FrankTrollman wrote:So Samurai and Ninja come with conceptual limits. We can imagine a very powerful Ninja or Samurai. But there are still limits inherent in the concept. But Shugenja has no limits. Reading books and having shit happen is a concept that is by definition unlimited.
I can partially buy that. Part of the issue here is that some of us think differently than others: once I say "magic exists," I'm not particularly finicky about the idiom that grants its existence. 3=2 bitches, all bets are off. Anecdotally, amongst rpers I have known, this was the most common mindset -- but most of them didn't play d&d.
But I acknowledge that many people -- and the bulk of them are from d&d land, which has market-share and cultural dominance -- are rather locked into weird notions on how these idioms work.
It's a perverse situation. Because reading a book does basically nothing dramatic irl, once reading=magic its magical scope is unbounded. But because swinging a sword is an inherently dramatic thing irl, any and all magic arising from it is limited by swordiness. For some.
Though not universal, that's a thing. And it has to be dealt with.
I think it's important to decouple magic from "mere" tools in your core book and make it very clear that the magic you're seeing from 99% of practitioners is the result of an unenlightened view of a much greater force. So the samurai's mystical kata and sword techniques may seem to be all about slashing, but the venerable master samurai understands that he needs no blade: he is the
essence of sharpness and can cut with a word, destroy relationships with a gaze, and split a river in twain with a shout.
Swordguy at his best isn't a guy with a sword. He is the essence of destruction and creation manifesting as a guy with a sword.
And all that metaphysics has to be in core.
Nath wrote:"Soldier" means "paid fighter". If he doesn't get paid, he's not a soldier.
Whaaaaaa -- no, that's just wrong.
Plenty of soldiers don't get paid. Sometimes this pisses them off and
they rebel. Soldiers are professional fighters and/or persons that are part of a military force. That's what makes them distinct, not salary. Slave-soldiers don't get paid shit by definition and they're still soldiers. Not even the
dictionary definition of soldier references salary. N.B.: Professional doesn't mean "paid."
Nath wrote:If you rather meant "occupying a socio-political fighting role" then the word is "military"
A "military" isn't a person or a job. So this:
Nath wrote:A character can be a soldier, a military and a warrior at the same time. . .
. . .is nonsensical. A military is a type of organization or an adjective describing things associated with soldiers.
There is slang use of the term "military" to refer to a person's profession or outlook, but that is, again, slang, and not generally accepted. In fact, outside of cities that have military posts nearby, I've never heard the term used that way in the U.S. (So when you're in the North, you rarely hear it, but come down to the pork-barrel military-base-full South and you do). In any event: you are sorely wrong about how that word works.
And samurai are definitionally soldiers as they are formal participants in the military. So even if your definition of soldier were right (it isn't) or military were right (it really, really isn't), samurai would still be soldiers. A samurai who has no military rank would probably be ronin.
Nath wrote:If people can't easily agree on what your label means, chances are it is not an archetype. Which makes me say "intelligence agent" is not. "Spy" is an archetype (even if the popular archetype is widely different from what real life spies did or do).
I never used the term "archetype" and I don't see how applying that term mystically makes what you just said make any sense. I was referring to professions. So your disagreement concerning "labels" seems nonsensical. When I used the term "intelligence agent" I was describing a job and deliberately using a phrase that was more expansive than the term "spy" precisely because "spy" does not overlap completely with "ninja." I was describing the point of a ninja. "Spy" also refers to Charles Atlas superheroes who fuck lots of attractive people: that has fuck-all to do with the job/idiom of ninjas and the greater field of intelligence agent which includes ninja, so I don't know why you'd bring up spies.
Nath wrote:And "religious ascetic guardsman" is so utterly specific that I know I'd just have to wait before the game needs to introduce yet another rule to deal with non-ascetic monks or monks with nothing to guard.
I have no idea what this means.
NineInchNall wrote:I take it you don't frequently get into discussions with 5minds and the like, because those shitheads seriously don't want "paranatural power" (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean besides shit-what's-not-really-plausible) to be in any way intrinsic to their "soldier/fighter/centurion/RealWorldProfession" characters' progressions. They don't want no paranatural power or magic -- where "magic" refers to doing that which is not actually possible, and unfortunately that includes doing any possible thing via ineffectual means (e.g., opening a lock by saying some words near it).
Long-winded and partially medicated response in spoiler; read at own risk.
Persons maintaining the Mundane Delusion fall into two rough categories, with some overlap.
The first group are stupid. They misunderstand what a d20 caster can do, they misunderstand what a noncaster can't, and they haven't the reading comprehension to address their failure -- but the internet doesn't punish them for their error. You meet few of these irl because if you do, it's trivially easy to display the error. Unlike on the internet, when you're shown to be wrong irl, you can't easily dismiss the event without consequence. When I've met these people irl -- after the 2000's (I didn't experience this in the 90's or earlier) and the table makes it clear that they're wrong -- such that their error makes it literally impossible to handle encounters PCs are expected to handle -- what happens, in my experience, is that the player immediately seeks a nearly no-magic game. As in: casters don't exist or are severely hampered. Now, the rubber meets the road here: most "low magic" players don't really want no-magic, so getting the game off the ground works poorly. But the Mundane Delusion is extinguished. That's my (biased, limited, subjective) real-life experience. On the internet, of course, they're never wrong.
The second group are lying. They're twats. They know they're full of it. They expect the GM to simply give them a special, personal benefit to make up for their mechanical limitations. Note that this is consistent with grognard priorities: if you're playing in a game where it's socially acceptable to be a selfish, immature dick, then side-deals and under-the-table negotiations are good form, and in their mind, you're the jerk for not "compromising." Further, the full caster who doesn't play along is verbally attacked, but even though these liars lie and say it's because such players are powergamers, what's really happening is that those casters are demanding too much honesty.
I don't meet these people in real life. . . anymore. They're bad people to game with, so I don't do that. They have more net presence than rl presence: irl, you'll probably be pissed with them over something else and quit playing with them long before you get to the Mundane Delusion crapping on your game.
Dealing with both groups, from a design perspective, is simple: don't engage. Don't tell them shit -- at least about this. This is not a rhetorical or logical issue, this is a marketing issue.
Assume you're making a game.
If your game is good enough for the non-deluded, the deluded will also play. If you stop engaging them respectfully, they lose power. It's not your job to enlighten the masses, it's your job to push a game.
Mundane Delusionists don't know what the term "mundane" means. They attribute super-powers to mundane abilities then pretend they haven't done so. So you emphasize the Charles Atlas Superpowers of your noncasters and don't worry their pretty heads with the details. If your game is advertised as having no linear fight(etc.) problem, do it in a way that engages people who care about that and doesn't engage the people that insist that the problem doesn't exist. They'll end up playing what their friends play. And grognards who never play anything new. . . won't play anything new.
Note that I think it's possible to make a good rpg (unlike 5e d&d) then market it to grognards (like 5e d&d). Here's the thing, though. If you're making a good rpg in this hypothetical, you will have sought out and grabbed new players, disillusioned/burned players, combined it with online services and a line of single-player games with a multiplayer game in the wings, given it smart phone support, created an srd and an ogl, and basically roxxd all available soxxz. Given the hypothetical market you have in this hypothetical product, how are the Mundane Delusionists even significant?