Quote from: Jaeger on December 26, 2020, 09:31:40 PMWTF!? Friendship and Magic is always benevolent!

You realize that you are causing real harm, literally physically hurting people, making them feel unsafe, and advocating actual violence when you spread such lies.

Blasphemer! Heretic! Burn him! Burn himmmmmmm......!

A friend of mine, with younger kids told me, a few years back, that the show had become a lot more like D&D. I guess there must have been some D&D fans in the creative team. So the above is not too surprising.

They have also taken on grown up topics like tackling an "everyone is the same" cult. Billy Bob Thornton talked about it in an interview for GQ. He considered it essential lessons for his daughter.
https://www.gq.com/story/billy-bob-thornton-bad-santa-2-profile

Quote from: Spinachcat on December 28, 2020, 04:56:33 AM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 23, 2020, 12:24:31 AM"I'm not out to kill your characters, but I'm not going to stand between your choices and the dice, either."

Excellent quote. It effectively defines how (and why) I GM in a single sentence.

Seconded.

Quote from: RandyB on December 28, 2020, 10:41:11 AM

Quote from: Spinachcat on December 28, 2020, 04:56:33 AM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 23, 2020, 12:24:31 AM"I'm not out to kill your characters, but I'm not going to stand between your choices and the dice, either."

Excellent quote. It effectively defines how (and why) I GM in a single sentence.

Seconded.

Much obliged, although conscience impels me to full disclosure: When characters have done everything right, or in the right spirit, and some of them simply get really bad luck at a critical moment, I too have been known to fudge rolls if the alternative is ruining the player's whole night.

The trick is to keep this secret and intermittent so nobody gets to counting on it.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 27, 2020, 08:31:29 AM
It's also why the setting in my own book I've been writing made the truth of the divine unknowable to mortals and included a monotheistic faith alongside the pagan ones.

IMHO a lot of gamers underestimate the effect of having a monotheistic faith in their campaign world. Many also seem reluctant and even adverse to even have one.

I feel that a lot of that reluctance is a overreaction to the Media generated D&D satanic panic that was an ineffective joke in reality.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 27, 2020, 08:31:29 AM
Frankly, my fantasy world is fantastic enough that mortal accessible otherworlds doesn't add that much (you're already IN elfland with elves, giants, dragons and shades, so what is gained by adding elfland+ to the places one can travel?), ...

I never understood the appeal of "planar adventures". I get where it comes from. It's a riff on the old myths of hero's journeying to the underworld, etc.. But adding MOAR!! and turning it to 11 has the same effect of having 12 playable PC races. When everything fantastical and special is common - the sense of wonder is gone. Because familiarity does breed a kind of contempt.

Quote from: mightybrain on December 28, 2020, 06:31:18 AM
...
They have also taken on grown up topics like tackling an "everyone is the same" cult. Billy Bob Thornton talked about it in an interview for GQ. He considered it essential lessons for his daughter.
https://www.gq.com/story/billy-bob-thornton-bad-santa-2-profile

Caught that too.

Unfortunately that is the type of message that goes straight over the heads of the supposedly grown ass adults who are buying the My little pony/D&D crossover stuff.

Quote from: Jaeger on December 28, 2020, 02:56:23 PM
IMHO a lot of gamers underestimate the effect of having a monotheistic faith in their campaign world. Many also seem reluctant and even adverse to even have one.

I think there's also just a fair degree of disdain for the main monotheistic faiths among the Left-leaning developers who comprise the largest game companies in the industry. You can't have your gender-fluid omnisexual pixie-centaur be celebrated as the special beloved snowflake they are if the default assumption for religion is Medieval Christianity.

It's a lot easier to paint Leftist values onto fictional deities than onto the holy texts that are among the most widely read books in human history.

It's also easy to pretend that all the cultural foundations that could have only arisen from Christianity in Western Europe (including ending slavery, women's suffrage and equal rights in general) are in fact just natural norms that could have arisen from any society because they're living in the echoes of two thousand years of Christian thought and haven't actually followed the consequences of throwing away the foundation on the structure supported by it to its logical conclusion (for which we need only look at the horrors the Godless communist/socialist/fascist regimes have inflicted).

