Regarding the Golden Hart not being the problem -- well, obviously I agree with that.  I think the complaints about the Golden Hart are silly.  If you (Spike or others) have other complaints about the setting, then they might make a refreshing change.  

Quote from: Warthur

Quote from: jhkimBy your logic, every game's home country should have an evil king, because doing otherwise means that they're taking away the "evil King" option for adventure. I think that's ridiculous.

Except not. Most games where there's a monarchy, you can put in an evil King fairly trivially if there isn't one by default. Aldis has the Hart making this much more difficult - if you want an evil King you need to re-engineer the entire basis of their society.

So you're saying that the virtue of other settings is that you can more easily fix them by inserting an evil king.  However, that's not denying my point that you feel that evil kings are necessary for a good adventuring setting.  

I don't feel that is true.  I think there are tons of adventure possibilities without having an evil king.  Consequently, I don't think that it is problematic to include good kings.  

Quote from: WarthurMake the king of Aldis good by default because it's a feature of the genre, by all means. But let's not pretend that there's no scope in the romantic fantasy genre for bad kings, and let's not jump through metaphysical hoops to add features to the setting which make no sense to people who aren't familiar with romantic fantasy, and are transcendentally unnecessary to people who enjoy romantic fantasy.

Note that I didn't say that there is no room for bad kings anywhere in romantic fantasy -- I simply said that I don't consider it necessary for the king of the PCs country to be bad.  

Now it seems like you've backed off from saying that it causes problems for romantic fantasy adventures to saying that it's unnecessary. I think that sounds more reasonable.  I'd agree that it isn't necessary.  I don't have any particular attachment to it, and I personally think that if it were cut out of the setting, it would be no great loss.  

Quote from: John MorrowIt's not so much that it's politics, per se, but that it's essentially an alignment system.  The Magic Deer defines what good is for the setting and if you disagree with it, you are wrong, just as the D&D alignment system defines what's good for the setting and if you disagree with it, you aren't good.  It's also why the Prime Directive is an issue in Star Trek and the people debate about the values of the Jedi and Force for Star Wars.

While Blue Rose does have an alignment system, the Golden Hart is not a part of it.  Its values are extremely abstract.  It reportedly chooses good sovereigns, but it has no philosophy or expressed values.  Its only clear actions were that it fought against the demonic Sorcerer Kings.  

For comparison, I ran several Star Trek campaigns, and there we certainly questioned the Prime Directive.  Heck, the Prime Directive was frequently broken in the show itself.  Just because it is a law or feature of the home country's culture doesn't mean that playing in that setting inherently espouses that value.  

As another parallel -- in Tamora Pierce's Tortall novels, there are ostensibly good gods who appear and meddle in the lives of mortals.  These gods are good, but their methods can certainly be questioned -- and indeed are by the characters.

Quote from: mythusmageAldis' real crime is, you're not allowed to fail. Not in any substantial way, any real way. You are protected from yourself and the consequences of your actions. And by this you are denied any chance to grow, to better yourself.

WTF are you going on about?
Any character can fall to corruption, I don't see how that's not being allowed to fail or protected from the consequences of your actions.

QuoteBlue Rose treats you as an imbecile child, incapable of learning, incapable of growth. In the world of Blue Rose you count for nothing, for everything is beyond you. Blue Rose is the best example of deprotaganization in RPGs ever published.

How are you treated as an imbecile child?

QuoteAll you can be is a pawn in the machinations of the gods.

The only thing the Hart does now is choose the King. By doing so it ensures that you at least start with a good ruler, though that can and has changed. That's certainly no more deprotagonizing than "the eldest of the King inherits". The only thing the Hart did then, was help a rebellion that had already happened. After it's arrival, it still took twenty years to clear out the sorcerer kings, and they weren't able to complete the job, Kern survived. So the gods sent help to people already in rebellion, and in spite of that help it still took a generation and countless lives to throw off the sorcerer kings. Doesn't sound very pawn-like to me.

QuoteThat is not for me. I am not one to let another live my life for me. As a man once said...

No matter how strait the gate
How charged with peril the toll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.

