But Why
-
@icanbeyourmuse i was going to tell @tez that of course she would say that since she’s an indoor-plumbing rejecting class warfare winning princess pinching feudal fangirl.
-
@Tez
Rich people do nice things for a few poor people some times makes them keeping everyone poor the rest of the time okay?Like, you get an annual Christmas bonus if you work really, really hard all year long at your job where you are under paid the rest of the year but because you have just enough money with that bonus to not lose your house that makes your CEO taking home 8000% the wages of the hourly workers at your company for his job of showing up twice a week for meetings perfectly okay, right?
Setting up a game where you play nobles and royals is like setting up a game where everyone plays CEOs and you have to optimize the productivity of your company while also putting on the appearance of not being a monster by doing charity events.
Games where you play the elites instead of the people standing up to the elites, are the glorification of everything wrong with the world.
-
@Roz GET respectfully wined and dined before you are treated to a delightful romantic encounter.
-
I am done with this. Instead, I will spend my time being amused by @mietze 's ‘unsaid’ comment to Tez.
-
@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
Or are they doing it because they want to have fun with the rose colored view of nobility?
I’m not saying that you should be mad at them for playing the elites, but it’s pretty degusting.
It took the rich a long time to normalize the propaganda that they are the good guys and we should look up to them. It’s done a lot of harm in the world and this type of genera is furthering that ideal.
If you want to play it, feel free! I just don’t understand why you would want to emulate the scum of humanity.
-
So to you the appeal is in playing the downtrodden masses fighting against the powers that be. The people who have mundane lives and no access to the fantastical excesses of their oppressors - maybe things like magic, fantastical technology, or plumbing…?
-
@De-Villefort said in But Why:
@Rinel
Star Wars is mostly a good example. The Jedi are for all their many flaws, people who act selflessly for the good of society as a whole.You mean the people whose dedication to celibacy and total emotional detachment led one of their strongest to murderize them because no one would help him save the one he loved?
Super-hero based stories are of course focused on basically good people.
Have you followed super hero stories since the 1980s? Or, like, every non-MCU or DC super hero content in the past four or five years?
Firefly is a good, well known story with basically good protagonists.
Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
My problem with the fantasy genera is that the stories who have terrible people for heroes is the standard not the exception.
This is a very narrow view of fantasy, that I can only assume is recency bias. Grimdark fantasy has certainly become extremely popular with the success of A Song of Ice and Fire, but it is a relatively newer approach. Honestly, the rise of anti-heroes in comics like Wolverine, the Punisher, Lobo, comes even before that.
Until the rise of grimdark in the 1990s, most fantasy followed the same basic tropes, and probably 75% of them were Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
Pug from The Riftwar by Raymond Feist
Belgarian from David and Leigh Eddings
Various simple folk in Shannara by Terry Brooks
The Heralds from Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey
Literal engineers and smiths from Recluce by LE Modesitt
All but one major POV char of the Wheel of Time by Robert JordanWith the exception of Belgarion as a “hidden heir” these were tradespeople, thieves, warriors, etc, and almost all of them fundamentally good people, even the thieves.
Now tell me how many upright noble truly good redeeming people were on Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly.
-
Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
I would agree on Wash actually being a ‘good guy’. Maybe not purely since he did go along with what the others decided but I would classify him as a legit good guy. Inara too, I think would fall into a good protagonist. Simon might be the other I would almost say is a good guy. Although, he does go pretty damned far in the stuff he is willing to do. Outside Wash and Inara and maybe Simon, I don’t think I would really call any of the crew of Serenity (or any other parts of Firefly) full of good protagonists.
-
@De-Villefort said in But Why:
In fantasy stories the Knight born into privilege and the Princess born into power are seen as the good guys while they ride their majestic white steed past the peasants dying in the streets.
People are complex, and no one is a good guy or a bad guy. They’re just good or bad for specific people in specific contexts. If you insist your fiction be only about good guys, then you are going to be spending a lot of time watching archived Saturday morning cartoons from the eighties.
-
@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
I would agree on Wash actually being a ‘good guy’. Maybe not purely since he did go along with what the others decided but I would classify him as a legit good guy. Inara too, I think would fall into a good protagonist. Simon might be the other I would almost say is a good guy. Although, he does go pretty damned far in the stuff he is willing to do. Outside Wash and Inara and maybe Simon, I don’t think I would really call any of the crew of Serenity (or any other parts of Firefly) full of good protagonists.
