D&D is a genocide simulator. Even compared to other fantasy media, there is a peculiar emphasis on invading your home and killing you and taking your stuff. But, let's be real here, most (especially but not exclusively modern) fantasy media puts a lot of emphasis on killing monsters and taking their stuff. It echoes the sorts of stories that all humans have been telling for centuries, evil is personified as a human-like thing, and you can profit by killing it.
I remember what D&D forums were like in the 90s, everyone understood this, and everyone had a different take, but a lot of people would just say "It's make-believe and it's fun" and just leave it at that. And if you followed the conversation, you'd always find a few people digging deeper, and they'd always come to the same basic consensus: that imagination is good, and that creative exercises dealing with morality can only serve to strengthen our moral foundations, whatever they may be.
I'm not trying to make a bad day for anyone, but my experience here is that most /tg/ posters from the last 6 or 8 years are completely allergic to everything that I just said. Why? D&D glorifies conquest, and conquest in the real world is evil, but it's a fun power fantasy and it isn't hurting anyone. Why is that so hard to swallow?
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Most gamers from the 00s back were used to being persecuted, and this feels like more of the same.
You're also double dipping. On the one hand, you're arguing that there's this genocide/conquest allegory and that's bad. You're also saying the bad thing is fine. That's calculated to get you the maximum amount of people annoyed. Plus the language of it, the lack of any kind of constructive element to the criticism...
All in all, you've pitched this bait well and I respect the hustle.
Happy genocide stories can be, and are, and always have been, used to motivate soldiers and build war. But you don't accomplish this by letting any old basement-dweller muck about with your story, you accomplish it by enforcing a partial monopoly on storytelling, you accomplish it by punishing criticism and deconstruction, you accomplish it by preventing thought. This supports my general hippy-liberal ethic that free expression is a good thing and that the conversation can enrich us all even when we don't agree. Poo-pooing on heroic fantasy in basements just gives more power to the ruling class, because these stories have power, and your rulers want that power all for themselves.
On a broader level, if your 'moral questioning' or whatever is disruptive to your group then I think you should shut the frick up, but if you complain about moral questioning wherever you find it (Burmian basketweaving bulletons) then you also need to shut the frick up, both of those positions are hostile to the conversation, just in different ways.
Yea, that's what peddlers of moral authority have always done, they argue about what the goodguys and badguys should look like. It's where their power comes from, it doesn't matter if they're christian or communist or fascist or trans rights or what. That's not specifically what I was talking about, but it sort of is, because it's one of the moral ramifications of storytelling.
I don't think that's an especially compelling argument, but I also object to the implication that paying more attention to the topic of colonization is devaluing. That's backwards. You could say "disrespecting", and I would say "cry me a river", but you can't say it's devaluing.
>That's not specifically what I was talking about, but it sort of is, because it's one of the moral ramifications of storytelling.
I meant is more as a structural format humans operate with, so while the contextual details of what you are discussing are not exactly that, the methods, reasons and way it will unfold likely are.
>moral ramifications of story telling
While story telling, games and social activity are social artifacts with interesting indicators about the makers, engineering the artifacts does not have 1:1 effect on the social groupings that use them. The idea that there are moral ramifications of storytelling seems to play into puritanism, unless you mean that it can be a useful way to engage with difficult concepts. That level of nuance where there may not be a simple answer of GvsE is not very common in pulp, nor is it a very viable site of social engineering, merely an indicator.
>I meant is more as a structural format humans operate with, so while the contextual details of what you are discussing are not exactly that, the methods, reasons and way it will unfold likely are.
As pampered and semi-educated westerners, we have the power to examine all our pro-war stories and ask what this means about us. We aren't the first to do so, certainly, but most people in most of history didn't have that kind of perspective, they liked storis that made them feel good ("you're going to live forever") and were hostile towards stories that didn't. And when you see leftoids and rightoids arguing about who the badguys should be they're usually operating on the more primitive level, "if the story makes me feel bad then it's bad". You aren't going to change their mind, but if you have to address them, just remind them that stories aren't real. They're operating below the level of that argument.
