Engaging New Worlds with New Imagination

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Guys,

Taking a cue off of greyorm's great reply in the Unified Truth/Religions thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=47779#47779), I went back to examine MJ's first post to remember what was at stake.

Reading it, I found this:

If the Greeks believe that Apollo drives the sun across the sky in a chariot and the Egyptians that a dung beetle rolls it across the sky, why does it matter which is true? It ultimately matters because I'm going to wind up with some idiot player who figures out how to go on a quest to see which is true

Okay.  So if I'm not mistaken, this thread is in process to figure out what to do with idiotic players.  Right?  I don't mean this dismissively.  Really, the devil's advocate folks are taking positions to test the "I've got the idiot player in my group, how do I make religion work" issue.

Leaving aside the fact that we at the Forge advocate not playing with idiots, let me step back a bit here and suggest we take a look at an even bigger issue: Why Play with Religion At All?

For as it stands, the idiot player in question is a common RPG type, one I tend to think of as the Mr. Wizard player.  He's the guy (and we've all done it probably), who at at certain stage of his playing bumped into a magic potion in AD&D and prodded and tested on all sorts of substances, animals and whatnot to figure out what it was before sucking it down.  Certain RPGs encourage this sort of behavior.  By making everything mechanistic in resolution, they put people in the mode of solid enlightment thinking, and the world, and the gods, had better well respond.

The question I'm asking is, "Why?"

While it's fine to ask religion to respond to a Mr. Wizard player (aka, the "idiot player"), does it really have to?  Almost this entire thread has been based on pleasing the needs of this player in the context of building a game setting that takes the mythic qualities of religion seriously.

I offer that the two are not compatible at all.  One only need look at the mish-mash of Greek myths to know that this stuff isn't about being clear and precise and repeatable for peer review.  There's no need to treck to Egypt. It's right there in any singular faith as well.

The ancient myths assume characters that know the world's faith and mythology, buy into it, are baffled by it, struggle with the gods and their place in the cosmos -- but don't test it with anything of the logic one will find in a fourth grade science class.  Anything from Homer to the Bible makes this clear.

There is, however, a certain kind of Conn. Yankee in King Arthur's court logic I've often found in RPGs when it comes to Religion.  (And magic, really -- but I know there are plenty of folks who practice magic who are very scientific about it, so I won't go further on this. I'll just state my preference: I thought 3rd edition Pendragon's rules for magic: "It's mysterious and what the GM says," were perfect for building the kind of emotional and spiritual logic so many of the tales I would want to model possessed in their mythology.)

The Yankee in the fantasy world is above the world's logic.  He understand the GM and the NPCs have a certain way of looking at things.  He simply brings his own logic to the table -- the logic of the enlightenment -- and is more than willing to push and prod until the world breaks.

I really don't remember seeing much of this in actual literature.  Moorcok's work comes close, and I'm sure there are other examples.  But for the most part, I've seen this only come through play of RPGs.

I think this is because the players are not always invested in the world of play.

The essence of this post is this: If the group is going to treat religion and mythological logic seriously, are they going to really play it straight (inconsistencies and all, as is befitting of all faiths and interactions of faiths), or are they going to stand outside of it and judge it?

Finally, I think this comes down to, not strangely enough, a matter of GNS (as far as I understand it (tm)).

I think Hero Wars mythological logic begins in character creation because it uses words to evoke the characters.  Without getting all poet-mystical, the use of words, I believe, will set the players on a chart toward images, sounds, similies and so forth that simply evoke a more narrativist feel.  What matters is not modelling the whole world, but the tale at hand.  And myths, as a form, depend on the tale at hand, not consistency with each other.

A sim game, on the other hand, often starts us with numeric language designed to be as fair, concrete and precise as possible.  We want it all to make sense.  We want to be able to travel to any part of the fictional world, arrive, test the conditions like astronauts landing on a new world. We want to determine that the laws of life and find them consistent and understandable.  Where they are not, we'll build a new theory to justify the world's logic.

One is mythic (that's narrativism), one is logical (that's simulation, independent of poetry).

Going back to MJ's original post, is this simply a matter of GNS disfunction? I think so.  I think to really do religion right in an RPG you need to wallow in the contradictions.  Religion isn't about how the sun moves across the sky.  It's about how a man or a woman stands in relation to the sun's existence at all!  Again, that's language, psychology, philosophy, faith, poetry.  Very different stuff.  It's seems a different style of play than what MJ's idiot player wants -- and I think the answer is to ask him to wait this tale out until a game more to his taste comes around.

