Stubbazubba wrote:Because that's what the OP is specifically asking about, Lago.
Asking where something comes from is not the same thing as asking how to deal with it.
Or going by analogy, I think the question of why and how Western Christians got into their peabrains that communism is the epitome of evil (in a book that goes quite a bit further in communism than even Marx proposed) is an interesting enough question; the question of dealing with that perception is much less interesting. Unless you're a sociologist or policy maker, the answer to that one is to sneer at and mock the denialists and their selective denialism. The applications of this to 'grognards and guns in fantasy' should be obvious.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Yes, and apparently you're firmly in the "how to deal with it" side of the thread, while the rest of us are talking about the "where it comes from" side. I contributed to that side of the thread by saying that even though I enjoy settings where a knight's armor stops a bullet and know that there are hundreds of legitimate reasons that that makes perfect sense, I nevertheless have a knee-jerk reaction when I see the situation without any other context. So I can see where people who can't swallow guns with their fantasy are coming from, even though I think they're wrong. See? That was on topic. Then you replied pointing out that with even just the context of generic fantasy conventions, my knee-jerk reaction doesn't hold up. Which is exactly what I said. Then virgil commented that people go to great lengths to hard-code that knee-jerk reaction into the rules, and you're not going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced. To which you replied, "I don't have to, why do we even care about grognard denial?" The answer is, because he asked, so we're talking about it.
To use your analogy, I could say that growing up as a christian in anti-communist America, since the communism we saw was Stalinism or Maoism or the other oppressive regimes in Asia/Latin America, I have a knee-jerk reaction that equates communism with totalitarianism, as well as atheism. Of course upon further review of the bible, the early christians endorsed a very strict code of communism, and the un-Christian exploitation of labor as defined by Marxism contrasted with the more equitable ideal of communism is compelling, as well, so my knee-jerk reaction towards communism would be effectively undercut, and as I've studied the topic both theologically and scholastically, I've come to the conclusion that communism is certainly as valid an idea as capitalism. I know, though, that many people can't get past the associations with totalitarianism and atheism, which is a threat to what they believe in, both from a human rights perspective and a religious perspective, so I can see where they're coming from even though I think they're wrong. To which you replied, "Book of Acts. Christians have no ground to stand on going after communism." Virgil replies, "But Christians are entrenched in their beliefs, the sermons are fiery, and there's no way you're gonna convince them, no matter how many times you reference the book of Acts." To which you reply, "Why are we trying to convince any peabrained Christians anyway?"
We're not. We're talking about where the assumptions come from and what they are, you are the only one who is veering off topic into individual criticisms of a view that precisely no one in the thread holds.
Last edited by Stubbazubba on Wed May 30, 2012 6:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:the answer to that one is to sneer at and mock the denialists and their selective denialism.
But then you irritate the two people who actually do agree with you, and they won't let you use the hugbox anymore.
Seriously, sneering mockery is like masturbation: it may be amusing enough in private, but doing it in public rarely advances your long-term goals.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
Sneering mockery serves exactly two, fairly narrow purposes: Making you seem smarter than other people (even if you're not) and making other people go away. Accomplishing either of these brings us no closer to understanding anything.
fectin, Chamomile: If you want to understand how and why the meme started, I'm game. If you want to engage people within the confines of the meme it's a waste of time.
It's just a fact of life. If someone wants or believes in something contradictory, it is a complete waste of time trying to engage them within the confines of the contradiction. If you want to introduce a third factor that resolves the contradiction (such as for this argument, making power scale so much that after a certain point in the game firearms are a meaningless distinction) that's fine. If you want to make them discard something that ends the contradiction, that's also fine. But until that happens, trying to make a person happy on that point is not only a waste of time it's flat-out impossible. People asking for impossible things after being told why it's impossible deserve nothing other than our contempt.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:fectin, Chamomile: If you want to understand how and why the meme started, I'm game. If you want to engage people within the confines of the meme it's a waste of time.
I didn't even bother reading past this because how and why the meme started was very explicitly the point of the thread from the word go.
Last edited by Chamomile on Wed May 30, 2012 7:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Stubbazubba wrote:Yes, and apparently you're firmly in the "how to deal with it" side of the thread, while the rest of us are talking about the "where it comes from" side.
