Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066466But Crayon, you are just using wikipages to look this stuff up.

There is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as research, I do it all the time.

However, you have to realise that it might not be completely accurate and is probably only scratching the surface. If you want to go deeper, then you need to do a lot more studying.

To be honest, for RPGs, I find Wikipedia to be just the right level of detail for settings.

What you shouldn't do is get on your high horse about terminology based on superficial research.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066781Is it? I thought a lot of D&Disms were needlessly confusing so I wanted to simplify things. So I decided to ask for some second opinions and advice. Somewhere along the line this became a vicious argument.

But you seem to be demanding that WE also simplify things in line with your vision... and in every example so far its been with a side-helping of "must portray in culturally sensitive (as determined by Wikipedia) fashion".

Take your ridiculous Giants must equal Genies thing where you went and subbed Ogre for both things... you're trying to force Genies and Giants to be smooshed into the same thing when there are MANY examples of differences between how the two are presented in different mythologies. The Norse Giants (upon whom the D&D giants are much more firmly based) would never be confused for Arabic Genies. The fact that we have words from different myths allows D&D to distinguish between these two, often wildly different creatures in settings that are neither Norse nor Arabic.

You may not THINK you're acting like an SJW... but you sound exactly like a "One True Way" SJW. You want to squeeze everything into a box that fits your Wikipedia-derived model and if we disagree, we need to get in line with your vision.

You say you want advice? Here's mine. If no one else agrees with you, maybe the problem isn't with everyone else, but with the ideas you're trying to foist on them.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066781Is it? I thought a lot of D&Disms were needlessly confusing so I wanted to simplify things. So I decided to ask for some second opinions and advice. Somewhere along the line this became a vicious argument.

But it's already simplified. There is already consensus in D&D circles. The goal being if you have something to add to the consensus, a new perspective, *create it*. If it's good - it'll get adopted.

Don't deconstruct for some silly out-of-game narrative. Make something relevant. Create a bunch of BoxCrayonTales "Geniekind" writeups and post them. If they're *GOOD* people will like them.

Questioning the validity of something established under the pretense of being concerned about the historical roots of how something is presented is passive-aggressive, and besides the entire point. We're here for gaming. Not political correctness in gaming.

This is the very thing that SJW's don't understand - deconstructing something you think is bad isn't better than constructing something good that might be better. If you need a good example of this: Look at what Marvel Comics has done to its characters. Star Wars too

This is why Genies in D&D are fine as is. Make something different if you think it's better. And I fully encourage you to create your BoxCrayonTale's World of Simplified D&D - shiny and new. DO IT. Make it good. Put all your beliefs into it. And put it up for public consumption. (or private critique). I'm sure many people here would happily offer that to you in good faith.

Quote from: Chris24601;1066798But you seem to be demanding that WE also simplify things in line with your vision... and in every example so far its been with a side-helping of "must portray in culturally sensitive (as determined by Wikipedia) fashion".

Take your ridiculous Giants must equal Genies thing where you went and subbed Ogre for both things... you're trying to force Genies and Giants to be smooshed into the same thing when there are MANY examples of differences between how the two are presented in different mythologies. The Norse Giants (upon whom the D&D giants are much more firmly based) would never be confused for Arabic Genies. The fact that we have words from different myths allows D&D to distinguish between these two, often wildly different creatures in settings that are neither Norse nor Arabic.

You may not THINK you're acting like an SJW... but you sound exactly like a "One True Way" SJW. You want to squeeze everything into a box that fits your Wikipedia-derived model and if we disagree, we need to get in line with your vision.

You say you want advice? Here's mine. If no one else agrees with you, maybe the problem isn't with everyone else, but with the ideas you're trying to foist on them.

Pretty much everything you are accusing me of here is completely wrong. I am sorry if I made you feel that way, but absolutely none of that is true. Back to my actual argument... You may be fine with treating all these things as different species or whatever, but I think that the D&Disms are anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive unnecessary things. That is my personal opinion, not the way I think everyone should be forced to act.

If I was world building from scratch, there is no way I would make an arbitrary (and it is entirely arbitrary) distinction between "genies" and "giants" just because D&D did it first. No culture on Earth does that. They simplify foreign myths when they adopt them. I gave an example of how Malay culture combined the jinn myths brought by Islam with their own myths of spirits.

Why would a fire giant not be able to grant wishes or change shape? Because the holy inerrant monster manual does not include said traits in its write up of fire giants? This is fiction. Loki was a frost giant and he assumed the form of a mare to seduce a stallion and gave birth to an eight-legged horse that could fly. Most myths and fairy tales and such sound like acid trips when you think about them critically. D&D, at least as you seem to interpret it, just seems to love sucking all the fun and fantasy out of them by forcing all sorts of excessive and unnecessary systematization.

