Quote from: Gormenghast;875396I just checked out the preview material for Dark Albion. I also read some reviews.

It looks fun.


I think it was good call on replacing the Catholic Church with the Unconquered Sun. Sol Invictus, FTW.
This is not because I dislike fantasy historical games that involve my religion, but because the change signals the reader/ player to expect other differences. It shows that, despite the many close parallels to our history, this is a " weird" alternate universe.

What hints I have read about Frogland make me think of the bells of Saint Toad, Clark Ashton Smith, and all that.
Creepy.

Thanks!  Hope you consider picking up the book.

Quote from: Arminius;875833Not to mention the Archduke Franz Ferdinand literally died from black magic or a combination of that and a bullet.

If Ferdinand had willed himself to take massive ballistic-impact damage because he was convinced he'd been cursed, that would be about equivalent.

Quote from: TristramEvans;875845so the fuck what? Magic wasn't real, isnt real, and their belief didnt change that. People werent assassinated by magic, crops werent ruined by magic, there were no actual effects from magic curses, plagues werent started by magic. Thats the point you don't seem to be able to grasp.

Oh...oh right, I just realized I'm debating with someone who does believe in magic. Fucking pointless.

The type of magic I practice has about as little to do with the typical medieval european's idea of magic as the typical modern physician's has to do with a medieval bleeder's.

You are so fucking blinded by your pig-ignorance of your own utterly robotic conditioning to the 21st century secular paradigm that you can't even begin to comprehend the concept that the entire culture was framed on assuming magic to be true, and that they MEANT it. You're convinced they were just trolling us all.

At least half of the Republican Party is willing to base public policy on a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, and the other half pays lip service to get their votes.  So you guys are telling me that people WITHOUT knowledge of science didn't believe the supernatural was real?

JG

Quote from: RPGPundit;876099You are so fucking blinded by your pig-ignorance of your own utterly robotic conditioning to the 21st century secular paradigm that you can't even begin to comprehend the concept that the entire culture was framed on assuming magic to be true, and that they MEANT it. You're convinced they were just trolling us all.

No, you're just so willfuly ignorant to the point I made that you're galloping around on some ridiculous mountebank high horse off on some ridiculous tangent that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I said. It has nothing to do with a point of view, or a paradigm, or any other projectionyou're putting on me because you're trying to make an argument that is so far beyond beside the point that you're tilting at some massive strawman windmills with your panties in a bunch.

Let me try one last futile attempt to explain this in as simple as terms possible:

1. No one in history died because of a magical curse. People may have believed that certain people died because of curses, certain deaths may have been attributed to magical curses. But the cause of death of no historical figure in our reality was "magical curse".
2. If people had died from magical curses this would have altered the course of history as we know it substantially. This is the echo effect. The "butterfly beats its wings" on a colossally grander scale. Not because of anything to do with belief, nothing to do with a medieval mindset vs a modern mindset, but because a person who would have, in our reality, continued to live, have children, affect others people's lives, die a natural death under different circumstances instead would be dead because of a magickal curse, at the whim of the person who could cast this curse. Not just one person, but anyone who any person wanted dead that was willing to put the effort in to learning a manner in which how to curse them. Fuck, if I could go out and learn a rite that would put a death curse on someone, just the political landscape of our world in the last 20 years would have been insanely different.
3. This is just one example of a commonly believed form of magick, granted one with a precedence stretching back to the Kollossoi of Classical cultures and probably well before that. That's several centuries of people with the ability to kill off people that in our reality were not killed by magick. Add in every other commonly believed folklore about witchcraft, and you have a vast alteration of the landscape of history. Because those people would not be replicating the natural events that took place that people may have blamed on witchcraft, those events would still happen in addition to the innumerable effects of actual witchcraft. If you actually consider the implications of that starting from prehistoric cultures onwards, it is so bloody obvious that history would be in every way completely altered from our reality that its absolutely flabberghasting to me that I even need to point this out, let alone argue it.