Leaving aside the desire to build religions like genetically engineered cultures on a petri dish, what about this issues:  The responsibility to play with a different view and logic when playing in a different world?

Take care,
Christopher

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Excellent post, Chris. You had said what I was trying to say and more way back on the first page, and more eloquently. It does sound like a right brain/left brain difference at work here. I didn't back up my point very well, though. I merely pointed out that GM's desire to appease the "idiot player" really doesn't make sense.

The arguement being, IIUC "I have an 'Idiot Player' who will try to find out how the sun is moved across the sky so I must know how it is for certain so I can tell him." (or her, to be fair)
And my response was "Why? How is he planning to find out? Building a medieval rocket ship? He's more likely to kill himself than reach the sun." That kind of thing. It seemed like worrying about things that really do not have to be worried about.

I really wasn't thinking GNS but I can see your point here for certain. It's like going to see a magician. You can either simply watch the magician perform his tricks or you can spend the time trying to figure out how he did each trick. Either way is fine, but if you shout out how he performed each trick, then the people who wanted to simply watch and be amazed will be unhappy. This is like the GNS dysfunction here.

EDIT:

The Yankee in the fantasy world is above the world's logic. He understand the GM and the NPCs have a certain way of looking at things. He simply brings his own logic to the table -- the logic of the enlightenment -- and is more than willing to push and prod until the world breaks.

This is a personal judgement on my part, but this mentality bothers me. It's akin to mini-maxing at character creation, I think. Taken in a particular light, the world's logic is less about willful suspension of disbelief or agreed upon conventions and whatnot. Instead, this logic is a tool used in play for the player to effect or force game events into their favor, or in ways they wish to try to force them, even if it's merely for the sake of forcing events. Am I the only one who see this possibility?

[clehrich]

As to "treating religion and myth seriously," I don't see this as a GNS issue at all.  On the one hand, you can certainly align game universes the way Chris suggested, but I can easily see a Narrativist game in which the Premise issue had to do with the characters' encounter with divinity and finding the "reality" behind it, and furthermore grappling with the existential implications of that reality.  In addition, I think a Sim game could very well explore a world in which religion is a matter of faith, as for example an Ars Magica campaign in which a major issue was the faith of the characters.  In the latter case, you'd still have an exploration in-character focus, which as I understand it fits with a Sim model, but the "real truth" behind God would not be accessible to the characters.

I do think, however, that the division within this debate does indeed come down to "what if I have idiot players who want to break the religion and myth of the universe," vs. "what if I want to build seriously with some notion of religion or myth as a focus."  And you're right: these are not compatible.  If you try to build a campaign universe in which religion is similar to real-world structures, for example, and you have idiot players who want to break that, you have a total mismatch of GM goals and player goals.

[M. J. Young]

O.K., this is good stuff; and I think that Reverend D.'s post on the other thread was excellent (I almost posted just to thank him for it, but decided to look at the split threads instead).

I'm going to say, though, that although it addresses the problem as stated, it doesn't necessarily get to the problem as intended. That is, we came from yet another religion in gaming thread where one of the questions raised was "why do you ever need to know what the truth of the matter is?", and I started this thread to say "I might need to know for this reason." I think Rev. D. has given some worthy insights to that particular problem; but I'm not certain he's dispelled the root problem entirely.

But perhaps I should take that to a new thread, too.

--M. J. Young

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the posts.  MJ, I especially appreciate your clarification on the reasons behind your first thread.

But I'm still interested if anyone has any ideas, thoughts, opinions on this idea of using RPGs to enter into alien modes of thinking.

We're living in a time where we relate almost all tales to our own point of view.  Either stories from the past (or real life incidents), fall short of our expectations of how people "should" behave, or they are used as Models of Behavior for what he know is "good" (a al William Bennet).

But I've always thought of literature as a chance to see the world from unexpected angels -- especially when one chooses ancient or foriegn sources.

My main point in this thread is that there's a tradition in most RPGs (games and play) to take cosmological issues and, no matter how fancy the original dressing, iron them out so everything sort of makes sense to us today from our point of view.

Again, I think one of the real values of Pendragon was an attempt to move the PCs and GM into the world of Mallory rather than the more normal approach of moving the game world to the players.  (This is a type of Sim play I seldom see addressed on the boards -- Sim of POV, which may be what this thread is actually about -- don't know yet.)

