Kill-On-Sight Enemies

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Post by FatR »

Wiseman wrote:I'm sorry. Maybe I should have been more clear. My issue is treating creatures like Orcs or Gnolls or Goblins as irredeemably evil and kill on sight.
Well, if you don't like such treatment, don't use it.

There may be valid reasons why they are kill on sight for human and human-allied races (and so the question of whether they are irredeemably evil becomes philosophical rather than practical). Maybe orcs, down to the last one, are extremely impulsive, violent and love to watch other creatures squirming in pain. Maybe gnolls divide other creatures into meat and competitors for meat who should be killed, no exceptions. Maybe goblins have an unconquerable instinctive loathing of all humanoids who don't look like goblins and wage a permanent war to cleanse the world from them. Or maybe your race war stretches for 10 000 years in the past and paranoia and hatred are so ingrained that even if you offer the other side mercy they would just think you're insane or trying to trick them.

Making up an explanation why coexistence with another humanoid race is less possible than coexistence of humans with wolves is not hard. The main question is, do you want to apply such an explanation to your setting? Personally I don't. Examples from above are more extreme versions of how those creatures are in my setting, but "more extreme" are the key words here.

The only things you just should not do period is branding a species as always evil without explaining why they are such (as was often the case in DnD), or giving a detailed explanation on why a species is a horrible blight on the world that dedicates its existence to killing and torturing everyone else and then act with indignation when someone comes to a correct conclusion that they should just be exterminated (as is often the case in Pathfinder).
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Re: Kill-On-Sight Enemies

Post by maglag »

FatR wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:High level spellcasters are MAD.
No. That's just completely factually untrue. Indeed, the nature of high level spellcaster powers in any edition of DnD proper incentivizes striking at any enemy high-level enough to conceivably be a problem to you as soon as you discover him, because offense generally oustrips defense (as with MAD) and collateral damage from the fight itself is very small (totally not like MAD).

The idea of "balance of power" was a really poor explanation why Elminster and his fuck toys do not kill a major bad guy per day; and repurposing this explanation does not make it better.
Ressurecting one major bad guy is easy. He probably even had a clone ready and stuff.

And now he is pissed off and kills a whole village of good guys in retaliation. And arranging for hundreds or thousands of ressurections is significantly harder.

You need to think nuclear warfare. If you push things to the limit millions will die and the eqrth will be reduced to sterile wasteland.
Last edited by maglag on Sat Jul 23, 2016 8:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Kill-On-Sight Enemies

Post by FatR »

maglag wrote: Ressurecting one major bad guy is easy.
Actually it isn't. First, just try resurrecting someone whose soul is currently in his killer's pocket. Alternatively, someone who was turned to stone, Sequestered and Imprisoned in a random location. There are general ways around resurrection, differing based on edition, of course.
Second, the number of evil clerics capable of casting True Resurrection and thus not leaving your victim weaker tends to be sharply limited, even if this spell is available at all. Even in FR there are just a handful, and all are at odds with each other. And naturally if your enemy's organization is known to have such a cleric, you may start your teleportation blitzkrieg with him.
maglag wrote:He probably even had a clone ready and stuff.
The clone is weaker than the original and original's equipment is now yours, so you just easily re-kill him. FR writers had to go into the realm of crazy shit NPC-only spells to make resurrection through clones viable.
maglag wrote:And now he is pissed off and kills a whole village of good guys in retaliation.
Actually now (if you haven't prevented that "now" as above) he is in desperate fear of your return, because he knows that without a level (and possibly a spell level) and his equipment he's no match, and will try to hide or, the worst case, run to one of the surviving major foes for protection. But as presumably you started your campaign with the toughest known foe that likely would not be enough.
maglag wrote:And arranging for hundreds or thousands of ressurections is significantly harder.

You need to think nuclear warfare. If you push things to the limit millions will die and the eqrth will be reduced to sterile wasteland.
Why I need to think so, if one of the main defining traits of nuclear warfare, immense indiscriminate damage, and inability to prevent such even if you win is absent? I mean, even if an enemy caster realizes he's doomed anyway and tries to kill as many people as possible just to spite my team, population, never mind ecological, damage he can inflict before facing retaliation is not likely to great. The strength of DnD casters against masses of little men is in applying inexorably accumulating losses over time, not in causing massive devastation in a flash. Their biggest-area spells affect about a city block.

