Musings

[Dean]

question- were the people who were forced by the Nazis to work in factories fascists because they were exploited by a fascist system?

Participants is a pretty clear word choice, anything further is playing at Loki's Wager. Also keep in mind: We did bomb Nazi factories. It's not like a hypothetical logic problem. Could you order the destruction of a nazi factory even knowing that many inside it don't even support the war? I can't tell you your answer, that's a subjective moral question. I would certainly say I consider "Yes" to be the more moral option.

[Omegonthesane]

I'm particularly curious as to where the hell the ideal of Goblins as "Fascist Capitalists" comes from... I mean, even if we're going full intellectually bankrupt tolkien fanboy, here... goblins are not fascist or capitalist in Tolkien's work. They are exploited by a fascist industrialist, which I feel is a big fucking difference...

Being a participant of an exploitative Fascist Industrialist government means you're a fascist industrialist. The move from identifying them as fascist industrialists to fascist capitalists (the same thing, fundamentally) is entirely a matter of 100 years passing since Tolkiens day and the evil people that readers and players will be familiar with having changed their hats incredibly slightly.

This is semantically wrong in a very important way. A capitalist is an owner of capital, not "a participant in a capitalist society". An industrialist is an owner of industry, not "a participant in an industrial society". Andrew Carnegie, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford - these men were industrialists; the workers they extorted were not industrialists. Jeff Bezos, Bobby Kotick, Charles Koch - these men are capitalists; the workers they extort are not capitalists.

And since there is no difference between being a participant in a fascist capitalist racial empire and -being- a fascist, capitalist, and racist

This is a straightforward counterfactual. As Prak so eloquently pointed out with the more extreme example of the Nazis enslaving the prisoners of concentration camps, being an enthusiastic beneficiary of an evil regime is very different to being coerced into serving that regime under threat of death. I am genuinely disturbed that you consider it "Loki's Wager" level bullshit to make the distinction Karl Marx made between proletariat and bourgeois, the distinction the feudal world made between serf and king.

Participants is a pretty clear word choice, anything further is playing at Loki's Wager. Also keep in mind: We did bomb Nazi factories. It's not hypothetical or a logic problem. Could you order the destruction of a nazi factory even knowing that many inside it don't even support the war? I dunno man, that's a subjective moral question and I can't tell you what your answer is. Though for the record I consider "Yes" the more moral position.

Bombing factories is morally very different to swording encampments. Bombs are not precision weapons. You don't have the option to just kill only the bad people in the blast radius. With a sword, you do have the option to not stab anyone who fails to violently resist you.

[Longes]

Dwarves: Deep Roots
Dwarven society runs on a caste and clan system with Royals, Merchants, Soldiers, Workers, and Agricultural workers as the 5 broad castes. Dwarven leadership hordes wealth but their people always seem very well fed and well supplied which leads me to believe Dwarves have good unions. "Unions" is obviously a very anachronistic word there but I think it's right. In a caste system different clans arise within fields of specialized labor and they become powerful enough to negotiate even with higher caste clans. So the Dwarven people work very hard but they have a moral attachment to hard work because they're represented enough that they're paid well and they can see benefits come to their family and community. A Dwarves clan, their job, their place in society, and their family are all a deeply entwined, giving them a hard nosed attitude for following tradition and doing what's expected of a Dwarf. Dwarven last names are literally just their Clans primary profession based on their Caste. "Axe" or "Shield" are Soldier clans. "Iron" or "Forge" are worker clans. "Gold" and "Silver" merchant clans, and so on. When Dwarves marry across clan they combine their names, becoming "Ironforges" or "Silvershields" or the like. Dwarves of different clans who share a moniker, like Shield, view each other as cousin clans. A newly married dwarf either gives up their old family name for their partners or each will add one of their two monikers together to create their new family name. In this way a Dwarfs name can tell you a lot about their life and values. A Dwarven King with the name "Oakenshield" would be telling a story about their upbringing: That their family were the common folk of the lower castes but that they were given a chance to prove themselves as a soldier and succeeded enough to rise in station.

