There is a lot of critic against the whole Good/Evil Lawful/Chaotic alignment and most RPG either don’t have any morality system, or different compass… A simplified D&D style alignment is great for board-gaming where you want to quickly says who is good and who is evil, but isn’t representative of real-life and doesn’t work for RPG, at least at the moment you want to write conflict a bit more complicated than Good versus Evil.
More important than culture, there is the point of view of various factions. Orcs are seen as dangerous barbarians who attack humans, but may-be orcs see human flesh very nourishing, need to give human flesh to kids if we want them to grow big and strong. Elves are at war against human, but may-be human are cutting the trees that elves need to live in. You example regarding property is pretty interesting. We’re on lemmy so let’s get political, in real-life many left-winger would agree that property is robberry Who is evil ? the person deciding that a piece of land and the cattle growing there is their’s or the person who cross that land and hunt that cattle to feed their family ? Isn’t the farmer asking gold to people wanting to feed their family the bad guy of the story ? Look at real-life, there is no such thing as good or evil only people with different opinion and objectives.
So when writing conflict, you need to take into account everybody opinion. Everybody needs the water from the river to water their crop, but the upstream clan decide to build a few canal to water more crop leading to drought in the downstream territories. There is plenty of real-life conflict based on that and it’s a very good pitch to start a war with things more complicated than evil orcs like to eat humans
The bigger problem occurs when players cast stuff like detect good and evil. If they cast it on the orcs, what do you tell them as a DM? Do you tell them what you think is their morality? Do you make the spell give an ambiguous result? Do you make the spell fail? All these options have benefits and drawbacks, but none of them are perfect.
My long-term players have learned to not rely on that dumb spell anymore … because the way I handle this as a DM is purely about the intent of the characters in question, independendly from their actual actions. Examples:
A witch-hunter who tortures and then burns women at the stake. A person who factually and personally brings suffering, pain, fear and death into the world as per his actions. What’s his intent? Well, if he just enjoys torturing women and takes the job of a witch-hunter as a convenient excuse then he’s certainly evil. But someone who is brainwashed into thinking that burning “witches” will save their souls from eternal hellfire and suffering, actually has “good” intentions and doesn’t think what he is doing could be evil. Sure it sucks that there is blood and fire involved, but what is a broken bone or two and a little bit of temporary pain compared to an eternity in hell? The spell would tell the caster that this is a “good” dude even tho he factually does the same as the other guy.
An adventurer going to kill a dragon that has plagued nearby villages for ages … surely that’ll be a hero, right? Well, if he does this FOR the villagers, to save them and prevent future suffering, no matter whether it is dangerous for hmself, then he has good intentions. If someone does this purely out of spite because he happens to hate all things scaly, or purely out of greed because he wants the bounty / plunder the dragon’s hoard and he just doesn’t care for the villagers or his co-adventurers, then the spell would “detect” him as being evil, even tho both adventurers factually do the same in the end.
Of course this isn’t optimal either (the optimal solution would be to just not have that dumb spell in the first place IMHO) but it can make for nice little story twists if the obviously evil villain of the story has an ulterior motive and gets detected as “good” ;) The players might get an explanation AFTER the game, but while they’re still in the middle of an adventure, they have to figure it out on their own.
This is actually my more fundamental critic against D&D. As a GM (and a player) I like more investigation-type scenario than dungeon crawling or big battle. Spell like detect good/evil or detect lie are basically killing any investigation scenario very quickly. like you have kids disappearing in the village, the king hires adventurer to investigate. The adventurer run one spell, Oh the Queen is Evil and the rest is a fight against the queen. While in an RPG without that type of spell (or even a whole alignment system) you’ll have a whole scenario on finding out that the Queen kidnaps kids and bathe in their blood to stay young and pretty, now you spent most of the evening about finding what happen, get enough proof to confront the queen, and finally fight her (or ask the guards to so because it’s already 23:00 and you work tomorrow). So an alignment mechanic and a way to detect it can have a huge influence on how the game goes.