You may argue that a high-level caster waging a guerilla warfare against population centers is very hard to stop, and depending on edition and optimization level you may be right. But you know, that's just another incentive to strike at him preventively, before he began doing that. And it's not like countries can't survive bombing raids.
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Post by DSMatticus »

FatR wrote:And, unfortunately, verissimilitude. Historically the three main ways of interaction between groups of people with significantly different customs and ways of life were assimilation, expulsion and extermination, and any group resistant to assimiliation was at some point subjected to the latter two. When your different group is a separate species, it is naturally and obviously unassimilable (even if their physiological and psychological makeup is sufficiently compatible to make living in the same settlement as humans even possible
This is not even remotely true. It's just one of those stupid things people say because... well, actually, I don't know why. Roman provinces had basically fuck all in common beyond being required to pay their taxes and give lip service to some very basic aspects of Roman culture. China has been trading with Britain for a very long fucking time and is still no closer to telling their govna to have a bloody g'day pip pip cheerio. The fact is that there is and always has been a fuckton of interaction between stably heterogeneous peoples, and things like assimilation, expulsion, and extermination are almost never the goal - the goal is "those guys have something we want, let's get it from them." Expulsion and extermination are methodologies that are sometimes - but honestly quite rarely - employed. Assimilation, when it occurs at all, is just an accident that follows greater intermingling (whether that intermingling be the result of conquest or developing trade) between two peoples.

I mean, fuck - there is a startlingly large amount of cultural difference between predominantly black and predominantly white communities given the level of economic and political interaction between them. The idea that the failure of a group to assimilate turns them into a "shoot on sight" villain is absurd. Now if only our police officers would get the memo ZING ha ha ha no but really fuck this planet.
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Post by Mechalich »

'Kill on sight' is something of an oversimplification. Beyond irrational levels of obsession, most people aren't going to bother to deliberately move to slaughter every band of orcs they see from the top of the mountain, its just impractical.

On the other hand, the development of implacable hostility between different sentient species that compete for the same resources such that, when violence does break out, it is without any rules of war to provide restraint, is extremely likely. Humans are entirely capable of doing such things to each other, it's only easier for them to do that to other species.

Beyond that it is likely that in a D&D style world there will be species with psychologies that are completely incompatible and even without resource competition between the two of them they'll feel the others may need to be exterminated forever.
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Post by Dogbert »

d&d is a game about stabbing people in the face and looting their corpses while we all sit at a table drinking mountain dew and eating doritos. Such activity is slowed down to a grinding halt if every encounter turns into an ethics and philosophy debate, and it stops beign fun. Alignments and "evil races" were created to prevent exactly that.

Players don't have to care about the dragon's niche in the ecosystem. The dragon is on Team Evil, the dragon has treasure, and the dragon grants XP upon death. That's all players need to know.

For RL examples, did you know that medieval Catholics used to believe moorish people had no soul, and so they weren't really alive, so it was perfectly ok to kill them? Hell, let's not go that far back into the past, just go to Ferguson or the RNC.

"Reality is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."
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Post by icyshadowlord »

Some people still LOVE to debate that stuff on their game tables. I don't think there are any rules for or against actually doing so, despite the game trying (and usually failing) to go for objective morality at least on print to stop people from trying to think too hard on it.
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Post by Stahlseele »

And of course, they want to be Mr.Feelgood and not come across as a bloodthirsty psychopath/sociopath . .
Which makes for some interesting inter party dynamics, if you have somebody who simply does not care at all.
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Post by Schleiermacher »

Dogbert wrote:d&d is a game about stabbing people in the face and looting their corpses while we all sit at a table drinking mountain dew and eating doritos. Such activity is slowed down to a grinding if every encounter turns into an ethics and philosophy debate, and it stops beign fun. Alignments and "evil races" were created to prevent exactly that.
See, that was very fun back when I was 15, but nowadays if that's what I want I'll play Bloodborne or something instead. I would say that the ethics and philosophy debate (between the characters, who are usually wildly unreasonable in some way, rather than players, just so that's clear) is usually the high point of any given session for me.
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Post by FatR »

DSMatticus wrote: This is not even remotely true. It's just one of those stupid things people say because... well, actually, I don't know why.
Because it happens to be true.
DSMatticus wrote:Roman provinces had basically fuck all in common beyond being required to pay their taxes and give lip service to some very basic aspects of Roman culture.
Dead wrong. To get anywhere in Imperial Rome, starting with getting a basic citizenship (until well into the time of decline, when it was granted to everyone to tax everyone equally) you had to be a good little Roman, to dress like a Roman, to speak Latin like a Roman, to change your name so it sounds like that of a Roman, and if you wanted a career you had to demonstrate passable knowledge of Greek-Roman literary classics and fashion and participate in staple Roman entertainment and shit. And of course you had to sacrifice to Roman gods. And for that matter the Roman nation itself by the end of I century BC was the result of absorbing various Italian communities that still were separate entities at the start of that century.