This is Kaylee erasure, and it will not stand.
-
@Jennkryst Haha. She has a good personality and disposition but I’m not sure she would be a ‘good guy’ type. I mean, the introduction of her was of her banging in an engine room because it gets her going. She also doesn’t object to what they do, most of the time.
-
@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
She also doesn’t object to what they do, most of the time.
Wash and Inara don’t raise a fuss about their heists either. Certainly all the characters have some degree of moral grayness, being on an outlaw ship and all, but they all have good in them.
-
I think the first thing maybe is to take this out of a format of a lecture. I don’t mean a lecture in a the pejorative sense, but like…a lecture, given by the authority/professor/headwiz to the audience.
Yep. Unless by authority you mean the person who’s backed by force, in this case the banhammer and the game’s off-switch, the game-runner probably isn’t one. They’re not necessarily the person who knows the most about the game’s setting or its rules and mechanics. They’re not necessarily the one who has the best storytelling skills, or the best people-wrangling skills, or the keenest sense of fun. They’re probably just the person who happened to want to run a game and had the wherewithall to do it. The GM’s the GM 'cause they’re the GM. I find things are a lot more fun if everybody just admits this and we ditch the expressing/defending/challenging authoritah trip.
In the practical, along with some other advice already given about that newsfile, “My call on this, and what we’ll be using for the game, is…” helps.
-
As you’re someone who shouted out James SA Corey I wanted to note that the setting of the Expanse (which by the way I FUCKING LOVE) is pretty much a raging dystopia.
Earth has been environmentally wrecked and suffers from crippling inequality even with the existence of a paltry UBI (this is even before certain things in the show/books that happen to Earth later).
Mars is…uh, like some mad mashup of Soviets and Texas. Not the best standard of living there but I admire the Martians for their sense of communalism.
The Belters? Hahahahaha, hello exploitation.
This seting provides a shitty experience for a large number of people.
-
@SpaceKhomeini and more important to some of the objections, a lot of them are exceptionally shitty to people in their own groups too!
-
So even if @De-Villefort is right and all genres except for sci-fi and cyberpunk are filled with nothing but bad terrible people…
So what?
Sometimes it’s fun to play the villain. Do you think that any actor that gets the role of a villainous type absolutely hates their job while doing so? Do you think Alan Rickman or Christopher Lee cried in anguish every morning they woke up before going off to play their various famous villainous roles?
-
Can this thread please be moved out of Game Gab so we can fully engage with the bad faithness of this original argument?
-
@spiriferida
The appeal to me is playing someone who is making the world a better place, not someone who wallows in extreme privilege and pretends doing something nice every few months makes it okay that their daily luxury is built on crushing the majority.You can play a bad guy if you want but I won’t play on a game where the bad guys are white washed as being the heroes. Nobles and Royals are bad people. Even the best of them. You can not participate in noble society and still be a good person any more than you can be a billionaire and be a good person today.
The very word Noble is propaganda to make horrible people seem like they are somehow better than everyone else so they deserve to enjoy every luxury no matter how many people have to suffer for it.
-
Sometimes it’s fun to play the villain.
Yes! It is! I never said people shouldn’t be allowed to play Nobles and Royals. I just don’t understand why you would want to be the bad guy.
Much of this thread is people being baffled that I can’t understand that part of playing the game requires you ignoring all the inconvenient truths about the peasants living in abject poverty and the mass murders of innocent people that are necessary for the institution of Nobility to continue.
I do understand it. I’m just baffled that anyone is able to enjoy a game where that is a requirement.
-
Now tell me how many upright noble truly good redeeming people were on Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly.
I disliked Battlestar for the very reason that everyone was a ***hole.
Farscape’s characters started off pretty bad, but it was a prison ship. Part of the appeal of that story was them becoming better people as the story progressed but they were not part of an elite class who held power over other people. They were criminals on the run.
The same is true for Firefly. Two people on that ship who were born into privilege was the Doctor and his sister and they gave that privilege up to escape the people hunting them.
But if they had not been on the run, if she had never gone to that school, they would still be living their best lives in the core not caring a fig about the people suffering around them or how unjust society is.
Other than Wash, the other truly good person on the ship was Shepard Book.
We never learned the details of it, but he was apparently a high ranking military official who gave up his power when he saw first hand the evil they did. He did what he could to make things better then when he saw that the system was unredeemable he walked away.
