The current era is too stupid for me to include slavery in nuanced form in any of my settings. My tolerance for stupid noises at the table has dropped to zero, so slavery is something only evil non-humans do.

But even then, most of my non-human races only see humans as food because as soon as you go down the slavery-as-a-practice road, you get into non-consentual fucking of the slaves.

But fantasy games have Charm spells...so now you have magical slavery without that pesky trying-to-escape part. There's no whipping, beating or rough talk with your Charmed pets, even though their real minds might be screaming inside or totally oblivious to what happened to them - depending on how you interpret the spell.

Quote from: Headless on July 13, 2022, 01:04:24 AM
Right it's only make believe.  The imaginary orcs can't actually do any work. So why pretend to be yucky?

Players can't actually do anything 'real' in a game - so why even RPG? If that's your logic...

  I guess we could moralize whether we should or should not have slavery...but morally, killing someone is considered the worst "crime" and adventurers kill all the time, sometimes at genocidal levels.   Is it better to let those who are certain to die have a chance to live as a slave?   Not for me to say (I do not have situations where players can engage in slavery, buying selling or suggesting) but somehow slavery is considered "worse" than murder or killing.  Most adventurers live in a gray area and are going into other creatures/beings homes and killing them and taking their stuff, with few if any questions asked. 

Quote from: oggsmash on July 13, 2022, 05:58:53 AM
  I guess we could moralize whether we should or should not have slavery...but morally, killing someone is considered the worst "crime" and adventurers kill all the time, sometimes at genocidal levels.   Is it better to let those who are certain to die have a chance to live as a slave?   Not for me to say (I do not have situations where players can engage in slavery, buying selling or suggesting) but somehow slavery is considered "worse" than murder or killing.  Most adventurers live in a gray area and are going into other creatures/beings homes and killing them and taking their stuff, with few if any questions asked.

When we played this nearly two decades ago (WFRP1e). Nobody even raised an eyelid it was just another job for the PCs. They could have chosen not to do it as well. But the Orcs had been brutalizing a barony with raids and killing the populous. It's not as if they were 'good' Orcs. The PCs and the ordinary folk thought they were the good guys.

Move to 2020 and now everyone's "OMG! slavery in a game of imagination".

Quote from: MeganovaStella on July 12, 2022, 10:52:40 PM
Slavers make a good opponent for demigods to punch. In the face. Repeatedly.

Precisely. I wouldn't condone it (unless I'm playing an evil character, then all bets are off) and it's great fun for PCs and DMs to go full ham on bad guys with minimal regrets.

But slavery is not something you can simply 'vanish' out of a setting, not unless your campaign is set in a very unusual world.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on July 13, 2022, 07:55:30 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on July 12, 2022, 10:52:40 PM
Slavers make a good opponent for demigods to punch. In the face. Repeatedly.

Precisely. I wouldn't condone it (unless I'm playing an evil character, then all bets are off) and it's great fun for PCs and DMs to go full ham on bad guys with minimal regrets.

But slavery is not something you can simply 'vanish' out of a setting, not unless your campaign is set in a very unusual world.

my world is unusual; all you need to remove slavery is to destroy the concept of slavery itself

This is easier said than done.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on July 13, 2022, 08:00:54 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on July 13, 2022, 07:55:30 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on July 12, 2022, 10:52:40 PM
Slavers make a good opponent for demigods to punch. In the face. Repeatedly.

Precisely. I wouldn't condone it (unless I'm playing an evil character, then all bets are off) and it's great fun for PCs and DMs to go full ham on bad guys with minimal regrets.

But slavery is not something you can simply 'vanish' out of a setting, not unless your campaign is set in a very unusual world.

my world is unusual; all you need to remove slavery is to destroy the concept of slavery itself

This is easier said than done.

Yeah, there's the rub.

I just think it's silly from a gaming/storytelling standpoint to eliminate such a wonderful 'hate sink' from a setting by fiat.

Do I approve of it personally? No. Would my characters? Not unless they are evil aligned (and even a couple might have qualms -- I ran a githzerai monk once who had some understandable issues with the institution. He may have been lawful evil but he sure got twitchy about slavery due to the history of the gith).