Myths are not static and are not "correct" because they are fiction people use to deal with their social and psychological issues. When you are dealing with myths, you are dealing with stories people told and modified to suit their tastes. Absolutely everything is arbitrary and streamlined over centuries of retelling. Genies live in lamps and grant wishes because one particular storyteller decided that would be good for one story he wrote, and other storytellers added their own twists like genies that did not do any of those things. They were not trying to force everything to fit into an arbitrary mold like D&D does.

So I do not see any point to maintaining an arbitrary distinction between genies and giants just because the monster manual lists them separately. I feel well within my rights to throw them into a blender and modify them as desired whenever I need something, and I feel absolutely no need to be consistent when I do that. If I want a genie with three heads, six arms and one leg, or a giant with a lion's head, lion's paws and live snakes for legs, or a frost giant with the power to change shape and grant wishes and whatever else I need at the time, I will add them and I will not get upset that they contradict the monster manual.

I came here to ask for ideas that I could not come up with myself. I am not omniscient. Please do not be a religious zealot who tells me that I cannot do that because it contradicts your religion centered on the monster manual. That is not nice and not helpful at all.

Quote from: tenbones;1066819But it's already simplified. There is already consensus in D&D circles. The goal being if you have something to add to the consensus, a new perspective, *create it*. If it's good - it'll get adopted.

Don't deconstruct for some silly out-of-game narrative. Make something relevant. Create a bunch of BoxCrayonTales "Geniekind" writeups and post them. If they're *GOOD* people will like them.

Questioning the validity of something established under the pretense of being concerned about the historical roots of how something is presented is passive-aggressive, and besides the entire point. We're here for gaming. Not political correctness in gaming.

This is the very thing that SJW's don't understand - deconstructing something you think is bad isn't better than constructing something good that might be better. If you need a good example of this: Look at what Marvel Comics has done to its characters. Star Wars too

This is why Genies in D&D are fine as is. Make something different if you think it's better. And I fully encourage you to create your BoxCrayonTale's World of Simplified D&D - shiny and new. DO IT. Make it good. Put all your beliefs into it. And put it up for public consumption. (or private critique). I'm sure many people here would happily offer that to you in good faith.

I am not arguing for cultural sensitivity here. I do not understand why people think that. That is wrong.

I think it is unnecessary to have confusingly similar names or to maintain arbitrary categories that do not have solid justification. We have giants, genies, onis and such. Why do they need to be distinct? They never co-existed in any real mythology and fit into the same recurring archetypes.

So my question here is what would you think is a good model for reorganizing them? I am not interested in forcing everything to conform to one model, but rather get guidelines for some universal toolkit that could be used to produce a wish-master fire-man, or a giant cannibal with snakes for legs covered in eyes, or a horned demon in a leopard skin bikini, all of whom have wildly divergent abilities but originate from the same source.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066822I am not arguing for cultural sensitivity here. I do not understand why people think that. That is wrong.

Maybe it's because of the nature of a lot of the threads you post? I think it's that.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066822I think it is unnecessary to have confusingly similar names or to maintain arbitrary categories that do not have solid justification. We have giants, genies, onis and such. Why do they need to be distinct? They never co-existed in any real mythology and fit into the same recurring archetypes.

And yet... we have them. I honestly have never heard *anyone* complain about these things. The only complaints I've ever heard were in 1e/2e about the ever growing list of what constituted a Goblinoid for the purposes of the Ranger Enemy bonus. And even then - it was never this big of a deal.

IF it's an issue - invent your taxonomy for a setting. Post it.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066822So my question here is what would you think is a good model for reorganizing them? I am not interested in forcing everything to conform to one model, but rather get guidelines for some universal toolkit that could be used to produce a wish-master fire-man, or a giant cannibal with snakes for legs covered in eyes, or a horned demon in a leopard skin bikini, all of whom have wildly divergent abilities but originate from the same source.

Well the problem here is I treat them all as distinct. I have no real problem with it. I consider Geniekind to be inherently more "magical" than giantkind - though they're both tied to elemental forces. If I were going to create a setting where these things factored in and I would err on the side of the cosmological forces that they are distinctly tied to. And EVEN then... I consider them distinct. If I were going to merge them I'd say a Genie is a term a Giant would use for one of their kind that is a powerful elemental sorcerer and the type of Genie they are is indicated by the type of element they've achieved mastery in.

So a Storm Giant Archmage with mastery of Air-magic might be Djinn. A Fire Giant with mastery of fire would be an Efreet. Maybe the different Giant-types gain bonuses to certain elements based on their kind, but they're not mandated to learn magic of that type. So you can have a Stone Giant that has mastered Fire Magic. or whatever. Genie becomes a title - not a distinct race. Something like that.

But overall - this only matters insofar as it is a conceit of the setting's lore.

