Gender and Setting
Brand_Robins:
So, I don't care much about the last two paragraphs.
In fact, I dislike the third because it undermines the interesting parts of the first two paragraphs (more on that in a minute), and the fourth paragraph just says to me "so its a culture, and works the way most cultures work." (Which is in line with Eero's "Glorantha 85%" kinda... its at least a simple way to talk about it without having to get into the deeper structures of how cultures work.)
The first two paragraphs I like because I find them at odds with each other. We've got a world in which the Knights Templar are women, but the majority of the non religious military is men. We've got female cardinals in a world where all the money is controlled by men. How the fuck is this going to resolve itself? Its a fucking mess!
I love it. I mean, culture is a fucking mess. And a good gaming culture should be a total fucking mess. There should be all sorts of places for people to run both within and without the lines. And this is doable without Eero's "weasel words" if you make and present a culture with some obvious gaps and then leave them to be played.
I guess that's where I diverge from Ralph, who normally says most of what I'd say. For me, looking at it as something to game with, the contradictions and ambiguities of the first two paragraphs are all story meat. What the players chose to have their characters do with that: to use it, abuse it, but to have to deal with it as the established order... that's all great. I can see a million ways people could play off that dramatically and fruitfully.
So I don't want it resolved. I don't want it worked out and aligned and explained. I don't want to be told about what the culture's attitude towards men and women and violence is -- I want to work that out through play and what the characters say and do to each other.
Valamir:
I can see that. But people in a culture generally have a pretty good idea what the cultural norms are in their culture in advance. The interesting part to play is where the culture is all a mess, but I think knowing the expectations of the neighbors is important for knowing how and where to challenge those expectations...or reinforce them as desired.
chance.thirteen:
I don't want to sound hostile, but if the product is a setting with significant cultural details, and the buyer desires a product with some basic framework where the players will fill out the hows and whys in play, it seems to me that either the product isn't for them, or they should just cross out all the details provided and not worry abotu them.
Brand_Robins:
Sure.
But I don't have that product. I have a short write up and question about how I feel about it. So how I feel about a hypothetical dense tome of setting detail is a different thing, isn't it?
And for the record, I generally like those. But I like those when they make settings with gaps and ambiguities, not when they try to smooth everything over and explain how everything works as a coherent, changeless whole.
Ralph,
Yea, that's all good too. I still think we're probably a couple steps different from each other in how many things we want explicit vs implied, but I think we're mostly agreeing in that way folks do on the internet.
Graham W:
Simon, I don't know. If you'd given me "This is a patriarchal society", I could do a character to engage with that. If you'd given me "This is an egalitarian society", likewise, and "This is a matriarchal society, suck up the role-reversal", I could do something with that.
But I wouldn't know how to make a character to engage with this. It's neither one thing nor the other.
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure how I'd play in it, or whether I'd want to.
Graham
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