Better to be king in Hell than a slave in Aldis.

Easy to say, not so easy to do. Take it up with guy under my name.

I think we can safely invoke Sturgeon's Law now.

(EDITED FOR SPELLING)

G'night everybody!

Quote from: apparition13Argument 4: we're talking about an RPG setting here. "The game-as-published" serves as inspriration for "the game-as-I-would-run-it"; it's the latter that's important.

And at this point we can't meaningfully discuss things anymore.

While I agree that it's the game that I personally experience which is, for me, the more important, I'm of the opinion that you can only meaningfully discuss the game-as-written online, simply because people can resort to the texts and so forth. I'm less interested in actual play threads, because they are always going to be filtered through the perceptions of the people posting, and there's no way to consult an objective record of what actually happened in the game.

So I am going to stop arguing with you. Because we're working from entirely different approaches.

Quote from: jhkimSo you're saying that the virtue of other settings is that you can more easily fix them by inserting an evil king.  However, that's not denying my point that you feel that evil kings are necessary for a good adventuring setting.

I don't feel that is true.  I think there are tons of adventure possibilities without having an evil king.  Consequently, I don't think that it is problematic to include good kings.

God fucking damn it.

I never said having good kings was a problem. Societal mechanisms which make it impossible to have a bad king - or at least make the most reasonable solution to a bad king "wait it out until the Deer sorts things out" - are the problem, especially when those mechanisms are so closely tied to the society's raison d'etre. (Aldis WOULD NOT EXIST without the intervention of the Hart, in the setting-as-written).

QuoteNote that I didn't say that there is no room for bad kings anywhere in romantic fantasy -- I simply said that I don't consider it necessary for the king of the PCs country to be bad.

Nor do I. But I consider it WILDLY UNNECESSARY to take the option away in the defualt setting.

QuoteNow it seems like you've backed off from saying that it causes problems for romantic fantasy adventures to saying that it's unnecessary. I think that sounds more reasonable.  I'd agree that it isn't necessary.  I don't have any particular attachment to it, and I personally think that if it were cut out of the setting, it would be no great loss.

It's unnecessary, and it's a restriction. Unnecessary restrictions chafe.

QuoteWhile Blue Rose does have an alignment system, the Golden Hart is not a part of it.  Its values are extremely abstract.  It reportedly chooses good sovereigns, but it has no philosophy or expressed values.  Its only clear actions were that it fought against the demonic Sorcerer Kings.

Ah, come on. The values of the Light are meant to be inherently good and coincide with the values of Aldis. The Golden Hart is the patron deity-in-all-but-name of Aldis, which founded the nation and gives its rulers legitimacy. The link between the Hart and the alignment system is implicit if not explicit.

QuoteFor comparison, I ran several Star Trek campaigns, and there we certainly questioned the Prime Directive.  Heck, the Prime Directive was frequently broken in the show itself.  Just because it is a law or feature of the home country's culture doesn't mean that playing in that setting inherently espouses that value.

If the majority of folk in a culture don't espouse a value, it can't really be said to be a feature of that culture.

Quote from: WarthurI never said having good kings was a problem. Societal mechanisms which make it impossible to have a bad king - or at least make the most reasonable solution to a bad king "wait it out until the Deer sorts things out" - are the problem, especially when those mechanisms are so closely tied to the society's raison d'etre. (Aldis WOULD NOT EXIST without the intervention of the Hart, in the setting-as-written).



Nor do I. But I consider it WILDLY UNNECESSARY to take the option away in the defualt setting.



It's unnecessary, and it's a restriction. Unnecessary restrictions chafe.