Powerless dirt farmers outside of the cities might have had little in common in different provinces but nobody fucking cared, the Roman culture was a city culture.
DSMatticus wrote:China has been trading with Britain for a very long fucking time and is still no closer to telling their govna to have a bloody g'day pip pip cheerio.
China is to a very large extent assimilated into the mainstream Western culture, politically, materially, and, well, culturally, given that American entertainment seems to be very popular there. For fuck's sake, the struggle that defined the Chinese society for half of 20th century was between the followers of two Western governmental and social models, indigenous Chinese ideas weren't even in the running.

If you want to look what a border between two truly, radically (not just in the sense of liking different foods, while operating on fundamentally the same assumptions about morality, role of reason, proper behavior and everything) different cultures look like, you may direct your attention towards frontlines against ISIS.

More importantly, China itself is a product of a long process of assimilation, marked with bouts of grand-scale extermination here and there. Han Chinese stand on the graves of hundreds of lesser tribes; China exists in its current borders due to successfully assimiliating its Manchu conquerors (who in turn were assimilating other Tungusic people at the height of their power) so that while they still exist as an ethnic minority, their culture was effectively replaced with Chinese mainstream; and Han are an overwhelming majority because the most troublesome minorities were subjected to brutal suppression up to and including outright genocide in XIX century.

DSMatticus wrote:The fact is that there is and always has been a fuckton of interaction between stably heterogeneous peoples, and things like assimilation, expulsion, and extermination are almost never the goal
That's an illusion stemming from living in a world where an uncommon amount of peace and order is imposed by a dominant power with the idea that just taking what you want is not how things should be done between nations. And in all likelyhood in a particularly nice part of this world. Yet ethnic assimilation and expulsion are a present-day fucking reality in several corners of the world, and the last full-blown deliberate and organized extermination attempt happened only 22 years ago (not counting various smaller tribal massacres or "convert or die" campaigns).

These "stably heterogenous people" you speak about are, by and large, results of great and often deliberate assimilation processes, that did not go without bloody struggles. As you mentioned English - ancestors of the English people were the result of two waves of conquerors, both of whose completely extirpated the old elite and imposed new laws and customs, and the first wave also imposed their language, while the second failed and was itself assimiliated instead. Ancestors of the French as late as high middle ages formed two distinct ethnic groups with separate languages (never mind fuck tons of local dialects in each), until the southern group was absorbed, in no small part due to defeats in wars. And so on.
DSMatticus wrote:I mean, fuck - there is a startlingly large amount of cultural difference between predominantly black and predominantly white communities given the level of economic and political interaction between them. The idea that the failure of a group to assimilate turns them into a "shoot on sight" villain is absurd.
I'm not going to be baited into a present-day politics debate. How about you try to provide an argument on how Imperial Rome wasn't really assimilating the conquered people, instead?
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Post by maglag »

Most of the locals in China cannot speak a single word of english. They mostly still eat only chinese food with chopsticks and care most about chinese festivals. Most of their toilets are still holes in the ground.

They have adopted lots of foreign technology but every civilization that wants to survive does that. And they are already assimiliating it with their own servers of chinese videos and chinese search engines and chinese social webs.

On the other hand the english did invade china and killed lot of chinese back in the day. Opium wars and stuff. Hardly peaceful relationships.
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Re: Kill-On-Sight Enemies

Post by hyzmarca »

FatR wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:High level spellcasters are MAD.
No. That's just completely factually untrue. Indeed, the nature of high level spellcaster powers in any edition of DnD proper incentivizes striking at any enemy high-level enough to conceivably be a problem to you as soon as you discover him, because offense generally oustrips defense (as with MAD) and collateral damage from the fight itself is very small (totally not like MAD).