******

Clehrich,

Good points.  As I said, it was GNS as I understood it.  My main concern still stands though : the existentialist model you offer is still a contemporary point of view on the matter.  Job and Ulysses simple dealt with the heavenly forces, no matter how terrifying and strange they found them to be.  These are the models I'm assuming.

Take care,
Christopher

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings Christopher,

Grab your hat, it's a long one.

While it's fine to ask religion to respond to a Mr. Wizard player (aka, the "idiot player"), does it really have to?  Almost this entire thread has been based on pleasing the needs of this player in the context of building a game setting that takes the mythic qualities of religion seriously.

I humbly disagree.

The problem is that the myths are being interpreted literally.  I've not wanted to say anything, since some games are worse offenders than others, but that, to my thinking is the problem.  That and the fact some games look as if the authors consulted little more than dictionary or glossary entries, rather than seek out texts like Works and Days, Theogony, Metamorphosis, et al.  But that's neither here nor there.

The Greek myths actually lay out a rather well defined history of our world in epochs of time, starting with the Golden Age.  Then comes Silver, Bronze, and Iron; if memory serves.  This almost exact same break down of world ages can be found in ALL of our older, long extant, world myths.

Greek myth has a deluge.  A deluge from one one man and woman survived to replenish the world.  So does Norse mythology, only in that the flood was caused as a direct result of a war with the "Giants".  (Giants also appear in Greek mythology.  In fact they are the ENEMIES of the Titans and their *offspring/successors* the Olympians.)  In fact there is a flood myth in ALL out world mythologies, even in the Popul Vuh.

Now, keeping with the the question of what makes reality real...

Is this proof that a deluge happened in our distant past, or that a concerted effort to fabricate a world myth has occured behind the scenes (sort of ala the Bene Gesserit's of Dune who sowed their root myths through out the galaxy)?

What do these myths have to do with how we perceive reality?

How does our perceptions differ from those we ascribe to "in-game" characters when faced with fictionalized versions of these same said myths?

Questions, questions.

I offer that the two are not compatible at all.  One only need look at the mish-mash of Greek myths to know that this stuff isn't about being clear and precise and repeatable for peer review.  There's no need to treck to Egypt. It's right there in any singular faith as well.

Greek myth is an amalgam of various traditions.  No "core text" of the underlying mythos really remains for us to examine.  (Just like we have to true original MSS of the Bible, but rather copies of copies of copies.  At least that is what we are told, what we have taken upon faith, and thus believe.  Just like we accept that the Dead Sea Scrolls are valid, based upon what we have read or been told.)   Most of what we have are ancillary works that have *survived* to us, mostly plays and the like.  Thus this statement is at best marginally fallacious, at worst jumping to a conclusion about a body of work that is not representative of what may have existed during antiquity.

And that, too, is a matter of perspective.

Remember the "Greek" myth most of us kow is not truly Hellenic at all, but rather has been passed through a Roman sieve.

The ancient myths assume characters that know the world's faith and mythology, buy into it, are baffled by it, struggle with the gods and their place in the cosmos -- but don't test it with anything of the logic one will find in a fourth grade science class.  Anything from Homer to the Bible makes this clear.

I'm not sure what you meant by that but it doesn't sound friendly.

*shrug*

(reaching up to pluck a copy of Euripides from my shelf)

(opening to random page)

ION:  Well, I shall go.  One thing is wanting in my fortune: unless I find the mother who bore me, father, life will be unlivable.  If I may make the prayer, I wish my mother would be a woman of Athens, so that I may have the right of free speech on my mother's side.  If a foreigner comes to a city of pure blood,e ven though he is a citizen in theory, his lips are enslaved; he does not have free speech.

Assuming, of course, we don't discount the text out of hand as a work of pure fiction since it is, after all, a play.  In that simple passage there is much for us to consider.  For instance, the ability to actually determine parentage, the ability to determine bloodlines, and the concern for legal rights.

For us it would be blood tests, DNA analysis, and the like.  How, pray tell, was an ancient Athenian to go about determining all this?

The essence of this post is this: If the group is going to treat religion and mythological logic seriously, are they going to really play it straight (inconsistencies and all, as is befitting of all faiths and interactions of faiths), or are they going to stand outside of it and judge it?

...

Leaving aside the desire to build religions like genetically engineered cultures on a petri dish, what about this issues:  The responsibility to play with a different view and logic when playing in a different world?

Christopher points something very important out here.  Something that, too often, gets lost under the weight of discussion.