Basically, there's a lot of hatred for Christianity (and thus monotheism) for putting up all these gates on various behaviors without bothering to learn why the gate was put up in the first place.

I think they also underestimate just what a change of perspective KNOWING that the gods and the afterlife are real versus having to take it on faith would have on a society.

Consider... you KNOW that X God exists and rewards Y behavior and that, in theory, you're just a planeshift spell away from visiting you dead mother's spirit in the afterlife.

There is zero incentive to do anything other than what your God requires to get you into their afterlife and zero fear of death since you know for certain it's not the end. That is almost more alien to human experience than all but the weirdest alien life forms who, if sapient, probably at least have existential questions about their place in the world and what, if anything, comes next.

Unless there's literally a god of technological progress why would any of these people have advanced beyond hunter-gatherers? If this life is known to be just a temporary stopover en route to an eternal life, why even bother with improving your technology when it does nothing to improve your odds of entering the next life? Unless you worship the god/goddess of fertility, why even bother reproducing?

If that sounds like a bunch of crazy fanatic behavior... the crazy fanatics are also 100% convinced that their version of the afterlife and the requirements to get there are true.

Basically, if you know for certain which gods are right and what happens after you die you'll never have a society that remotely resembles a real human society. You basically NEED the uncertainty of what happens after death to create anything relatable to any real human being (barring the aforementioned fanatics).

By the same token, and a fair degree of permanence to death is also needed. This isn't to say there can't be loopholes, but there's a huge difference between "you can save someone as long as they're only mostly dead and they wake up as if from a coma" and "you can cast true resurrection on a pile of hundred year old ashes and restore them to life with full memories of their time in the afterlife."

Basically, you only get the Medieval European world that underlies most standard fantasy settings without an unprovable afterlife, the finality of death and a Christian-like faith encouraging certain behaviors and condemning others.

You could do something early Dark Ages themes with the clashes between Christian and pagan societies, but you just don't get Western Europe culture without Christianity (and the many many advantages, particularly to women and the lower classes, that it offered relative to paganism).

OK, I'm not sure how this got into a discussion of monotheism. On the original subject of therapy -- it seems to me that posters here are taking the game far more seriously than either old-school or new-school gamers. As far as I can see, even hippy new-school gamers are at most treating RPGs as a storytelling form of entertainment, not like therapy.

There are plenty of Christian D&D players who don't insist that the game has to be Christian, any more than poker or chess have to be Christian. A game's a game.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 28, 2020, 04:41:26 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on December 28, 2020, 02:56:23 PM
IMHO a lot of gamers underestimate the effect of having a monotheistic faith in their campaign world. Many also seem reluctant and even adverse to even have one.

I think there's also just a fair degree of disdain for the main monotheistic faiths among the Left-leaning developers who comprise the largest game companies in the industry. You can't have your gender-fluid omnisexual pixie-centaur be celebrated as the special beloved snowflake they are if the default assumption for religion is Medieval Christianity.

It's a lot easier to paint Leftist values onto fictional deities than onto the holy texts that are among the most widely read books in human history.

Except that D&D's polytheism isn't some new thing from Seattle-based hippy designers -- it was written into the game by creators Gygax and Arneson in the 1970s.

Quote from: jhkim on December 28, 2020, 05:02:32 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 28, 2020, 04:41:26 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on December 28, 2020, 02:56:23 PM
IMHO a lot of gamers underestimate the effect of having a monotheistic faith in their campaign world. Many also seem reluctant and even adverse to even have one.

I think there's also just a fair degree of disdain for the main monotheistic faiths among the Left-leaning developers who comprise the largest game companies in the industry. You can't have your gender-fluid omnisexual pixie-centaur be celebrated as the special beloved snowflake they are if the default assumption for religion is Medieval Christianity.

It's a lot easier to paint Leftist values onto fictional deities than onto the holy texts that are among the most widely read books in human history.

Except that D&D's polytheism isn't some new thing from Seattle-based hippy designers -- it was written into the game by creators Gygax and Arneson in the 1970s.

Pretty much. D&D's polytheism doesn't even resemble real life polytheism. It's just this weird henotheistic aberration based around gods as conceived by people who don't understand how actual pagan pantheons work. And it's all based around emerging fantasy tropes that sprang along with D&D and similar media, not "Leftist" ideology.

