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But Why
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
In fantasy stories the Knight born into privilege and the Princess born into power are seen as the good guys while they ride their majestic white steed past the peasants dying in the streets.
People are complex, and no one is a good guy or a bad guy. They’re just good or bad for specific people in specific contexts. If you insist your fiction be only about good guys, then you are going to be spending a lot of time watching archived Saturday morning cartoons from the eighties.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
I would agree on Wash actually being a ‘good guy’. Maybe not purely since he did go along with what the others decided but I would classify him as a legit good guy. Inara too, I think would fall into a good protagonist. Simon might be the other I would almost say is a good guy. Although, he does go pretty damned far in the stuff he is willing to do. Outside Wash and Inara and maybe Simon, I don’t think I would really call any of the crew of Serenity (or any other parts of Firefly) full of good protagonists.
This is Kaylee erasure, and it will not stand.
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@Jennkryst Haha. She has a good personality and disposition but I’m not sure she would be a ‘good guy’ type. I mean, the introduction of her was of her banging in an engine room because it gets her going. She also doesn’t object to what they do, most of the time.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
She also doesn’t object to what they do, most of the time.
Wash and Inara don’t raise a fuss about their heists either. Certainly all the characters have some degree of moral grayness, being on an outlaw ship and all, but they all have good in them.
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I think the first thing maybe is to take this out of a format of a lecture. I don’t mean a lecture in a the pejorative sense, but like…a lecture, given by the authority/professor/headwiz to the audience.
Yep. Unless by authority you mean the person who’s backed by force, in this case the banhammer and the game’s off-switch, the game-runner probably isn’t one. They’re not necessarily the person who knows the most about the game’s setting or its rules and mechanics. They’re not necessarily the one who has the best storytelling skills, or the best people-wrangling skills, or the keenest sense of fun. They’re probably just the person who happened to want to run a game and had the wherewithall to do it. The GM’s the GM 'cause they’re the GM. I find things are a lot more fun if everybody just admits this and we ditch the expressing/defending/challenging authoritah trip.
In the practical, along with some other advice already given about that newsfile, “My call on this, and what we’ll be using for the game, is…” helps.
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As you’re someone who shouted out James SA Corey I wanted to note that the setting of the Expanse (which by the way I FUCKING LOVE) is pretty much a raging dystopia.
Earth has been environmentally wrecked and suffers from crippling inequality even with the existence of a paltry UBI (this is even before certain things in the show/books that happen to Earth later).
Mars is…uh, like some mad mashup of Soviets and Texas. Not the best standard of living there but I admire the Martians for their sense of communalism.
The Belters? Hahahahaha, hello exploitation.
This seting provides a shitty experience for a large number of people.
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@SpaceKhomeini and more important to some of the objections, a lot of them are exceptionally shitty to people in their own groups too!
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So even if @De-Villefort is right and all genres except for sci-fi and cyberpunk are filled with nothing but bad terrible people…
So what?
Sometimes it’s fun to play the villain. Do you think that any actor that gets the role of a villainous type absolutely hates their job while doing so? Do you think Alan Rickman or Christopher Lee cried in anguish every morning they woke up before going off to play their various famous villainous roles?
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Can this thread please be moved out of Game Gab so we can fully engage with the bad faithness of this original argument?
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@spiriferida
The appeal to me is playing someone who is making the world a better place, not someone who wallows in extreme privilege and pretends doing something nice every few months makes it okay that their daily luxury is built on crushing the majority.You can play a bad guy if you want but I won’t play on a game where the bad guys are white washed as being the heroes. Nobles and Royals are bad people. Even the best of them. You can not participate in noble society and still be a good person any more than you can be a billionaire and be a good person today.
The very word Noble is propaganda to make horrible people seem like they are somehow better than everyone else so they deserve to enjoy every luxury no matter how many people have to suffer for it.
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Sometimes it’s fun to play the villain.
Yes! It is! I never said people shouldn’t be allowed to play Nobles and Royals. I just don’t understand why you would want to be the bad guy.
Much of this thread is people being baffled that I can’t understand that part of playing the game requires you ignoring all the inconvenient truths about the peasants living in abject poverty and the mass murders of innocent people that are necessary for the institution of Nobility to continue.
I do understand it. I’m just baffled that anyone is able to enjoy a game where that is a requirement.
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Now tell me how many upright noble truly good redeeming people were on Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly.
I disliked Battlestar for the very reason that everyone was a ***hole.
Farscape’s characters started off pretty bad, but it was a prison ship. Part of the appeal of that story was them becoming better people as the story progressed but they were not part of an elite class who held power over other people. They were criminals on the run.
The same is true for Firefly. Two people on that ship who were born into privilege was the Doctor and his sister and they gave that privilege up to escape the people hunting them.
But if they had not been on the run, if she had never gone to that school, they would still be living their best lives in the core not caring a fig about the people suffering around them or how unjust society is.
Other than Wash, the other truly good person on the ship was Shepard Book.
