just pop around to anywhere on the planet. Also, creating gates is expensive and difficult. So only large guilds or city govts. or kingdoms can afford to finance them. This would probably mean that the great majority of gates would be erected in population centers (ie cities, towns, castles). What would that leave in between? It's already been mentioned that roads would fall into disrepair. Would this also retard the incentive for people to build in undeveloped areas? Would this allow for a greater proportion of wilderness areas between pop. centers?

Re: What is Evil? Phil, Good catch on the part where I declared both God and Satan to be intrinsically evil. I was in a rush when I wrote that post and that was an unintentional typo. Remove the word God from that sentence and you get my intended statement. I still think the concept of evil is most prevalent in the fantasy genre because that is where people most explicitly define their adversaries as being evil. Yes, people, including our President, continue to do this today, but it's not neccessarily the fallback position. As to whether I believe different societies have different brain chemistries, almost. Neural structure would be more precise. Everytime you learn anything, you change the network of neural synapses in your brain. Ergo, any society or culture that has a different set of beliefs than another culture would necessarily have differently organized synapses in their brains. That doesn't mean either culture is insane, though. While it is extremely unlikely that all of Nazi Germany spontaneously went insane in the 30's, I don't think it's much of a stretch to suggest that Hitler was insane, especially if you read about his state of mind in the last days of his life. He would have attracted like minded people to the top tier of his govt. and then it would have all rolled down hill. I perhaps overemphasized the role of physiological insanity in my first post. Behavioral and social psychology also are important. The new science of memes which is developing also is relevant to this. Even if you don't buy any of the above, though, the one point I would most like to make is that there are reasons why "evil" people or societies do what they do. They are not just compelled by a mystical force called "evil". Contra the penultimate sentence of your last post, it does matter why people do what they do. If we don't understand that, we will be doomed to always reacting to attrocities after they have occured rather than preventing them beforehand.

Re: Implications of single-aspect magic on game worlds Outsider, Wow! That was some incisive commentary. You've given me a lot to think about. Just goes to show that even a single change in the nature of reality can have profound consequences.

Re: What is Evil? I think there is a good reason that evil races or species or individuals are a staple primarily of the fantasy genre. (Space opera has gottem too, but space opera and fantasy are basically the same genre in different clothes) The concept of evil works best in a religious or supernatural sense. God and Satan can be described as intrinsically evil and you can't question their motivations because they are beyond human reality. Down here on Earth, the closer we look at the brain/mind of real people, the more we realize how little control we really have over our actions. I know it's easy to dismiss all psychology as hoohah, because so much of it has been exactly that. But recent advances in brain chemistry and the ability to view brain activity in living people is providing good, scientifically credible evidence that sociopaths and child molesters and others whom we would consider to be evil often do have aberrant neural physiologies. As much as it impinges upon our ideas of free will and just retribution, we are eventually going to have to admit that not everyone is capable of restraining themselves from committing attrocious acts. I think the concept of evil is just a mask that keeps us from having to examine why people do 'evil' things.

Has anyone ever run a gameworld in which the only available magic has only one effect? Specifically, I was pondering medieval Europe with the addition only of gate magic. Certain talented individuals who have been trained in the art of gate magic can set up teleportation gates to allow individuals or large groups to instantly jump hundreds or even thousands of miles. Other than that, there is absolutely no magic or other fantastic elements. How would this one aspect affect medieval Europe politically, militarily, culturally, and religiously? Any comments about either Europe or any other setting in which you've used a single-aspect magic system would be most appreciated.

Re: Complementary skills incentive Lord Liaden, I'm glad you were able to sort through my obtuse prose. I should have been more explicit about the -5 modifier only being applicable in non-general situations. With the graduated modifier on failing a comp. roll, I went with that becuase I don't like the abruptness of saying "You missed your roll by one; -5 penalty." The graduated modifier models some one who comes close to knowing all the relevant info, but not quite. You do raise an important point. If a PC has 2 comp skills and he fails the first roll by one and the second roll by three, what is the modifier? I think rather than adding the negative modifiers, I'd just go with the lowest. In the above example, the PC would receive a -3 to his primary skill. I'm not too worried that the graduated approach makes comp skills overly powerful, because it is only affecting a modifier that I'd already placed upon the primary skill. No failed comp. skill is ever going to raise the primary skill above its starting value. Thanks for your input. You've made me clarify my own thoughts, which is always a good thing.

Re: Complementary skills incentive Lord Liaden, I don't think what you and I are saying is all that far apart. When I proposed the -5 modifier, rather than attempting to punish players, I was modelling real life professions. For instance, medicine. A general practice doctor has a good deal of knowledge and skills relating to the treatment of common ailments and maladies. When dealing with those, he could use his primary Physician skill without a negative modifier. If he were to see a patient with some rare parasitic condition, though, he would receive a -5 to treat that patient. Otherwise, he'd have to refer the patient to a tropical disease specialist who would have SS:tropical diseases 11-. The comp. science skill would then negate the -5 modifier. Physician skill would still be the primary, because he's still practising medicine, he just needs training in a particular specialty of medicine. Most professions and occupations requiring advanced education have specializations within the larger practice. Think: law, science, business, etc. You are right to point out that this would limit the PCs' ability to be competent in a wide range of skills (you can't just be an all around know-it-all like the Professor on Gilligan's Island). For more realistic campaigns (which I prefer), I think this could provide greater nuance. Also, it does allow skills that have only a broad applicability to still have a chance at success. The GP doctor still has a chance of having come across that particular parasite at some point in his practice. Also, I was thinking that if the PC's comp skill failed, rather than receiving the full -5 modifier automatically, he would receive -1/point failed by, up to max -5. This way, even a failed roll by a specialist would usually be better than a generalist with no training in that area.