Quote from: Ghostmaker on July 13, 2022, 08:13:06 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on July 13, 2022, 08:00:54 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on July 13, 2022, 07:55:30 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on July 12, 2022, 10:52:40 PM
Slavers make a good opponent for demigods to punch. In the face. Repeatedly.

Precisely. I wouldn't condone it (unless I'm playing an evil character, then all bets are off) and it's great fun for PCs and DMs to go full ham on bad guys with minimal regrets.

But slavery is not something you can simply 'vanish' out of a setting, not unless your campaign is set in a very unusual world.

my world is unusual; all you need to remove slavery is to destroy the concept of slavery itself

This is easier said than done.

Yeah, there's the rub.

I just think it's silly from a gaming/storytelling standpoint to eliminate such a wonderful 'hate sink' from a setting by fiat.

Do I approve of it personally? No. Would my characters? Not unless they are evil aligned (and even a couple might have qualms -- I ran a githzerai monk once who had some understandable issues with the institution. He may have been lawful evil but he sure got twitchy about slavery due to the history of the gith).

Yeah. It makes it feel like the world itself is censored. It's different from implying that it exists. it's like what we're seeing is a Hollywood movie of the world rather than the actual world itself put to words.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on July 12, 2022, 11:32:00 AM
Slavery makes a great 'bad guy' to push against for heroic PCs. It's like that line from Sin City: you never feel bad about what you do to slavers.

The old 1E A series played a big part in my campaign world.  One of the Slave Lords managed to escape and will return at an inopportune time for the party.  In the meantime, their network was destroyed and hundreds if not thousands were saved.  What's not to like about that?

As people have been saying... Slavers make truly vile villains so there's the hook right there for the PCs to get involved.

Quote from: Spinachcat on July 13, 2022, 04:58:09 AM
The current era is too stupid for me to include slavery in nuanced form in any of my settings. My tolerance for stupid noises at the table has dropped to zero, so slavery is something only evil non-humans do.

But even then, most of my non-human races only see humans as food because as soon as you go down the slavery-as-a-practice road, you get into non-consentual fucking of the slaves.

But fantasy games have Charm spells...so now you have magical slavery without that pesky trying-to-escape part. There's no whipping, beating or rough talk with your Charmed pets, even though their real minds might be screaming inside or totally oblivious to what happened to them - depending on how you interpret the spell.

The Charm Person spell in 5E at least is toothless and worthless. Unless you just want to make sure somebody wants you dead anyway. Its entirely too easy to save against, especially if you are in combat. It lasts a mere hour, and it's not subtle, as the subject knows they were charmed as soon as it's effects are over and exactly who charmed them. It can hardly be called a worthwhile spell to take at all in this edition.

One might as well forget entirely building a character based upon enchantment magic in 5E. So it's better just to play any other edition if you are considering such.

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on July 12, 2022, 10:24:35 PM

Quote from: Headless on July 12, 2022, 10:18:14 PM
Yucky.

It just makes common sense... Put the greenskins to work until they drop.

Remember it's only a game of make-believe.

Hopefully not in a game based on the Warhammer greenskins or any other where ork reproduction is based on spores and conflict makes them stronger.

Quote from: HappyDaze on July 13, 2022, 09:52:33 AM

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on July 12, 2022, 10:24:35 PM

Quote from: Headless on July 12, 2022, 10:18:14 PM
Yucky.

It just makes common sense... Put the greenskins to work until they drop.

Remember it's only a game of make-believe.

Hopefully not in a game based on the Warhammer greenskins or any other where ork reproduction is based on spores and conflict makes them stronger.

Indeed... All based on WFRP 1e lore. But they were a small band of marauders. So once they were beaten and chained up they were never going to escape.

And if the greenskins didn't work then they would be beaten and starved to death. I'd assume... because we never actually played beyond the delivery of the filthy greenskins.

But who knows, maybe they escaped after that?? Now I have part 2 of the adventure! Our brave heroes now have to root out and exterminate all the vile Orcs.

Quote from: tenbones on July 12, 2022, 04:35:00 PM
I have slavery as a caste, I have slavery as indentured servitude, I have slavery as punishment instead of death sentences, I have slavery as a "profession". Depends on location and setting assumptions.