Your example of a "good" society is... a caste system? What the absolute fuck? You understand that this is a million times worse than everything you wrote about goblins?

[Dean]

Why are they the "good" society!? The existence of caste societies is not offensive in any fucking way. My wife and (thus) family are South Asian, they have a familial "caste". It's a part of their history. There's literally billions of people on the real earth who still have connections to a caste society. Your outrage makes no sense and is plausibly kinda ethnocentric. The feudal divine right of kings is also a shitty way to structure a society by modern standards but we're having feudalism too. Thinking one's totally cool but the other offensive to mention is weird and, again, kinda ethnocentric.

Dwarven fiction looks a lot like a fantasy version of a caste system government of our world. I'm not trying to convince you to become a member of a caste system, but the Mughal society does look pretty close to Dwarven ideals no? Have em drink mead and wear all the kilts you want Dwarven society doesn't look anything like Highland society, it looks a lot more like some South Asian societies.

Finally, regarding them being the "good" guys. I actually think Dwarves are generally presented as societally neutral rather than good. They're usually portrayed as honest but pretty self interested rather than being capital G good guys.

[OgreBattle]

Caste societies can have lots of problems, but the banking society that invaded killed millions in a tiny span of time too. So subhuman goblins should be associated with greedy bankers like in harry potter.

[Omegonthesane]

Caste societies can have lots of problems, but the banking society that invaded killed millions in a tiny span of time too. So subhuman goblins should be associated with greedy bankers like in harry potter.

I hope this is irony, 'cause you're straight up describing the most commonly flagged antisemitic undercurrent in the harry potter books as if it's an appropriate treatment of goblins

[OgreBattle]

Caste societies can have lots of problems, but the banking society that invaded killed millions in a tiny span of time too. So subhuman goblins should be associated with greedy bankers like in harry potter.

I hope this is irony, 'cause you're straight up describing the most commonly flagged antisemitic undercurrent in the harry potter books as if it's an appropriate treatment of goblins

To a white audience, the potter goblins appear as an ugly stereotype of a specific subset of whites, but outside of that they're an ugly stereotype of whites in general.



You should give Sun Yatsen's Vital Problem of China a read:
http://chinese.larouchepub.com/wp-conte ... na-eng.pdf

He was a 1900's democracy revolutionary in Asia, when he starts talking about Britain just imagine the potter goblins

[Wiseman]

Wow, so it's okay to kill something on sight as long as it isn't humanoid?

I don't get the need to have intelligent beings that are kill on sight in the first place.

[SlyJohnny]

Wow, so it's okay to kill something on sight as long as it isn't humanoid?

I don't get the need to have intelligent beings that are kill on sight in the first place.

What about intelligent beings where it's generally understood that if you see them, you're going to die?

[Whipstitch]

As a long time shadowrun and vampire player it's really just the apologetics that puzzle me. When someone asks how your bad character sleeps at night you can always just say "on a pile of money and opiates."

[Prak]

question- were the people who were forced by the Nazis to work in factories fascists because they were exploited by a fascist system?

Participants is a pretty clear word choice, anything further is playing at Loki's Wager. Also keep in mind: We did bomb Nazi factories. It's not like a hypothetical logic problem. Could you order the destruction of a nazi factory even knowing that many inside it don't even support the war? I can't tell you your answer, that's a subjective moral question. I would certainly say I consider "Yes" to be the more moral option.

You're right, participants is a pretty clear word choice. And it's yours. Uruk-hai were created by Saruman to be slave soldiers for his fascist war. Goblins were exploited by Saruman to the same extent. They were pressed into a vicious military under the control of a fascist. That does not mean that goblins, let alone uruk-hai, held any fascist beliefs themselves. Similarly, their willingness to eat sapient flesh likewise does not imply fascist beliefs, merely the absence of a cannibalism taboo.