This is, after all is said and done, a matter of game logic.  Which, by definition, probably isn't very logical since the key word is Fantasy Role-Playing Game, thus requiring the suspension of belief.

Still a game does have to be internally consistent to be playable, and that means believable in its fictional outline.

Yet religions in games do provide a depth of complexity that is often hard to ignore, if only because too many players are not able to disassociate the "in-game" religious aspects from their own real world preconception.  And that, I think, is perhaps the toughest role of a Game Master of all.  To wrangle player's through their discomfort with in-game religions, all while trying to figure out just how the world mechanics operate.

Or am I off base?



Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

[contracycle]

Okay.  So if I'm not mistaken, this thread is in process to figure out what to do with idiotic players.  Right?  I don't mean this dismissively.  Really, the devil's advocate folks are taking positions to test the "I've got the idiot player in my group, how do I make religion work" issue.

Thanks, that idiot player must be me.  I've already pionted out that Exploration is a boig draw for me and if you said that the world was flat I would want to see over the image to see what the Gnm had imaginied.  Pardon me for being interested in what the GM had imagined, I'm sure that must be what makes me an "idiot player".

But I'm still interested if anyone has any ideas, thoughts, opinions on this idea of using RPGs to enter into alien modes of thinking.

Yes, obviously; what the hell is it you think we "idiot players" are doing?

My main point in this thread is that there's a tradition in most RPGs (games and play) to take cosmological issues and, no matter how fancy the original dressing, iron them out so everything sort of makes sense to us today from our point of view.

Yes - modern, indeed post mjodern ways of thinking such as relativism and the euqal validity oif multiple ideas.  But in reality, people who believed such mythological ideas where burning others as witches not just grooving on each others vibe of who was going to hell in sandal-and-oatflakes hippy way.  I am saying that in order to access the alien mindst, one should be provided, not this postmodern live-and-let-live stuff at all.

[Le Joueur]

But I'm still interested if anyone has any ideas, thoughts, opinions on this idea of using RPGs to enter into alien modes of thinking.

We're living in a time where we relate almost all tales to our own point of view....

My main point in this thread is that there's a tradition in most [insert any form of expression] to take cosmological issues and, no matter how fancy the original dressing, iron them out so everything sort of makes sense to us today from our point of view.

Christopher,

Got some bad news.  The quoted is exactly how it has always been since the dawn of storytelling in prehistory.  Why?  Simple; why would you be interested in a story that was irrelevant to you?  Shall we invoke the accounting game, Papers and Pencils?  Delve deeply into the realms of double-column accounting, probate, money management, and tax reporting.  How many here would be able to dredge up interest in arcane tables of accounting procedures?

That's why stories address your relevant condition.  Take Sorcerer for example; is it about demons, summoning, metaphysics, and cosmology?  Nope, it's about people and what it takes to be human.  Is Pendragon about knights in the Arthurian age?  Nope, it exists in a fantastic version with knights in armor and castles (King Arthur, according to all the archeology I've read, came before stone fortresses and metallic warriors); when we romanticize that era, we make it more familiar, more relevant.

It may take on more of a fictional setting (Mallory was fiction after all), but in doing so it becomes more symbolic.  Chivalry as it is known today was an impractical ideal at the time, mostly a figment of the contemporary writers of the time.  The symbolism allows us to 'see ourselves' in 'larger than life circumstances' that help clarify the 'timeless message' given in the story.  Chivalry becomes the symbol for personal integrity.  In gaming, like child's play, you can 'feel out' these issues in a way not available in real life, not available in necessary in every story.

Now if a game were about something truly alien, how would you approach it?  What would be the attraction (leaving xenophilia aside for a moment)?  Let's say you play an integrated function composed as a part of an engineering diagram; that's pretty alien, right?  So...what do you do?  Better, why do you care?  So what if your relationship to the other functions determines the success or failure of the truth-value of the document?  This goes back to the major problem I have with reinventing the wheel for it's own sake, the problem I have stressing 'innovation' to the point that quality or interest ceases to be an issue.

If the product is not relevant to the audience, if they aren't interested, if they cannot 'make sense' of it, if they find no self-representation, why should they be interested?  We only have our points of view, here, today.  Admittedly too few things these days have any substance, having been 'ironed out' to pablum, but that doesn't make the opposite extreme any more attractive.  Best, to my way of thinking, is something relevant and accessible, which contains a few 'crunchy bits' from a philosophical perspective.  This allows a contemporary audience to access areas they lack familiarity from a position of comfort.  I doubt many people desire or pursue the shock of a totally alien product.

