Why do so many GMs hate jesters and nobles, /tg/? It feels like no matter with whom or what I play they are always either shady or evil.
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Professions/races that are always demonized
Why do so many GMs hate jesters and nobles, /tg/? It feels like no matter with whom or what I play they are always either shady or evil.
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>Jesters
Clowns are fricking sinister.
>Nobles
When a hobo has an evil scheme, nobody cares. When the guy who runs the local economy has an evil scheme, that's a problem.
>Clowns are fricking sinister.
No they aren't. The second most meme fear after dolls.
Humans are the most dangerous animal you're likely to encounter in your life.
Clowns are humans except
>Bizarre, unpredictable behaviour
>Danger colouration
>in weirdly good shape and intermittently very agile
>people around you seem to mindlessly like/laugh at them
Clowns look and act exactly like a child's distorted memory of a schizophrenic rapist. Avoid them.
>what are grizzly bears, snakes, spiders, sharks, and cows
I'm not likely to encounter any of those. Well, maybe cows but they're significantly less likely to injure or kill me than humans are, statistically.
I nearly stepped on a viper once and I saw a female boar with piglets on a parking lot. Not every one is an urbanite.
All of which are benign and aren't "uncanny valley" or distortions of the natural world at all, anon, and all of which have predictable behavior when healthy.
Stop spreading clown disinformation. The amount of murder clowns who have been caught is remarkably low, and you can practically count them on your fingers. The whole uncanny Valley babble about clowns is just nonsense, their make-up and outfit is designed to be whimsical, so any good clown can tell you. Just spend some time close to a clown (preferably alone) and you'll realise how harmless they are. I'm tired of this blatant anti-clown propaganda (probably posted by a mime) and we're really fed up with it.
>who have been caught
hot
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?
Good one.
>Clowns look and act exactly like a child's distorted memory of a schizophrenic rapist.
Clowns don't act like trannies at all, anon. You're off your nut.
The hair and makeup match, anon.
>Clowns don't act like trannies at all, anon.
, unpredictable behaviour
colouration
around you seem to mindlessly laugh at them
three out of four ain't bad.
>jesters
Subverts expectations!
It's the loser who you're supposed to laugh at!
No-one would expect him!
Wait, what do you mean it'd subvert your expectations if Wormtongue was the badguy and had zero justification for his actions outside of pure greed and jealousy?
>nobles
Probably the same as the above, to be opposite to all the time we had where nobles could do no wrong, because they were funding the artist writing the play.
>Professions/races that are always demonized
Organ harvesters.
Necromancers.
Drug dealers.
Can't complain about any of those being bad people.
>Clowns are humans except
>>in weirdly good shape and intermittently very agile
They're drunk to escape acknowledging their job is to be laughed at, often by the noble's autistic son.
>No-one would expect him!
No that's the Spanish inquisition
>Professions/races that are always demonized
Don't forget careers like executioner, dyer, and charcoal burner. Soldiers, through much of history, have been a feared and distrusted lot.
>Soldiers, through much of history, have been a feared and distrusted lot
>Rough, physically imposing men who make a career through violence and there's never only one of them
Soldiers historically do terrible things in occupied territories. It's really only in the past few centuries where militaries in developed Western nations actually punish their soldiers for looting or rape. For most of history that kind of behavior was tolerated or even encouraged.
There were also tanners, for making the whole street stink.
Entertainers, as well. At least actors. 'Actor' was just a synonym for 'prostitute' for a good chunk of western history up to today.
Ties in with dyers, working with most natural dyes had the same problem
You simply have read too much honk-honk rape-murder clown memes on /tg/.
>Clowns look and act exactly like a child's distorted memory of a schizophrenic rapist
Why should I believe you, when you’re clearly honking?
So what you're saying is, Clowns are the true heroes?
>t. Scary Clown
This, real clowns who just wanted to make children laugh have all had their careers ruined because of morons pretending to be scared of them.
Good.
I completely believe that anyone scared of clowns has either never encountered a real clown or only did so when they were little children that would get scared by anything. Clowns literally exist to make you laugh and feel happy, it's like the only clowns they're aware of are the evil caricatures off of truck stop t-shirts.
Answer truthfully: Have you or have you ever been a clown?
Been a clown? No, unless you mean "acting like a clown," I'm not into the whole dressing-up and face-painting thing. I can respect someone who'd dedicate their life to making other people happy, though, especially when it doesn't involve merchandising and corporate bullshit (as long as they're not some secret sexual predator or shit like that).
NTA but 7years of clown experience here. Everyone thinks I'm some sorta drugdealing NEET. Haven't told them the truth cuz I'm too embarrassed, mainly forso parents, they think my main source of income is from drugdealing which.. they aren't really that mad about I suppose..