In fact, the goblins and the Great Goblin of the Hobbit, the only glimpse we see of goblin society not under the hand of another (so far as I'm aware), are simply... raiders. Which does not impart any particular moral leaning in an Iron Age setting. It was a way some people lived. At most it implies a lack of respect for the concept of private property, and a willingness to steal said property to support their existence. Which... kind of sounds like a standard adventuring party? Except not as bad, because the goblins have claimed a specific location, and raid travelers through that country, whereas adventurers invade others' spaces to kill them and loot their bodies. Now, granted, they practice slavery, which does imply an evil bent in that particular society, but certainly not a fascist or capitalist one. In fact, if the goblins were capitalistic fascists, they would claim the mountain pass, and charge people to use it, rather than just saying "we live here! And if you come through here, we're gonna take your stuff and kill some of you and enslave some of you!"

Now... certainly goblin society in Tolkien's vastly overrated WW2 AU fic is unpleasant. But it's not fascist, which would require a level of society that is... quite a bit beyond the tribal society presented in the Hobbit, and it's not capitalist because... of much the same reasons. You could almost argue that the tribe led by the Great Goblin in the Hobbit is a state capitalist system, but... it would be a really hard argument unless there's some manner of trading and wages going on. And some form of profit. And I don't think you can really qualify "all the loot we can carry" as "profit" and "you're allowed to eat the meat we capture, sapient or otherwise" as "wages."


But... even on top of ALL that...

you know that Tolkien didn't invent goblins, right?


Goblins come from European folklore, and "are ascribed various and conflicting abilities, temperaments and appearances depending on the story and country of origin. They are almost always small and grotesque, mischievous or outright malicious, and greedy, especially for gold and jewelry." (Wikipedia)

So... the most you can say about goblins, without picking one specific folkloric tradition for your source is that they're "small, like gold and jewels, and are either mischievous or malicious." Which basically gives you a culture of humanoid magpies that hoards shit and is primarily Chaotic Neutral with some amount of evil members. Like, ok, sure, they're "greedy," but that's not the same as capitalist. Dragons hoard shiny things, too, and they are not capitalists. Goblins are more like... five year old little girls if you're basing them on folklore. They like shiny shit, they don't have what we would consider a developed and healthy moral compass, and they want all the bangles they can get. And if you want to say that goblins are fascist because they make racist elf jokes... well, then, Dwarven and Elven cultures are fascist, too, because they make racist orc jokes, and racist elf and dwarf jokes, respectively. In fact, if you really have a hard on for some fantasy capitalist fascist culture, dwarves fit the bill a lot better than goblins.

[Dean]

It occurred to me today that tube worms, the kind that live on hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, could probably live in the underdark and would be a good answer to the "what do they eat in the underdark?" question. A being that lives without sunlight through access to water and lava seems like a really good model to form the basis of the ecosystem the duergar are supposed to live in. The underdark has lava and water and little else and I could totally buy tube worms as being a thing that civilized underdark folk have whole aquifer farms of. It could be like the wheat of the underdark.

Now it's possible that a being that basically breathes and eats sulfur would be totally inedible. It's also possible that any place that could support them would fill with deadly gasses that would kill you way faster than starvation but it's also POSSIBLE that those things aren't true. I mean fuck if I know but any explanation that requires someone to have a science degree to definitively say I'm bullshitting is exactly the kind of worldbuilding I'm into.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Relevant.

[Ignimortis]

As a long time shadowrun and vampire player it's really just the apologetics that puzzle me. When someone asks how your bad character sleeps at night you can always just say "on a pile of money and opiates."

This. Murdering people without feeling guilty about it doesn't have anything with them being bad people, it only has to do with you being a sufficiently bad person and finding a sufficient reason to kill someone.

A good person might kill in self-defense when it's an obvious "you or me, and you're already trying to kill me". A bad person might kill because it's convenient. A really bad person might kill because it makes them feel good (powerful, righteous, etc). There is no such thing as a good person who sees a sentient creature and says "they're evil, it's free game" - that's just evil (or at least very screwed-up neutral) masquerading behind "noble ideals".

