Quote from: Benoist;480917That's because I thought it was public, but it wasn't. I made a mistake.

No worries, I figured something like that was the case. Is it a forum you need to be a member of to view?

I take it you and the OP are no longer on speaking terms?

Did he clarify where he was going with the OP later in the thread?

Quote from: J Arcane;480909Discomfort is not a logical position.

This is a semantic quibble, but doesn't address the main point.  

What exactly are you trying to argue?  Are you saying that players should logically never be uncomfortable doing any kind of act in character?  If not, then what?

Quote from: jhkim;480919This is a semantic quibble, but doesn't address the main point.  

What exactly are you trying to argue?  Are you saying that players should logically never be uncomfortable doing any kind of act in character?  If not, then what?

It's not a "semantic quibble," it's a definitional error.

You called it logic, but it isn't, it's your emotive response based on your own preconceptions.

I'm just arguing for some intellectual honesty around here, and repeatedly being especially surprised by the kinds of nonsense you have spouted here when you seem otherwise to be a reasonable, academically minded and intelligent individual.

I'm not sure why you've decided that your personal intuitions are so much more important than reason here, but your unwillingness to acknowledge the difference is frustrating and makes you look more foolish than I know you to be.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;480918No worries, I figured something like that was the case. Is it a forum you need to be a member of to view?

It's Google Plus. So you've got people in different circles, and when you post something you can release it to a circle in particular, all your circles, extended circles, or make it public. My assumption was that the post of Levi (who had "shared" the original post) was public but apparently it wasn't. That was my mistake.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;480918I take it you and the OP are no longer on speaking terms?

That's an understatement. I was really, really not diplomatic, even by the RPG Site's standards.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;480918Did he clarify where he was going with the OP later in the thread?

I honestly do not remember beyond him telling me to fuck off at the end.

Quote from: Benoist;480923That's an understatement. I was really, really not diplomatic, even by the RPG Site's standards.

Hey, it's the internet, everyone blows some steam once in a while. Hope it didn't cause too much blowback for you on google +.

QuoteI honestly do not remember beyond him telling me to fuck off at the end.

Must have been one heck of a flamewar.

Quote from: Benoist;480914I did have an exchange with the guy yes. It didn't end very well. I wasn't exactly diplomatic, and he told me to me to fuck off and enjoy my mindless braindead hack and slah or something. Don't really remember. I blocked him soon after.

Any reason why you decided to be so um.... well rude I guess ?

And did you indeed go back to your mindless hack and slash ?

Quote from: J Arcane;480922I'm not sure why you've decided that your personal intuitions are so much more important than reason here, but your unwillingness to acknowledge the difference is frustrating and makes you look more foolish than I know you to be.

Look - I'm getting more short-tempered in all this, which probably has more to do with new job stuff than anything else.  I'm sure I have made all sorts of errors in what I said.  

For example, I never meant to say anything about Tolkien personally.  I did mean to say something about his stories.  

I did mean to say that playing out killing prisoners and/or children - even as fantasy fiction - is something that many people are liable to feel uncomfortable with.  I don't think that is a unique personal hang-up of mine, but rather a broader trend - and the causes of that trend follow patterns that can be rationally analyzed and identified.

Quote from: jibbajibba;480927Any reason why you decided to be so um.... well rude I guess ?

Because his argument is dimwitted, mostly. This kind of argument coming from idiots who don't know the first thing about TRPGs? Fine. From a gamer? No fucking way.

Quote from: jibbajibba;480927And did you indeed go back to your mindless hack and slash ?

About to restart it, actually.

Quote from: Benoist;480935Because his argument is dimwitted, mostly. This kind of argument coming from idiots who don't know the first thing about TRPGs? Fine. From a gamer? No fucking way.

But surely you have really just reinforced his opinion. He lays out some arguements about D&D which stem from his own real world experience and belief. Rather than coming in with a nuanced argument, which I think you have tried to do here and we is now up to close to 1200 posts, you didn't engage him seriously. Now he can say look what these racist coloninal RPGers don't like it up em do they.....

QuoteAbout to restart it, actually.

Hope it's great fun.

PS. I am off to Nice tomorrow for a wedding know any decent restaurants?

Quote from: jibbajibba;480941But surely you have really just reinforced his opinion. He lays out some arguements about D&D which stem from his own real world experience and belief. Rather than coming in with a nuanced argument, which I think you have tried to do here and we is now up to close to 1200 posts, you didn't engage him seriously. Now he can say look what these racist coloninal RPGers don't like it up em do they...

I didn't want to convince him of anything, though. It was more like a fuck you for the principle of it. To him I'm just lambda guy on the internet, and to get so far down the rabbit all of bullshit PC you've got to have been going at it for quite some time. I wouldn't have changed his mind in any case. What surprises me is that others who should definitely know better, like Stormy (nevermind Trollman and his extensive knowledge of real gaming), are sympathetic to this kind of rhetoric. That genuinely surprises me.

Quote from: jibbajibba;480941Hope it's great fun.

It's been so far and I'm pretty sure we'll keep up with that. You can join us if you feel like it.

Quote from: jibbajibba;480941PS. I am off to Nice tomorrow for a wedding know any decent restaurants?