The idea of "balance of power" was a really poor explanation why Elminster and his fuck toys do not kill a major bad guy per day; and repurposing this explanation does not make it better.
I'm not talking about fights between spellcasters. I'm talking about aboute casters intentionally casting Genocide [Race] (Yes, I know that's not an actual spell). When multiple high-level casters of every race are attempting to commit genocide against every other race, they can easily lifewipe a planet.
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Post by DSMatticus »

FatR wrote:Powerless dirt farmers outside of the cities might have had little in common in different provinces but nobody fucking cared, the Roman culture was a city culture.
You are talking about a society pre-industrialization of agriculture. Do you have any idea what the urban-rural demography would have looked like? No, you don't get to describe how you personally don't give a shit about the vast majority of Romans in order to tell us what real America is real Rome is. The fact is that the Romans ruled from what would today be France to Syria to Egypt and the vast majority of those many disparate people would never set foot in Rome or anything like it.
FatR wrote:China has totally been assimilated into western culture! Don't you know how much they loved the Warcraft movie?
Hahaha, nope. Look; you know fuck-all what you're talking about. The fact is that for several hundred years an absolutely staggering percentage of the world's Christians lived relatively peacefully under Islamic rule - that is how the actual world works more often than not. You are embarrassingly wrong, and I don't think there's a single person who could hear you tell them how "western" China is and not figure it out.
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Post by Mechalich »

China contains 55 recognized minority groups. All of them live in territory on the fringes of the state in territories where they were either conquered in place by the Han or forced to flee to by the encroachment onto their lands by the Han of somebody else (often the Mongols). Legal action by the communist party has suppressed the existence of several other minority groups, disallowing recognition and forced a number of minorities - such as the varied unrelated ethnicities that make up the 'Miao' classification - into Franken-identities that do not reflect their true history. The Chinese state is currently in the process of utilizing deliberate settlement patterns to reduce all of the minorities in China to minorities in their own homelands - ex. making Tibet into a majority Han territory - so that minority control over autonomous regions can be further reduced and their cultures gradually obliterated.

Peaceful, equal interactions between different ethnic groups sharing the same territory throughout history are not all that common - usually even when there was peace one group exercised clear dominance over the other. One of the funny things that has a risen in D&D is that it is actually more acceptable at a tabletop full of Americans or most Europeans for the party to go into a village and murder all the adults leaving the children to starve, than to go into a village, murder the men, rape the women, and take the children as slaves even though the later is a more accurate simulation.
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Post by DSMatticus »

Mechalich wrote:Peaceful, equal interactions between different ethnic groups sharing the same territory throughout history are not all that common - usually even when there was peace one group exercised clear dominance over the other.
If you define sharing the same territory as "living in the same communities as neighbors," then it is not common for extended periods of time because two groups living their daily lives amongst one another tend to eventually fuck away all their differences. If you define sharing the same territory as "living in the same geopolitical area," then it is incredibly common. Scotland has been a part of the United Kingdom for three hundred years and you would never confuse it with England. Black people came along with European settlers in motherfucking 1619 and are to a large extent still not even integrated into the same communities as whites.

But more importantly than that, put down the fucking goalposts. Examples of a culture being erased are not evidence that the primary interaction between cultures throughout history has been to erase one another through "assimilation, expulsion, or extermination." In truth, the most common interaction between cultures throughout history has been and continues to be trade, which does very little to supplant either's culture with the other's. But even when you define the debate in terms of violent conquest, counter-examples to this sort of bullshit are abundant. The Roman Republic was not one giant melting pot; Rome kind-of-sort-of was, but Rome made up about 2% of the population and the many far-flung provinces were mostly allowed to keep their cultures in tact if they'd let Rome appoint them a leader from afar to make sure the taxes got paid. For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire was a Muslim minority ruling peacefully over a Christian majority (and then not so peacefully, and then peacefully again, because different rulers had different ideas about how stringent enforcement should be), and this is at the same time they would have forced any polytheists to convert by swordpoint. Hitler - motherfucking Hitler - conquered France and today there are still French people and French culture. Ethnic groups other than "German" survived occupation by the man most synonymous with genocide in the entirety of the western world. And that's not for a lack of capability - look at the demographics of pre- and post- war Poland.

