european fantasy cultures and how to fit them

[...You Lost Me]

It seems that the topics have changed directions a bit. Cham, I'm currently seeing your concerns as:

1. Players won't read fluff.

The point of "riffing off" of a stereotypical culture is not that players read a bunch of paragraphs of fluff for that culture. It's not even that they read 2 sentences of every culture. Given that this is a KSF we're talking about, players should not be under the burden of reading all (or even most) cultures in your setting. If a PCs only interaction with a KSF is, "Where do the vampires come from?", then they are a normal player. That's why you use stereotypical cultures in response. You point them to not-Translyvania, not-The-Dark-Brotherhood-From-Elder-Scrolls, and not-Twilight. Then they write "Culward Edlen" on their character sheet and spend the session talking about they are depressed yet exquisitely beautiful. No one needs to read or write a single sentence.

2. You have lots of PCs who ignore settings and pick backstories based on class.

A KSF should definitely have a million factions for every single class to call their home. If there was only 1 faction for fighters, I don't fault any PCs in your campaign for picking the 1 fighter faction and getting confused when you tell them that their friends must be french or whatever.

Alternatively, if you point out that there are a lot of Fighters Guilds for british people, and your PC ignores you because they want to be part of Fighters Guild 9 in not-France... is that really the fault of the KSF setting? They were going to ignore a wonderfully crafted, original campaign setting too. I don't think a KSF should be burdened with solving this kind of player's behavior.

[Libertad]

Back in the day I wrote up two blog posts pertaining to borrowing elements from the Mediterranean region and Byzantine Empire for fantasy gaming. I hope that people here will find them useful reads:

https://quasarknight.blogspot.com/2016/ ... ce-to.html

https://quasarknight.blogspot.com/2015/ ... ntine.html

[Chamomile]

If a PCs only interaction with a KSF is, "Where do the vampires come from?", then they are a normal player.

Firstly, no, they aren't. A normal player doesn't even ask the question, and they definitely won't stick their French Fighter guy in not-France home of the Wizards over not-Britain home of the Fighters, even if not-France does in fact have Fighters. That's the entire point, and I'm not sure how you missed it: They will put their French-accented Fighter in Not-Britain because that is where Fighters come from, and more often than not they will not even notice that they're using the wrong accent. If they do notice, there will be a convoluted backstory to explain the discrepancy which will never come up again. All the effort you put into theming not-France as not-France is 100% wasted unless you actually visit not-France during the story, because players will not notice or care what the culture of the place is when crafting their backstory.

Players write their backstory completely independently of whatever original setting is presented to them and do not ask how that backstory can be slotted into the setting, which is why having a setting capable of absorbing an arbitrary number of new setting elements is beneficial. Trying to write a list of "prompts" whose job is to anticipate rather than actually, y'know, prompt player backstories is a doomed endeavor, because you will never cover everything. What you want is to have blank space as close as possible to the action so that it is easy to justify someone having wandered across the border and into the starting town no matter what their apparent culture of origin.

But secondly, even if you can anticipate every player backstory, you are inevitably going to do so by having a map stuffed ludicrously full of tons and tons of background elements none of which will ever come up, and whose only purpose is to make every backstory element the players actually interact with as part of the main plot seem small and insignificant by comparison.

You're buying into Frank's strawman of my position that there is some kind of mastercrafted artiste style of setting building that will make players care, but if you look for a quote from me where I advocate that, you won't find one. My actual position is that players won't interact with your setting at all when making characters, so your focus when worldbuilding should be exclusively on the campaign's actual story. Don't bog things down with places intended to serve as potential origin kingdoms for the players, because the players don't care. The only thing that matters when worldbuilding a campaign setting is the events of the campaign itself. You need not-Vikings who shapeshift into bears if and only if you plan to have not-Vikings who shapeshift into bears be relevant to whatever situation the players are interacting with. As a GM, you are very likely the only one who will interact with the setting elements you load into the campaign world, so don't even bother building anything in if it doesn't have a purpose for you. This idea that players will use your setting as prompts for their own backstory is a fantasy.