I agree that the traditional D&D alignment is way too simple for role play.
But I still have a soft spot for Lawful/Chaotic. I think many people display a tendency to conform to the standards of their society and are comforted by norms and tradition, whereas others prefer independence and break from order. This tendency seems more universal than good or evil, since it depends slighly less on cultural norms.
I definitely agree with your focus on factions. In fact, I think many differences between fantasy races derive from the ecogical niche they inhabit, which is emphasized more using factions.
The socialist definition of “private property” is really narrow, and is completely separate from personal ownership, and both your examples are referring to the second.
The thing is, this is still tying culture to race. If there is no racial essentialism to the traits you describe, then there’s no reason to say that some goblin cultures / sub-cultures do understand the concept of property - and disagree with what they understand to be stealing. Etc.
Sure, it adds nuance - and if that’s all you care about then you’re all set. But it doesn’t address The Problem, which is painting “races” as monoliths with essential characteristics. Just because you can explain why All X Are Evil, doesn’t solve for it being boring/lame/tending-toward-offensive that they all are. Seems like we dealt with this in other contexts, why not include it in lore?
Think of it more as culture tied to community. A village of goblins is going to behave one way, but a goblin raised in a human city will behave another way. Yes there are characteristics that are generally associated with a species (I shy away from “races” generally, too loaded of a word). But that’s just because those species generally form their own communities. Are all goblins like this? Of course not. Are all goblins that the small town cleric has met like this? Yes.
It’s not really that different from a native Californian thinking a native New Yorker is rude and interrupts all of the time, and the New Yorker thinking the Californian doesn’t engage in conversation, simply because their conversational speeds differ enough that it creates underlying tension. In that example, did I paint all New Yorkers as rapid speakers? Yes. Is it generally true of native New Yorkers? You tell me.
There will always be generalizations, and there will always be nuance that disproves the generalization. When telling a story the secret is knowing WHY the generalization exists and how the character relates to it.
I think in most cases when you zoom in on one of these admittedly poorly named ‘races’ in D&D, you see the breaking of molds almost more often than not. What they allow is an extreme contrast in behavior being packed into a smaller terrain that isn’t simply viewed as another community by the surrounding people. A bunch of kobolds living in the mountain near your village isn’t seen as having bad neighbors, it’s seen as an infestation. The kobolds, likewise, don’t view the human village the same way they view another kobold settlement. That, in and of itself, highlights some of the problems with an expanding civilization, but it also provides smaller contexts that can clash heavily against one another within the ‘established’ territories of various countries.
You do have many examples in D&D of cities populated by a huge diversity of different types of creatures. Looking at Forgotten Realms, most cities aren’t limited to just humans or just dwarves or elves. Those exist, but they’re not what’s most common. You’ve even got places like Westgate where humans, elves, halfings, and what not are living with orcs, drow, ogres, bugbears, and all sorts of other folks that would typically be attacked on sight in otherwise similar cities.
There’s a lot of nuance and room for nuance in D&D. Even in the case of outer-planar beings like fiends, who are petitioners (dead people living an afterlife) from a plane associated with a particular alignment (evil in this case), there are cases where characters have a major turn-around. I’d say that most of the most popular characters are actually subverting some trope rather than living up to it.
The thing is, this is still tying culture to race.
I had a go at breaking past this barrier, and found it extremely difficult. I started with the idea that geography informs culture, and made a split between elves in the frozen South and elves tropical jungles. This left me with half the normal space to write about elven cultures.
So I figured I could do 2-3 cultures per race, and end up with (5 x 2.5) ~13 descriptions of fantasy cultures. But who wants that? I can’t use that much in my own game. Writing because you have to write something makes for bad writing.
Another route is to limit cultures even more. Maybe dwarves and gnomes basically live the same way, as do gnolls and humans. But then it seems odd that gnolls having the mouth of a canine changes nothing about them. If nothing else, their language has to be deeply different, given the lack of lips.