FatR's simplistic view of how different peoples interact is just straight up wrong. The real world is considerably more complicated than his "fuck or kill" theory of clashing cultures. The truth is that there is no single answer to what happens when two cultures bump into eachother, and "one culture ends up erased" is not even especially common. It takes a lot of work to make a culture disappear. You either have to declare full genocide or move enough of your people into their lands that heterogenous families outbreed homogenous families, and both of those things are 1) stupendously expensive, and 2) do not help accomplish the goal of 99% of all conquest: "take other people's material wealth." Both of those happen, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident, but they also don't happen. All the fucking time. All over the world.
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Post by FatR »

DSMatticus wrote:
FatR wrote:Powerless dirt farmers outside of the cities might have had little in common in different provinces but nobody fucking cared, the Roman culture was a city culture.
You are talking about a society pre-industrialization of agriculture. Do you have any idea what the urban-rural demography would have looked like? No, you don't get to describe how you personally don't give a shit about the vast majority of Romans
But I do, because Romans didn't either. All power - and all culture high enough to reach us as well - were concentrated in the cities. Mediterrainean civilization being a cilvilization of cities is a trivialism. By the way, about the demography of its center of culture and arts - do you know what a Greek polis was?
DSMatticus wrote:The fact is that the Romans ruled from what would today be France to Syria to Egypt and the vast majority of those many disparate people would never set foot in Rome or anything like it.
Yet if they wanted to have any measure of control over their lives, these increasingly non-disparate people had to adopt Roman way of life. After those openly opposed to it were put to the sword of course. Regular bouts of extermination and expulsion of the Jews, and ruthlessly enforced prohibitions of native Celtic cults (never mind general brutality of Roman conquests and rule that would make Nazis blanch), demonstrate us that harsh measures were never far away for those who were found too different for Roman taste.
DSMatticus wrote:China has totally been assimilated into western culture! Don't you know how much they loved the Warcraft movie?
The second you start twisting my words to make my apparent (only to you) stupidity appear "funnier", is the second you concede all pretenses of discussing rather than trolling. As this is not the first thread where you butted in despite not having anything intelligent to say, as I generally come to the Den in hopes of having something approaching a rational discussion, and as your behavior makes me no longer interested in correcting your ignorance, to the ignore list you go.

By the way, if you think that entertainment is a small deal you're wrong as usual. Hollywood (or lack of access to it under the old regime) in all likelyhood contributed far more to the fall of USSR than Langley.
DSMatticus wrote:The fact is that for several hundred years an absolutely staggering percentage of the world's Christians lived relatively peacefully under Islamic rule
Oh, and that never happened.
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Post by DSMatticus »

FatR wrote:But I do, because Romans didn't either. All power - and all culture high enough to reach us as well - were concentrated in the cities. Mediterrainean civilization being a cilvilization of cities is a trivialism.
What the fuck are you arguing? People don't exist if they don't have political power? People don't exist if you haven't read about them? There were fifty times as many people living outside of Rome but within Roman territory as there were inside Rome itself. There would have been anywhere from four-to-seven times as many living outside of the cities entirely as would have been living inside them. These people weren't mindless robots or tribal savages or whatever stupid shit you think - they were people with communities and customs. And some of them lived in what we would today call France. And Syria. And Crimea. And Egypt. And these provinces would have looked basically fuck all like eachother (even in their urban centers) beyond some basic high-level bureaucracy. It'd be like arguing that Texas and New York are basically the same place because they both have these weird things called "governors." Except if Texas had its own language, with its own alphabet, and were a weird brand of polytheist that you couldn't find anywhere else in the entire country.
FatR wrote:Yet if they wanted to have any measure of control over their lives, these increasingly non-disparate people had to adopt Roman way of life. After those openly opposed to it were put to the sword of course. Regular bouts of extermination and expulsion of the Jews, and ruthlessly enforced prohibitions of native Celtic cults (never mind general brutality of Roman conquests and rule that would make Nazis blanch), demonstrate us that harsh measures were never far away for those who were found too different for Roman taste.
Romanisation as you imagine it is a complete myth. "Proper" Roman culture didn't even fully penetrate into Dalmatia, and past that high culture was mostly Greek, not Roman. The phenomenon you are discussing is limited to Italia, the provinces of Gaul, the provinces of the Iberian peninsula, and probably Britannia question mark? Yes, a bunch of Jews got stabbed for refusing to admit that the Roman gods were super cool - and a bunch of more entrenched groups didn't get stabbed for much worse. Rome was willing to make demands and murder people over them, but mostly only when it was easy or they thought you needed stabbing anyway because you were a bunch of (potentially) rebellious little shits, and their demands were honestly pretty basic shit like "admit how awesome we are." Your vision of a genocidal Rome that would unleash the legions upon any who dared to stray from the "proper Roman way" is... fucking ridiculous. The "proper Roman way" never even made it out of western Europe! They wanted obedience and tokens of submission, and they offered incentives to the elites of conquered territories - particularly those near Italia - to adopt a Roman way of life. And sometimes that didn't work, and Rome mostly didn't give a shit as long as you didn't get blatantly uppity.
FatR wrote:The second you start twisting my words
I'm going to stop you right there. The second you handwaved away the absolutely massive differences between China and the West on the basis that China imports some movies you lost this argument as hard as you could have and now you're just being a whiny bitch about it. Why don't you go try living in China for a year and tell us how similar it is because "you can always go catch (some of) the latest U.S. flicks!" No one is discounting that cultural exchange happens, but to suggest a fraction of the movies in a country's movie theaters is indicative of anything makes you a fucking idiot. Life in China is fuck all like life anywhere in the western world, and you deserve to be ridiculed for not understanding that.