And all that is ONLY taking into account beliefs of witchcraft extant of those time periods. Add in D&D style magic and you're talking about a world completely alien to anything we could conceive of. Wars would be massacres between wizards. In fact simulations of this were actually run by Gygax and his wargaming buddies, who took the basic concepts of D&D and applied them to a massive army scale conflict. What they found was ancient wargaming was essentially turned into World War 2.

Quote from: TristramEvans;8761462. If people had died from magical curses this would have altered the course of history as we know it substantially. This is the echo effect. The "butterfly beats its wings" on a colossally grander scale. Not because of anything to do with belief, nothing to do with a medieval mindset vs a modern mindset, but because a person who would have, in our reality, continued to live, have children, affect others people's lives, die a natural death under different circumstances instead would be dead because of a magickal curse, at the whim of the person who could cast this curse. Not just one person, but anyone who any person wanted dead that was willing to put the effort in to learning a manner in which how to curse them. Fuck, if I could go out and learn a rite that would put a death curse on someone, just the political landscape of our world in the last 20 years would have been insanely different.
.

Except if you take the secret history approach, which is what most people are arguing for here, the only people who die that way prior to the start of the campaign are people who would have died anyways and whose deaths were attributed to witchcraft. No historical events are being changed at all. The only thing that is being changed is the explanation for those events.

I do agree the echo effect is an issue. But that is an issue in any game where history is changed in any way for any reason. As far as plausibility goes, this is a pretty tight solution to that issue. I think it isn't asking readers, players or viewers a lot to accept that one conceit in a historical setting (especially if the events leading up to the moment everything starts were not changed in their outcomes, but simply had a magical explanation behind them).

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;876157Except if you take the secret history approach, which is what most people are arguing for here, the only people who die that way prior to the start of the campaign are people who would have died anyways and whose deaths were attributed to witchcraft.

Also in this fictional world that happens to look a lot like our real world, some of the historical deaths that were not attributed to witchcraft were undoubtedly, but very secretly, actually due to witchcraft.

Quote from: TristramEvans;876146Let me try one last futile attempt to explain this in as simple as terms possible:

1. No one in history died because of a magical curse. People may have believed that certain people died because of curses, certain deaths may have been attributed to magical curses. But the cause of death of no historical figure in our reality was "magical curse".

Mmm... Wrong. Here's how this actually works scientifically speaking.

If you believe you are cursed, you are cursed. Anything that you believe will make you I'll, will make you ill (Nocebos). Some Placebos which actually have no healing properties at all, will heal you, simply because you believe the Placebo has healing powers. There are plenty of medical studies which have proved this. So Disbelieve in magic to your peril, because magic can affect other people, and those other people can harm you. Just becuase you don't beleieve it can affect you doesn't mean that it won't.

Now here are a few actual cases, you can review for yourself. Feel free to get back to me with questions.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150210-can-you-think-yourself-to-death

Despite its continued use in clinical trials, the so-called placebo response is not universally accepted. In fact, in 2001 a systematic review of clinical trials concluded that there was no evidence of clinically important effects, except perhaps in the treatment of pain and continuous subjective outcomes. A Cochrane review with similar conclusions (updated as of 2010) has also been published by the same authors.

One conclusion that can be drawn is that the nocebo response may be of similarly dubious scientific merit despite the belief in its existence.

Quote from: Bren;876197Despite its continued use in clinical trials, the so-called placebo response is not universally accepted. In fact, in 2001 a systematic review of clinical trials concluded that there was no evidence of clinically important effects, except perhaps in the treatment of pain and continuous subjective outcomes. A Cochrane review with similar conclusions (updated as of 2010) has also been published by the same authors.

One conclusion that can be drawn is that the nocebo response may be of similarly dubious scientific merit despite the belief in its existence.

What?!!! Your claim is simply not true!  From your study from the New England Journal of Medicine;

"As compared with no treatment, placebo had no significant effect on binary outcomes, regardless of whether these outcomes were subjective or objective."

"For the trials with continuous outcomes, placebo had a beneficial effect, but the effect decreased with increasing sample size..."