Quote from: jhkim on December 28, 2020, 05:02:32 PMExcept that D&D's polytheism isn't some new thing from Seattle-based hippy designers -- it was written into the game by creators Gygax and Arneson in the 1970s.

I think I read Gygax was Christian (Jehovah's Witness) as was Tolkien (Roman Catholic) but neither thought to model their invented worlds after their religion.

Quote from: mightybrain on December 28, 2020, 06:24:17 PMI think I read Gygax was Christian (Jehovah's Witness) as was Tolkien (Roman Catholic) but neither thought to model their invented worlds after their religion.

Yes and no. Tolkien deliberately tailored his legendarium to be theologically compatible with his Catholicism, as much as he could, while averting explicit allegories to specific religious matters -- this is most clear in the opening parts of The Silmarillion, which pretty clearly depict Eru (God) creating the Ainur (angels), some of whom are postulated to enter the world as the Valar and the Maiar, and one of whom falls out of pride and anger (Melkor/Morgoth, q.v. Lucifer/Satan) to become the Great Enemy of all life. However, none of the cultures of Middle-Earth practice any kind of religious worship analogous to real faiths because they all, in Tolkien's conception, predate Judaism and Christianity by thousands of years.

Gygax, similarly, grabbed the Indian names of devas, planetars and solars for his angelic-type outsiders specifically because he didn't want to use the names of real beings for these in-game creatures, but pretty much everything about classical 1E clerics and paladins comes straight out of Christian imagery and iconography.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 28, 2020, 04:41:26 PM

Quote from: Jaeger on December 28, 2020, 02:56:23 PM
IMHO a lot of gamers underestimate the effect of having a monotheistic faith in their campaign world. Many also seem reluctant and even adverse to even have one.

It's also easy to pretend that all the cultural foundations that could have only arisen from Christianity in Western Europe (including ending slavery, women's suffrage and equal rights in general) are in fact just natural norms that could have arisen from any society because they're living in the echoes of two thousand years of Christian thought and haven't actually followed the consequences of throwing away the foundation on the structure supported by it to its logical conclusion (for which we need only look at the horrors the Godless communist/socialist/fascist regimes have inflicted).

Exactly - A lot of this  school of thought came from people who had a similar mentality to the crowd* that founded the SCA - The SCA describes itself as a group devoted to the Middle Ages "as they ought to have been", choosing to "selectively recreate the culture, choosing elements of the culture that interest and attract us".

i.e. Imagine how cool it could be without all that pesky Christian stuff in the way...

*(A crowd that included Marion Zimmer Bradley; one only has to read her Avalon books to see what she thinks of Christianity.)

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 28, 2020, 04:41:26 PM
There is zero incentive to do anything other than what your God requires to get you into their afterlife and zero fear of death since you know for certain it's not the end. That is almost more alien to human experience than all but the weirdest alien life forms who, if sapient, probably at least have existential questions about their place in the world and what, if anything, comes next.

If you are an atheist I would say that what I highlighted In bold is why there is a big difference between the fake religions in D&D/RPG's and the "fake" real-life religions.

In Real Life - even in new-age crap like wicca - people of faith behave in certain consistent ways. Ones belief system informs a lot about how people/cultures act and relate to each other. Even on a daily basis.

The faux pantheons of most RPG's do not influence in game character behavior in even remotely similar ways. The average PC acts in very "alien" ways about their in game religion, that don't reflect how a people of faith act. Mostly due to said "religious systems" being written by people who don't practice any religion writing how they think religions work.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 28, 2020, 04:41:26 PM
... you just don't get Western Europe culture without Christianity (and the many many advantages, particularly to women and the lower classes, that it offered relative to paganism).

This also ties in to your line of "...they're living in the echoes of two thousand years of Christian thought."

The ability to be irreligious, and a good person in this day and age has a lot to do with the fact of being brought up in a western culture that has been infused with 2000 years of basic Christian morality. Mostly their 'alternative' moral code consists of merely taking the sex restrictions out they don't like, an calling you some flavor of "phobic" if you disagree with them.