[OgreBattle]

Back in the day I wrote up two blog posts pertaining to borrowing elements from the Mediterranean region and Byzantine Empire for fantasy gaming. I hope that people here will find them useful reads:

https://quasarknight.blogspot.com/2016/ ... ce-to.html

https://quasarknight.blogspot.com/2015/ ... ntine.html

Thanks. A lot of space stories use space as a metaphor for oceanic sailing adventures, but I read the space stories first so I see ocean sailing, storms, sea monsters, hidden islands and so on as the "lower tech version of sailing the stars, sailing the... water"

[tussock]

My actual position is that players won't interact with your setting at all when making characters, so your focus when worldbuilding should be exclusively on the campaign's actual story.

My experience is if you just do a game arc without a proper setting for it, players totally keep fucking asking where everyone is from, where things happened, where they can go to get a thing or meet someone, where an antagonist might have gone to, ....

Like, even if players don't do any backstory, they totally end up intertwined with the world over the course of a few adventures, and hand-waving that all the time or retrofitting something later just doesn't work as well as building your campaign ideas into a world in the first place.

Hell, I'm fine with players adding or modify backstory whenever (give or take for being a pain in the ass), some players are much happier deciding where they're from and why they adventure after they see a few things in action.

[...You Lost Me]

Firstly, no, they aren't. A normal player doesn't even ask the question, and they definitely won't stick their French Fighter guy in not-France home of the Wizards over not-Britain home of the Fighters, even if not-France does in fact have Fighters. That's the entire point, and I'm not sure how you missed it: They will put their French-accented Fighter in Not-Britain because that is where Fighters come from, and more often than not they will not even notice that they're using the wrong accent. If they do notice, there will be a convoluted backstory to explain the discrepancy which will never come up again. All the effort you put into theming not-France as not-France is 100% wasted unless you actually visit not-France during the story, because players will not notice or care what the culture of the place is when crafting their backstory.

See, you did the thing I just mentioned. You had fighters come from not-Britain instead of just having fighters come from everywhere. You did something that was not part of a KSF game and then complained about how that was a failing of KSF games.

Players do care about backstory. The ones you mentioned explicitly went out of their way to ground their class in backstory. They did the thing we wanted! They integrated themselves with the world of the game by using the existing prompts, and it only failed because they ran into a part of the game that wasn't KSF.

If there was only 1 faction for fighters, I don't fault any PCs in your campaign for picking the 1 fighter faction and getting confused when you tell them that their friends must be french or whatever.

For some reason you have your settings' fighters coming from 1 country, locking fighter backstory to british backstory. Localizing a widely-available option for no reason is the opposite of what you want a KSF game to do. To quote someone who thinks they are very clever: "That's the entire point, and I'm not sure how you missed it".

[Whipstitch]

Cham's characterization of "normal" players hits me as something truthy but ultimately useless. In my personal experience the assertion that people don't give a shit about setting/background crashes headlong into the Gnome Problem extremely quickly. Yes, most gamers I know have a build fetish and don't want to play someone else's character, but as often as not I still have that one weirdo in the group who wants some stage directions and a gimmick to play off of rather than a blank character sheet.

[Username17]

A KSF should definitely have a million factions for every single class to call their home.

Yeah, I think everyone who isn't Chamomile understands that a KSF setting suggests that "not-Britain has Fighters" not that "Fighters only come from not-Britain." The KSF setting provides many prompts that each go to white space the players can fill in as needed. That's literally the thing it's for.

My suggestion is to not spend much effort in attempting to engage Chamomile, because the number of times and thoroughness with which he has been refuted suggests to me that he is either not arguing in good faith or is so fundamentally confused about the nature of this conversation that he has nothing constructive to add.