Won't say lots but the start of my clown-journey was by getting trained in highschool from a oldschool clown, we did drugs together. Think I skipped a fewtoo many school-classes though.. I don't regret it.
This is the silliest backstory I have ever read, so I guess you must be pretty good at your job.
Ay, I'm a natural.. so I've heard =o(
You have the soul of a mighty hero, I wish you nothing but a blessed life full of whimsy and laughter
Thanks Anon, wishes were taken. I'm sure to jolly be til I'm nothing but dust =o)
>trained in highschool from a oldschool clown, we did drugs together
>Everyone thinks I'm some sorta drugdealing NEET
hmm i wonder why
I know someone who is a professional clown and he's the most off-putting dickhead ever.
Sure, but there's always separating the art from the artist. Not to say your friend isn't a shitty clown, too, but I can think of plenty of actors and musicians that I didn't realize were douchebags until years after I was already enjoying their work.
I've never been afraid of "Scary Clown" archetypes. It's trying too hard. But IRL normal clowns can be a little unnerving IMO.
>But IRL normal clowns can be a little unnerving IMO.
that's where that archetype comes from
>But IRL normal clowns can be a little unnerving IMO.
They're supposed to be. It's less of a 'thing' now, but the big part of a clown is they get to transgress normal propriety. Which can be a bit unsettling, especially when they drag you into it.
I was at a circus once where there was a junggling clown who used ping pong balls and would occasionally catch them with his mouth and spit them into the audience. Had a waterbottle to lubricate and was dripping and spitting all over the place as he was walking through the seats. That was enough to make everyone uncomfortable.
Post-corona that would probably be considered a warcrime anyway.
>When a hobo has an evil scheme, nobody cares
Clearly, you've never played Unknown Armies.
>When a hobo has an evil scheme, nobody cares.
Which is honestly very weird, because if you think about it, few things are worse than a man with nothing to lose - especially in an era where tetanus and infection are real life-threatening concerns.
Nevermind peasant rebellions.
In practice I think tetanus and infection do more to stop men with nothing to lose than to help them.
I can think of a lot of things worse than a man with nothing to lose. Frankly give me an enemy with nothing to lose instead of an enemy with a vast fortune, political influence and an army of loyal minions. Maybe I could find some way to make him lose those things, but it'd be a lot easier to stab a hobo serial killer.
>found out clowns are morpho-genetic memory of nephilim and the reason why humans have the uncanny valley effect
I like clowns.
>clowns are morpho-genetic memory of nephilim and the reason why humans have the uncanny valley effect
Anons knows?
Anyways, any loredumps from Anons on Clowns/Jesters would very much be appreciated.
>when you realize the gnostics were dead wrong and the 'old gods' have "escaped" death to the other side, the dry places where there's no rest, only for them to return and turn humans against the owner of the earth in a hopeless struggle to fight against said owner of the world who comes to destroy the earth
I await the end of the world.
Go back to /x/, schizo. DMT is harmless.
>DMT is harmless.
>astral world is gay
Really makes you think.
Hobos are literally the default low level enemy across thousands of games.
A clown is a children's entertainer, but not a particularly high paid one.
This means that he is :
A: Keeping a family tradition of circus performance alive, making him a Carnie.
B: Unable to obtain a higher paying job, making him a loser- homeless guy in makeup dancing for a pittance
C: Keeping the job because he wants to be around children.
A and B are pitiable and suspect, but have some form of dignity attached- it's honest if demeaning work.
C, you have to either have some calling like Mr Rogers or you are a kid fiddler.
There are other options in Feudalism, like getting close to the King's court for suspect reasons that are more intriguing than the above
Maybe that's why.
>A clown is a children's entertainer
Actual clowning isn't just for children, if you ever set foot outside the US.
>When a hobo has an evil scheme, nobody cares. When the guy who runs the local economy has an evil scheme, that's a problem.
yeah. I'm not too sure about the clowns but a powerful man with resources is a classic villain trope
All these replies, and everybody's going the dumbass clown route. Jesters aren't demonized because of clown association; they're demonized because they're irreverent and wholly untrustworthy tricksters who are largely incapable of loyalty, virtue or lasting conviction. Their whole schtick is to stand in opposition to whatever/whoever contributes to balance and stability. Their trickster nature drives them to duplicity and they thrive in environments of imbalance. They are a danger to everyone, themselves included, and THAT - not lolsorandom clownery - is why Jesters are demonized.
Antisemitism.
>Jester
Unfunny jokes and a misguided, if not cruel, sense of whimsy
>Noble
Rarely a lesser noble, always a character of great importance. Annoying and poorly delivered impression of a 19th century English aristocrat.
That’s mainly it. There are some smaller details I left out. Feel free to fill in the gaps.
