Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Either you believe joseph campbel's universal themes, the john carters are part of our DNA and we play with them though we know it not, or you believe--as some of you claim to profess, that your fantasy gaming is not directed subxonciously by your cultural conditioning amd by your human (homo-sapien) experience.

Japanese people play d&d differently than americans, who play it differently than the english. Why? How is, "warhammer: das rollenspiel" slightly different from, "warhammer: the role plying game" simply in terms of cjoice of translation, subtle as is a translation of marcus aurelius that uses the word God, instead of gods. How did lovecrafts intense xenophobia shape his own fantasy experience?

Orc in English isn't exactly the same thing in Russian, there are cultural shades that some may find interesting to explore. James M. hates spiders, but who's to say that isn't (in a lovecraftian sense), a primordial reaction to the aeon-long battle taking blace between vertibrates and invertibrates? No joke. There is more than mythology to a "harpy" it says something about culture than women can be harpies and men ogres. These are worthy topics to explore.

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't want to bother with them, but it takes an near illiterate to deny them their import. Noam Chomsky, orwell, umberto ecco have spent their lives explaining semiotics and the meaning of language.

Who knows, maybe the mythic underworld in d&d is a retelling of orpheus with gold and XP as a metaphor of persephine--that which must be rescued from hades? Colonialism is just one story among many. But a lot of western white people get quite defensive on that particular topic, which is why it's best discussed as metaphor.

What a load of bollocks.

Wow, Bargle. What a condescending prick.

Bargle wrote:These are worthy topics to explore.

Maybe we can have two games, eh? One where my friends and I are laughing and rolling dice and drinking a beer listening to some music; another where you and the guy from the first post use D&D as an excuse to masturbate intellectually over the deep cultural significance of Everything.

Frankly, exploring cultural, scientific, political, religious and philosophical topics has its place for us all, but as for me, I just don't care to ruin my choice of relaxing hobby with things that end up political. Go figure!

Bargle wrote:Either you believe joseph campbel's universal themes, the john carters are part of our DNA and we play with them though we know it not, or you believe--as some of you claim to profess, that your fantasy gaming is not directed subxonciously by your cultural conditioning amd by your human (homo-sapien) experience.

Japanese people play d&d differently than americans, who play it differently than the english. Why? How is, "warhammer: das rollenspiel" slightly different from, "warhammer: the role plying game" simply in terms of cjoice of translation, subtle as is a translation of marcus aurelius that uses the word God, instead of gods. How did lovecrafts intense xenophobia shape his own fantasy experience?

Orc in English isn't exactly the same thing in Russian, there are cultural shades that some may find interesting to explore. James M. hates spiders, but who's to say that isn't (in a lovecraftian sense), a primordial reaction to the aeon-long battle taking blace between vertibrates and invertibrates? No joke. There is more than mythology to a "harpy" it says something about culture than women can be harpies and men ogres. These are worthy topics to explore.

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't want to bother with them, but it takes an near illiterate to deny them their import. Noam Chomsky, orwell, umberto ecco have spent their lives explaining semiotics and the meaning of language.

Who knows, maybe the mythic underworld in d&d is a retelling of orpheus with gold and XP as a metaphor of persephine--that which must be rescued from hades? Colonialism is just one story among many. But a lot of western white people get quite defensive on that particular topic, which is why it's best discussed as metaphor.

Sorry man, your post is all over the map. Happens to me, too, when I post at 3am, so if this reply sounds overly harsh perhaps it's because the medium chosen was unable to appropriately signify the essential content of the message you were trying to communicate.

[Aside: Here is where I will self-referentially indicate my perhaps flawed reliance on semiotic theory in the preceding paragraph.]

So anyway, I highlighted part of your comment because it's simply too reductionistic. Americans (like the quoted anti-colonialist in the OP) play d&d differently than other Americans (like me) -- a condition I expect also occurs within the English, since at least one of them seems to play d&d more similarly to my game than most of my fellow Americans do. And if there's no monolith of "American D&D" how can it be compared to the game played by English, Japanese, or Germans?

As a corollary, I also expect the way one Japanese group plays d&d will be different from another, and ditto for German players. Although I can't prove it. Because to reduce how individual persons and groups approach a game of structured make-believe into such a broad universal categories based on cultural tendencies and linguistic differences is simply your own conjecture, and concluding otherwise requires a level of field research and statistical modeling adequate for a dissertation in sociology or cultural anthropology. I have never seen such a study, so in my ignorance I choose to remain skeptical.

But if my expectations are correct or at least my skepticism valid, what does that say about trying to apply Joseph Campbell's universal themes as a metaphoric truth incarnated through the process of playing d&d? Shouldn't cultural influences be basically inconsequential if d&d is supposed to somehow tap into the Jungian archetypes common to all humanity that underpin Campbell's work?

