Quote from: Chris24601 on February 03, 2021, 02:02:42 PM
Actual archeological evidence though is that the Dark Ages common folk were healthier, lived longer and had a better diet than their equivalents in the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a net boon for everyone who wasn't part of the Roman aristocracy.

Population collapses are great for the survivors.

Quote from: S'mon on February 04, 2021, 11:12:24 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 03, 2021, 02:02:42 PM
Actual archeological evidence though is that the Dark Ages common folk were healthier, lived longer and had a better diet than their equivalents in the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a net boon for everyone who wasn't part of the Roman aristocracy.

Population collapses are great for the survivors.

Yep.  Also good for getting people to focus on essentials.  When you've got to get the shelter made, and the seed in the ground, or the hunt done, or the water found--or die, it tends to focus the mind.  Also have to protect any of that from someone else that decides the best way to not die is to kill you and take your stuff.  Or enslave you and extract a major chunk of the results of all that work.

What people miss so often about customs is that the needs and the means of dealing with those needs come first.  Then if stable for some time, the customs become ingrained, maybe even tradition that will last some time after the needs change.  Distinctions, for example, between "women's work" and "men's work" can get blurred in a hurry when it is "everyone pitch in and get this done or we all die."  One of the many reasons that your typical SJW is an idiot is that they are so far removed from this kind of survival reality, that they don't understand the cause and effect direction of the customs in the society they criticize.  You know, sometimes the needs are so great and so varied, it is important not to have everyone pitch in but instead have everyone do whatever it is that they are best able to do.  Or else die.  (We aren't even to comparative advantage in that situation.)  Sometimes, that means you need the people most capable of exercising brute strength to do so.

Of course, the flip side to that is that when living on the edge that way, it doesn't take much to push you over.  Then you die or get enslaved or impoverished anyway.  Customs and even traditions develop to try to avoid that fate, too.  A lot of people do a lot of hard work so that an SJW has the luxury of demonstrating complete lack of understanding of the human condition with this game.  If the author was less of a fool, they'd be more grateful for this fact.

Quote from: S'mon on February 04, 2021, 11:12:24 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 03, 2021, 02:02:42 PM
Actual archeological evidence though is that the Dark Ages common folk were healthier, lived longer and had a better diet than their equivalents in the Roman Empire. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a net boon for everyone who wasn't part of the Roman aristocracy.

Population collapses are great for the survivors.

They are. I'm also coming to believe they're rather necessary to human civilization in the same way that forest fires are necessary to the health of forests. They clear out the dead wood and corruption and make way for a healthy regrowth.

In terms of recorded history we've had two such collapses, the Late Bronze Age Collapse c. 1100 BC and the European Dark Ages c. AD 460-ish... give or take about 1500 years apart, both concurring with massive corruption, the collapse of global trade and mass migrations of people displaced by famine, invasion or other calamities. The Norse were basically the people ideally situated to take advantage of the power vacuum caused by the Roman collapse and their influence on European culture really can't be understated (see The Normans... Vikings who settled down adopted Christianity and started all sorts of new dynasties).

It's been a bit over 1500 years since the fall of Rome and you can't tell me the people at the top now are the best and brightest at the start of a new dynasty... they're almost invariably either near-cadavers clinging to power or their idiot scions who've never experienced a day outside their bubble of prestige and privilege. They're the types you see at the end of every dynasty; clutching to hold onto power and wealth they neither created or struggled to maintain but feel entitled to by dint of birth as they run the system into the ground.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 04, 2021, 12:18:45 PM
They are. I'm also coming to believe they're rather necessary to human civilization in the same way that forest fires are necessary to the health of forests. They clear out the dead wood and corruption and make way for a healthy regrowth.

Yeah - but most of us die. Experiencing a step-change or full civilisational collapse is not fun.

Quote from: S'mon on February 04, 2021, 12:33:20 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 04, 2021, 12:18:45 PM
They are. I'm also coming to believe they're rather necessary to human civilization in the same way that forest fires are necessary to the health of forests. They clear out the dead wood and corruption and make way for a healthy regrowth.

Yeah - but most of us die. Experiencing a step-change or full civilisational collapse is not fun.

Thus the Robert Heinlein quote:

Quote
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

I see it as just a little like the weather.  It's coming.  A lot of it will be bad.  Might as well take some comfort in the silver lining.

Quote from: TJS on February 03, 2021, 09:23:10 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 03, 2021, 11:26:40 AM
This is pretty striking for depicting a woman leading twenty men, and making aggressive demands of her brothers. Sure, the average woman wouldn't have this sort of power or freedom, but that it was even believable in a historical saga says a lot about the relative status of women.

The situation is complex.  And it gets especially complex when we try to use Icelandinc sagas written in Christian times as evidence for life during the viking period.

In many ways the women in the sagas do seem to have a relatively good deal of power and independence.  Certainly more so than women in supposedly more civilised societies of the time such as the Eastern Roman Empire or the Arabic Caliphate.