A person can say that african-esque orcs are evil propaganda and are harming society, and this is a somewhat more sophisticated argument, it acknowledges what stories are and what they aren't. But I find that most such arguments still don't hold up to a simple examination of the nature of fantasy, or an examination of social engineering, or censorship. Trying to delete african-esque orcs simply doesn't affect society in the way that they want it to.
>The idea that there are moral ramifications of storytelling seems to play into puritanism, unless you mean that it can be a useful way to engage with difficult concepts.
Yes, I have made this very clear. Everyone uses stories to engage with difficult concepts. Even simplistic stories (the story of heroes fighting badguys) is used to engage with difficult concepts, that's why they're about death and conflict and sacrifice, this is very basic.
>Everyone uses stories to engage with difficult concepts.
vs
>but most people in most of history didn't have that kind of perspective, they liked storis that made them feel good
You're kind of moronic.
Even us pampered westerners, with whatever time/resources we use for whatever we want, will default to wanting oversimplified pulp stories of good being what we like vs evil being what we don't. That's about as far as most humans will get regardless of pampering. Same humans hamurabi was dealing with, different haircuts.
I don't owe you shit. You're the one deadset on ...
>pulp invented space travel.
nvm, you're moronic. Have fun huffing your own farts about comicbooks being great literature, and great literature being meaningful social engineering. It isn't.
Are you sure you're the anon I was just responding to? You don't sound very sharp, you sound more like the guy from earlier, the one who kept trying to lump together everyone he didn't like with vague, flailing accusations of hypocracy.
Oh well.
Working out who the badguys look like and who the goodguys look like IS using stories to engage with difficult concepts. "This story is about death, but for some reason I can't stop retelling it", that's using stories to engage with difficult concepts. "This hero is kind of an butthole sometimes, but I like him!", that's using stories to engage with difficult concepts.
Hamurabi's humans didn't have the power to casually examine a continent-century worth of stories and ask what that says about the people telling them, but we can, and in doing so we are also using stories to engage with difficult concepts. All humans use stories to engage with difficult concepts at all times, this starts on the level of base feelings, but it doesn't end there, and I never said it did. Stories touch us on an animal level, they grab us by our emotional core, and then they trick us into looking at things that we don't really want to look at.
Do you think you see some contradiction here? Because I don't think you do. I think you're relying on a rhetorical style (vague, flailing accusations of hypcocracy) which eventually leads you to deconstruct all forms of rational thought and thereby eject yourself from the conversation.
You at least understand that the space race was propaganda, right? You understand that it had no practical purpose, either for the U.S. government or for the soviets, and that it was done to capture the imaginations of the people, who had been primed by early 20th-century science fiction? Actually, the people building the actual rockets and balloons would have never done so without stories to inspire them (they kept saying so), but we can ignore that for now, just look at the geopolitics.
>That level of nuance where there may not be a simple answer of GvsE is not very common in pulp
Cripes, what are you smoking? You now owe me a 10-page essay on the development of American comic books, starting with Superman 1 and going on at least until Moore (but you can talk about woke Marvel too if you want, it's the same thing. It's impossible to tell stories about good vs evil without reflecting on the nature of good and evil. I'm telling you, with supers comics we were actively trying not to take this shit seriously, and we failed).
>nor is (pulp) a very viable site of social engineering, merely an indicator.
I broadly agree, but try to remember that pulp invented space travel and cell phones. And the boundary between "pulp" (just for fun) and "religion" (serious fricking business let's build some pyramids) wasn't always so stark.
>putting christians in the same category as those
combat is just the most easily understood game
hitting is scoring, and death is the lose condition
anything else requires abstraction
Its not actually as different as it appears. The pallet of who/what is Evil has shifted, that's about it. Its just fashion of who to exterminate to profit off of. It'll swing again, marketing trends as a mix of cultural phenomena and engineered production.