A goblin ambush is probably something that you'll have to defend yourself from, and while not inherently a good act, killing the goblins in self-defense is mostly fine. Burning and pillaging a goblin city only "because they're evil" and you've faced a few goblin ambushes (not necessarily associated with the city)? Yes, that's a good point to take a good hard look at your morals, friend. Are you trying to be good? Yes? Then you're going about it wrong. If not, then go ahead, it's perfectly fine to play a not-good character. Just don't expect to look righteous at the same time.

[OgreBattle]

It occurred to me today that tube worms, the kind that live on hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, could probably live in the underdark and would be a good answer to the "what do they eat in the underdark?" question. A being that lives without sunlight through access to water and lava seems like a really good model to form the basis of the ecosystem the duergar are supposed to live in. The underdark has lava and water and little else and I could totally buy tube worms as being a thing that civilized underdark folk have whole aquifer farms of. It could be like the wheat of the underdark.

Now it's possible that a being that basically breathes and eats sulfur would be totally inedible. It's also possible that any place that could support them would fill with deadly gasses that would kill you way faster than starvation but it's also POSSIBLE that those things aren't true. I mean fuck if I know but any explanation that requires someone to have a science degree to definitively say I'm bullshitting is exactly the kind of worldbuilding I'm into.

That's an evocative idea. There's a massive amount of microbes living in the earth too:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 77521.html

Trillions of tons, and surviving 'deep see vent worm' type temperatures. Also more fun technobabble to justify the underdark having all kinds of aberrant critters or things that eat rocks or phase through earth.

[pragma]

As a long time shadowrun and vampire player it's really just the apologetics that puzzle me. When someone asks how your bad character sleeps at night you can always just say "on a pile of money and opiates."

This. Murdering people without feeling guilty about it doesn't have anything with them being bad people, it only has to do with you being a sufficiently bad person and finding a sufficient reason to kill someone.

I think the central conflict of D&D is that people are trying to emulate some gestalt fairy-tale / heroes journey, in which they play a hero whose use of force is always justified. However, unless the GM makes a very accommodating world, you're going to end up playing a mercenary who does violence to people and animals for profit (and possibly revenge). It makes me wonder if you can shine a critical theory lens on the underlying stories (Ivanhoe, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Tolkien, etc.) to expose the violence inherent in the system.

[Ignimortis]

I think the central conflict of D&D is that people are trying to emulate some gestalt fairy-tale / heroes journey, in which they play a hero whose use of force is always justified. However, unless the GM makes a very accommodating world, you're going to end up playing a mercenary who does violence to people and animals for profit (and possibly revenge). It makes me wonder if you can shine a critical theory lens on the underlying stories (Ivanhoe, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Tolkien, etc.) to expose the violence inherent in the system.

That's what old D&D tried to be, isn't it? Orcs weren't evil because they were just bad people with a society that encouraged them to be bad, but evil because they're primordially evil.

Tolkien also worked with that - orcs are inherently evil and corrupt, that's their metaphysical property through manipulation of cosmic forces of evil (inasmuch as Melkor and Sauron count).

As far as I'm aware, King Arthur stories mostly worked on the lawful-chaotic scale instead of good and evil per se - acting like a proper honourable knight was "good", but it didn't mean much from a moral point of view - knights fight monsters and each other most of the time, and knights who were treacherous or craven were "bad", even though they might've been decent people otherwise.

Robin Hood is one step removed from a fairy tale - not much to work with there, except "unlawful king and his retainers are bad, because he's not the lawful king and we want Richard back".

I don't think it's impossible to make orcs and other sentient monsters truly evil - but you will have to accept that they don't think like humans or feel like humans, and all their thoughts are driven by the desire to cause harm and suffering instead of self-interest and occasional emotional bursts of most humans. And you'd have to accept that such orcs will be very shallow and barely deserving of the "sentient" label. Those orcs won't have the "surviving orcish child" dilemma - such a child will try to bite off your fingers and stab you in the back even if it didn't see you kill its' parents, simply because you're nearby and thus a more valid target than anyone else.

