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Homeric heroes are giant tools
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 3:53 am
by endersdouble
So I've been burning time in the weight room listening to the Iliad on audiobook. It's fun, if incredibly repetitive, but the fact keeps kicking me in the balls: these are terrible, terrible people.
Some examples.
Odysseus and Diomedes are sneaking about at night. They meet a Trojan, Dolon, doing the same. He surrenders, offers a ransom for his safe return to the trojans, and Odysseus agrees not to kill him if he tells them about the Trojan line of battle. Dolon does, Diomedes cuts his fucking head off, and all is well. What a good action by our valiant heroes, punishing a coward!
Diomedes challenges the Trojans. Glaucus answers said challenge. Quoth Diomedes "Who the fuck are you?" Glaucus gives his lineage. Diomodes: "Well that's alright then, we're old family friends! Here, let's have some fun together. Go kill my friends and I'll kill yours, K?" Glaucus: "Sounds good to me!"
Actually, that's the biggest thing: no one gives a shit about anyone not important enough to get an epithet.
Yeah, yeah, we've all read Frank's Tome of War; morals were different then, and we see their morals in our D&D characters, stripping our enemies' armor and cutting down their minions without a second thought. But that doesn't make me feel good hearing about these guys. What games focus on heroism, the way that D&D focuses on Bronze Age mentality or WoD focuses on horror, that doesn't make me feel like a terrible person for liking my character?
I'd say Exalted, but then again Exalted is about as popular as Loren Coleman here.
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 4:09 am
by Juton
I wonder how much we've really changed. We hear about all these excesses troops commit abroad, maybe the life of a soldier just dehumanizes a person.
If you want a feel-good morality experience you could always try a superhero game set in the four colour comic era. All the good guys take prisoners and never use excessive force, yet still manage to win the day. And generally they don't loot their enemies, they're all squeaky clean.
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 4:59 am
by Cynic
most mythological epics are tool-riffic.
Take the Mahabharatha - The hero loses a dice game to the villain and loses his kingdom, his wealth, his brothers, himself, and finally his wife in gambles.
The villain drags the wife to the court to humiliate her as she is his property. THe so-called righteous heroes sit still and let it happen because she no longer is their *property* and since she is now the villain's *property*, he can technically do anything he wants . SUch as implied rape in front of the assembled court.
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 8:17 am
by TheFlatline
You want clear cut morality?
Star Wars RPG. I'd prefer WEG version myself. Pure, simple morality. None of the gray area.
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 10:31 am
by Red_Rob
D&D can do clear cut morality just fine. Just because Frank played up the case for D&D-as-warring-city-states doesn't mean your campaign has to be that way.
If you play up the "Always Chaotic Evil" aspects of the monster races and never confront the players with a baby kobold situation then you can play a pretty black and white campaign setting.
Just make sure the bad guys are always irredeemable and Hey Presto! There's no problem with stabbing them in the face.
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 12:34 pm
by Clutch9800
At the present I'm reading "Retribution" by Max Hastings. It's about the Pacific Campaign against Japan in 1944-1945.
Here's an excerpt that takes place on Iwo Jima:
It was six weeks before American troops addressed themselves systematically to clearing the caves in which such survivors as Harunori Ohkoshi clung to. First they tried tear gas. Then they sent captured Japanese to broadcast by loudspeaker, who sometimes called on men by name to come out. One POW approached Ohkoshi's tunnel entrance, bearing water and chocolate, only to be shot by the occupants. "We were doing him a favor," claimed Ohkoshi laconically. "His honor was lost."
Ohkoshi was later captured and sent to a POW camp on Guam.
Clutch
P.S. If you like military history, I can recommend three books by Max Hastings.
"Battle for the Falklands"
"Armageddon"
"Retribution" (This one is called "Nemisis" in the UK for some reason)
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 3:38 pm
by Username17
Clutch9800 wrote:
"Retribution" (This one is called "Nemisis" in the UK for some reason)
It's the British. They are like that.
-Username17
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 3:46 pm
by Vnonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Gen ... f_Morality
I've actually been reading a lot of Nietzsche's work recently, so I understand a fair bit of what you're talking about vis-a-vis morality.
You really shouldn't be feeling like a terrible person for liking a dnd character or Diomedes any more than you should feel like a terrible person for liking a lion, eagle, or even a cat (they are carnivorous, you know)
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 6:52 pm
by Cynic
See the argument made by Nietsche is that people and other life forms are on the same level. Most arguments of morality ignore this and say that only humans have morality or a greater concept and complexity of morality.
Animals have a kill to eat morality. Humans have a morality of X,Y,Z, and omega.
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 11:36 am
by Vnonymous
Cynic wrote:See the argument made by Nietsche is that people and other life forms are on the same level. Most arguments of morality ignore this and say that only humans have morality or a greater concept and complexity of morality.
Animals have a kill to eat morality. Humans have a morality of X,Y,Z, and omega.
Humans and animals have the exact same morality - humans are animals. Morally, we are largely indistinct from them. Human morality is pretty much "What helps my genes". Most of the stuff that isn't "help my genes" is either evolutionarily novel or a mistake.
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 6:22 pm
by Cynic
No that's not the only morality for HUmans.
If say I was a douche who liked hurting people for the sake of hurting people then that doesn't help my genes.
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 6:33 pm
by Username17
The capacity for moral systems is something which is definitionally consistent with the spread of associated genes. But there is no guaranty that any moral system is beneficial in that regard or even that the capacity for moral systems is on the whole non-negative.
Evolution is a tautology, but selection is only negative. Mutation is random in its effects, and its results continue and clutter things unless and until actual selection occurs.
-Username17
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 6:34 pm
by Prak
Cynic wrote:No that's not the only morality for HUmans.
If say I was a douche who liked hurting people for the sake of hurting people then that doesn't help my genes.
yes it's either evolutionarily novel, or a mistake. It kind of depends on how much it impacts your species.
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 6:45 pm
by Kaelik
Prak_Anima wrote:It kind of depends on how much it impacts your species.
No, it depends on how much it impacts the propagation of your genes. Which is not always much to do with your species.
Also it's possible that it just doesn't have much of an effect, in which case it's not novel or a mistake.
Bottom line:
Capacity for moral systems is a function of how our brains work. Any moral system you choose could affect your survival, but we have no way of knowing if your genes had any effect on you choosing to follow utilitarianism rather than Divine Command Theory, really. So moral systems don't really affect gene propagation in any way we can track at all.