So in the end, I’ve decided to just fill in a very small part of the world, and leave an underlying assumption that elves, humans, and gnolls might do things differently elsewhere.
Thanks for this. I think what you ended up with was the absolute right move. Trying to solidify everything from the top-down, beforehand, seems an impossible task to do well, or with enough foresight to make work across your eventual varied needs. In real world terms it seems sort of Prescriptive, in a vaguely Victorian scientist way; cataloging races instead of meeting people.
I’d imagine working bottom-up, Descriptively, means you can put all of your nuance into a single group or region, per the story you want to tell. You find out who and why, because you meet them on the ground in their actual situation - instead of thinking you can manufacture everything ahead of time in a vacuum. And then the next time your story crosses paths with another such group, you again get to reflect on the individual circumstances that make them even slightly different, and add a new micro culture to your growing canon.
Like, I can still add a totally different gnoll tribe later on in a module, or just add one ‘from the icy South’, and let the GM imply a world without yammering about it.
I think racial descriptions in fantasy games are more like tendencies. Tendencies that often have to do with the environment that each typically grows up in. I thought this was the traditional view, but maybe not.
While there are of course deviations from the norm, it is hard to lay this out in a digestible way. Simplification help readability. NPCs or locations that break these norms seem like a more pleasant way of de-essentializing.
I have a fun headcanon about dwarves: Their bones contain a toxic substance they call Stone-Marrow. Dwarves take pride in a potent Stone-Marrow, as any achievements a dwarf has are even more impressive if they were under the effects of a powerful poison at the time. This also ties into dwarven drinking culture, as alcohol resistance is a sign of strong marrow.
Stone-Marrow is even tied into dwarven funerals. When a dwarf dies, their bones are used to forge metal tools that are handed down to their descendants. The Stone-Marrow causes the metal to grow strong in ways other races can’t recreate, no matter how hard they try. Because the objects made from a dwarf are decided by the dwarf, they are said to carry the will of that dwarf with them. All of this combines to mean that when a dwarf fights with a steel axe left to them by their grandfather, they are literally fighting with their grandfather in their hand.
The only restriction on metals used for dwarven funerals is gold, as only royalty can be turned into dwarven gold. The throne and crown is made of dwarven gold, giving the current king a feeling for the support given by the kings of the past, and the weight of responsibility their position comes with.
So if you ever need an insult to give to an elf, call them “marrow-less!” But never insult a dwarf’s weapons in front of them.
Another thing: I find it likely that just like current ownership and terms-of-service with electronic devices, bots on the market likely won't allow you to do certain things. Particularly certain "activities" that aren't even frowned upon by normal people might cause it to lock you out and require "maintenance".
Actual normal things that you might ask a human to do might not be allowed or might even artificially paywalled (even incapable of learning it if you could "teach" AI) such as knitting (anything that could make money) or any other type of service (imagine choking to death on the floor in your kitchen and hearing "I am sorry, as a sex bot I am not authorized to provide medical assistance. Please upgrade to Gold service plan to allow that feature, or Bronze service so I can contact outside services such as in the event of...").
Being a shut-in, I'd rather have my brain put in a (not that kind of) robot body. Unfortunately I know that's more complicated than an AI bot (robots are somewhat a thing now even with locomotion, just not there with power/cost) and unattainable for me unless my brain gets a free spot in cryo as a beta tester (which isn't currently legal before you've died naturally). Then again, I know that's an unhealthy thought (like "sleep would be a lot easier if I could just initiate it at any time" or "if I got my body replaced, most of my medical issues would be gone").
@salorarainriver people actually advertising that they're willing to dump their partner once something better comes along. The robot part is just rationalizing.
Pac-Man brings back memories of my childhood. I too love goofy socks. My mother-in-law buys them for me on sale all the time, so I have a ton of ridiculous pairs.
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