Fang Langford

[Walt Freitag]

It might perhaps require a post-Enlightenment world view to wish to test mythical ideas, but it does not require such a world view to attempt to make use of them. And in any game system in which an outcome is resolved, maintaining a distinction between using and testing can be mighty difficult.

Here are two player-characters. One wants to enter Hades and attempt to bring back a dead person because he wants to affirm or disprove that Hades (or perhaps life after death) exists. The other wants to enter Hades to rescue his lost love from death's clutches. The first is being a Mr. Wizard; the second is acting completely within his character's belief system and mindset, and in fact is emulating several of the heroes of that very mythology. One is "testing," the other is "applying," the knowledge imparted by myth. Thus, one is apparently an idiot playing dysfunctionally and the other is fully invested in an appropriate alternate world view. But they both present the GM with the exact same problem: what do they find?

There are, of course, many effective and appropriate ways to resolve this. But ultimately, as Fang said on one of the precursor threads, they all boil down to two possibilities: either the myth is objectively valid, or it is not. For example, the participants might decide that the character can experience the myth (e.g. climb down into a cave and experience events congruent with the mythological expectations, including meeting the loved one) but because the story of the underworld is myth, there can be no objective proof produced, so it must in the end be impossible to rescue the loved one. Not only is this railroading (at least, if it's a GM making that decision), but the decision itself reflects a decidedly post-Enlightenment world view. As does any resolution, however clever, that deliberately protects the ambiguity of the outcome (e.g. the character is told, in the underworld, that he has won the loved one back but that no one else in the world of the living will ever be able to see her or perceive her in any way). The mythos itself doesn't proclaim its own ambiguity, it plainly states what the underworld is like, and that if you're strong enough you can go down there and grab Cerebus and carry him in the light of day to the city gates for all to see.

There's nothing unusual, in any age including the present day, about people believing in myths, nor in their interpreting ambiguous experiences as confirming their prior beliefs, nor in people holding simultaneous and contradictory beliefs. The situation most demanding of a "different view and logic" is the case in which the mythology is objectively real in a way that can be experienced and explored.

- Walt

[Christopher Kubasik]

Good morning everyone,

After reading the flurry of new posts on our braided thread topic I dropped off to sleep thinking, "I don't know yet how to define what I'm after."  This morning I woke up with it pretty clear in my mind.  So, this:

Jack in the Beanstalk. A boy, a foolish boy, trades his cow for some "magic" beans, mom tosses them out the window, beans turn into a giant beanstalk, boy climbs beanstalk, and, after some impulsive and criminal behavior, comes back rich.

Now, the common RPG style of play, when confronted with this initial situation, might start asking questions along MJ's line of thinking (ie, "How much do I need to know ahead of time?")  In other words:

"Are there more magic beans?"

"Is there an 'ecology' of giants up in the sky?"

The players, using player thinking along the same lines, might start asking, "Could we track down a lot more magic beans?"  "Could be grow a bunch of beanstalks, hire a mercenary army and assault the giant's castle?"  "If there's a retaliation, could we make a pact with a nearby king for shared defense and promise a share of the wealth?" and so on.

Now, all that sounds fun, actually, but it's not Jack and the Beanstalk!.

Leaving aside GNS for a moment, let's call the Fairy Tale version of the story a Naïve style of play, and the other(the one common to most RPG sessions), a Sophisticated style of play.

Okay.  That's what I'm talking about right there.  Can players and GMs by Naïve in their play?  Is it desired?  How to facilitate it?

What I'm talking about is going back to an older style of storytelling, a style that one can barely conjure today in almost any medium.

Many people credit Thomas Moore's Utopia as the first SF story.  I can see why now.  Whereas before fantastical tales and place bumped along willy-nilly, Moore introduced a self-consistent and rationalized reason for exactly why his imaginary island was the way it was.  It was, using the terms here, Sophisticated.  Using the terms I'm using here, SF is Fantasy made Sophisticated.

Interestingly, Fantasy (as a publishing genre), is fantastical fiction made sophisticated.  RPGs have followed this lead as well.  (Witness the "Ecology of the..." series in Dragon Magazine.)  There's been this desire to give all Fantasy worlds a cohesive, scientific logic.  That's were we get the magic potion shops ("Of course there'd be capitalism in Fantasy worlds. It's makes sense!")  But tales of the Naïve type simply don't take this approach. The tale is the thing.  It works on an almost dream logic that one finds in Myths and Fairy Tales.