In any case, this thread is nominally about using Europeanisms in fantasy settings. The advantage then of Europeanism in a KSF is the presumed familiarity of the source material. Because the players are assumed to be familiar with various European cultures, you can convey that something is "not-British" or "not-Italian" or whatever with a lot of easily accessible tropes - and that the players will be able to enlarge upon that with various British or Italian stereotypes to fill in the white space. This contrasts strongly with lesser known peoples - it would take quite a bit of information before people successfully guessed that you had coded some fantasy group as Lisu or Hmong, and even knowing that fact most of your player base would have difficulty enlarging upon the associated white space because few of your players have much familiarity with stereotypes of the Hmong or Lisu people.

And that's even before we get to the "cultural insensitivity" issue. That is, it's OK to use comedic stereotypes of British people because they are not an oppressed people. Making fun of many kinds of white people is OK because those stereotypes aren't part of an overall campaign of discrimination. Using stereotypes about Romani people is profoundly less OK because those stereotypes are part of a larger corpus of discrimination where parents literally get their children kidnapped by police because Romani stereotypes have real world consequences. Norwegians don't get stopped at airport security because of Viking stereotypes, but Afghanis do get stopped at airport security because of South Asian stereotypes. Üter on the Simpsons is a hurtful comedic German stereotype and no one cares because Germans aren't being actually hurt in the real world by the presence of these stereotypes in the popular culture. This results in it being morally superior to run a campaign as coded European if your intention is to be loosey goosey with simple prompts and spontaneous use of cliches and stereotypes.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

See, you did the thing I just mentioned. You had fighters come from not-Britain instead of just having fighters come from everywhere.

You did that:

Alternatively, if you point out that there are a lot of Fighters Guilds for british people,

And yes, you did mention that France had a Fighter's guild, which is why I said this:

A normal player doesn't even ask the question, and they definitely won't stick their French Fighter guy in not-France home of the Wizards over not-Britain home of the Fighters, even if not-France does in fact have Fighters.

You might find my posts are more coherent if you read all of them, rather than randomly selected fragments of them.

And also DrPraetor actually did suggest having classes directly associated with specific cultures just a few posts ago. Having classes be restricted to a specific culture or faction is dumb and you shouldn't do it, but it's apparently not something you thought worthy of comment when DrPraetor dedicated an entire post to it. Frank did find that worthy of comment, though. Specifically, this comment:

Very much this. An important point though is that your European fantasy kitchen sink cultures are going to want to present at least two classes each. But remember that every meaningfully different flavor of cloth wearer counts, so that doesn't get things down as much as you'd think.

This thing where what class you are limits what culture you're from is a thing that DrPraetor introduced and Frank explicitly endorsed, and the fact that you didn't feel the need to respond to it until you mistakenly thought someone else was endorsing it does not speak well to your motives for joining the conversation. But that idea, in fact, dumb. There is no reason to limit people's choice of culture of origin by their preferred class, nor vice-versa. In fact, Frank seemed to strenuously agree that it was dumb, back when he was trying to strawman me earlier:

if other people at the table want to play their Paladin as French because that is the only accent they can do, who are you to get in their way?

Apparently it's bad to tell people that their Paladin can't be French, but totally cool to tell them that their Paladin can't be Norse? It's apparently less dickish to slap someone's character sheet out of their hands if they're playing something weird than if they're playing something stereotypical? Like, my assumption with this is that Frank was trying to strawman me as demanding that nobody ever play a cliché, but apparently his real point is that only cliché should be acceptable, and you totally should get in the way of people who have culture/class combinations that are atypical?

Probably not, though, because Frank is now saying that every culture should have every class, but a couple of posts ago the minimum was "two" rather than "eleven" (or however many classes are in your PHB). So probably he's just contradicting himself in a frantic attempt to get people not to notice that 1) he has totally failed to understand how improv prompts work and 2) his effort to exclude me from the conversation in order to distract from that has also totally failed.

Players do care about backstory. The ones you mentioned explicitly went out of their way to ground their class in backstory.