I really like the idea of using background skills as complementary to other skills as a way of creating skill specialization. Unfortunately, it is more cost effective to just buy up a primary skill than to purchase comp. skills. Short of changing the rules, I've been thinking of a way of incentivizing the purchase of background skills for comp. purposes. One idea I had was to put substantial negative modifiers on skill rolls if the primary skill is not backed-up with an appropriate comp skill. For instance, if a hacker were trying to break into a Cray supercomputer, he would need computer programming as the primary skill and KS: supercomputers as the comp. If he only had computer programming without the KS, he would receive a -5 to his roll. If he were to blow the comp roll, he would also receive the -5. Does this sound like a plausible strategy?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? On the species topic, it's true there is a good deal of bleed between close species. Darwin himself said that there would be no distinct point in time when one species evolves into another. The idea of species is an intellectual construct that zoologists placed upon nature in the 18th C. to make it more comprehensible. Unfortunately, it's become so widely accepted that many people now mistake the concept for reality. I think the biggest challenge to the concept of species is that the largest percentage of the Earth's biomass is comprised of asexual microbes. Microbes are classified as species too. But since they (mostly) reproduce by splitting in two, that puts them outside the definition of species.

Re: Doulocracy: how's it work? Uhhh... The Holy Grail (which I've watched till my eyes bled), while being perhaps the funniest film ever put to celluloid, was not a documentary. That's not actually English history. And even if it were, I still don't see how it relates to the question of whether the English were ruled by slaves. That guy was talking about a commune of free peasants, not a government ruled by slaves.

Re: Doulocracy: how's it work? Nuke, I've done a fair amount of research into English history and while they did have slaves at certain points, I'm unaware that the English were ever governed by slaves. If you could quote time periods and names, I'd love to learn something new.

Re: Doulocracy: how's it work? I'm currently running a campaign set in 13th Century Egypt, which was governed by the Mamluks. When the Arabs spread out from Arabia and conquered all of North Africa, they spread their own forces very thin. As a way of supplementing their armies, they used slaves, mainly from what is now Turkey. In the year 1250 AD, these slave soldiers (ghulams) were so powerful that they were able to exploit a weakness in Arab succession and put themselves into the Sultanate. Interestingly, they chose to maintain the process of manning their army with Turkish slaves. Technically, every Turk in the army was a slave, including the Sultan himself. Although the Sultan could be said to be his own owner (wha???). Strange as this form of government may seem to us, it managed to maintain itself for 500 years, when the Mamluks were finally conquered by the Ottoman Empire. As Steve Long also mentioned, slavery was often seen as a form of social advancement. Being a ghulam gave one the opportunity of working one's way up in the military, which ruled Egypt & Syria. One might even become Sultan one day. This was opposed to living a life of almost guaranteed destitution and violence as a free man back in Asia Minor. Many turks weighed the pros and cons and decided to sell themselves into Mamluk slavery. Before we start praising slavery, though, we should keep in mind that this was a bizarre exception. The Mamluks and Arabs also took black Africans as slaves, and they lived horrid and very short lives. Most slaves would rather not be slaves.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Phil, I'd actually been doing a lot of thinking about running a campaign along the lines of what you'd described as an analogy of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In that year, the Hutu govt. organized a propaganda campaign against the minority Tutsi population, trying to convince Hutu Rwandans that the Tutsis were planning to massacre them. While this was completely invented, there was a background to it. The Tutsis were a majority in neighboring Burundi and had orchestrated past massacres of Hutus in Burundi. The Hutu Rwanda govt. whipped the population into a frenzy of fear and then forced them to massacre 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the entire country. I'd thought, what if orcs were still around after the fall of the dark lord. They are no longer magically compelled to do evil, but they have not been allowed to integrate into society because of their past reputation. The PCs could live in a city with a minority orc population who are forced to live in slums and do all the shit work for the non-orc population. Then the govt. of the city decides to "do something about this orc problem once and for all." The PCs have to take sides. Having thought about this, I think it would be important to have the PCs and the non-orc populace ambivalently motivated. The orcs, like any group of people allotted the worst place in society, would be violent and given to crime. Orcs would still be ugly and socially unpleasant by human standards. And most every non-orc member of the society would have lost grandrelatives to the orcs under the Dark Lord. They would still rehearse the tales of the evil orcs. The PCs, perhaps playing town constables, would be put in a position of having to deal with the orcs and they would come to see that the orcs are indeed individuals. Some are more intelligent and personable than others. The orcs would attempt to organize themselves and express their legitmate grievances to the city govt. This is all still in the planning stages, but I think this idea has a great deal of potential as a way of exploring contemporary social issues through the lens of fantasy. I also think it could be done in a way that the GM would not be moralizing to his players.

Re: Is anyone gaming the Iraq war? JmOZ, Details?