In RPGs, I'd credit Stafford's Pendragon for opening this difference up to me.  In the first grey box on the first page of the 3rd edition, he's very explicit about the tension in Mallory's world between the nuts and bolts reality of the trained soldier's view of the world in terms of expenses for tack and horse and such, and the dreamlike logic of magic and religion of the adventures and quests.  By setting up this opposition, he made it clear that a style of play outside the normal RPG Sophisticated play could exist.  I was immediately drawn to this Naïve style of play and wanted more of it.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of playing Hero Wars, but I presume that a game where a sword can become a vital historical artifact "just cause" works along this dreamlike, naïve logic.

And now, to bring it back to MJ's "How much does the GM need to know?" question, I'll bring in James V. West's, the Questing Beast.

West creates in the game's rules the Accord. This is what the GM needs to know, and the players. It's a very Naïve world background, and encouraged Naïve play.  It focuses on characters, places and things, and leaves the magic and reality of circumstances to come to be defined as they come.

The idea is that this is the starting point.  The logic of the tale created "grows" from this agreement.  Everything doesn't have to be set up ahead of time.  In contrast to the Sophisticated RPG experience, one really won't have any sense of what's behind a door until it's opened.

"There's a sick cow. The fool trades them for beans.  What do the beans do? Don't know yet."

That's naïve play.  The Questing Beast is about that style of play.  The GM doesn't know much about the world's logic.  Not much more than what they start with, and it gets defined as they go.

We live in a time of very sophisticated storytelling.  I'd offer Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg as really the rare exceptions in a world that demands everything makes sense in a story from all angles at all times. The fact that I like Naïve storytelling is the only reason I miss the fact there was more of it.  (And notice how these films of these directors often feel too tight or annoying when they clash into the needs of Sophistication.  One can't help thinking, "That makes no sense," whereas other passages that make no sense never bother us.)

So, to MJ: The GM needs as much data before play as the style of play requires.  But given the fact that most people know Sophisticated play and assume it as the norm, that's usually a lot.

What I'm trying to do here is work toward re-introducing Naïve play.

Any takers?

Take care,
Christopher

[Christopher Kubasik]

Wow,

Since I went to bed, so much grumpiness... and anger. Well, I'll try to clean it up as quickly as possible.

Kester,

I think we've somehow got off to wrong start right from the bat.  The first quote you've got from me completely redefined my concern about taking religion seriously and made it seem as if... Well, as if you're saying something different than I was saying.  Which you didn't.  

In other words, MJ's imaginary idiot player is the one who wants the game world to take religion "literaly", while the rest of the group wants to take it seriously... Which isn't the same thing at all.  So you're right.  Trying to please a player who needs the religions taken literally in the context trying to deal with mythology seriously will create problems.  Which is what the sentence said.

After that... I don't know.  You seemed to have a bone to pick and just started picking. You seem to be trying to defend Greek ghost from me for saying the tales are inconsistent.  And here I am thinking all the time I love those dead Greeks!

For example:  Are Mars and Venus married?  Some tales say yes, some say no.  I am insulting these anceint cultures for pointing this out?  I don't think so.  I am suggesting that the difinition of these gods and these stories were clearly not set down in stone enough (not "literal" enough) that different writers could use them to different ends in different relationships.  That's all.

I really don't think I'm disagreeing with you on most of these points.  I think you've just jumped to contrary conculsions about my statements... But at some point I'll just be jumping to conclusions about what made you misread what I wrote, so I'll stop now.

Gareth,

If you want to claim the mantle of idiot player, that's fine, but I certainly didn't give it to you.  I simply, and literally, pulled the phrase from MJ's post.  I didn't have you in mind, nor do I think such players are idiots.  Again: MJ. MJ's Post.  Sorry if you were offended.

Fang,

Like Kester's post, I feel as if you've challenged me with an arguement that I don't feel is particularly contrary to my point of view.  You use "alien" to me the most extreme thing in the world imaginable.  I'd simply say, "Ken Lay.  Lancelot."  Is Lay familiar with Chivialry as a concept he's allowed to really imagine and feel out.  Not some dictionary definition he read somewhere, or something he knows about but dismisses as naive?  My guess is, at least of years late, it was an alien concept to him.  Underandable and felt are two different things, and I was suggesting it might be fun to move our hearts and imaginations into areas of feeling and imagination we don't normally get to tap.

Walter,

I think (hope?) my last post will offer you a response to your post.  My point being that in the naive tale, objectivity is resolved in the telling.

