Quote from: Settembrini@Pierce: What´s a "Bildungsbürger" in english?

Doesn't exist!

LOL ROFL

Returning to an earlier point:

Quote from: Pierce InverarityThere are rules that "encourage" (zzzzzz...) or "foster" (bleargh) "story," or "drive it ever forward" (gahh). Rules = structure.

It is important to ignore the rhetoric and grasp the actual form of the game if we are to shed light on its cultural location. I am not sure that the author's leaning towards kitsch has any bearing on how the game plays in practice. If you'll direct your attention to the whiteboard:

• The character has a desire.
• Demons can help him attain that desire.
• What will the player do?
• The GM lays on stress. What will the player do now? Etc.

Comments?

Quote from: droog

• The character has a desire.
• Demons can help him attain that desire.(1)
  
• What will the player do?
• The GM lays on stress. What will the player do now? Etc.

Comments?

(1)Thanatos02 has speculated that the use of demons may indicate their own sign; that is to say that using a demon in the game Sorcerer might demonstrate certain class and philosophical bias. In this case, Thanatos02 goes on to mention that the premise of "How far would you go..." becomes moot at a certain point. For example, the very summoning of something called a 'demon' might, in itself, be a mighty sin greater then anything the summoner would command to demon to do.

He speculates that the question raised might and the gaming method (demon summoning) could indicate a would-be middle-class initiative. The petty use of demons seems designed to artifically excite, for example, where the subject matter ought to do as well. The use of a potentially rebellious third-party actor who is forced to act on the part of a summoner who risks their humanity for forcing the deal also speaks to a conflicted opinion of industry; demonizing forced labor, but also viewing it as a path to power as well as the user losing 'humanity' the more they push... speaks of a bourgeious mentality (Mocabee 136)

(never mind)

Before security dragged Prof. Calithena away, I believe he was shouting something about the theme of power versus humanity being as old as the Greeks. Could anybody shed any light on his ravings?

Quote from: droogCertainly an idea worth considering, Prof. Pseudoephedrine; although it seems we find the middle classes at the end of every road.

One of my pet projects, never pursued in any sort of academic way, is an updated taxonomy of the economic classes in society. I'm not sure there is a middle class any more, just varieties of technocrats and experts who have usurped the roles of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat alike.

Droog, I can't comment on Cali's post, I didn't read it. But since I have a fetish for the Greeks, why don't I share my thoughts anyway.

I've said it before: There are no humanist subjects in the Greek epic. The epic is not a novel, let alone a "story." It is a very alien thing. Funnily enough, it is alien in ways tangentially interesting for our lowly discussion of RPGs.

Settembrini's earlier point is relevant here: D&D characters don't need a question in order to act.

To act unquestioningly is to act epically. For a question to precede action, what needs to have happened is a split between the private interiority of what is considered an autonomous person on one hand, and a hostile or indifferent external world on the other. "Given the world's adversity, what will I, snowflake that I am, ever do? What could even get me out of bed?"

That split only happened in the modern world, in Romanticism & after. When Edwards "cites" Dr. Faustus, what's really meant is not Marlowe but Goethe's Faust--or whatever memory of that play has survived into 20th-century US comic book culture.

Relations between subjects and environment in the premodern world, especially antiquity, are a totally different ballgame, and so are their accounts in genres like the epic, as opposed to the novel. Mid-twentieth century notions of "story" will not begin to fathom them.

The first pages of Erich Auerbach's amazing book, Mimesis, talk about precisely this difference.

In the Odyssey, he says, "a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depth. And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground--that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute."

The Greek epic has no "background"--it is all foreground--and its protagonists and their actions have no depth--they are all surface. They have no hidden recesses of "character," from which the turmoil of a "question" might arise. They live in the fullness of the instant, which is transparent to them, and to their readers.

"Delight in physical existence is everything to them [the Homeric poems], and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us. Between battles and passions, adventures and perils, they show us hunts, banquets, palaces and shepherds' cots, athletic contests and washing days.... the Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret meaning. Homer can be analyzed, but he cannot be interpreted."

Auerbach was pretty smart.

To steer this back from the heights of Homer to the plains of RPGs, I shall repeat myself and mention my anti-story counter-example from a couple months ago: ole Conan, who, while not exactly Homeric, is even less a humanist subject.

Like Odysseus, Conan doesn't ask Teh Question. He too has no depth. What Bataille said about animality in the Theory of Religion is true for him: The animal exists in the world like water in water. Even its death is merely a ripple on its surface.

This unquestioning depthlessness is what Conan shares with the epic, and it's what's reverberating through a modest but remarkable enterprise like the D&D roleplaying game.

My only quibble with Pierce's statement there is that I would push the development of interiority back to the Protestant Reformation, with its explicit problematisation (albeit in a basic way) coming about through Descartes etc. in the early-modern period - well prior to Romanticism.

A tour de force, Prof. Inverarity, though I think the roleplaying game as it exists has less to do with epic and more to do with television soap. Consider the continuous weekly episodes, the meandering storylines, the central cast that undergoes adventures at a rate far beyond that of normal suburbia.

Quotethough I think the roleplaying game as it exists has less to do with epic and more to do with television soap.

...then you are doing it wrong, totally wrong.
In mainstream roleplaying, there are no situations whatsoever that resemble an episode of a TV Soap.

If you want to draw such a US-centric and oblivous parallel, then you could say:

The mainstream roleplaying games share structural similiarities with Saturday morning  toy advertisement cartoon shows.

And even this simile breaks down together quickly, as RPGs totally lack the "moral at the end of the story". And if they lack the superhero bullshit: "I can only win, if I do the morally right thing!"

My main accussation against Thematic Games is that they in deed seem to emulate TV Soaps, horrible!

EDIT: Coming to think of it, I think droog totally misread Pierce´s point: the epic is not meant as a story-structure, but as a text-type. The similiarity of RPGs and epic texts regarding introspection was at hand, not schedule and structure of events.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityDoesn't exist!

LOL ROFL

OMFG!

Agreed, basically, on Homer.

Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Socrates are not quite so convincingly dealt with through this prism, however. I could be convinced that they don't have modern interiority; less sure that their actions and way of understanding actions are ones which aren't morally structured in a way congruent to the power vs. humanity question. As long as the conflict is there I don't think interiority is essential to it.

The Sorcerer text highlights a particularly modern sort of interiority, granted; not convinced that the mechanics can't handle situations that don't require any connection to that. In particular, Sorcerer & Sword seems to point in this direction, albeit through the prism of 'lowbrow' (and some 'middlebrow', like Leiber) S&S fiction.

Interestingly, we may be cultural artifacts of a bygone age: interiority may be on its way out as we speak.

Other than that, don't want to get dragged into this discussion.

Pierce: great post, although almost totally unrelated to the topic of this thread. Of course, it wasn't a very good thread in the first place, so do go on.

Stunning post by Pierce. I've favorited it.

QuoteAeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes

They are dramatists, so they surely deal with the human condition.
Homer is not.

How Socrates fits here, is above me. Care to explain?