So address the little scenario I threw out in post 42. King goes bad (it's happend before in the setting), King knows the Hart has deposed Kings before, so makes preparations to prevent that. King finds means to defeat Hart (there is nothing in the Blue Rose canon that says this is impossible). There isn't anything in the Blue Rose canon that explicitly says what the Hart is, either. It could be an agent of the gods, it could be the collective unconcious of Aldis, it could be the product of a ritual, it could be an elaborate scheme by Kern to get rid of his rivals [this last is somewhat unlikely], it could be many things, many of which would be vulnerable in one way or another. (Heck, if it's the product of a ritual, maybe the people doing the ritual have gone bad.) If you are GMing, and you get the sense that your players would like to do a "King turns evil" scenario, and you want to avoid the spectre of the Hart trotting into town to save the day, keeping that from happening without violating canon shouldn't be that difficult. Personally I like the "wack it over the head with the sceptre" idea, it has a certain synchronicity to it. If the end result is the players saving the day and turning Aldis into some sort of republic, cool. If they fail, and the end result is Aldis getting ravaged by the rest of the world, you're no longer playing a Romantic Fantasy game, but if everyone is onboard with that, also cool.

Finally, looking over mythusmage's post again, I get the sense that neither of you likes what you percieve to be "unnecessary restrictions". How do you feel about Pendragon? It has a magic deer, it has a good king, and it has an ending that is going to happen, no matter what the players do. Seems a mite more restrictive than anything Blue Rose suggests, yet it gets no complaints. Why not? If magic deer selecting the good king is bad, why is the sword in the stone okay? If a setting where the king cannot go evil is bad, why is Camelot okay? If Blue Rose is bad because it limits the players, why is Pendragon okay?

Quote from: apparition13Or in this case, "chick with grail". Seems like the same thing to me. Some supernatural protector of a country determines who may be King, yet there has been no hue and cry over if like there was over Blue Rose, and I wonder why.

[Disclaimer: I have no particular aversion to the magic deer in Blue Rose. There are other aspects of the setting I don't care for, such as why Jarzon is still so fundamentalist after all this time when Aldis is a buffer between them and Kern. You'd think with time and distance their memory of the threat would have faded. Now if they were the buffer state, the set-up would make a whole lot more sense to me.]

I can only speak for myself when I say that I don't own, nor do I plan to own, WFRP. I also don't have plans to own or play Pendragon. So, when I bitch about the magic deer, it's because I do own BR and hate the magic deer. It sounds to me like I'd hate the similar aspects of those other games as well, probably never going to know for sure. I won't go into why I hate the deer here because I've expressed that before in other threads, along with what I'm doing to fix it IMC.

Quote from: WarthurI never said having good kings was a problem. Societal mechanisms which make it impossible to have a bad king - or at least make the most reasonable solution to a bad king "wait it out until the Deer sorts things out" - are the problem, especially when those mechanisms are so closely tied to the society's raison d'etre. (Aldis WOULD NOT EXIST without the intervention of the Hart, in the setting-as-written).

I can't see how the hypothetical matters.  Let me try to break this down, because I'm failing to see how this isn't a problem with good kings.  Let's consider two possibilities:

1) A country has had a succession of good kings, and the present king is good.  The successor is appointed by the present king.  

2) Another country has had a succession of good kings, and the present king is good -- and there is a mechanism to ensure that the king is good.  

Now, it seems to me that in practical terms for the game, there is no difference between these two cases unless a bad king comes to the throne.  Sure, in #1 there isn't a mechanism to reject a bad king, but that's irrelevant to the action of the game unless there is actually a bad king.  

My point, which you seem at times to agree with, is that there are tons of possibilities for adventure with a good king.  If this is true, then hypotheticals about "Well, what if there were a bad king instead" are irrelevant to normal play of the game.  

Quote from: WarthurAh, come on. The values of the Light are meant to be inherently good and coincide with the values of Aldis. The Golden Hart is the patron deity-in-all-but-name of Aldis, which founded the nation and gives its rulers legitimacy. The link between the Hart and the alignment system is implicit if not explicit.

Whether it is the patron deity or not, the point is what moral lessons can we learn from the Golden Hart?  Well, it helped fight the Sorcerer Kings.  And it's picked a bunch of people as sovereigns.  But it never talks; it has no expressed ideology, and there is nothing said about anything in common between its choices for sovereign.  If it is the patron deity, its religion is purely token.  

To take a contrasting example, let's consider the kingdom of Kanday in Harn.  Kanday's patron deity is Larani, Lady of Paladins.  She has an actual religion, which has a priesthood and tenets and so forth.  It is different than, say, the religion of Peoni, the peaceful Goddess of the Harvest even though both gods are considered good.