Take care all,
Christopher

[Marco]

Not surprisingly, I agree with contra (in that I expect an objectively real mythology to be objectively real) and walt (in that once you cross that bridge to the "real" mythology there's no going back--consistency is an issue for any game unless at the outset declared to be an inconsistent world).

I'm not sure I see the problem (well, I think I do and I'll address that in a second--but I don't see the *stated* problem): you concieve of a world. You postulate a mythology that in some way distinguishes itself from our world or otherwise "exists" in it.

At that point you have to address the issue that *something* is going on. You tell the characters that the sun-goddess drags the sun across the sky on her prisoner's ankle chain chased by the moon-god's smaller one ... well, is it the case or not? If you decide not-to-decide, I see that as a cop-out. Your decision can be: the physical objects are representations of the chase going on in the meta-plane of existence--a telescope will *not* show the goddess and the god (only the physical objects that are reflections of the "higher" truth)--but a proper offering will indeed stop the moon or the sun.

In that case the player's quest for a modern-real-world physics explanation is going to end wihtout answers. You don't have to explain how "as above, so below--but maybe not THAT clearly" but you've decided something--and that something will let you answer questions you hadn't though to ask (the spiritual world has an "edge"--so in the real world, which is, maybe, a sphere, you can only get to the edge with the right ship--a special ship whose physical-reality is a reflection of a ship in the meta-realm capable of sailing towards the spiritual edge in the over-world).

And if you don't want them asking that question--don't want an Enlightenment mind set? Set it up in the character/world defintion. Read Warhammer 40K--all the tech you can shake a stick and and a dark-ages mentality that prevents them from really studying it.  Read GURPS II's Mad Lands (the horriffic mythology based on Winnie the Pooh puts the players in the mindset of primitive tribesmen). I expect contra'd have no problem with any of that--and, IMO, it's an obvious 'fix.'

I think the problem isn't so much a GNS issue: the player who refuses to egnage anything the GM has given them in a hell-bent quest for the edge of the map is a strawman. A "idiot player" (someone who has his character make exploration decisions when dealing with a fictional universe) is not where the problem lies. IMO, the problem lies one person closer to home.

-Marco
[and for the record, I only advise against playing with idiot players as a tautology--not in any way that would have relevance to this thread. As I sometimes happen to post here, who exactly is the 'we' on The Forge?]

Edited to add: After reading the later posts (this one was derailed for several hours) I see Christopher's point about Naive play styles.  A good post that explained to me what he was getting at. It is a clear answer for me: if you set up at the outset that you're doing that, cool--if you don't it's a major mistake.

Ron says consistency is crucial across all standard GNS modes of play--the Naive one has the option of tossing that. That puts it into the mode I addressed when I said that consistency was crucial unless disposed of before play. A game that does this is Little Fears (IMO).

-Marco

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I would also offer M Night Shyalmalan's Signs in the Naïve style at least in one part. This is a spoiler so you may wish to skip this post if you haven't seen the movie. I have turned the text white to make it hard to read if you don't want to. All you have to do is highlight the text and it will be legible.

Many people have complained about how the aliens should have had some kind of wetsuit or something to protect them from the obviously dangerous water covering our planet. The thing is, I could explain it with the context of the movie's premise, but the fact that some people need the explanation is the difference between Naïve and Sophisticated, isn't it? I mean, the aliens came down and when they confronted the alien in their living room, the boy was saved because he had asthma and did not breath in the alien's poison gas and the alien was killed because the little girl was always leaving half-finished glasses of water everywhere. Then someone stops and goes Why didn't the alien have some kind of protection from the water if it was so dangerous? In this case, it's what has "ruined" the movie for this person. I have heard many, many people complain about this point and only this point with the movie and the only thing it illustrates is the difference between the Sophisticated and the Naïve mindset. Had the alien been wearing some kind of spacesuit to protect itself it would have completely changed the ending of the movie as well as robbed us of the metaphysical reveal, the "wow," the "aha!" about why the little girl had that weird quirk about her water.

I am not sure if I had more to offer except to illustrate Naïve/Sophisticated using this movie. Although I will note that the more Naïve viewers enjoyed the movie without having some kind of nitpicky detail ruining the entire experience for them. That and there appears to be a bit of self-importance surrounding Sophisticated, as if filmmakers must abide by this Sophisticated mind-set and not doing so is a failure. I'm not sure about that, though.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Marco,

For the record, I think we've moved past the idiot player thing, right?  (I understand you wrote that before you're edit.)  Anyone reading, actually *reading* the first post of this thread will notice that I quickly equated MJ's "idiot player" with my view of the Mr. Wizard player, and read, right there next to it my claim that we've all done that at one time or another.  So I proposed no We or They.  Okay?  Right there, due north, in the post, in black letters on white background.