[Thaluikhain]

Have to drop orc (et al) as a PC option, unless you are running a party full of alien monsters, though.

I'm not seeing a good way to solve that mess, myself, there's a lot to fix and doing so would likely get rid of the reasons people wanted orcs anyway.

[deaddmwalking]

Bad people do bad things, and sometimes you have to kill the bad people to stop them.

We already have demons so we don't need metaphysically evil orcs. When a war band is marching on a village and they'll leave death and destruction in their wake, PCs are justified to use force. When the evil wizard is preparing his doomsday plot, the PCs are justified in using force to stop him.

Villains need to do villainous things. If it's a PG game, he has to kick puppies and twirl his mustaches while loudly monologuing all the bad things he's going to do. If it's an R-rated game you'll have the Sheriff murdered, crops burned, stores looted, people stampeded, and cattle raped.

When the PCs meet orcs on the road, they should talk to them. I'd the orcs draw weapons and attack, PCs are permitted to defend themselves. But if PCs attack everything they see, they're the bad guys.

[Blade]

Our culture has this strange fascination for "good" people solving problems with force: how many movies are about a "good guy" solving problems with a gun?
We also have a fixation on heroes, with helpless masses needing big heroes to save them.

Both of these are problematic but they're what most of our stories, and RPGs, are built on.

It's the same for video games, and it's funny to see how some games nowadays try to find ways to deal with it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Our culture has this strange fascination for "good" people solving problems with force: how many movies are about a "good guy" solving problems with a gun?

Aside from the extradiegetic reason of 'a transformative social engineering project would take too long to depict in most mediums and it would also overshadow the original conflict', long-term social engineering is simply not within the ken of liberalism. The idea of stopping organizations like SMERSH and and the New Jersey Mob by literally re-engineering society to make it impossible for these organizations to exist would require changes unpalatable to the said ideology of liberalism.

Thus you can see how the obsession with force is a side-effect of Western society's other, more maladaptive obsession: that of non-violently solving societal problems with rhetoric. After all, once you've rejected out-of-hand how the only solution to stopping Roosh and The Joker is for society to take control of the means of production and make it impossible for people like them to exist, your only way of solving problems without violence is rhetoric. Which works sometimes for small-scale, interpersonal conflict like convincing an individual drug dealer to stop selling drugs to children but breaks down when convincing a drug-dealing organization to stop selling drugs to children. After all, humans can accept a nonviolent protagonist convincing an individual human trafficker to free their slaves, but not the entire organization from Taken.

And at that point, if you want the protagonists to actually stop the worst of problems more systemic than 'Mr. Withers is beating his wife', protagonists HAVE to use force. It's literally the only option they have.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It doesn't help that exerting force over imaginary creatures is usually a pretty fun affair. When most people are part of the 'helpless masses', pretending to be a hero with enough power to personally change the world is very cathartic.
... hopefully it's changed for the better.

[Dean]

I have found, in the modern day, one of the more exciting ideas to players is the ability to fix problems of a place and then come back to it later and see the place being different now. My 40k game is entirely about that. With the players investigating a planet, doing anything they can to fix it's most fundamental issues, then leaving to do so on the next planet. The really rewarding part with a space game is I can use time dilation to let them come back 6 months later (by my warp traveling players perspective) and see what the world looks like 10 years later by that planets perspective. Then they can try to tackle any unforeseen side effects of their original adventures.

[OgreBattle]

I have found, in the modern day, one of the more exciting ideas to players is the ability to fix problems of a place and then come back to it later and see the place being different now. My 40k game is entirely about that. With the players investigating a planet, doing anything they can to fix it's most fundamental issues, then leaving to do so on the next planet. The really rewarding part with a space game is I can use time dilation to let them come back 6 months later (by my warp traveling players perspective) and see what the world looks like 10 years later by that planets perspective. Then they can try to tackle any unforeseen side effects of their original adventures.

Positive change is great to see when revisiting fantasy lands, but with 40k do you go for "and things got worse"?