No they didn't. They attached their character to a faction themed similarly to their class despite near-total ideological opposition. You're apparently assuming that "the wizard faction" is the source of fully 100% of the setting's wizards, but that is not a thing I said, so I do not know why you are assuming that. Just because there's a faction in a setting that has a wizard in charge of it doesn't mean that they, like, hunt down all wizards outside the faction or whatever. If that was literally a setting requirement, that all wizards be from the wizard faction, why would I bother bringing it up?

In my personal experience the assertion that people don't give a shit about setting/background crashes headlong into the Gnome Problem extremely quickly. Yes, most gamers I know have a build fetish and don't want to play someone else's character, but as often as not I still have that one weirdo in the group who wants some stage directions and a gimmick to play off of rather than a blank character sheet.

10-20% of the population does still mean that you're reasonably likely to have that one guy who actually cares in any given group of 3-6 people. Unless your campaign takes place in an empty white void, though, you're going to have a hook for that guy by having the one region you need just to have a starting place for the campaign at all.

[MGuy]

Cham is probably right in this argument. From what I can guess there is a hierarchy of places where your players are going to look to decide what character they are going to make. If your goal is to make a generic kitchen sink setting the likelihood that a player is going to use your setting for their prompts is probably lower than if you used a more unique setting like Star Wars. I think that's a good way of thinking about it.

[Username17]

See, you did the thing I just mentioned. You had fighters come from not-Britain instead of just having fighters come from everywhere.

You did that:

Alternatively, if you point out that there are a lot of Fighters Guilds for british people,

I'm not quoting this to argue with Chamomile. I'm quoting this to gently encourage other people to fucking stop engaging with Chamomile. He's literally quoting someone using the construction "There are Fighters in Britain" and pretending that it's the construction "All Fighters are in Britain" which is simply false. He's quoting the section that says he is wrong and pretending that it exonerates him.

Maybe he doesn't understand how tenses of the verb "be" work or cannot differentiate distributive determiners. Maybe he's just being shockingly disingenuous. It doesn't fucking matter, because either way you aren't getting anywhere using written English as a medium to express concepts.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

You're quoting me directly in an effort to convince others that I'm wrong. What do you think "argument" means, that this does not qualify?

Also:

A normal player doesn't even ask the question, and they definitely won't stick their French Fighter guy in not-France home of the Wizards over not-Britain home of the Fighters, even if not-France does in fact have Fighters.

This is the third time I have posted this and the second time I have posted this with explicit emphasis on not-France also having Fighters. At no point in this hypothetical did I ever claim that not-France did not have Fighters. Learn to read.

[Thaluikhain]

In any case, this thread is nominally about using Europeanisms in fantasy settings. The advantage then of Europeanism in a KSF is the presumed familiarity of the source material. Because the players are assumed to be familiar with various European cultures, you can convey that something is "not-British" or "not-Italian" or whatever with a lot of easily accessible tropes - and that the players will be able to enlarge upon that with various British or Italian stereotypes to fill in the white space. This contrasts strongly with lesser known peoples - it would take quite a bit of information before people successfully guessed that you had coded some fantasy group as Lisu or Hmong, and even knowing that fact most of your player base would have difficulty enlarging upon the associated white space because few of your players have much familiarity with stereotypes of the Hmong or Lisu people.

And that's even before we get to the "cultural insensitivity" issue. That is, it's OK to use comedic stereotypes of British people because they are not an oppressed people. Making fun of many kinds of white people is OK because those stereotypes aren't part of an overall campaign of discrimination. Using stereotypes about Romani people is profoundly less OK because those stereotypes are part of a larger corpus of discrimination where parents literally get their children kidnapped by police because Romani stereotypes have real world consequences. Norwegians don't get stopped at airport security because of Viking stereotypes, but Afghanis do get stopped at airport security because of South Asian stereotypes. Üter on the Simpsons is a hurtful comedic German stereotype and no one cares because Germans aren't being actually hurt in the real world by the presence of these stereotypes in the popular culture. This results in it being morally superior to run a campaign as coded European if your intention is to be loosey goosey with simple prompts and spontaneous use of cliches and stereotypes.

