Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer had a great deconstruction of atheism in a setting where gods categorically exist.
There's a really good LP of it on lparchive, if you have the inclination towards such things
LudiousI just wanted a sandwich A temporally dislocated QuiznosRegistered Userregular
I had a dream last night that I was friends with Jay Z's famous rapper son (who doesn't really exist) and he was staying over at my place for the night between tour stops.
Only I could not remember his name at-fucking-all (because he doesn't actually exist) so when I introduced him to people I kept being like "Hey this is *mumble* you know Jay Z's son"
and I can remember thinking in the dream that I wanted to keep calling him LL Cool J but I am like GOD DAMN IT, LUDIOUS HE IS NOT LL COOL J. OH GOD HE'S GOING TO THINK YOU'RE RACIST BECAUSE YOU DON'T REMEMBER HIS NAME. -WE WENT TO SCHOOL TOGETHER-
I hate this topic. It was a really awful situation with no viable way to ensure both the gorilla's and child's safety. I hate that this is a fucking meme.
In all seriousness I think that clerics of an ideology are a huge benefit to D&D and can make a setting much more fun, even if it generally relies on gods parcelling out talents.
in a polytheistic world where there are many gods and people choose one in particular to worship
what kind of asshole chooses to be a cleric of the lawful evil Hitler god over the one that chills out and gets drunk and fucks all day
campaigns where the players are the gm's playthings are just tremendously unfun
We all know Ludious would actually obsess over making a good, fun campaign for his players and actually stress himself out trying to make sure it runs smoothly and self-flagellate every time it went off the rails
And then seethe quietly about how players are blundering hamfisted idiots who ruin everything they touch
players are blundering hamfisted idiots who ruin everything they touch
they can't help it
it's in their nature
It takes a lot of investment to behave well in a game that mostly rewards you with a capacity for violence and in which there are not necessarily consequences for violence or misbehaviour
Just cross-eyed murderous goons carrying backpacks full of weapons cracking heads to see if gold comes out
I like the idea, in an RPG, of piety as a modifier for how much impact a god can have on an individual.
Like, a god can't harm a true atheist because the atheist just doesn't accept the god's existence.
But the atheist also can't benefit from healing miracles and doesn't even believe his teammates are being healed around him which can cause morale issues.
There are ways to balance it out.
I think Final Fantasy Tactics and Arcanum both have shades of this. The Faith/Brave stats in FFT. The magic/tech stuff in Arcanum. The more magical affinity you have the more positive and negative impact magic has on you and how much impact your own magic has.
Belief, as a general concept, is something that can be very nuanced and in the right hands employed well. See: Planescape.
See also Essence in Shadowrun. Healing spells have a much harder time affecting people who have lower Essence (generally folks who have implanted a bunch of cyberware or fucked up their bodies with drugs), for obvious reasons.
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VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
In all seriousness I think that clerics of an ideology are a huge benefit to D&D and can make a setting much more fun, even if it generally relies on gods parcelling out talents.
in a polytheistic world where there are many gods and people choose one in particular to worship
what kind of asshole chooses to be a cleric of the lawful evil Hitler god over the one that chills out and gets drunk and fucks all day
A horny teetotaler with an authoritarian streak
So Donald Trump is your answer
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TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
We all agree that the massive outcry over shooting the gorilla is a little racist, right?
wat
the boy who fell in was black i believe, and there was a ton of "mother should bear all the responsibility for the gorillas death, how dare she not pay attention to her kid for 5 seconds, what a terrible mother, send her to jail, etc etc etc"
there was considerable backlash
The same thing happened with that white kid eaten by a croc at Disneyland
There certainly were people saying that, but at no point did the zeitgeist become about the crocodile. There is absolutely a racial component to the harambe shit.
I'm gonna lean towards "but not really tho"
Tav, I appreciate that racial tension and stuff like that may not be part of your reality, but you do not live in the states.
Really, tho. You just don't have the same perspective. Period.
I get that you're super enlightened now but take it down a notch, yeah?
I don't pretend to understand tensions between catholics and protestants like you do.
Do you think I'm pretending to understand a meme and how it was perceieved by the Internet and people outside of the south?
