Quote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 03:15:39 AMHaste gets cast quite a bit in my 5e games. It also gives you +2 ac and advantage on dex saves which can be very useful. A crafty player can get a lot of use out of a free dash or disengage too. Being able to move twice and still do your attack action can be a game-changer.
Quote from: ForgottenF on Today at 12:44:45 AMThey're also a biological impossibility. The wingspan is never anywhere near enough to lift the mass, and they couldn't possibly intake enough calories to power their fire-breath, etc.Biologically impossible, yes, but not spiritually impossible, particularly if you've been listening to Tucker lately.
Quote from: Eric Diaz on April 22, 2024, 12:02:01 PMGURPS was good at this, but too complex to the point of becoming unrealistic: a 10-second fight between two people has 20 or more sword blows, most being parried.There's nothing unrealistic in this, ten seconds are an eternity in a close combat fight. Same goes for the parries, the absolute majority of fighting styles emphasize defense for a reason; what's totally unrealistic, instead, is being hit (good hit, not a glancing blow) more than once or twice by a sword and not dying.
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on Today at 12:23:34 AMQuote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 09:54:41 PMQuote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMThe biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins,
The thing that people who compare the idea of evil orcs to biological essentialism can't grasp is that fantasy worlds do not necessarily follow biological or evolutionary principles. Things can be as they are for other reasons. The supernatural is real and evident. Races can be created by gods or other supernatural beings, not evolved. Dragons didn't evolve in LotR. They aren't biological organisms. They were magical creatures created by Morgoth to be weapons. Orcs weren't naturally occurring organisms. They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers. Biology was not a factor.
It's a good point--dragons in fairy tales have hearts, blood, and bones, but no cells or DNA, because no one in fairy tales has cells or DNA.
Quote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 09:54:41 PMQuote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMThe biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins,
The thing that people who compare the idea of evil orcs to biological essentialism can't grasp is that fantasy worlds do not necessarily follow biological or evolutionary principles. Things can be as they are for other reasons. The supernatural is real and evident. Races can be created by gods or other supernatural beings, not evolved. Dragons didn't evolve in LotR. They aren't biological organisms. They were magical creatures created by Morgoth to be weapons. Orcs weren't naturally occurring organisms. They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers. Biology was not a factor.
Quote from: jeff37923 on April 22, 2024, 11:46:37 PMQuote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMIt occurred to me that the main thing holding back the Wokification of all media products is what we might call anthropological realism...
Before I touch this subject, I'd like you to define "anthropological realism" because I have not been able to find a definition online.
Quote from: SHARK on April 22, 2024, 03:55:16 PMGreetings!
As I recall, the saying is "Politics is downstream from Culture." I forgot who first coined the expression.
Still, this all is absolutely a total culture war. Woke must be totally crushed and destroyed. If the Culture War cannot be won, then everything under the umbrella of "Culture" will continue to be corrupted and or destroyed. The TTRPG gaming hobby will be the least of our worries. It too though, will be corrupted and destroyed, just like every other aspect of our culture.
Tolkien is not at fault for anything. The problem is with the Marxist, Woke scum. They are the filthy, diseased rats, threatening to devour everything in society.
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 22, 2024, 03:17:00 PMIt occurred to me that the main thing holding back the Wokification of all media products is what we might call anthropological realism. This includes TRPGs. Film and television period pieces still grasp at casting actors who look like lovers of historical accuracy would expect them to look, e.g., all those White young men on the beach in the film Dunkirk. If this anthropological realism is ever abandoned, which is the direction we're going in, we can expect every media product to look like it was generated by Google Gemini.
Correct me if I'm wrong: Tolkien was the one who introduced anthropological realism into fantasy literature. Before that we had legends and myths and fairy tales, but the grand idea of a Secondary World complete with legendarium, songs, languages, lineages, religions (of a kind), creation myths, and verisimilar histories, didn't exist until he literally wrote the book on it.
TRPGs trace their ancestry to D&D, which was heavily influenced by Tolkien, as we all know. But, there the seeds of their destruction were sown. By making fairy tales anthropologically realistic, the stage was set for inserting Boasian anthropology and Wokism into the literature. The biological essentialism that informs fairy tales of evil dragons and goblins, the ontological reality of good and evil, and the ignorance of ecological ramifications of fantasy elements, we must count down to destruction, as the real-world, contemporary opinions of these things arrogate all gamerdom.
That is, by making our TRPG worlds as, or more, realistic at Tolkien's in their ecologies, and ontological and anthropological assumptions, we open the door to the presently fashionable political agendas on these things that end up removing their fairy tale underpinnings.
This crushes the spirit of the games. If we can't have good versus evil, or wicked categories of monsters, or sexism, or unmixed races, then we can't have fairy tales, legends, and myths that transcend anthropology and connect themselves with real-life foundational histories.
This is not to object to media products being transformed into propaganda. I'd agree that they're already always propaganda. Refusing to indoctrinate someone is indoctrinating them into neutrality, just as refusing to teach children religion is teaching them nullifidianism. The Wokists have that right: most everything reinforces one political narrative or other.
The problem is that the traditionalist European narrative is what is being effaced, and if you're like most gamers, this means that your culture is on the chopping block. White, straight, sexed-normal, Christian, phallologoic, Euro-cultural elements have to go, or be queered or race-mixed or otherwise tortured and mutilated into something other than what they are, not for the sake of improving the game, or reinforcing a healthy Western Euroculture, but in order to score political points for those who hate you--a ruined and terrible form of fiction.
Anthropological realism, now informed by Woke socio-anthropology, has become the undoing of gaming. We're at the point where many young people aren't even aware of the "damsel in distress" trope. Trained by Tolkien to cultivate our sophisticated Secondary Worlds, we lose sight of the very fairy tales, legends, and mythologies that tell us to slay the Woke dragon that seeks to eat us.
So, Tolkien giveth and Tolkien taketh away. Resisters can play in their Aral Seas or Lake Chads of traditionalist gaming, but so long as the political winds blow Woke, they're going to continue to evaporate. The nature of TRPGs as anthropologically realistic obscures the fact that the fairy tale foundations in the minds of youth have been prestidigitated away.
Saving gaming from Woke cultural desertification requires rerouting a veritable Congo river's worth of cultural assumptions, including how we look at gaming itself.
Quote from: yosemitemike on April 22, 2024, 09:54:41 PMOrcs weren't naturally occurring organisms. They were twisted things made to be foot soldiers. Biology was not a factor.