We're not. We're talking about where the assumptions come from and what they are, you are the only one who is veering off topic into individual criticisms of a view that precisely no one in the thread holds.
me wrote:I think that the biggest objection of guns has to come from people who want Conan-level fantasy that stays at Conan-level. Once the power level of the setting gets enough so that people can easily block, dodge, or tank gunfire as easily as they would arrows or swords the Bruce Lee vs. Grandma thing ceases to become a problem. Guns just become another weapon of choice. Of course, the power level of a setting doesn't have to increase very much at all before gunfire becomes just another flavor of fireball or crossbow bolt, so people who scream that guns 'ruin' fantasy have a rather narrow scope in mind.
So, am I going to get an apology for you accusing me of being off-topic? I mean, that's a pretty clear smoking gun of me whinging about the 'where'.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Wed May 30, 2012 7:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Chamomile wrote:I didn't even bother reading past this because how and why the meme started was very explicitly the point of the thread from the word go.
Oh, so you get to go off-topic about wondering about the efficacy of tone and certain engagement styles and it's okay, but my off-topicness is grounds for you to ignore everything else? That's very consistent of you.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Wed May 30, 2012 7:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
I've been thinking about that Sanderson blog. If the 2 fundaments of Fantasy are magic and worldbuilding, then you don't need to have heroic individuals to have a fantasy story. I suppose I should already know that after Perdido Street Station (another fantasy with guns, by the way).
i got suckered into playing a fantasy game set roughly in the age of knights once . .
seeing how the GM had decided that it would be close to real life how the stuff works, i did the logical thing . .
I made a dorf, i had a mine, i started inventing gun-powder . .
Big eyes, long face, stunned silence by all around the table who, simply, had not thought of trying something like that . . Some time later, a mage wanted to show off, threw a fire-ball. So i lit a little sack full of gun powder on fire on one end and THREW it as far as i could. Comment:"so what, i can throw fireballs too!"
The reason behind stuff like that is, that most people simply don't really know what was invented when or how and just what kind of stuff was available where at which point in time . . so they simply assume:"no no, this is the 1900's, they don't have machines!" and lump ALL KINDS OF STUFF in with that . . like black powder. and the logical implementation of uses for black powder . .
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
It's not a problem if gunpowder weapons are a part of the game, or even if they get introduced by player action within the game. But it's not appropriate to assume your Character has knowledge of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
It's no more reasonable to allow a character to make black-powder weapons with no 'in-game' knowledge of the process than to allow a character to make a functioning laser weapon or even an electric flashlight.
The fact that it is possible without breaking the rules of physics (already mostly irrelevant when the sun could literally be a chariot pulled across the sky) doesn't make it any better.
deaddmwalking wrote:You quoted the statement of the person that you disagree with:
"When I saw Torchlight had guns, I decided not to try it. I prefer fantasy settings."
I have not seen the original post, but the implication here is 'I prefer fantasy settings that don't have guns'.
I thought the implication there was that Torchlight wasn't fantasy. And I think Desden's desire to explore that attitude is a perfectly good one.
In my very highly biased opinion:
[*]Those people who equate fantasy with something vaguely medievalishesquelike are really just fanboys of <Tolkein, D&D, RenFaires, Something Similar>.
[*]Fantasy = Magic (Since I gravitate toward historical fiction, I tend to divide fantasy up into historical time periods).
[*]Sci-Fi = The Future.
Should something have both magic and be about the future, it's both.
Avoraciopoctules wrote:I've been thinking about that Sanderson blog. If the 2 fundaments of Fantasy are magic and worldbuilding, then you don't need to have heroic individuals to have a fantasy story. I suppose I should already know that after Perdido Street Station (another fantasy with guns, by the way).