When I read it, that's stupid of me to write. It is different, but more in how it appears. The underlying construction of
>fight evil
>be good
>get bigger game numbers
>occasionally discuss morality and choices or something that someone will get autistic about but overall is just games
is similar. The aesthetic/fashion of good and evil shift around for sure though and you will likely experience generational dissonance or other alienation sort of things through it, marketing hype, etc. The ability for social media to amplify the autist taking it too seriously does seem different. That's more of a social media thing than a d&d thing specifically though.
So is it a good thing?
Or is it a bad thing that is good because it's not real?
Does it teach moral lessons?
Or does it not teach moral lessons because it's just a game?
Let's face it. You have no games, so the only game you have left is arguing about fantasy morals.
When will you stop avatar posting?
Don't use my Oshi.
Bait thread but: the issue with handwaving away an intrinsically colonial power fantasy with
>its fun!!
is that it devalues the lived experience of oppression that many extant groups of exploited persons suffer with even today.
0/10, too obvious.
Ok Timmy. Refute any part of it.
Easy, you're gay. Nerd.
>is that it devalues the lived experience of oppression that many extant groups of exploited persons suffer with even today.
Don't worry, I couldn't possible value their lived experiences any less so that's not a problem.
Based
I roleplay as a lawlful good human paladin, so I can gain divine favor by smiting evil races.
>intrinsically colonial power fantasy
surviving past the age of 10 is intrinsically colonial power fantasy too and yet here you are
>its fun!!
it also has value in that it forces people to engage with hypotheticals that they can judge morally and draw conclusions that may be applicable in their lives
>it devalues the lived experience of oppression that many extant groups of exploited persons suffer with even today
if sitting in a basement rolling dice somehow harms starving african kids, frick em
If they didn't want to suffer from the colonial power fantasy, they shouldn't have been weak, not unlike goblins and orcs.
Is there anything good that expresses this sort of amoral Ganker conservative outlook as an actual in-world perspective? Goblin Slayer isn't good.
no but john carter of mars is famously about a former confederate soldier who, while fleeing from a group of apache, ends up travelling into space where he teaches the foolish, inferior natives his white man ways and become their king, twice over
IIRC the red and black Martians are pretty advanced.
John Carter alludes to the idea that being brainwashed by the cult of the thern is similar to having fought for the confederacy at one point. Most of the ideas he introduces to the Martians are ones of friendship and tolerance when he’s not ripping and tearing. He’s based but not in the way many would thing. For the time he’s surprisingly liberal.
God has forsaken us.
>Bait thread but: [more b8]
t. seething orc.
>and conquest in the real world is evil
It isn't. As long as your culture is superior you have a moral obligation to spread it. Even by sword, if necessary.
>most /tg/ posters from the last 6 or 8 years are completely allergic to everything that I just said. Why?
Because D&D is a shit system that nobody wants to play. There are so many options of better systems out there that can do genocide simulator better than D&D ever could.
Quality post.
Why should your opinion/analysis hold any signficance to me?
It all goes to the fact that people think its racist to have evil only races only then to turn around and say how because its a fantasy game their shortstacks kobold should be able to swing a giant hammer 8 times the size of herself while casting magic through her eyes.
What's wrong with that take? Do shortstacks with eye lasers propagate some sort of genocidal meme that I'm not aware of?
I'm not saying that people who want to play kobolds are stupid. I'm saying the same people who proclaim stupid crap like bikini armor should not be a thing because its not realistic or how there should be no such thing as evil races because that's racist are also the same morons who want to be a half angel half demon who can punch through mountains then say "its a fantasy setting let me do what I want".
>also the same morons
Anon, it's really not, the people saying that evil orcs are a colonial fantasy are not saying "it's a fantasy setting let me do what I want", they're saying "It's a fantasy of female empowerment and self-idealization and it's also something that males have taken for granted for centuries." They're poised against the "It's just a fantasy" argument, which is stupid, but that's where they are. They could say "it's just a fantasy let me have what I want" and also say evil orcs are racist and that wouldn't make them hypocrites. They don't understand tolkien, and we should pitty them, but "unrealistic power fantasies are harmful" and "race war parables are harmful" are completely different arguments.