We need to conduct more studies, because your own study says that with continuous treatments placebos indeed have a beneficial effect...

What that means in plain English is if the people believe it is good for them, they are getting healthier.

So instead of dissing the study on Nocebo's you should be calling for more in-depth studies.

What you'll learn from that though is what I'm already telling you.

If the people believe the curse works, the curse really works, and they can die, or die sooner, as a result of said curse...

i.e. Magic... works.

Quote from: GameDaddy;876207What?!!! Your claim is simply not true!  From your study from the New England Journal of Medicine;

First, it is not my study. It's the study I cited. You, on the other hand cited no studies just a media piece.

Quote"As compared with no treatment, placebo had no significant effect on binary outcomes, regardless of whether these outcomes were subjective or objective."

And second, no significant effect for binary outcomes. That means there was no placebo effect for any binary outcomes. Like I said and unlike your claim that placebo/nocebo has a powerful effect. Guess what one example of a binary outcome would be: Is the subject alive or dead? Guess what the studies show for placebo in those cases? No effect.

Quote"For the trials with continuous outcomes, placebo had a beneficial effect, but the effect decreased with increasing sample size..."

You left out "The pooled standardized mean difference was significant for the trials with subjective outcomes but not for those with objective outcomes." So when they pooled the results (which was done in an attempt to discount the effects of small sample sizes), they found that only in the case of subjective outcomes was there any significant evidence of a placebo effect. Which is why the authors suggest the effect may be an artifact of small sampling size rather than of any significant beneficial effect for placebo.

So what does all this continuous, subjective outcome stuff mean in English?

What it means is if you give people a pill and then ask them later "does it hurt less now?" there is a statistically significant increase in the number of people who say, "Yes it hurts less now" when compared to the group where you do absolutely nothing for them and then ask them later "does it hurt less now?" Is this really very surprising? What might be surprising would be if they improved on some nonsubjective criteria or on a binary outcome. But the studies showed that doesn't happen with any binary outcomes nor does it happen with any objective outcomes. Which calls into question the long held belief in the power of the placebo effect.

QuoteWe need to conduct more studies, because your own study says that with continuous treatments placebos indeed have a beneficial effect...

No that is not what the study said. What it said was people said they felt better. Whether they actually felt better than they would have felt without placebo is impossible to determine because you can't separate their subjective feeling from any objective actuality. But when the measure is objective, then in large studies, small studies, or pooled studies, there is no placebo effect.

QuoteWhat that means in plain English is if the people believe it is good for them, they are getting healthier.

No what it means is some people will tell you they feel better if you tell them you did something that will help them to feel better. When the measure is of something objective, placebo does nothing. When the measure is binary, placebo does nothing. The only time any placebo effect is seen is when the measure is both nonbinary and subjective. And we can't separate improvement from perception of improvement.

QuoteSo instead of dissing the study on Nocebo's you should be calling for more in-depth studies.

What you'll learn from that though is what I'm already telling you.

If the people believe the curse works, the curse really works, and they can die, or die sooner, as a result of said curse...

i.e. Magic... works.

No what the study review shows is that death (a binary, objective result) is exactly the sort of thing that placebo does not effect. There is no reason to think that nocebo will be more effective than placebo for causing changes that are objectively measured. Like, for example, death.

Now ere's what the media source you provided says about the death curse. "We can never know whether the nocebo effect would have actually killed Mr A, though Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin Medical School thinks it is certainly possible."

So we can never know if there was a nocebo effect for the objective measure of Is he alive or is he dead? But despite the lack of evidence Fabrizio Benedetti still believes enough in his unprovable claim that he spent time out of his day to talk about it with a reporter. Lots of things are possible. Responsible scientists obtain proof before making claims. Sadly, the media is always happy to report unproven claims if they think it will sell papers, get clicks, or boost ratings.

I laughed out loud when I read this in your media source: "It is notoriously difficult to neutralise long-held beliefs, but responsible media reporting would at least stem the spread of poisonous rumours." I laughed out loud because the placebo response is a long-held belief that is only now being called into question by actual academic research. But apparently you and Signore Benedetti know the truth without the need for troublesome studies and data and stuff.