I don't know much about the Nice area I'm afraid. Ask me about areas like Eastern France, Southern Bretagne, I might be able to help, but the Mediterranean coast, I'm not so knowledgeable about it.

Quote from: Benoist;480945What surprises me is that others who should definitely know better, like Stormy (nevermind Trollman and his extensive knowledge of real gaming), are sympathetic to this kind of rhetoric. That genuinely surprises me.

Really?  Still trying to slip this one through?

It's weird, because just recently I was reading this post where a guy was roundly condemned for making derogatory statements about people who don't share his views.

Quote from: jhkim;480934I did mean to say that playing out killing prisoners and/or children - even as fantasy fiction - is something that many people are liable to feel uncomfortable with.  I don't think that is a unique personal hang-up of mine, but rather a broader trend - and the causes of that trend follow patterns that can be rationally analyzed and identified.

I don't think it's a unique reaction, either.  My group reacted that way to the reality of it.  And an emotion by which moral outrage is conveyed in the human mind is disgust, which is why people tend to feel disgust toward people who advance a moral position they don't agree world.  But what a lot of people seem to be saying is that they find the whole idea so disgusting that they don't want to accept any context in which doing so would make logical utilitarian sense, to the point where people have said that any GM that puts their players in that situation is a sadist.

(As an aside, after years of seeing threads where people ask how to create real horror in role-playing games, I think putting the players into a situation where they have to kill mothers and babies or else they'll have an even more horrific situation on their hands might just do the trick for a lot of groups.)

The article I keep referencing about how moral decisions are made argues that moral decisions are made by the brain comparing how it morally feels about an act versus the strength of the rational argument in favor of the act and the strongest urge wins.  The people who humanize monsters and think of them like people are likely to have strong feelings of disgust at the thought of exterminating them when they are helpless, no matter how strong the utilitarian argument might be in favor of doing so might be, and may even see analogies between hatred and violence directed at those monsters and human victims of such hatred and violence.  The people who don't humanize the monsters and think of them more like animals or robots are likely to experience little to no disgust at the thought of exterminating them while they are helpless, especially when there is a strong utilitarian argument in favor of killing them.  

But before you argue in favor of empathy always winning out over utility, consider that people in the modern Western world are largely insulated from having to kill for any reason and thus have the luxury of favoring empathy over utility.  Earlier in this thread, you made an argument against killing even a dangerous dog.  Do you eat meat?  Do you wear leather?  Many, if not most, people in the modern Western world would likely experience a lot of disgust if they had to slaughter their own cow to eat a hamburger or slaughter their own cow to make a pair of leather shoes, yet have no problem eating meat or wearing leather because they never have to see a cow get killed to make the hamburger or leather.  On several television shows, I've watched people cry over chickens killed to make dinner, not only on reality shows like Survivor but a show about a family living in rural Africa, because they treated the chickens like pets.  And if you have a problem with the idea of killing helpless dogs, you should never take a serious look at what goes on in most animal shelters or around the world (on the other hand, if you want a good cry, read this -- even if it takes liberties with the truth, it reflects the reality in many shelters).

Of course what people see in the other direction (and this is the point I make about psychopaths) is that if one has no emotional connect to real people, then one can justify all sorts of atrocities against people that should cause moral outrage.  The trick is balancing the emotional distance of a moral problem such that one neither becomes falsely sentimental or unjustly heartless.  One can certainly err on the side of being heartless, but can also err on the side of being too sentimental.  A reluctance to identify evil and squash it brutally, if necessary, is one of those areas where I think people can get too sentimental.

What I personally think of whenever I think of the orc baby scenario is that a few years ago, my back yard was infested with field mice.  There were so many that they were leaving trails through the grass and were getting into the house.  Knowing that it was part of the problem, I decided to dig out an old pile of cut grass from the previous owner.  In doing so, I uncovered a mouse nest.  I noticed a mother mouse frantically grabbing her young to carry them off to safety.  Rather than dispatching the mice quickly with the shovel, which I think was the logical thing to do and was more or less what an exterminator or traps or poison would have done for me, I let the mother mouse carry her babies away because I felt sorry for her.  Was that the right thing to do and a good thing to do or was I simply letting false sentimentality and an overactive anthropomorphization of vermin get the best of me?  And would I have cared if an exterminator did it for me instead of me having to do it myself?

So while I understand the reluctance and even disgust people have expressed over the idea of slaughtering helpless monsters and can even understand why people see parallels to real world racism and colonialism in it, I think that when it persists even when the GM states as objective fact that the monsters are inherently evil and there is no good that can come out of sparing them that it's the same sort of false sentimentality that made me squeamish about killing some mice and even reluctant to kill bugs (when possible, I catch them and put them outside).  And as such, I think a warrior charged with fighting evil could not be so squeamish about the grim necessity of killing evil.  Further, there are a variety of reasons why a role-player who is not so sensitive or squeamish, not so emotionally involved in the idea of all sentient creatures being just like people, or simply not even all that emotionally invested in the monsters and game at all would have no problem slaughtering monsters without pause, with it having nothing to do with repressed racism or any analogy with real world racism or violent atrocities at all.

But were the mice evil?

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;480969But were the mice evil?

You have no idea.

Quote from: StormBringer;480970You have no idea.

NIMH !