While I'd tend to agree with that, people often still tend to stick, say, Romani stereotypes in their European setting, because those stereotypes exist in Europe about people living in Europe. Keep to King Arthur rip-offs and you can't go wrong (that way), though, sure.

[rampaging-poet]

I'm not quoting this to argue with Chamomile. I'm quoting this to gently encourage other people to fucking stop engaging with Chamomile. He's literally quoting someone using the construction "There are Fighters in Britain" and pretending that it's the construction "All Fighters are in Britain" which is simply false. He's quoting the section that says he is wrong and pretending that it exonerates him.

That's not at all how I've read Chamomile's posts. He said right up front that all classes are available in all areas, but his players tend to ignore that. It's not that "Britain has lots of Fighters, therefore all Fighters in this setting are British," it's that his players see "There are lots of Fighters in Britain, so that's probably where my Fighter is from."

Using the setting as a character prompt can help when people haven't decided who they'd like to play. Someone could look over the hooks, find an appealing one, and say, "Oh these not-French look cool, and they have a lot of Wizards and Paladins. I think I'll make a not-French Wizard!" That's pretty useful!

On the other hand, some people already have a character in mind and are just looking to put them on the map. In that case it's really easy to say "There's lots of Fighters here. I am a Fighter. Therefore I'm from here."
Matching on game-mechanical prompts is simply easier than matching their personality to an existing cliche - if only because skimming the setting document for [CLASS NAME HERE] is faster than actually reading all the prompts.

It's also possible that part of the disconnect is one-off settings for a single campaign vs published settings intended to be used by a large number of people. If you're making a bespoke setting for a campaign it might not make sense to write up fifty cultures when most of them won't even show up. You can save a lot of time by writing up just the places and cultures your adventure immediately needs. If a player wants to play something that just doesn't fit those cultures, you can then work with that player to fill in some of the blank space with somewhere they could be from.

Published settings, however, have multiple purposes. Writing lots of culture prompts makes sense for a published setting because a lot more people will see them. That makes it far more likely that any given prompt will see use. Also, while a given game will only have 3-6 PCs give or take (barring dead or retired characters), it will have a vast wealth of NPCs. Having more prompts can help the DM much more than it would help any individual player. Furthermore even players that didn't care about the setting at first may get curious as play progresses. Maybe a not-Ukrainian NPC shows up, and players that previously couldn't care less decide to read up on Not-The-Ukraine. Published settings even make it somewhat simpler to discuss and compare characters from different campaigns because they offload explaining the setting from the storyteller to a book.

Either way when you're actually running a game your players may or may not care about the setting. If they really don't care, you only need as much setting information as you, the DM, want. In some cases world-building is part of the fun and you'll want a lot, and in others you'll just want enough to keep the name of the PCs' home base straight.

[jt]

Chamomile is right to focus on how the setting is useful to the GM more than the players. The point where the setting would be most useful to the players - when they're making their characters - is the point where they have the least attachment to it. Once they've played the campaign a while they might become more attached, which is when they start asking, "Where was I from again?"

The players aren't attached to the world when they make their characters, but eventually want to have their characters be from that world. I can think of three ways to solve this:

1 - Everything is in the world somewhere, so players can come to the table with whatever and the GM can point at some place on the map and say "you're from here." This requires a ton of content and has an annoying tendency to imply level 1 characters have traveled halfway across the world already (the character has experienced a lot more of the world than the player has).

2 - The setting concept is narrowly defined enough that you can explain all the relevant stuff before anyone gets bored; thus the players know enough to properly place their characters. This has to be very simple, since you don't really have buy-in at the start of a campaign, and the length of explanation you're allowed is limited by politeness instead of enthusiasm.