I'm not sure why you needed some guy's blog to tell you that. Heroic stories/epics are a slightly different category. There are plenty of fantasy stories with non-heroic characters, including (arguably) LotR and the Hobbit. The major characters spend most of the story completely unarmed, and their only real value is their ability to walk.
well, i had given him several usually fluff only skills just for that purpose . .
mostly mining related, some geology, some physics, some chemical stuff knowledge, some metallurgy . . it was a dorf after all . . people figured i'd want to make armor, shields and swords and axes and stuff and some poisons . . all it takes is some creative application of available skill-sets after all . .
and i did not go and say:"i am making blackpowder"
i basically started with establishing a new mine, deciding to give up the old one and torching stuff that were mostly useless byproducts of general mining activity . . sulfur, coal and potassium nitrate, some old and broken tools . . threw it all into an old fireplace and lit it on fire to try and smelt some ore out of stone . . what happened was quite different. and afterwards it was trying to figure out what went wrong. and how to do it again. the GM actually was the first to figure it out and watched me make the appropriate rolls . . had i failed the rolls, nothing would have happened . . or i would have suffered more consequences than my beard being singed off half way to my face . . which actually was problematic, because dwarves in that system ain't allowed to cut off their beard . .
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
Avoraciopoctules wrote:I've been thinking about that Sanderson blog. If the 2 fundaments of Fantasy are magic and worldbuilding, then you don't need to have heroic individuals to have a fantasy story. I suppose I should already know that after Perdido Street Station (another fantasy with guns, by the way).
I'm not sure why you needed some guy's blog to tell you that. Heroic stories/epics are a slightly different category. There are plenty of fantasy stories with non-heroic characters, including (arguably) LotR and the Hobbit. The major characters spend most of the story completely unarmed, and their only real value is their ability to walk.
I mean Heroes in the Greek sense. Or, to borrow terminology from AS, Luminaries. There totally are special characters in The Hobbit. You have the wizard that organizes the whole adventure, for one.
I've always really dug guns in (quasi-medieval) fantasy settings; same thing with swords in modern settings. No particular reason, just personal preference.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
Schwarzkopf wrote:I've always really dug guns in (quasi-medieval) fantasy settings; same thing with swords in modern settings. No particular reason, just personal preference.
I like tech levels around that of the Mughal Empire in India, sometimes with the addition of early rail lines. You can totally have horse archers and musketeers in the same army.
While that might be a part of it, I think the consensus is that most people who believe that guns don't belong in fantasy like a type of fantasy that doesn't have guns.
deaddmwalking wrote:While that might be a part of it, I think the consensus is that most people who believe that guns don't belong in fantasy like a type of fantasy that doesn't have guns.
I am getting the idea that you think that the position I am talking about (That you cannot have guns in fantasy) doesn't exist, since you seem to be trying very hard to rephrase it as "I don't like guns in fantasy".
They are two very different positions.
Last edited by Desdan_Mervolam on Wed May 30, 2012 10:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Don't bother trying to impress gamers. They're too busy trying to impress you to care.
"You cannot have guns in fantasy" is pretty noncontroversially wrong. I've listed 2 novels so far where gunslinging adventurers or massive numbers of musket-bearing policemen are integral to the setting. These are widely viewed as being "Fantasy" in genre.
Desdan Mervolam wrote:So, the consensus here seems to be this mostly comes from people who think guns must be overpowered to portrayed properly.
I think it comes mostly for people who see Conan the Barbarian/Lord of the Rings as the end-all/be-all of fantasy. Guns, even the shitty pre-19th century firearms, pretty much derail those kinds of stories. Of course, considering even that that woefully low-tier characters like Batman and Green Arrow don't shit themselves when a dozen men with guns try shooting at them, this is a very restricted scope of fantasy indeed. Again, not that there's anything wrong with that.
The people who think that any campaign with a higher power level than LotR/CtB isn't Real Fantasy probably overlap a great deal with the number of people who view guns as an unstoppable monster force though. So who knows.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
deaddmwalking wrote:While that might be a part of it, I think the consensus is that most people who believe that guns don't belong in fantasy like a type of fantasy that doesn't have guns.
I am getting the idea that you think that the position I am talking about (That you cannot have guns in fantasy) doesn't exist, since you seem to be trying very hard to rephrase it as "I don't like guns in fantasy".
They are two very different positions.
Yes. If someone says 'if it has guns it cannot be fantasy' they are wrong. They are clearly wrong. There are plenty of examples of fantasy that includes guns.
Therefore, it is likely that they'll happily rephrase to something akin to 'the kind of fantasy I like doesn't have guns'.
This is no different from someone saying 'dogs are not pets'. Clearly the statement is false, and anyone making the claim is really saying something like 'I think cats make better pets' or 'I'd never get a dog as a pet'. It's at least akin to hyperbole. This is just 'no true Scotsman' semantics.