Rich merchants. Also slave traders, but I guess thats part of the job.
dunno why clowns, but with nobles it's because of the French Revolution, American Revolution, English Civil War, Pre-Republican Rome, Imperial Rome, the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, and a million other cases of people having a bad time over monarchism and/or landed nobility I neglected to mention.
also giving a villain authority is just, like, an easy way for them to bully the protagonist which is the whole point of having a villain in the first place.
Not just because of revolutions, rebellions, and bad rule, but also because literature tended to be written by the higher class, and they wrote about themselves, and so of course all the most wicked villains were usually also noblemen or at least men of good social standing.
>jesters
Any class that encourages players to be "funny" often results in them being anything but. You get exactly what your OP image in fact. A character like Harley Quinn who exists to act wacky and random and is the single shittiest most annoying mainstream character alongside Deadpool.
>jesters
“Teehee I’m so random isn’t this hilarious and not at all annoying”
>nobles
“Yeah I’m secretly a prince to a kingdom who was forced into exile and I wish the whole campaign was based around me since I’m the main character.”
You know, suddenly i want a campaign where every player is a prince in exile and they go on a fabulous bromantic adventure together
>Why am I such a massive homosexual, /tg/?
Because you keep sucking dicks, you prostitute
>murder and rape 33 people
>use your job as a clown to win your victim's trust while doing it
That's where it comes from. It's also why the fear of clowns is uniquely American.
Gacey didn't really use the clown thing to lure in his victims though. That was just a weird hobby he had and it was part of his "community everyman" persona. Most of his victims were guys he hired to work for his construction company. He was a complete stranger to all of them. The media just hyped up the clown angle to sensationalize the story.
>The media just hyped up the clown angle to sensationalize the story.
He also played into his own legend by painting creepy clowns in prison
I saw a professional clown show a few years ago. It was genuinely really funny and goofy. Had a great time with it.
Real clowns are a treat that more people should see. But, when the majority of Americans hear the word "clown", they think underpaid children's birthday party clown who doesn't want to be doing it.
Plenty of nobles in games are good; they often give you quests. Not that plenty aren't evil, but there's a mixture of them. They do tend to be important, because they have money and power.
What professions should be demonised more? Journalists and lawyers?
>Journalists
This is a meme word, there is no real journalism, there are only liars and propagandists.
"Liar" is not a profession; it isn't specific enough.
Undertaker. Although the problem here is that they profit from human misery.
*insurance agents
>Although the problem here is that they profit from human misery
That's kind of a warped view. They bury the dead. That's better than piling up bloated corpses on street corners.
You could say a medical doctor profits from human misery as well. Or you could say they help people in need.
>That's kind of a warped view.
>In Feudal Japan, there was an untouchable caste comprised of "impure" professions such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners.
Actually, this is a classic view at the profession, in most countries undertakers were considered as a caste of untouchables and the majority see them as vultures.
Same with executioners, which is hilarious because pre-modern people were much more inclined to demand crime be punished with blood and there was none of this gay-ass "he could be rehabilitated" shit for murderers. You got your neck stretched (or strangled, before more modern techniques were implemented), and that was it. Take it up with God. But the people that carried this practice out? Shunned.
My party did recently tie up a coffin maker in his shop, pour lamp oil everywhere, and torch the place. But we did it because he'd stolen a saint's bones from a church, not because of his profession.
Note to self run a jester that's just a mundane dude doing his job in my next campaign
Because nobles are the ruling elite and thus a obvious choice for an antagonist. Everyone can relate to fighting an evil/ corrupt government/ government official and pretty all of medieval fantasy fiction is filled with examples. They have power, influence and men at their disposal and inhabit an established position within a societys structure. Be it your Denethor, your Teryn Loghain and Arl Howe, your Perenolde and Ashvane, the entirety of Game of Thrones, your Emyhr and Radovid, your Tharns or a dozen more. They always work and they always work well and most of the time they have relatable motivations of power, influence, legacy and politics, instead of going off the deep end by worshipping space satan to bring the apocalypse.
nobles will always fit well into villainy, it's someone who has power and is well positioned to use it to work towards nefarious ends.
>I'm not sure I've ever seen clowns/jesters demonized in a game I play in, across many different groups, dozens different systems, hundreds of games and decades of playing.
What I do get annoyed with is the clergy being evil, or if not evil, lawful stupid/belligerent to the point of always having an antagonistic relationship with them. I know it's a trope going back to the 3 Musketeers or probably even older. In a world where we know demons, devils, and extraplanar entities intent on destroying the world exist it'd be refreshing to have a Holy Order that thinks their God's beautiful world is worth working with others to save.