3 - You generate buy-in by giving everyone a chunk of the world to define themselves; now everyone has room for whatever they wanted and a stake in the game. Of course this leaves the GM with a massive headache trying to collate all of this into a coherent world, and people are likely going to conflate their ownership over a chunk of the world with their character owning that chunk of the world. And not everyone wants to do the work a GM does.

[Username17]

Chamomile is right to focus on how the setting is useful to the GM more than the players

Not remotely. The MC can make whatever declarations they want. The players have constrained declarations. Every declaration of the player is subject to veto by the MC, meaning that they can only make declarations that are consistent with the setting as heretofore understood. The MC can add whatever they want to the setting whenever they want and even unilaterally retcon declarations previously made.

Yeah, it's a kind of dick move to pull the rug out from under the players, but it's something that the MC can do. In the same sense that the writer can do literally anything at all with their story. The only real veto the audience has is the freedom to walk away.

Indeed, the only utility the setting has to the MC is as a communication tool to inform the players what kinds of declarations they might be permitted to make. And that can itself be looked at as a utility for the player, since of course it is their declarations that are in danger of being vetoed, not those of the MC.

While I'd tend to agree with that, people often still tend to stick, say, Romani stereotypes in their European setting, because those stereotypes exist in Europe about people living in Europe. Keep to King Arthur rip-offs and you can't go wrong (that way), though, sure.

It's definitely true that Ravenloft went all-in on being European, and that it went all-in on Romani stereotypes. And that was terrible and we try to pretend it never happened.

In a broader sense it's a bit of a rock and a hard place. Hurtful stereotypes are a problem, and lack of representation is also a problem. But it's difficult to see how an ad hoc role playing game can deliver anything but stereotypes, because the setting's only purpose is to give broad stroke suggestions for the kinds of declarations that people who aren't the MC can make on the fly. What is going to go into that white space if not stereotypes and clichés?

I don't have a simple answer to that. It's a persistent wicked problem. But it is also true that hurtful stereotypes of privileged European groups do not exist. Not because there aren't negative stereotypes available, but because those negative stereotypes do not have the power to hurt people who are in positions of privilege the way they have the power to hurt those who are not. Just yesterday we were having a laugh about Italians being philanderers and thieves with my Italian co-workers and it was hilarious and not hurtful - while if we had made the same jokes about our Sudanese co-workers it would have been a big no-no all around. Because Sudanese people have legit problems in real life from these kinds of stereotypes being circulated and white guys just don't.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

Cham, I'm gonna try 1 more time to move this in a productive direction before I give up. Let's go back in time and check out that old comment you keep bolding for us. What else was in it?

Firstly, no, they aren't. A normal player doesn't even ask the question, and they definitely won't stick their French Fighter guy in not-France home of the Wizards over not-Britain home of the Fighters, even if not-France does in fact have Fighters.

One more time

not-Britain, home of the Fighters

For the quadragazillionth time, Cham: how are GMs supposed to implement KSF settings? Are they supposed to make players read a paragraph for every culture? Of course not. Are they supposed to make players read 2 sentences for every culture? Of course not. KSFs are for stereotypical cultures, who should exist as no more than a bullet point until they are explored.

What is your bullet point for not-Britain, Cham? What did you write for it? Let me bold it again for you:

home of the Fighters

That's it. You had a conceptual budget of 1 stereotype, and the stereotype you handed to your players is "home of the fighters". Your players used that stereotype just like they were supposed to, and now you're complaining about how they don't care about their setting. You created the problem and them you blamed your players. Why did you do that?

If you want your PCs to remember that not-Britain is the home of the British, then don't make it the home of the fighters. It really is that simple:

not-Britain, home of british imperialism

XOR

Fightoria, home of the fighters who speak with whatever accent they want because the relevant stereotype is that they're all fighters

You messed up making a KSF, and it came back to bite you. Don't blame KSFs for your mistakes.