Quote from: tenbones;1066826Well the problem here is I treat them all as distinct. I have no real problem with it. I consider Geniekind to be inherently more "magical" than giantkind - though they're both tied to elemental forces. If I were going to create a setting where these things factored in and I would err on the side of the cosmological forces that they are distinctly tied to. And EVEN then... I consider them distinct. If I were going to merge them I'd say a Genie is a term a Giant would use for one of their kind that is a powerful elemental sorcerer and the type of Genie they are is indicated by the type of element they've achieved mastery in.

So a Storm Giant Archmage with mastery of Air-magic might be Djinn. A Fire Giant with mastery of fire would be an Efreet. Maybe the different Giant-types gain bonuses to certain elements based on their kind, but they're not mandated to learn magic of that type. So you can have a Stone Giant that has mastered Fire Magic. or whatever. Genie becomes a title - not a distinct race. Something like that.

But overall - this only matters insofar as it is a conceit of the setting's lore.

I have been entertaining multiple different solutions on my blog. In a series on giants, I mentioned that D&D and PF have included entire races based on extremely one-note concepts like having six arms or two heads and so forth. I decided to treat giants as one race divided into many tribes. Some tribes may be distinguished by particular physical features, but all giants are subject to random mutations simply because they are literally the grandchildren of Chaos through their mother Gaia.

So Argus Panoptes might have children with a thousand eyes each, but his siblings include the cyclopes. There is no reason that Argus' children could not include cylopes, or that the Elder Cyclopes' children could not include giants with a thousand eyes, or that any of their kids could not have three heads, six arms and one leg (which is probably a giant snake). EDIT: Or be born human, for that matter. (By comparison, in Greek myth the cyclops Polyphemus was the son of Poseidon, who was nephew to the Elder Cyclopes and Younger Cyclopes.)

Genies never existed in Greek myth, but they are analogous to many different Greek entities like the rustic deities, giants, and such. Within Arabic folklore the genies are equally diverse and are suspected to descend from Pre-Islamic divinities and spirits. So I really do not understand why they should be treated as distinct in any setting where they are real, because they are clearly cultural equivalents.

The goblinoids issue you mention is a perfect illustration of my peeve. D&D demands clear mutually exclusive categories for everything, but these do not exist in myth (or in any sane tagging system like image booru). Years ago when I was only familiar with D&D I used to think in clear category terms, but reading non-D&D fiction, studying mythology and looking through OSR reinventions really opened my mind. The 13th Age supplement on nymphs, for example, has them start out as humanoid then become elemental to reflect their age or something but the type mechanic therein is barely important to the rules anyway.

You're saying that you don't like D&D's settings. And you want them to create a setting that caters to your particular tastes.


... my suggestion is you stop pestering us in the choir and get your ass to the back of our million-person line that have been saying this for multiple editions over the course of decades. Get out of here carpet-bagger!!! Stop cutting into the line!


Or you create the thing you want. And share it.

Is it wrong that I only pop into these threads to see everyone dogpile boxcrayontales?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066822So my question here is what would you think is a good model for reorganizing them? I am not interested in forcing everything to conform to one model, but rather get guidelines for some universal toolkit that could be used to produce a wish-master fire-man, or a giant cannibal with snakes for legs covered in eyes, or a horned demon in a leopard skin bikini, all of whom have wildly divergent abilities but originate from the same source.

Are we just talking D&D here or other games?

Some games have a more realistic way of treating demons and genies, trying to base them on medieval descriptions.

Quote from: tenbones;1066840You're saying that you don't like D&D's settings. And you want them to create a setting that caters to your particular tastes.


... my suggestion is you stop pestering us in the choir and get your ass to the back of our million-person line that have been saying this for multiple editions over the course of decades. Get out of here carpet-bagger!!! Stop cutting into the line!


Or you create the thing you want. And share it.

Do you want the blog link? It is terribly amateurish but I've been trying to layout my thoughts there for a couple of years now.

Quote from: Spike;1066917Is it wrong that I only pop into these threads to see everyone dogpile boxcrayontales?

I don't see a problem. The dogpiling has to do with replies mistaking me for an SJW when my complaints aren't about being culturally sensitive (whatever that means), especially not when the culture in question will never actually read the material or be impacted by it. I'm more of a grammar nazi, except with world mythology.

Quote from: soltakss;1067111Are we just talking D&D here or other games?

Some games have a more realistic way of treating demons and genies, trying to base them on medieval descriptions.

It varies depending on what mythology you use as the baseline.

In Arabic folklore genies are the generic spirits of pre-Islamic times, only being codified in Islam as a pre-human race created by God who have free will like humans do. In areas where Islam has spread, there's been syncretism. In Malay, for example, genies have been combined with native beliefs in spirits that cause illnesses.

In medieval Christian lore, you might be able to divide all supernatural entities into demons, angels, and fairies. Demons follow Satan, whereas fairies took no side.