On the other hand, 'toxic masculinity' is probably a good description of a lot of male behaviour during viking times.

Quote from: TJS on February 03, 2021, 09:23:10 PM
Basically viking history has gone through a period of sanitisation and that seems to have been ending more recently as historians have begun to realise the extent of the slave trading that seems to have taken place.

Sure. I don't think these are contradictory. Women having more freedom and men acting more violently aren't necessarily at odds. The Laxdaela Saga and other sagas talk about slaves and violent behavior. In some ways, this was Christian condemnation of the vikings by those who wrote down the sagas two centuries after the times they were set in. However, the saga authors also clearly had an admiration for their violent great-great-grandparents, and the tales themselves were probably oral traditions from much earlier. There are endless arguments of exactly how accurate the sagas are, but I think there is material for heroism and for toxicity in the sagas.

Quote from: TJS on February 03, 2021, 09:23:10 PM

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on January 30, 2021, 06:41:55 PM
So the idea that masculine "honour" only exists in the physical presence of women is a nonsense the authour must have got from some incel forum. And this is the first problem with doing roleplaying games as social and historical education: the authour rarely knows anything about society or history. And the second problem is of course that it's boring and cringey.

It's hard to argue with this.  I find the idea that masculine ideas of honour were targetted specifically at a female audience somewhat bizarre.

Agreed.

Quote from: Thornhammer on January 29, 2021, 01:53:45 PM

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on January 29, 2021, 07:39:48 AM
Sounds like somebody wants to play a Viking-themed fanasy RPG and has cleverly disguised it as diversity training.

No GM, no dice, no cards.  And it is, of course, coming soon to Kickstarter.

I'm sure there are people who will greatly enjoy this sort of thing, but I'd rather spend my ever-dwindling RPG time having some fun instead of getting lectured.

This clarifies to me what I should take as a warning to avoid. If an rpg lacks dice or some other random result generator, then take that as a sign to flee, nothing actually fun can result from it.

Quote from: wmarshal on February 05, 2021, 02:25:16 PM
This clarifies to me what I should take as a warning to avoid. If an rpg lacks dice or some other random result generator, then take that as a sign to flee, nothing actually fun can result from it.

Even RPGPundit has published diceless games. While it might not be to your taste, I wouldn't associate diceless play with games being similar to Blood Feud. Here's Pundit on his diceless game from ten years ago.

Quote from: RPGPunditSo, to begin with: Lords of Olympus is a diceless RPG where the players portray children of the Greek gods.  Yes, diceless.  You see, over 20 years ago, a guy named Erick Wujcik wrote the first-ever totally diceless RPG; Amber Diceless Roleplaying.  Mr. Wujcik's game was revolutionary unlike anything that had appeared in the hobby since D&D itself.  And the Amber Diceless RPG was a huge success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies over its lifetime, and spawning not one but a whole series of Conventions dedicated to its play, as well as hundreds of websites (most gone now, but back in the early days of the World Wide Web, the net was chalk-full of Amber campaign sites), a huge MUSH, and other things.

Source: http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2014/02/rpgpundit-reviews-lords-of-olympus-by.html

One of GM's in my team is big fan of Amber and was trying for several years to make us play it - though between two long D&D 3,5 campaigns, and his other projects, we still have not done it.

Quote from: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 05, 2021, 04:18:18 PM
One of GM's in my team is big fan of Amber and was trying for several years to make us play it - though between two long D&D 3,5 campaigns, and his other projects, we still have not done it.

It's been many years, but my memory of GMing Amber was that the system was exhausting. Most of the dice rolls are instead put to GM judgement, and that's a lot of judging to do.
Old memory, IMO and all that.

Well possible. I like Amber setting, but also I sort of like uncertainity of dice.

Quote from: This Ends Tonight on February 01, 2021, 04:53:39 PM
"I'm going to teach you all the horrors of toxic masculinity by role-playing as badass, muscular, axe wielding, alpha male psychopaths, who do what they want, when they want, surrounded by women who necessarily know their place as subservient wives and daughters, in a patriarchal, totally unfair society!"

I do believe you all hit the mark saying this stuff is for self-loathing men. More specifically, men who are terrible at being men and therefore hate all things men. We don't live in a world where you're forced to be many things just by birth, but like if we did, and you were born into the basketball tribe and had to play basketball everyday... if you sucked at basketball and got dunked on, smacked around on pick plays, people talked trash in your face all day, you would despise basketball with a passion. They want a performative, public way to demonstrate their hatred of this thing they fail at.

Well said.

Quote from: robh on February 02, 2021, 05:25:45 PM

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on January 30, 2021, 05:42:52 PM
It will be highly entertaining to watch this thing flop.

Yes it would indeed, but it probably won't.

Given the hate mob woke environment the writers feed on, it has to fund or there is a major loss of credibility within their social media "safe space".
The funding level will probably be set at the bare minimum to get something released just so they can point to it being "successful".

That's the tactics they use after all. Actual metrics and statistics don't matter to them.