For that matter, your initial either/or proposition makes no sense. Because in the first place you're arguing that we should consider how playing d&d taps into "DNA" (that which is universal to humanity), and in the second you're arguing that an individual's preferences are key. But Lovecraft didn't play d&d, because it hadn't been invented by Eggy Gygax.

[Aside: this is the point where I feel like I've gone all the way into redlettermedia movie review territory.]

No one here's trying to deny that social, cultural, and economic realities have influenced how he or she plays the game of d&d. But that's not even relevant, because the OP started off with such a ridiculously obvious straw man that to me the only sensible reaction is to fire up some pizza rolls and pretend it didn't happen.

Or blame Ed Greenwood.

We eat sugar because it is sweet, we play d&d because it is fun.

Both have more complex answers. It's ok to simply eat the sweet, but the evolutionary sociologist isn't wrong when he says it's more complicated than that.

Bargle wrote:We eat sugar because it is sweet, we play d&d because it is fun.

Both have more complex answers. It's ok to simply eat the sweet, but the evolutionary sociologist isn't wrong when he says it's more complicated than that.

And if that evolutionary sociologist tells me it's so complicated that I can't put any in my coffee because it's wrong to do so, then my fist is going to endorse the genocide of his colon.

Bargle wrote:We eat sugar because it is sweet, we play d&d because it is fun.

Both have more complex answers. It's ok to simply eat the sweet, but the evolutionary sociologist isn't wrong when he says it's more complicated than that.

Yeah, I guess I take offense to guys saying that I'm basically a Nazi unless I play the game their way, especially when the argument they make is a strawman. Call me crazy.

godentag wrote:Somewhere along the way DM's refused to enforce "evil means actually evil, not just misunderstood" and the ecology series was a great place to humanize monsters in order to make a "morally deep" imaginary world.

Plus, on a practical level, it's almost as satisfying to blame Elminster as it is to blame DragonLance.

This trend was canonized long before the "Ecology of ..." series, though. Roger E. Moore's racial "Points of View" series in Dragon, for example, included articles on the society and culture of not just orcs but also other humanoids. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover there were others before even Moore's articles. I don't think the problem lies with fleshing out the mindsets and behaviors of monstrous races but with the widespread notion that alignment in D&D is both useless and dispensable. In my opinion, it's that, more than anything, that leads to nonsense like "orcs are people too."

Coleston the Cavalier wrote:When I started advertising X-plorers earlier this year, a blogger actually posted that I was encouraging, "race-motivated murder." I decided not to even acknowledge it and others in the OSR let him have it.

Yeah, I remember that and it was a bizarre post, but then deriding old school games as nothing but thoughtless hack 'n slash is pretty much par for the course on the Net, including at some supposed bastions of this style of play.

Bargle wrote:James M. hates spiders, but who's to say that isn't (in a lovecraftian sense), a primordial reaction to the aeon-long battle taking blace between vertibrates and invertibrates?

And here I was thinking that my arachnophobia was simply a reflection of the fact that I'm a big wuss in real life. Who knew?

Bargle wrote: Orc in English isn't exactly the same thing in Russian,

Dipshit, on the other hand, is pretty much universal.

James Maliszewski wrote:And here I was thinking that my arachnophobia was simply a reflection of the fact that I'm a big wuss in real life. Who knew?

*raises hand*

And to all of you who also found Bargle's steaming crock baffling or offensive, thank you. I'm glad I'm not alone.

James Maliszewski wrote: This trend was canonized long before the "Ecology of ..." series, though. Roger E. Moore's racial "Points of View" series in Dragon, for example, included articles on the society and culture of not just orcs but also other humanoids. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover there were others before even Moore's articles. I don't think the problem lies with fleshing out the mindsets and behaviors of monstrous races but with the widespread notion that alignment in D&D is both useless and dispensable. In my opinion, it's that, more than anything, that leads to nonsense like "orcs are people too."

Yeah, in all seriousness I agree about the root cause being the neutering of alignment. It takes a special kind of miscreant to self-identify as evil. Most folks I knew then (and now!) just wanted to be able to act that way without any consequences or negative connotations.

My finger-pointing at Greenwood is because his by-line of the published Forgotten Realms setting gave his articles in Dragon a gravitas that Moore and others never acquired.

In fact, Greenwood was writing "The Ecology of..." series at the same time he was introducing Elminster to readers. Canonization always follows after-the-fact, and once the Realms became AD&D's defacto setting, it's not only logical but predictable that his ecology series would likewise be incorporated into future publications as a retrofit.