So you are saying the same people who invaded the hobby to proclaim everything is problematic are also not the same newcomers who want to play special snowflake characters with power fantasies then browbeat people into accepting it because "It's a fantasy setting"?
Nobody "invaded the hobby" and nobody is "proclaiming" anything but common sense. Sorry your rock got turned over and you can't be racist over plastic space men and get away with it any more. Do better or do something else like tying flies
>Nobody invaded the hobby
>Your behavior must change
His behavior wouldn't have to change if his community weren't invaded. How are y'all so doublethink constantly?
People who look different from you enjoying the same games that you play is not an invasion. How are y'all so unable to nuance constantly?
You lying two faced motherfricker, he wasn't talking about people that look different from him. He was talking about subversive buttholes that come into his hobby and expect everything to change because it's "problematic" or "harmful", even though no problems or harm ever came from the hobby.
You can still buy used copies of Oriental Adventures and say the n word in your basement with your bald single friends dude. You realise the world and society moves on outside of your myopic life don't you? Nobody cares what you do as long as you do it quietly and out of sight.
If your gang kept out of hobbies you don't even like in the first place we'd not even bother with your existence. Yet here you are, searching for things you don't like, demanding we change things that aren't bad all for the sensitive taste of Your Most Holy Majesty.
>everyone I don't like is the same person
I was always under the impression it was the same humorless gays who hate revealing armor with a genocidal hatred of anything that isnt a human. The people who say if races arent inherently evil then you are doing them wrong. They tend to be the rpg conservatives, where as the rpg liberals tend to be pro out there armor and morally flexable races and monsters
>I was always under the impression it was the same humorless gays who hate revealing armor with a genocidal hatred of anything that isnt a human
Why would you ever think that?
Why wouldn’t you?
a person able to recognize that oppai e-girl golbins aren't real is also probably able to recognize that orcs aren't real, but black people are
Why is it we have the equivalent to orcs but not oppai e-girl goblins
>conquest in the real world is evil,
gr8 b8 m8.
Maybe you should skip the tabletop part and go to F-List if you want nothing but a multiracial circlejerk
Human history is one of conquest and preventing conquest, even today it's the same way, even if we avoid the messy feudal or civic aspects of it by outsourcing the savagery to corporations.
It's not genocide if they aren't human. Also, they never seem to run out of shitty orcs and goblins. A better analogy is pest control.
>D&D is a genocide simulator.
Yes.
>But, let's be real here, most (especially but not exclusively modern) fantasy media puts a lot of emphasis on killing monsters and taking their stuff. It echoes the sorts of stories that all humans have been telling for centuries, evil is personified as a human-like thing, and you can profit by killing it.
It's one of the easiest narratives to swallow. Alongside the fantasy of personal development
With each subsequent edition, more and more, yes, a genocide simulator. That's why, for all its strangeness and unsophistication, I prefer B/X. At least then your character was easy to kill, and if you wanted to succeed you had to think of other things to do than fighting and killing.
gaming is for social rejects.
so them gravitating to mass murder is no surprise.
>D&D is a genocide simulator. Even compared to other fantasy media, there is a peculiar emphasis on invading your home and killing you and taking your stuff. But, let's be real here, most (especially but not exclusively modern) fantasy media puts a lot of emphasis on killing monsters and taking their stuff. It echoes the sorts of stories that all humans have been telling for centuries, evil is personified as a human-like thing, and you can profit by killing it.
Firstly, there's a difference between monsters and humanoids in dnd, and while I certainly don't doubt earlier renditions of dnd were shit in terms of handling races, this has little to do with how DnD is handled NOW. Keep in mind, most of the "evils" that a lot of old fantasy stories tell are often against monsters or malicous entities which are far from human beings- often spawned from primordial or eldrtich creations with less than human features who often act as an aggressor as opposed to a defender. For all the western chauvanism that LOTR sometimes exhibits, the realms of man, dwarves, hobbits and the elves are far from an imperialist entity.
