But Why
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@De-Villefort said in Concordia Thread:
Stop and really think about that.
Choosing where to stop thinking about fiction is what makes it interesting to people. Everyone loves Lord of the Rings but no one ever asks themselves what thirteen men who haven’t bathed in months and who at best have leaves for toilet paper must smell like; Sauron shouldn’t need spies at all, but just be tracking them by monitoring how close their odor is to Mordor. Same general principle applies here: people just pretend they live in a world where everything is hygienic. It’s fine. That’s what pretend is for.
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@De-Villefort said in Concordia Thread:
@Roz said in Concordia Thread:
Also see: Game of Thrones’ popularity.
Stop and really think about that. Think about being one of the people who live in the piss stained streets of Kings landing where you are born into a life which you can only do the trade your father did. A life were women are second class citizens unless they are nobles. A life were you can die at any moment for no reason. A toothache could kill you. Stubbing your toe could kill you. Getting an infected cut could kill you. Every day you live is a miracle because the whole world wants to kill you and you don’t even know why half the people you have ever met in your life died. They just stopped one day and no one knows why.
Plus one out of three women survive child birth on average so if you are married you have to live with the fact you might kill your wife every time you have sex.
Why would anyone want to go back to that? That’s not a fantasy, it’s a nightmare.
Because you don’t have to RP all of those bits? You don’t HAVE to RP about stubbing your toe killing you? You don’t have to RP about dying in childbirth?
Specifically to Concordia, all the PCs are nobles, so they’re already skipping over the first point you made.
By this logic, no one should even play modern day stuff, we should ONLY play in utopian sci-fi where every single world problem is fixed.
@Pavel said in Concordia Thread:
@De-Villefort said in Concordia Thread:
Why would anyone want to go back to that? That’s not a fantasy, it’s a nightmare.
It’s fiction, you idiot. It’s playing pretend, not yearning to go back in time.
We’re not in Rough and Rowdy, just as a heads up.
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Since this is more generalized ‘why do people play this’, maybe admins could spin this off into a different thread so it’s not clogging up this game’s discussion?
But also put it in the rough & rowdy so we can get nasty lol
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@De-Villefort this is weird. i’m not yucking your yum about viewing different realities through your current experience/mindset as a thought exercise but honestly you’re getting some of that wrong anyway, if you think that noblewomen weren’t also second class citizens.
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@De-Villefort said in Concordia Thread:
Why would anyone want to go back to that? That’s not a fantasy, it’s a nightmare.
Yeah! I mean, that’s like people wanting to play in a cyberpunk dystopia where the Earth is dead and everything is run by corrupt government, megacorps, and crime syndicates!
Who would EVER want to do that?
… Seriously, dude? Seriously. You can’t think of why anyone would want to play in anything other than a bright and happy utopia with no conflict or challenge?
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Is this the point where I get to whip out my notes on historical hygiene practices, from the time that abbots were complaining of Norse invaders seducing local women what with their heathen “baths” and “combing their beards” to the importance of frequent undergarment changes for proper Tudor lords and ladies?
Because I can and I will, and that is not an offer, that is a threat.
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Forked, but I left it in game gab. If you want to start a new thread on this in R&R you can.
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T Tez referenced this topic on
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@Tez Thanks for the fork.
@De-Villefort why would anyone play anywhere with that logic? Why would I want to play in the current modern day America for example where people can’t afford to buy groceries and the healthcare system sucks and the rent is too damn high and some people still don’t have clean water and let’s not even talk about the risks of having sex???
Like, come on dude. Is game, have fun.
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It probably wouldn’t bother me if people really feel the need to have to play out having to leave an important long-winded dinner or meeting with everyone chugging alcohol during it by having to exit the scene by running to the bathroom. Or like, I don’t know. Farting during a silent moment during the king’s speech. I regularly pose my medival type pcs coming in dusty/grimy especially after travel or other activities. Or like, getting annoyed because someone is talking to them while they know their bath that’s been made ready for them up in their room is probably getting cold. But if other people don’t like that or whatever who cares? I can keep my thoughts in my head and just enjoy the what ifs when I know others would be offended or not enjoy it, it’s not that hard.
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I SUSPECT they might NOT BE ASKING in GOOD FAITH.