Generally speaking, you don't have "civilization" without slavery. It's almost a developmental mandate to get past "Iron-Age" technological levels for a civilization. There are no ancient cultures that did not practice slavery and since most of the details of my fantasy games are informed directly or by analog by these cultures, it's pretty common in my fantasy games.

This doesn't mean there aren't locations where the practice is banned, of course. Or that there aren't cultures that that abhor it - but they tend to be smaller cultures or those that lean heavily on magic. That pyramid ain't gonna build itself - slaves or otherwise.

To add to this: slavery is so central to civilization we still practice it today. We just don't care because we just call it something else and it mostly happens in other parts of the world, so it's out of sight out of mind. But every time we use our computer and smartphones to type posts like these we're using the products of slavery, which we participate on every time we buy these products—specially those of us (not me) who feel like neurotic need to always have the latest mobile device as a status symbol.

The materials for these devices are mined by slave labor in Africa. The devices are assembled by people working in factories with suicide nets in China. Globalism at its finest! Slavery's everywhere, we just don't see it even though we participate in it all the time.

And if things are that way today, imagine how how they would be in the type of ancient worlds most fantasy games are based on. That's why I always assume that slavery is going on in all my campaigns even if I don't explicitly make it an issue PCs encounter all the time.

Quote from: oggsmash on July 13, 2022, 05:58:53 AM
  I guess we could moralize whether we should or should not have slavery...but morally, killing someone is considered the worst "crime" and adventurers kill all the time, sometimes at genocidal levels.   Is it better to let those who are certain to die have a chance to live as a slave?   Not for me to say (I do not have situations where players can engage in slavery, buying selling or suggesting) but somehow slavery is considered "worse" than murder or killing.  Most adventurers live in a gray area and are going into other creatures/beings homes and killing them and taking their stuff, with few if any questions asked.

I view this more as a modern cliche than the way reality really works. There are worse things than death (what's described in Metallica's song "One" comes to mind), and people used to kill each other even over petty shit like insults right up until relatively recently in history. And they still do sometimes, but it used to be socially acceptable to challenge someone to a duel and just kill them cuz they publicly disparaged your character or whatever. And being forced into slavery is far worse than being insulted.

IMO, life itself is pointless and meaningless on its own. It's what you get to do with it that has any value. But merely being technically alive while being someone's property and not being able to do anything with your life is pointless, and depending on how you're treated and what sort of things your "owner" gets to do to you, death might just be a more merciful end regardless.

Quote from: Dropbear on July 13, 2022, 08:50:33 AM

Quote from: Spinachcat on July 13, 2022, 04:58:09 AM
The current era is too stupid for me to include slavery in nuanced form in any of my settings. My tolerance for stupid noises at the table has dropped to zero, so slavery is something only evil non-humans do.

But even then, most of my non-human races only see humans as food because as soon as you go down the slavery-as-a-practice road, you get into non-consentual fucking of the slaves.

But fantasy games have Charm spells...so now you have magical slavery without that pesky trying-to-escape part. There's no whipping, beating or rough talk with your Charmed pets, even though their real minds might be screaming inside or totally oblivious to what happened to them - depending on how you interpret the spell.

The Charm Person spell in 5E at least is toothless and worthless. Unless you just want to make sure somebody wants you dead anyway. Its entirely too easy to save against, especially if you are in combat. It lasts a mere hour, and it's not subtle, as the subject knows they were charmed as soon as it's effects are over and exactly who charmed them. It can hardly be called a worthwhile spell to take at all in this edition.

One might as well forget entirely building a character based upon enchantment magic in 5E. So it's better just to play any other edition if you are considering such.

Charm Person is a first level spell, and it's not good for long term compulsions. However, targets could tell they were charmed all the way back in 1E/2E, and the trick to using Charm in 5E is to tag a weak-Wisdom save enemy to keep him out of the fight or convince someone to do something when you don't care about long-term issues ('Hey, buddy, why don't you open this door for us?').

Magic in 5E got nerfed solidly anyways. Concentration doesn't stop you from casting other spells, but sustaining a spell definitely limits some of your magical options.