>D&D glorifies conquest... but it's a fun power fantasy and it isn't hurting anyone. Why is that so hard to swallow?
How does it glorify "conquest" NOW though? Half the time DnD is more of a power-fantasy where a band of adventurers act as a sort of strike team to kill an agressing force. By that logic, I may as well feel bad and shameful that the Nazis were "conquered" by the USSR, nevermind the Nazis were a pack of genocidal imperialist maniacs. When you're launching an all out counter offensive on a tyrannical ancient red dragon, or liberating barovia from Strahd or defending a town from bandits in Theros, are you really "conquering" them?
I'm disputing your views on DnD as it existed THEN, but as it exists NOW, especially with the community that's evolved from it, the only one doing "conquest" is my groups warlock who likes to top the bard.
*not as it existed then.
Sidenote: personally i'd say this just presents the limitations of dnd- you're there to fight monsters, get into silly shenanigans and goof around being murder hobos. If you're expecting some sort of "game of thrones" like game, you're going to realise the limitations of the roll20 system.
It's not even a limitation of the system. You can have Game of Thrones with D&D and some people have. But its legacy is as a war game where you go kill stuff and bring back treasure. The stories were just there to give context and make you care more about why you're fighting.
These days D&D is closer to the 80s cartoon, ironically enough.
We've always been the monsters.
Although it is interesting about the mechanical difference.
Are you talking about the way 5e handles magic items, the way they took them out of the basic stats-per-level math, so that a party without magic items is always the baseline assumption? Because that's legit, that was a big step away from D&D-as-genocide-simulator. And I don't think that was necessarily the intent, I think it improved the game in a number of ways that I as a 3eeaboo wouldn't have predicted, but one of the effects is that the loot-cycle isn't an assumed part of gameplay, you don't have to do any math to get rid of it.
I should say that most 5e adventures are still all about going to cool places full of evil creatures, and all the GMs I've seen still hand out magic items like it's 3e, to say that 5e "doesn't glorify conquest" is going way too far. But you still have a point.
>These days D&D is closer to the 80s cartoon, ironically enough.
Oh shit he's right.
Honestly if squads of D&D nerds started methodically wiping out trap houses IRL I would cheer them on
>and conquest in the real world is evi
We did nothing wrong in the great discoveries
>genocide simulator
Even being extremely generous with the number of monsters you actually kill throughout a average campaign. You still; primarily kill creatures that breed and mature rapidly and no matter what you do you'll never put a significant dint in the population, extraplanar entities that have a complex relationship with death and are rarely truly ever fully destroyed. 99% of the things you could feasibly genocide are things that shouldn't exist in the first place.
>D&D is a genocide simulator.
You don't play games.
>D&D is a genocide simulator.
Sounds awesome. Maybe I’ll give this D and D thing a try. Oh there’s multiple editions of it. I probably want the most recent one right? That’s what everyone will be playing
Conquest and genocide are good in some cases anyway so who cares, especially if it’s against evil monsters
What a very midwit gross post-modern deconstructionist way of looking at a fake about going on heroic adventures to fight objectively cosmically evil creatures and take their magic items that they used for evil, to then use for good.
> “it’s just a harmless fantasy!”
Sure, bud. Tell that to the people you’re genociding.
I can't tell if I'm too high for this thread, or not high enough
Hey Anon! Did you know that:
>SHIFT+RIGHT CLICK= HIDDEN THREAD
No need to thank me.
Because people want to be heroes. Problem is, they have different ideas of what constitutes "heroing". Until there is only one definition of "hero", there will be conflict.
If it bugs you, then try the alternative and make it a story about fighting off the monsters attempting to kill you and take your stuff. Make the monsters take the fight to the player.