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@Tez true. Hey @De-Villefort maybe view it as kind of like a “danger zone” like the one you so admired on Dark Metal, you’ve just got to know that you’ll be subject to people to RPing out fantasy through a modernist lens. If you go to the zone, you’re getting what you deserve.
Edited to add: and no, having played on DM too back in the day, it didn’t solve gross behavior problems that were OOC.
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@De-Villefort Why not?
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I wonder if it’s also a problem on a cyberpunk place that individuals who don’t have enhanced bladder or bowel modifications never crap themselves when getting into an unexpected firefight. Or if there is fretting over deckers not putting on adult diapers before they jack in. Did this person engage in the Shadowrun Seattle bboard fight about how all orcs and trolls should talk with lisps because they tested it by sticking carrot sticks in their mouths and couldn’t speak properly. (yes, that was a thing. in retrospect i am very glad that owod/nwod/cod solves this problem for vampires because they have retractable teeth so there aren’t people tut tutting at others for not having their vampire drool like a newfoundland all the time because damn it, they tried wearing the plastic vampire insertable teeth that you get for halloween and they couldn’t speak properly OR not get a mouthful of drool after awhile.
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Did this person engage in the Shadowrun Seattle bboard fight about how all orgs and trolls should talk with lisps because they tested it by sticking carrot sticks in their mouths and couldn’t speak properly.
I was just getting ready to ask you if this was a real thing and then you said YES IT WAS.
Amazing. brb getting some carrot sticks.
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i always wondered how they got the carrot sticks to stay in to try to talk. perhaps should be thankful no one choked. but i wasn’t a mom back then so i didn’t really care about those things.
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
What is the appeal of playing humans in a world without magic, technology, or even indoor plumbing?
…
That’s not a fantasy, it’s a nightmare.I’m going to assume this is in good faith despite some of the other replies, because I think it’s an interesting question.
What defines “fantasy”? For some, it has to involve some kind of fantastical element, be it magic or tech or aliens or whatever.
But for others, it’s simply “what if”. The world could be a nightmare. Post-apoc / dystopian / cyberpunk / war settings certainly fit that bill. That’s what makes the stories interesting.
Even if the world at large is a nightmare for most, the game/story might focus on the exceptional ones. You see that a lot in Wild West settings, for instance. Your protagonists are the gamblers or the idle wealthy or the roguish outlaws and gunslingers. They’re not the farmers toiling in the fields all day or the pioneers dying of dysentery.
At least not usually. But even then, sometimes people DO like the “slice of life” RP. To each their own.
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@mietze said in But Why:
True, even noble women were treated as second class nobles but they still had better standing than your average peasant man in society. That was my point, to show how horribly stratified and stagnant society was back then.I guess I’ve just read too much history to think going back to anything even remotely related to those times would be appealing. It was all so barbaric. Even in Lord of the Rings things were really messed up if you stop and think about it even for a moment.
To me, maybe because I was raised on sci-fi rather than fantasy, making a fantasy version of the dark ages is like making a fantasy version of the American south during slavery. You could do it, it is possible, you could ignore all the bad stuff and make a game out of the high society aspects of it, but… why?!
To each there own, I guess.
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i totally don’t think it’s wrong to think about this kind of stuff, i do all the time in the sense of “wouldn’t it be funny if…” just to liven things up a little. but i dunno, maybe i just have a great imagination because i can also think of why maybe other people wouldn’t especially enjoy it. which is why i try to control myself.
i would never advocate for a mandatory +shart check at the beginning of every ambush. everyone’s got their own things that they feel are demeaning and i don’t see the benefit in subjecting anyone to that sort of thing, especially when it’s hard to know who can read the room or not. i’d much rather just keep my juvenile thoughts to myself than make someone uncomfortable in the middle of a scene.
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We are used to viewing history through a singular lens, as though everything was always worse all the time forever about everything in the past, but that isn’t at all true. ( @Aria I think this is your cue.)
There are places and times where women enjoyed more rights than they do now in many cultures, including our own. With many original themes, they make changes to remove many of the abrasions and inequities of history around race, gender and sexuality because so many players deal with that enough in their day to day. There are still plenty of things to play about, plenty of reasons for characters to engage in conflict, without those pieces. It would be a mistake to assume that all historical settings engage in those aspects, just as it is a mistake to assume that all of history if a monolith of ‘bad’ and ‘worse’.