Also due to the post WWII black legend spun about Christianity by leftist western academics; people have BIG misunderstandings about what Pagan practices actually entailed, and how easily Christianity won pagan converts in part due to said practices.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 29, 2020, 12:36:56 AM...
Yes and no. Tolkien deliberately tailored his legendarium to be theologically compatible with his Catholicism, as much as he could, while averting explicit allegories to specific religious matters -- this is most clear in the opening parts of The Silmarillion, which pretty clearly depict Eru (God) creating the Ainur (angels), some of whom are postulated to enter the world as the Valar and the Maiar, and one of whom falls out of pride and anger (Melkor/Morgoth, q.v. Lucifer/Satan) to become the Great Enemy of all life. However, none of the cultures of Middle-Earth practice any kind of religious worship analogous to real faiths because they all, in Tolkien's conception, predate Judaism and Christianity by thousands of years.

Religious worship is not mentioned much in Tolkien IMHO partly because he was was telling closed-loop myths.

In one sense, the way middle earth is set up, with actual relatable cultures and mythology - makes it perhaps the best fantasy RPG setting anyone could want.

But his "setting" is also so tied to the myth of the one ring, that it really makes it hard for PC's to feel that they are not always overshadowed by the fellowship.

IMHO this dual attraction/disappointment is why a Middle Earth RPG is one of the evergreen properties in the hobby, and also why it will always be a 3rd tier RPG franchise at least two steps behind D&D in popularity.

.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 27, 2020, 08:31:29 AM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 26, 2020, 08:58:23 PM
You caught me, I was being a bit weasel-wordy there. What I really meant was "religious" -- I'm Catholic, and so the basic cosmic nihilism that underlies Lovecraftian horror is simply something I can't buy into for any great length of time, not and still enjoy the story.  But calling it a "philosophical" difference tends to be less prone to side-tracking such discussions into religious arguments, which I've found the hard way seldom get anywhere productive.

Same boat here; Catholic and not even really comfortable pretending to be a pagan in D&D. If monotheism isn't on the table I prefer to play agnostics and just not engage that element.

You need Lion & Dragon, then!

Quote from: RPGPundit on December 30, 2020, 09:15:51 PM
You need Lion & Dragon, then!

Nah! I'm just a few pages from finished with my own superversive-themed system which has a fully developed Catholic-inspired monotheistic faith as one of its options.

As I've outlined elsewhere I pretty much loathe OSR style play (Palladium Fantasy 1e excepted). Rather, I prefer high fantasy Big Damn Heroes and my system is written to fit.

I also find your interpretations of "real" magic to clash with actual Catholic theology (something I strived to stay very much in line with in my own system) so I'll pass.

Thanks for the offer though.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 30, 2020, 11:35:50 PMI'm just a few pages from finished with my own superversive-themed system which has a fully developed Catholic-inspired monotheistic faith as one of its options.

As I've outlined elsewhere I pretty much loathe OSR style play (Palladium Fantasy 1e excepted). Rather, I prefer high fantasy Big Damn Heroes and my system is written to fit.

You can definitely count me in as an interested patron if and when this is finally finished.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 30, 2020, 11:35:50 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on December 30, 2020, 09:15:51 PM
You need Lion & Dragon, then!

Nah! I'm just a few pages from finished with my own superversive-themed system which has a fully developed Catholic-inspired monotheistic faith as one of its options.

  Having read that part of the draft, I must say, I wouldn't have typically associated monotheism with the primal power source, but I think it generally works.

Quote from: VisionStorm on December 28, 2020, 05:15:42 PM

Quote from: jhkim on December 28, 2020, 05:02:32 PM
Except that D&D's polytheism isn't some new thing from Seattle-based hippy designers -- it was written into the game by creators Gygax and Arneson in the 1970s.

Pretty much. D&D's polytheism doesn't even resemble real life polytheism. It's just this weird henotheistic aberration based around gods as conceived by people who don't understand how actual pagan pantheons work. And it's all based around emerging fantasy tropes that sprang along with D&D and similar media, not "Leftist" ideology.

I wouldn't call it henotheistic, because henotheism emerged from pantheism and has different characteristics than D&D's religions. D&D's version is monotheism, crudely back-pasted onto pantheism by monotheists who didn't get pantheism.

Trying to compare it to real world religions makes brain hurt.