Think of it as gentle encouragement to be less stupid.
FatR wrote:Oh, and that never happened.
Yes, yes it did. A fuckton of Muslim empires have at some point ruled over a nontrivial number of Christians without genociding them or forcibly converting them. They were second class citizens, certainly, but we're talking about a time when women were often straight-up considered property so what the fuck were you expecting? This is not an era known for its progressive stances on civil rights. Under the more lenient rulers, they would have been expected to keep their religious practices to themselves and pay a "you're not a muslim" tax while being exempted from the "you're a muslim" tax - nothing even remotely like the bloody never-ending culture war you imagine.
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Post by maglag »

Fun fact in my home country christian tax was converted to moor tax after the christians took control. Aka moors could keep their religion in the conquered lands by paying extra. The expression "work like a moor" has survived to our days.

Heck Lisbon had a christian bishop before Afonso Henriques and the crusaders conquered it.
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maglag wrote:Fun fact in my home country christian tax was converted to moor tax after the christians took control. Aka moors could keep their religion in the conquered lands by paying extra. The expression "work like a moor" has survived to our days.

Heck Lisbon had a christian bishop before Afonso Henriques and the crusaders conquered it.
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Post by maglag »

Lots of fish because almost everybody lives near the coast.

Fresh vegetables and potatoes and bread and rice to accompany. Sometimes all at the same time in the same dish.

Meat is also popular usually stewed or boiled.

Olive oil used in a lot of dishes or simply as sauce.

Wine is the booze of choice for meals. Helps when you have the monopoly in cork production.

Snails are a summer delicacy. No fancy preparation like the french. We just boil them with herbs and then each person at the table pulls their own out from the shells using pointy sticks.
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Post by FatR »

And one more point on caster MAD, given that I spoke of magical ICBMs myself in the past (and certain DnD settings, like Greyhawk and Dark Sun, involved things like this in the past, albeit not in the form PCs can access).

Ultimately caster MAD is a form of mental exercises to establish a balance of power in a setting where strategic depth does not exist and war is likely to be extremely short and decisive. It does not work mechanically (because rather than an ICBM standoff DnD presents the relativistic space war situation - not only offense is stronger than defense, an assault can come with very little to no warning), but it can be made to work.

But then we come to the problem inherent in the very idea - if balance of power not only exist, but indeed successfully precludes any direct confrontation between top factions of the setting (rather than being the simple statement of who can hold what according to the current power levels of those factions and results of their last clashes), that eliminates probably a majority of common fantasy plots from the setting and shits on PCs' agency. You cannot even emulate adventures of Conan the Barbarian in a Cold War five-minutes-to-midnight setting, and if you can't do as much, your setting concept probably needs rethinking.

And I also think that attempts of DnD writers to play with the idea of big B Balance amply demostrated that maintaining status quo in DnDland results in pretty grim setting realities - if we take species relations status quo means an endless border war and raiding constantly waged below the level that can trigger a magical apocalypse.