Quote from: Bren;876223No what it means is some people will tell you they feel better if you tell them you did something that will help them to feel better. When the measure is of something objective, placebo does nothing. When the measure is binary, placebo does nothing. The only time any placebo effect is seen is when the measure is both nonbinary and subjective. And we can't separate improvement from perception of improvement.

GE did a study back in the 50s.

They went through corporate offices and increased the lighting, telling people they were installing "better lighting."  Productivity increased measurably.

Then they went through and decreased the lighting, telling people they were installing "better lighting," and productivity increased measurably again.

Then they set the lighting to its original level, telling people they were installing better lighting, and productivity increased again, and stayed up.

It's in the Harvard Business School Case Study Library someplace, it was 30 years ago I read it.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;876227GE did a study back in the 50s.

Interesting. I'd be curious to know more about the study. Sustained productivity improvement is surprising. Successive increasing improvements in productivity is surprising. Successive, increasing, sustained improvements is very surprising. At some point there would have to be diminishing returns in productivity or lack of sustainability otherwise GE could have continued to play that game forever, with ever increasing productivity, which (since GE does not own the world) obviously did not happen.

That said, an awful lot of "productivity" in corporations is and always has been subjectively, not objectively, measured so without knowing more about what GE measured in 1950 that they called productivity we might not want to accept the case study results at face value. But even if the productivity in the GE studies was objective in measure, there are lots of subjective things that will make people either more or less productive.

EDIT: Not sure about the GE Case Study, but the earlier Western Electric studies associated with the Hawthorne Effect seem to indicate that improvements were temporary.

QuoteThe term was coined in 1958 by Henry A. Landsberger[3] when analyzing earlier experiments from 1924–32 at the Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric factory outside Chicago). The Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to see if their workers would become more productive in higher or lower levels of light. The workers' productivity seemed to improve when changes were made, and slumped when the study ended. It was suggested that the productivity gain occurred as a result of the motivational effect on the workers of the interest being shown in them.

This effect was observed for minute increases in illumination. In these lighting studies, light intensity was altered to examine its effect on worker productivity. Most industrial/occupational psychology and organizational behavior textbooks refer to the illumination studies.[4] Only occasionally are the rest of the studies mentioned.[5]

Although illumination research of workplace lighting formed the basis of the Hawthorne effect, other changes such as maintaining clean work stations, clearing floors of obstacles, and even relocating workstations resulted in increased productivity for short periods. Thus the term is used to identify any type of short-lived increase in productivity.[3][6][7]

Isn't the placebo effect something very specific though? I'm not sure it would apply to being cursed (since it is generally about whether your condition improves after taking a pill).

I would think though that a person who believes they are cursed and works themselves into an intense emotional state over it, might raise their risk of a heart attack or something. I believe people who are newly diagnosed with highly fatal cancers have an increased risk of suicide, stroke and heart attack (and some of this risk is believed to stem from mental health affecting the body). I'm no doctor, and I am open to whatever the medical consensus is on this,but I've long been under the impression that it is pretty accepted that mental health can impact physical health.

Quote from: Bren;876231Interesting. I'd be curious to know more about the study. Sustained productivity improvement is surprising. Successive increasing improvements in productivity is surprising. Successive, increasing, sustained improvements is very surprising. At some point there would have to be diminishing returns in productivity or lack of sustainability otherwise GE could have continued to play that game forever, with ever increasing productivity, which (since GE does not own the world) obviously did not happen.

That said, an awful lot of "productivity" in corporations is and always has been subjectively, not objectively, measured so without knowing more about what GE measured in 1950 that they called productivity we might not want to accept the case study results at face value. But even if the productivity in the GE studies was objective in measure, there are lots of subjective things that will make people either more or less productive.

EDIT: Not sure about the GE Case Study, but the earlier Western Electric studies associated with the Hawthorne Effect seem to indicate that improvements were temporary.

I may indeed have been thinking of the WE study, and the results were indeed short term as cited.  As I said, thirty years ago.