Lamentations of the Flame Princess is made of lies
lumpley:
Conveniently, nobody chose to play an elf, so THAT's good. I can say "sure, you've heard stories about elves," and leave it at that. When somebody decides to play an elf we can figure it out then, or maybe I'll decide to bring one in as an encounter sometime.
Some number of generations ago there was a dwarfish diaspora across Northern Europe. I suppose that the original dwarfish kingdom was under the mountains somewhere; why they all abandoned it, I haven't considered. Now dwarfs are integrated into human society, more or less, keeping their own ancestral customs and adopting local customs in the mix that seems best to them case by case. Thus our heroes can come upon a 500-year-old Vikano-dwarfish bedstead ornament of cast gold in the New World. Meg plays Van Joost as practical and worldly.
Halflings live apart from humans and dwarfs in their little aboriginal pastoral villages, under sod roofs and in the roots of giant trees, in remote places throughout Europe. They've been here longer than anybody except maybe the elves, but we don't know about the elves. Rob plays Leike as wide-eyed.
There's no such thing as species in this world (as our heroes will learn most concretely if they go hang out with the Warranawankong, but shh don't tell them) so it's not saying much to say that humans, halflings, dwarfs and probably elves are all ultimately the same kind of critter.
So I'm finding the demihumans fun and nonproblematic!
Callan, your thing about a chesslike approach to play may or may not apply to Lamentations sometimes, I don't know, but it's off the mark for this game.
-Vincent
Eero Tuovinen:
The bit about moral basis being a part of the tactical landscape makes sense to me. When we've been playing D&D lately, the moral core of the activity has sometimes been part of the goals ("Can I make it in this fucked-up world without descending into iniquity?"), sometimes part of the means ("Wow, look at how much easier it is for me to get the gold by being nice once in a while!"), sometimes a part of the consequences ("Hey, who knew I'd get in trouble by being an asshole.") and so forth. In a sense being a paladin is its own reward, because it's the iron man mode of play in my conception of the game: your choice of playing the heroic type is not rewarded in any way by the game, except in that you can say that you've hacked with the best of 'em, and you're good enough to make it look good, too.
D&D (and LotFP, being as how it has that same die-for-your-stupidity-and-money-is-its-own-reward thing to it) truly is an utterly cynical world, I recognize that unwillingness on the part of the players to play the hero; it's not encouraged by anything in the system, and it can so easily become an unneeded difficulty that it's no surprise the players will most of the time gladly play immoral opportunists. Their characters will still do the right thing when presented with the easy opportunity, but the gravity of the risks in baldly refereed D&D is enormous; it's one of the few games where I've ever seen a player balk at doing the heroic thing when given the chance, when the same player will always take that option in your average narrativist game. The combination of random mechanics leading to random death for the brave ones and an uncaring universe does that. The long-term consequence seems to be that the characters who choose the high road are vivid exceptions (or quickly dying naive ballast), and when the characters achieve heroism the GM doesn't keep back from celebrating it - the one time in ten sessions when the characters actually manage to help somebody, they better be able to enjoy it in terms of fictional color and positioning.
It's pretty easy to sympathize with the 2nd edition D&D developers who wanted to make the game more clearly support underlying morality in how it was played. It might not be far-fetched to interpret the softer and nicer GMing approaches with this need for moral validation; there's a lot more room for vicarious chivalry in a game where the GM actually acknowledges it and plays fast and loose with the rules to make sure the errant knight actually gets, if not the girl, at least an honorable death. The OSR stuff I've been considering lately is quite opposite in this regard, the GM in most of that will never give an inch - you live or you die by the dice and your decisions, and the only chivalry in this world is the one you bring to it yourself. In that sort of context player characters almost have to be neutral opportunists to begin with, and the players have to downplay moral absolutism; to do otherwise would be to constantly focus on how mediocre, powerless and mean our own characters are. We've only gotten some characters to third level, but I can already see how the players loosen up and are willing to have their characters take more moral stances when they start feeling like they're a force to be reckoned with - a third-level character in my campaign has enough freedom and security to afford chivalry, one might say.
I think that reading Ravenloft material from the 2nd edition era might be an interesting counterpoint to your campaign experience. There's a lot of different and diffuse ideas in there, and a lot of it is blatantly dramatic in nature, but often you can see it sort of attempt to get to the place where moral absolutism becomes a tactical concern. It's a difficult conundrum, as you can't really convince a player to put his character (and interest to play) on the line with moral constraints unless you also back him up by guaranteeing him some respect and support for that choice; how to do that without going over the line and starting to ensure that the good guys win all the time?
Judd:
Vincent, you lost me but that is fine. I'll watch the thread, marinate and ask questions later.
Thanks.
James_Nostack:
Hi Vincent,
I'll broadly agree with Eero. In the OSR, Lamentations has cred as a nice hack of Moldvay/Cook, but I don't think anyone regards its "spoooooooky" stuff as much more than flavor text.
D&D does not easily lend itself to moralistic horror stories. The rules of the game directly reward getting rich and, if necessary, killing whoever gets in your way. As an emergent property it encourages operating from a position of overwhelming tactical advantage. These are shitty moral values if taken seriously: in the real world, they would be the values of a psychopath. Therefore Vance's sense of irony as a method of detachment.
What D&D does do fairly well is "lousy human beings get devoured one by one as they panic, and serves them right" type horror stories. If you present a creepy room in a dungeon, and the players sense the danger but can't bring themselves to leave it alone, then there is at least a sense of dread. Maybe if you establish that all of the characters are scumbags, that might provide a moral framework for the carnage that follows...?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Vincent,
As an intellectual issue, I am having a little trouble with the term "lies." I want to let that statement sit quiet for now, maybe to be addressed later.
The crux point for your experience seems to me to have been right at substantive character creation. You had a vision, or an aesthetic, or whatever we want to call it, in your head; character creation occurred, and you found that vision to be inconsistent with the raw tools-of-the-trade, i.e., the characters and their evident purpose at the player-use level.
I think you can probably see how my old, incomplete Color-first project is implicated here. That project sought to examine how goals of play and rewards of play were given shape through character creation, and what information was necessary - and differed - from game to game regarding that exact process.
Therefore I really, really would like to know about the following.
1. What precise information were the players working with regarding "what this game is about"?
2. What steps did they go through to make their characters, in terms of both (i) the literal step-by-step instructions and (ii) socially, the extent to which it was overseen by you?
3. What exactly were the characters as they emerged, i.e., what and who were they, right there on paper?
Best, Ron
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