Nuke. Orbit. Be sure.

apparition13,

The restrictions in Blue Rose are restrictions on growth. You are to be protected from your own actions and the consequences thereof. Has nothing to do with going bad, it's about striving against adversity. Real adversity. Not some touchy-feely crap where you explore how you felt before mommy and daddy saved you from yourself.

It's stifling, it's paternalistic, and I say it sucks. The worst part is, it makes you dependent. It makes you a complaisant compliant little drudge following the rules because you haven't the initiative to look for another way. It is disempowerment and deprotaganization of the worst sort. In the name of the individual it degrades the individual, making each person nothing more than a cog in some great machine. It's pathological environmentalism applied to humanity.

I've known tyranny. I've seen the would-be tyrants of right and left spout off on their pet causes, on their desire to see everyone living the way the tyrants want them to. I've known tyranny, and the magic deer is probably the worst.

:what:

Dammit, I'm pretty sure I already said "G'night everybody!" What's this doing still on?

Quote from: apparition13Finally, looking over mythusmage's post again, I get the sense that neither of you likes what you percieve to be "unnecessary restrictions". How do you feel about Pendragon? It has a magic deer, it has a good king, and it has an ending that is going to happen, no matter what the players do. Seems a mite more restrictive than anything Blue Rose suggests, yet it gets no complaints. Why not? If magic deer selecting the good king is bad, why is the sword in the stone okay? If a setting where the king cannot go evil is bad, why is Camelot okay? If Blue Rose is bad because it limits the players, why is Pendragon okay?

Pendragon is about roleplaying as part of the Arthurian myth-cycle, which has a very defined beginning, middle and end (although in the Great Pendragon Campaign Stafford points out that GMs should expect events to go a little differently as a result of the PCs' actions). The restrictions in Pendragon are necessary in order to present the Arthurian myth-cycle as opposed to just some generic fantasy game.

Blue Rose is about roleplaying in the romantic fantasy genre. The Hart is a restriction added to the game to add the sort of explanation for the fantasy society most romantic fantasy authors don't find necessary.

See the difference?

Quote from: mythusmageapparition13,

The restrictions in Blue Rose are restrictions on growth. You are to be protected from your own actions and the consequences thereof. Has nothing to do with going bad, it's about striving against adversity. Real adversity. Not some touchy-feely crap where you explore how you felt before mommy and daddy saved you from yourself.

It's stifling, it's paternalistic, and I say it sucks. The worst part is, it makes you dependent. It makes you a complaisant compliant little drudge following the rules because you haven't the initiative to look for another way. It is disempowerment and deprotaganization of the worst sort. In the name of the individual it degrades the individual, making each person nothing more than a cog in some great machine. It's pathological environmentalism applied to humanity.

Okay, I'm still having a WTF reaction, but not nearly as strong. I think I'm tantalizingly close to getting what you are trying to say, but I suspect that there is still some disconnect in worldviews working against us. How about we try to go around it, and see if that helps. What would you need to change, and how, to make Blue Rose empowering and conducive to growth?

Quote from: WarthurPendragon is about roleplaying as part of the Arthurian myth-cycle, which has a very defined beginning, middle and end (although in the Great Pendragon Campaign Stafford points out that GMs should expect events to go a little differently as a result of the PCs' actions). The restrictions in Pendragon are necessary in order to present the Arthurian myth-cycle as opposed to just some generic fantasy game.

Blue Rose is about roleplaying in the romantic fantasy genre. The Hart is a restriction added to the game to add the sort of explanation for the fantasy society most romantic fantasy authors don't find necessary.

See the difference?

I see not just rails, but a glass tunnel in the  Great Pendragon Campaign. I see characters who can have no appreciable impact on the way the Arthur story plays out. Guenevere and Lancelot will have their fling, Arthur will fight Mordred, and sail off to Avalon in the end, the dream of Camelot dead. If the characters could prevent that, it might be worth doing, but if the intent going in is to play out the myth, no thanks.