We never learned the details of it, but he was apparently a high ranking military official who gave up his power when he saw first hand the evil they did. He did what he could to make things better then when he saw that the system was unredeemable he walked away.
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Firefly is principally based off of the themes and aesthetics of the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy, as a heads up
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
You can play a bad guy if you want but I won’t play on a game where the bad guys are white washed as being the heroes.
I get you. I’ve been genuinely angry with GMs for letting ‘heroes’ get away with being callous or murderous, especially in games where the heroes really are supposed to be proper heroes.
I’d argue that the nobles are all bad people thing doesn’t quite stand, since they didn’t choose their parents. Very few people of any type are good people in ‘Game of Thrones’ but poor and working nobles are in the IP and there’s plenty of room for a character who reacts to the accident of their birth in a decent way, or makes an effort at it in spite of the systemic pressure.
That is a different game than a Masq of The Red Death But The Red Death Never Shows Up kind of Lords and Ladies game that I suppose might exist. (It’s probably a Regency Romance, though, does that count as L&L?) I don’t think such a game would include RPing grinding the faces of the poor with impunity, though. Just glossing over inequity and where the money comes from. If that’s just not part of the story and people don’t want it to be, why the heck not? Not your cup of tea, sure, and I feel the same, but no worse than how Pern games typically remove how Pern is a crapsack world where most people do a lot of hard labour and way too many of them have absusive parents.
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
Sometimes it’s fun to play the villain.
Yes! It is! I never said people shouldn’t be allowed to play Nobles and Royals. I just don’t understand why you would want to be the bad guy.
Much of this thread is people being baffled that I can’t understand that part of playing the game requires you ignoring all the inconvenient truths about the peasants living in abject poverty and the mass murders of innocent people that are necessary for the institution of Nobility to continue.
I do understand it. I’m just baffled that anyone is able to enjoy a game where that is a requirement.
No one is ignoring it. But you’re implying that we should all feel guilty for partaking in a literal hobby that is completely separated from actual history.
If you’re gonna virtue signal about what types of characters are the ‘right’ ones to play, at least be honest about it.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament that’s no fun, when you can totally troll on others playing things you don’t like while totally not responding to the same thing in the things that you do like.
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Like I
personally would never play a member of an aristocratic caste as a hero for basically the same reasons @De-Villefort cites. And I also find the habit of L&L games being full of charitable, heroic aristocrats doing good to be more than mildly nausea inducing for all the whitewashing. But like, I’m not gonna yuck anyone’s yum about it that’s wild. I would wager that Power Fantasy in one form or another eclipses all other motivations for roleplaying, indicting people’s motivations based solely upon their engaging with a “problematic” genre (show me an unproblematic genre that is based on actual humans) is myopic and just comes off as cluelessly self-righteous.edit: idk where the line is here can the whole site just be R&R please
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@shit-piss-love I just think it’s weird that in 2023 we’re having some kind of odd debate about what kind of characters is ‘okay’ to portray yourselves as and to do otherwise implies there’s something wrong with you as a player. As if you’re not altruistic enough as a human because you happen to enjoy medieval fantasy tropes, even if, yes, the historical aspect can, and probably should, be side-stepped. Since it seems to me that most rational people would agree from a historical standpoint, yeah, that’s pretty bad.
But really, point to any point in the length of human history and show me something that wasn’t horrible that was caused by humans. And I’m sure as hell not going to go deeper than surface level in noting just how bad humanity is from a larger scope. That’s not the point. The argument to me feels more like moralistic grandstanding than anything else.
It’s…it’s really not that deep.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament said in But Why:
The argument to me feels more like moralistic grandstanding than anything else.
Yeah that’s where I land. Like I have my personal prefs of what I want to play and in what genres. Others have theirs. “You are bad for wanting to play this type of character and/or in this genre” is just bargain basement self-aggrandizement.
I’m actually gonna go a step further here in disagreeing with the OP. I also think it is Absolutely Fine and Good to play an evil, serf-oppressing, conflict-profiting, violence-dispensing, privileged aristocrat who is actively engaging in Bad Things. The assertion that it is only morally defensible to play Good Folk Doing Good Stuff is puerile and trite. Engaging with such a role is no different from reading through Antony Beevor’s Fall of Berlin.
This hobby allows for a lot more than simply playing heroic characters. Playing an unheroic character can be a vehicle for exploration of the human experience, and can be equally valid whether or not that character goes through a redemption arc. Our world is complex and built on circumstance and context; it can be interesting to explore ideas like “why good people do bad things” or “what drives someone to rationalize acts of evil” or even simply “what is the internal experience of someone who is put in a position with few options that don’t hurt someone”.
Even more simply, narratives are built on Conflict. Villains (and I am using broad terminology to describe what is a very wide spectrum even before contextualization) serve narratives by prompting Conflict. Heroes with no Conflict just sit around and have tea parties (obligatory: playing TeaMU is a morally defensible activity even if i personally find it boring af).