[MGuy]

You lost me... Did you perchance consider taking the 'whole' sentence you quoted under consideration before homing in on one part of it? Typically you should be reading the entirety of the sentence in order to really engage with it.

[...You Lost Me]

I'll one-up you on that recommendation, MGuy. Typically you should be reading the entirety of a comment in order to really engage with it. Try that now: read my entire comment to determine why I have homed in on the particular bold part of Cham's quote. Once you do, you'll realize that I could have homed in on another part of that sentence entirely and drawn the exact same conclusion.

Of course, if you just hate that people are emphasizing sentence fragments, I recommend going after the source of it all. Let's not forget that I made an awfully similar criticism to the one you wrote. Not-so-coincidentally, it's the comment you just responded to.

Cham, I'm gonna try 1 more time to move this in a productive direction before I give up. Let's go back in time and check out that old comment you keep bolding for us. What else was in it?

Hmmmmmm who on earth could I be imitating? Who could possibly have selectively bolded a quote? I hope you figure it out and give them a stern talking to, considering how important this must be to you.

[deaddmwalking]

You're quoting me directly in an effort to convince others that I'm wrong. What do you think "argument" means, that this does not qualify?

Also:

A normal player doesn't even ask the question, and they definitely won't stick their French Fighter guy in not-France home of the Wizards over not-Britain home of the Fighters, even if not-France does in fact have Fighters.

This is the third time I have posted this and the second time I have posted this with explicit emphasis on not-France also having Fighters. At no point in this hypothetical did I ever claim that not-France did not have Fighters. Learn to read.

If your contention about players is true, they couldn't know enough about the setting to insist their character is from 'not Britain' rather than from 'not France'.

If they've gone to the trouble to create a character completely independently of ANY prompts (which is possible) and they talk to the GM about their character, being from 'not France' is going to come up the moment the player says, "Why do you think I have this outrageous accent you silly king?"

I think it's bizarre that you posit that a player won't take any inspiration from material offered to them but at the same time will take the time to master the material to explain why the other choice doesn't work.

As a sometimes player, I typically try to figure out how a character I make can reasonably fit into the world. Sometimes that DOES mean playing an outcast type character that explicitly differs from the cultural stereotypes and other times that means choosing an origin that specifically matches the cultural stereotypes that I've chosen.

About a year ago I was creating an NPC for a Pathfinder game (I don't play Pathfinder) and I didn't read mountains of setting material. I did read a few prompts about various nations and Galt fed into the setting description that I wanted; a few descriptions on the wiki let me tie the character to the setting explicitly and convincingly. Knowing that there was a 'revolutionary France like country' was the only seed I needed to tie the character to the setting.

[Chamomile]

In which YLM strenuously agrees with me without realizing it

Yes, dumbass, that is my point. That class associations drown out any and all other considerations. All those examples of people picking factional associations based purely on class? Do you remember what post they first got brought up in? Do you recall that it's the one directly quoting DrPraetor? DrPraetor asserted that different cultures should produce different classes, and I brought up several examples of this being a terrible idea, and for some reason you decided to argue with me and not him.

And selectively bolding my own quotes to draw attention to the parts you've ignored is obviously different from selectively bolding someone else's quotes to pretend that the context doesn't matter, you disingenuous fuckwit.

[...You Lost Me]

Oh yeah, remember when my response included a direct attempt to clarify your points? Remember when you completely ignored that?

• Here is where I double-checked whether your issue was "players won't read fluff". In the case my assessment was right, I included a rebuttal.
• Here is where you responded to that, choosing not to tell me that my interpretation was wrong and directly responding to my rebuttal. At no point did you tell me "hey buddy, this isn't an accurate representation of my comment!" Oh no, you wrote four goddamn paragraphs about how I was wrong. So I interpreted that as you believing that your players don't read fluff... because that's how normal humans read any 4-paragraph response to a rebuttal.
• Here is where I reminded you that the player is reading fluff because that's literally how they get info on being a fighter.
• Here is where you selectively quote yourself, drawing attention away from the part where you were wrong.
• Here is where I reminded you, get again, that PCs looking into fighterville is literally reading the fluff.