In absence of explaining setting realities through stable opposed cabals of wizards and assuming that all-out wars and shit regularly happen, what stops DnDland from descending into an endless inter-species conflict of all against all? My own answer for the time being goes like this: the conflict of all against all is indeed the "normal" state, unless in a particular setting an external force of goodness and civilization (such as a benevolet deity) was dominant for a long time. But the very fact that there are commonly more than two sides means that species which can entertain the idea of allowing conditional surrender and submission at least for the species closest to themselves, eventually gains an advantage. Those who attack everyone else indiscriminately and always wage total war are more likely to get besieged on all sides. If humans are willing to accept dwarves and elves as tributaries and second-class citizens, while goblins are killing them all, it is obvious who is going to have more allies.

But in DnDland there is a complication - some subjects bring more trouble than they're worth in the long term. The stereotypical DnD division into "good" and "evil" races is rooted primarily in observing which species are compatible enough with humans (as humans are the dominant race in DnDland by default) and which, well, aren't. Obviously creatures that need to eat specifically humans, or reproduce by parasitising on them, or are physically pained by proximity of other thinking beings, or fall physically and mentally ill without torturing other sapients, or just smell so badly (in addition to being highly aggressive and xenophobic) that a human risks to vomit upon coming within several metets, are incompatible and in absence of gigantic magical advances that can make them a non-threat (or maybe even fix their problems), you can only kill them on sight. Orcs, gnolls and whatever are a more dubious case, and whether they can be truly rehabilitated as people, or only intimidated into behaving, and whether even fear can keep them in line well enough to make coexistence safe are questions that's discussed in-setting both by philosophers and politicians.
Last edited by FatR on Sun Jul 24, 2016 9:26 pm, edited 5 times in total.
hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca »

Well, the fact that half-orcs exist are pretty much proof that orcs are not kill on sight for everyone.

Also, Mongrelfolk prove that a lot of shit isn't kill on sight for everyone.

Image

Just try to figure out which races this guys grandparents were.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Sun Jul 24, 2016 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich »

DSMatticus wrote:Scotland has been a part of the United Kingdom for three hundred years and you would never confuse it with England. Black people came along with European settlers in motherfucking 1619 and are to a large extent still not even integrated into the same communities as whites.
It both of those examples one group was exercising clear dominance over the other one for almost the entire history, with a modest exception for the modern era (which doesn't apply to D&D comparisons anyway). The experience of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves actually represents the point I was making quite well. Modern TTRPG players in the US are far more comfortable charging through a village full of foreigners and murdering them all than they are capturing them and taking them back as slaves. Your citation of ethnically divided states like the Ottoman Empire as an example undercutting one group exercising dominance over the other make no sense.

Trade was and is the most common form of interaction between ethnic groups, but prior to the modern era equal trade was accompanied by all kinds of exploitation, colonialism, slavery, and more. That easily can develop into a conflict between groups that is kill-on-sight for all practical purposes.

I do not think that such interactions would be the majority of interactions, but they certainly are historically based and were really not all that uncommon. It is absolutely a pro-verisimilitude scenario to have conflicts between groups in a fantasy setting that reach this level.
DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus »

Goalposts the fuck down, Mechalich. FatR did not say "historically, people have been various degrees of dick to one another." He said that groups which were difficult to assimilate would be expelled or exterminated and that's why kill-on-sight enemies were verisimilitudinous. That. Is. Not. Fucking. True. It's not even remotely true.
Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich »

DSMatticus wrote:Goalposts the fuck down, Mechalich. FatR did not say "historically, people have been various degrees of dick to one another." He said that groups which were difficult to assimilate would be expelled or exterminated and that's why kill-on-sight enemies were verisimilitudinous. That. Is. Not. Fucking. True. It's not even remotely true.
Maybe you could try actually arguing against me when you quote me then. I'm not FatR nor am I parroting his argument directly. Besides, arguing something actually reasonable is far more useful than having both side erect and subsequently demolish a whole bunch of absurdist straw men.

Historically people have been sufficiently dickish to each other to reach something that, when converted in TTRPG terms, approximates into kill-on-sight and then have done that on many occasions.

In a humans-only fantasy situation where an ethnic group had active relations with 10 other ethnic groups, having 1 of them be kill on sight would be totally reasonable and actually verisimilitudinous. In a fantasy situation where a species has relations with 10 other species it would actually be more likely to have a greater number of them be kill-on-sight because of the far greater range of psychological disparities.
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