Have you considered you're overcompensating for living in a racist shithole by being vocal about how progressive you are?
On tensions between catholics and protestants, the manager of my local Tesco has 1688 and 1745 tattooed in his arms
I can picture him being a Rangers hooligan some twenty years ago, ever ready to beat the ever living crap out of those Catholic Celtic scum
Id take Celtic vs Rangers a lot more seriously if they weren't both shit and suffering from big fish in a small pond syndrome.
I've tried watching Scottish football
The situation here is dire
The smugness of Celtic fans really bothers me. The amount of them going on about Sevco and how Rangers don't exist anymore and it's like "lads, really, do you not see how much damage having the SPL be a one horse race has done?"
No one gives a shit about a league where the same team has won easily for the past five years on the trot
In all seriousness I think that clerics of an ideology are a huge benefit to D&D and can make a setting much more fun, even if it generally relies on gods parcelling out talents.
in a polytheistic world where there are many gods and people choose one in particular to worship
what kind of asshole chooses to be a cleric of the lawful evil Hitler god over the one that chills out and gets drunk and fucks all day
people are motivated by more than the pleasure of a full belly and the warm sun?
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
would you describe this choice as being rock hard?
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"okay though what about our own party's cleric, who has just ascended to godhood and forcibly converted your mind to belief"
"sure she's a god but not like a God god y'know?"
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
"ok but what about the time we killed Infernus, the demon god of fire and suffering, and afterwards all his clerics lost their powers"
"I suspect Infernus was the lynchpin in some kind of black-market pyrotechnic smuggling operation"
Legitimately, something like this happened in that game I was talking about; they killed some minor demigod who was granting low level clerical powers to a cult, and the cleric-of-ideology was like "they are having a crisis of faith now, but the ones who believed in the cause will regain their power."
And what do you know, many sessions later one of the cultists showed up as an Ubermensch cleric of himself. It was a really fun campaign.
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There's a really good LP of it on lparchive, if you have the inclination towards such things
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OLcAGbXhWIVcl5IziVpG0eKFJS3xi_Sac9kYMkRFvD8/edit?usp=sharing
Only I could not remember his name at-fucking-all (because he doesn't actually exist) so when I introduced him to people I kept being like "Hey this is *mumble* you know Jay Z's son"
and I can remember thinking in the dream that I wanted to keep calling him LL Cool J but I am like GOD DAMN IT, LUDIOUS HE IS NOT LL COOL J. OH GOD HE'S GOING TO THINK YOU'RE RACIST BECAUSE YOU DON'T REMEMBER HIS NAME. -WE WENT TO SCHOOL TOGETHER-
in a polytheistic world where there are many gods and people choose one in particular to worship
what kind of asshole chooses to be a cleric of the lawful evil Hitler god over the one that chills out and gets drunk and fucks all day
It takes a lot of investment to behave well in a game that mostly rewards you with a capacity for violence and in which there are not necessarily consequences for violence or misbehaviour
Just cross-eyed murderous goons carrying backpacks full of weapons cracking heads to see if gold comes out
he was at summerslam last night because he's smart and knows how great wrestling is
A horny teetotaler with an authoritarian streak
So Donald Trump is your answer
The smugness of Celtic fans really bothers me. The amount of them going on about Sevco and how Rangers don't exist anymore and it's like "lads, really, do you not see how much damage having the SPL be a one horse race has done?"
No one gives a shit about a league where the same team has won easily for the past five years on the trot
people are motivated by more than the pleasure of a full belly and the warm sun?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
would you describe this choice as being rock hard?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"okay though what about our own party's cleric, who has just ascended to godhood and forcibly converted your mind to belief"
"sure she's a god but not like a God god y'know?"
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Legitimately, something like this happened in that game I was talking about; they killed some minor demigod who was granting low level clerical powers to a cult, and the cleric-of-ideology was like "they are having a crisis of faith now, but the ones who believed in the cause will regain their power."
And what do you know, many sessions later one of the cultists showed up as an Ubermensch cleric of himself. It was a really fun campaign.
On average, this thread was careening by at warp 2.3
@Aioua will create the new thread
@Variable is backup