And now we have you telling me we were on the same side all along. So there are a couple options I can see here:

a) You had an opportunity to say that "Players don't read fluff" is a misrepresentation of your position, since the opportunity to do so was handed to you on a silver platter. Instead of doing that, you wrote 4 paragraphs telling me I'm wrong. Apparently I am a dumbass for thinking that this means my representation of your position is correct, because [????????].

b) You realized you were wrong and are pulling some weird goalpost shift.

Don't pretend that context doesn't matter, Cham. It makes you look like a disingenuous fuckwit.

EDIT: Since I'm strenuously agreeing with Cham like a dumbass, it sounds like he now believes bullet points are things that players will read. Does this means there is "an amount of required effort low enough that it will convince your players to read and care about a list of prompts"? Who knows? I could ask Cham about it, but I'm not sure I can get a straight answer on anything.

[Chamomile]

Funny how you decide your historical recap should end right before it makes you look like an idiot. Let's back up one post more:

Given a total of five prompts, three of which had clear class associations, fully one hundred percent of players and backers chose either to ignore all of them or to associate their character with the prompt that matched their class, because it matched their class, even if it contradicted their character's stated motives or cultural affiliation.

My response was written from the assumption that when I said "everyone interacting with this setting did one of two things" and you responded "so your concerns are 1) that players do [one of the two things] and 2) that players do [the other of the two things]" that you had successfully comprehended me, but apparently I should have instead guessed that you actually meant that all players did both of those things simultaneously despite the explicit presence of the apparently enigmatic "either/or" rhetorical device.

[...You Lost Me]

Yes, that's why I included (again) a direct attempt to clarify your points. Like, I wrote that post with the full knowledge that I might not understand your comment, and you wrote a 4 paragraph speerg in lieu of just saying "No that is not what I meant".

I wrote my request for clarifications because I attempted to read your comment, saw the either/or among the sea of examples, and did not think that it was an actual either/or because it didn't seem to gel with all your other comments about cliches being literally impossible to use. I then (just as a reminder) attempted to clarify your position. I did this with a numbered list, as opposed to bullet points or format-less sentences, because I did not want to imply the "or". I also listed them without using the words "either" and "or", because I did not want to imply the "or".

I guess my lesson here is not to assume you are agreeing with a characterization when you respond to it. Next time you include "or" statements that I think are actually poorly-written "and" statements, I will make sure to include the word "AND" alongside bolded numbered lists. Hopefully that way we can carry one a conversation without sending you into some kind of frothing seizure.

[MGuy]

So yea in the sentence you quote you home in on the British fighters thing but in that sentence he says players aren't going to have their French fighter come from a place known for wizardry even if it does have fighters over the place known for having fighters. He in the sentence you quote doesn't state that fighters only come from x but makes the claim that the only thing players are looking for are things that support the decisions they made. He didn't cast a given place as being related to a class and openly says he's directly opposed to that in posts you are apparently not reading. So yes I've followed not only the sentence, the post in question, and what you're trying to get at but the entirety of the conversation. Perhaps if you don't want to continue wasting time on this strawman you should just accept that's not what Cham has ever been arguing (and don't worry you don't have to say sorry for not being able to read just move on pretending you haven't embarrassed yourself) and either engage with what Cham has clearly stated he is arguing for because this weird thing where you isolate parts of a sentence and pretend that it's all you need to create a convincing strawman isn't impressive.

You've spent more time trying to make the argument that Cham definitely always was arguing this straw argument you've formed for yourself and then indignantly demanding he admit that not only is this straw argument his but that he apologize I guess for making it. I'll help you out. You have the biggest e -peen here and I'm sure Cham is very jealous. There, that's what you're waiting for right?