>It'd be subversive at this point to have a gruff, craggy man who secretly has a heart of a gold, if he was a priest
I suspect this is what I get for playing with a gay DM/storyteller
>"Someone said I'm going to hell when I was a teenager waaaah"
Whereas I get annoyed by overly Catholic-flavored practices for religions that lack pretty much any of the doctrines or history that would result in such a structure. Give me Grecian mystery cults over fricking cathedrals to the god of the harvest.
You really are an butthole.
repent
You guys would probably really like Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" trilogy. It has the main religion as a blatant Catholicism expy right down to the principal religious figure being a divine Son who was nailed to a tree by the old Empire. And the religion is depicted as wholly benevolent with a clergy made up of genuinely good-natured people.
The setting also has virtuous pagans though so if you're deep into the tradlarp shit you might not like that aspect.
I wouldn't like that, since I'm sick to the teeth of fictional Catholicism.
>Why do so many GMs hate jesters
S'my game
Get rid of 'er
She's shite
DAE IT
Noble make good villians because aside from having built-in justification for them having the resources to execute their will plan you can have them being high class fancy buttholes who do cool stuff when not murdering thousands. A while ago I read 813 and one of the most memorable scenes involved Lupin going to the opera with the rival criminal mastermind, making small talk, laughing and having a great time before trying to kill each other in the street after the show. Bond and Goldfinger have a nice chat before his thugs raid Fort Knox.
People who are afraid of clowns piss me off. I suspect there's some mental illness or feedback loop (clowns are scary because I think clowns are scary) that they try to justify after the fact by convincing themselves that Pennywise is the canonical clown.
>People scared of things I'm not have to be mentally ill
Unironically an autistic thought process.
>something that has historically been considered funny and amusing
>umm that is actually REALLY scary
This is not a normal line of thought.
And you jerk off to ancient fertility statuettes too, right?
It's a thing in Europe, too. And in central America. I don't think it occurs in cultures that never actually had clowns like ours.
Reminder that clowns are adult entertainment.
Jesters
>literaly trained in mutiple skills to just entertain people and has to be good at them to become a jester
>are often very close to the rulling class and can possible run skits or gags to influence the leaders opinion on issues or groups
>literally uses social malpulation to make people laugh
>wears a mask or heavy maskup to conceal idenity
>there is a fine line between genius and madman espically in performers
>large baggy clothes able to conceal and hold many objects/items
>in a profession the simple and children easily trust
>great at improv so can likey get laughted out a sitution or problem even if caught at scene of crime
>literally seen so comical that people will have a hard time to believe one can be evil
a psychopathic jester is truly a terrifying concept
>Jesters
They've been made to be sinister over time and people fail to understand their original purpose historically.
>Nobles
The elite are the enemy, and anyone who thinks otherwise should refer to picrel.
>nobles
useless leeches
>jesters
useless leeches (funny)
Clowns scare people (mostly children, who go on to remain scared of clowns as adults) because they're transgressive. They dress bizarrely. They act out of turn, and even illogically. They might charm you with a trick, scare you with a spook, or humiliate you with a prank. No one stops them, either, so they're this obvious ambiguous figure you just gotta experience. For adults - for whom clowning was originally derived - this is amusing, they have a full understanding of their absurdity. For kids, it can potentially be scary.
There is also the fact that circus clowns have been slowly disappearing with circuses while most children only encounter them now at birthday parties for very young children where very over-exuberant parents overstimulate a 2 or 3 year old to the point of long term trauma and now the appearance of a clown triggers childhood ptsd.
I've always wanted to play a jester, but one who was sad
Nobles tend to have more mercenary minds due to other people (usually other nobles) trying to take power from them. I've honestly never noticed people demonizing jesters in tt games
Despite being a clown, John Wayne Gacey never actually committed any crimes as a clown, it was just his day job.
>nobles
>anything but evil
get a job, poorgay
Maybe the fricking nobles should get jobs, how about that?
>jesters
Are we talking True Clowns or just people who wear makeup?
>Jester Hate
More of a player hate directed at the DMs who make them unlikable. The outright evil ones are usually in emulation of The Joker. It’s a shame because a lot more can be done with the trope that usually gets used for the king’s trusted advisor, even though the jester can also perform that role. I’ve played a spellcasting jester and had a little fun with him but it did get a little old when I ran out of jokes.
I sometimes daydream about going clownmode. Being a clown seems so fun. I wish I was a rich NEET so I could get away with adopting a clown persona 24/7. Eventually the clown would replace the man. Like how Batman is the real person and Bruce Wayne is the mask.
>Why do so many GMs hate... nobles
For the very same reason why so many people hate politicians
>Nobles
Wokeism mostly. Look how much this generation disrespects successful hardworking CEOs like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamer. It's jealousy that sprouts from laziness.
>Jesters
A few of them were supposedly assassins historically
>Clowns
Because Americans ruined clowns for everyone and now live in fear of clowns murdering them
>Nobles
Do you hate plot hooks?