I see the difference, but I don't see "the players don't get to choose the King or Queen" as much of a restriction, particularly when, as I gave an example of above, you can find ways to eliminate that restriction without violating canon.  

Quote from: WarthurWhile I agree that it's the game that I personally experience which is, for me, the more important, I'm of the opinion that you can only meaningfully discuss the game-as-written online, simply because people can resort to the texts and so forth. I'm less interested in actual play threads, because they are always going to be filtered through the perceptions of the people posting, and there's no way to consult an objective record of what actually happened in the game.

I'm not talking about actual play, but about implementation (so maybe "when the hypothetical dice hit the hypothetical mat" would have been better). Your players come to you and say "this blue rose thing looks kind of interesting, can we do a few sessions to see what it's like?", how would you implement the setting?

Let's review some of the problems with Blue Rose that are only tangental (if even that...) to the Magic Deer.

One: Very VERY preachy about it's take on sexuality... so much so that even outspoken pro-gays can, and did, find it offensive and 'treacly'.  But only one specific type of 'gay' is canon, as someone else pointed out.  Sure, it's Genre. I know, I've read a few. But this goes far enough out there to squick. At least in the average 'genre' novel, its only squicky when they put the actual scenes on the page, here the setting does the job for you! Huzzah. I don't play RPG's for the freaky sex I get from them.

Two: Every freaking animal in the world is psychic! And playable! Including the god damned DOLPHINS! Look, leave aside the annoyance of a world where you are either a vegitarian or a potential cannable (expanded out to include consumption of any sentient life), I've long come to realize that any game the is not explicitely set in a watery environment that makes fish a playable race is Ass. Period, no exceptions.  That one player that... for some reason always waits until everyone else has made a character, that choses to play a fucking dolphin just shat on the game. Don't give them ammo. Unless you are shooting it at them.

Three: Aldis is surrounded by two hostile nations, some barbarian nomad horde types (who, ironically, are not hostile... wtf? Touchy feely barbarian nomads?) and an open body of water.  Now, the only thing keeping Aldis from being overrun by the undead feinds is that it's easy to hold the mountain passes. Despite the fact that the undead are immune to frostbite, say.  The only thing keeping the fundy fanatics (oh... THAT"S good characterization.) from attacking them is a magic swamp.

That's right. A magical fucking swamp.

Wait. What about all that open water?  Apparently no one has invented the concept of BOATS. Other than the Aldeans apparently.  Every fucking thing in this setting is a lame cliched characterization,a  caricature.  The Aldeans are too happy go lucky to survive, so the world takes care of them. The Sorcerer King, despite being thousands of years old and the only survivor of his evil kind, can't think to march around to the relatively undefended plains that are HIS neighbors to attack those dreaded aldeans.. no, he has to go through the mountains.  The less said about the truly one dimensional fundy kingdom the better.

Four: The alignment system is bollocks.  Good is defined by feel good nanny-statism socialism. Evil is objectively defined as individualism with a dash of selfishness thrown in for good measure.  Never mind that the ONLY magic item in the game (AFAIK) is the god damn alignment detecting scepter, which for plot reasons only works on a given person ONCE.  Uh.. Dude, if the scepter is that broken of an idea, then why not... you know... leave it out?

Five: the deer, which is really far down the list as its no more than a personification of the way the entire universe seems to smile down at this massive hippy commune, what with magical swamps, absolute idiot enemies, and fucking Dolphins.  Never mind that it's track record is abyssmal. Out of 11 kings chosen, TWO have gone horribly horribly wrong. Not a little wrong, not a bit selfish and out to put their own children on the throne, damn tradition and the Hart... not, bugfuck crazy evil. Child eating monster evil.  Out of eleven kings you managed to squeeze elizabeth bathory and Vlad Tepes in there! Way to GO Magic Deer!!! Woot!  


Which, when all added up makes for a seriously 'WTF' suspension of disblief breaking game of absolute shit. I won't even list the governmental/economic woes they should be suffering from... or the godlike unicorns that are only there to make the 13 year old girls happy. What no fucking fairies?  Or did I miss them when I wiped the tears of blood out of my eyes?