Okay, onto more fun things:

Let me clarify: Naive doesn't mean "inconsistent".  It is consistent within itself.  There are beans.  They are magical.  Oh.  They make a giant beanstalk.  Oh, there's giant in a castle in the sky.

Each step builds on the previous point of imagination.  But the naive view isn't consistent with what we expect all the world to usually be like, modelling all sorts of contemporary assumptions on the tale.

In some stories, the goddess of love will be married to the god of war.  That's an interesting point of view, and says something about the universe the characters live in, their place in it.

In another tale, the goddess of love is married to the craftsman of the gods, the lame demigod  who makes beautiful items for the gods.  That's a whole 'nother bit of poetry to feel and consider.

There is not objective truth to whether love is married to war or a lame maker of beauty.  But once defined, that's part of the tale.

My point is, it seems to be that to really be open to the implications of these two different marriages should feed the RPG's story in an interesting way.  "Hmmmm.  Love is married to war?  What's that mean?  What's the implication of that to my character?  How does he see the world living in that kind of a world?"  It's just using the imagination actively, and discovering what you, the player, find out about what you feel or think as a result.

Take care,
Christopher

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings Christopher,

Greath weather we're having, isn't it?

You seemed to have a bone to pick and just started picking. You seem to be trying to defend Greek ghost from me for saying the tales are inconsistent.  And here I am thinking all the time I love those dead Greeks!

For example:  Are Mars and Venus married?  Some tales say yes, some say no.  I am insulting these anceint cultures for pointing this out?  I don't think so.  I am suggesting that the difinition of these gods and these stories were clearly not set down in stone enough (not "literal" enough) that different writers could use them to different ends in different relationships.  That's all.

If by the simple fact I am attempting to point out you are putting all of the Greco-Roman myth cycle into one lump sum, despite the fact the tales that survive plainly can be traced to different periods of time, different geographic regions (and thus groups of peoples from the Pelasgians, Hellenes, on to the Romans) is nit-picking to you then so be it.

Apologies if that sounds unduely harsh but, quite frankly, I find it amazing what is actually in mythology (at least what I have read of it) and what people tend to "think" is in it.  Then again here's a factoid you probably don't know.  I am of Greek descent.

Does that mean anything?  Does it give me some esoteric insight into this matter?

No.

"What?  He says he's Greek but disclaims indepth insights and knowledge of his own cultural heritage?"

No.

But what I am aware of is the fact that these stories, the ones we are so familiar with, have gone through the editorial sieve of the Western world and have been shaped by various time periods into what they are today.  The biggest influece, perhaps, being the Renaisance period and when Edith Hamilton and Bulfinch's mythologies were published.

None of which are truly representative of Greek culture, much less reflective of classical religious thought.  Yet, from what I am reading here, many are equating the "myths" with the religious views of antiquity.

That is erroneous, and my point.

I really don't think I'm disagreeing with you on most of these points.  I think you've just jumped to contrary conculsions about my statements... But at some point I'll just be jumping to conclusions about what made you misread what I wrote, so I'll stop now.

Solright.  

Just keep in mind that the reason there are differences in the myths is because they are not the *same* myths.  It would be nice if we could lump them together into some Bible of Myth, but that is modern thinking.  Every city-state had it's own foundation myth and patron deity.  Each patron deity was cast as the de facto chief of their corner of real estate, and thus may have figured far more prominently in local "religious" festitivities than other deities.  Just like we have various "holy-days" we celebrate, even though we may have reduced them to "holidays".  The roots remain much the same, only the manner in which we celebrate (and who or what we are paying homage to) have changed.

Certainly this can be said to be the case with Athens, whose patron deity was Athena.  Pop over to Rome and the patron was (thinking) Roma(?).

ANYway it really is a matter of perspective.  Not just about pantheons, but also from which city-state a character would originate.

I've not wanted to mention this since it would probably just over complicate the question of how priestly characters are supposed to act when meeting priests of foreign pantheons.  But, in many respects, even the pantheon of the next over city-state would be considered foreign.

Remember our ideal of "nation states" is not necessarily the same as was applied to nation states in antiquity.  And that, partly, is where I think my though process was when I responed to your post.  Hope it clarifies things?




Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius