Gaming Too Far?
Aug. 3rd, 2005 02:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caraigI was poking about the net lately, and came upon something that... tweaked me. So, for those of you with an interest in gaming, clicky on the cutty. I put it behind a cut so that your page does not become too filled with my babbling.
For starters, I should confess that I'm am strongly biased against Wizards of the Coast. I was stunned when WOTC bought TSR. A small and growing game company that came up with some gems as Robo-Rally and The Primal Order and Ars Magica, and developed Magic:The Gathering (which while I'm not too fond of it myself, did spawn an interesting gaming dynamic and helped to keep the FLGS afloat, I'm sure.) I mean, it was the ultimate triumph of the "little guy" over the "big guy." WOTC came out of left field and blindsided TSR. There was something kind of uplifting about that story.
And then, as all things do, WOTC changed and became even more of a giant wooly mammoth than TSR could have been. Though to be fair that might have been when Hasbro bought WOTC. Either way, WOTC has made some decisions and choices that I disagree with and I'm none too fond of them.
Now, that being said, I will readily admit that WOTC -- together with the contribution of SJ Games and some other game companies -- revitalized the RPG/Gaming industy from the wasteland it had become and which some companies ("Pudding Workshop," for example...) seemed intent on making the industry into.
All right, enough about me harping on my bias. You now know I consider WOTC to be a misguided empire. Let's move on, shall we?
I slashed-and-burned a huge amount of text here. Let me summarize: WOTC came out with Book of Vile Darkness a few years ago. Basically BVD is "Things to up the power level of evil characters." Using anything in BVD -- classes, spells, feats -- is basically the short road to the evil side of the alignment chart. There was, predictably, some parental protest about this. For myself, it had some interesting ideas to mine, but it didn't appeal to me much; a lot of it seemed intended to be 'evil just for the sake of being evil' which doesn't jive with making dramatic villains.
Okay, a few years later, Velar Project releases Book of Erotic Fantasy and the uproar at WOTC seemed enough to wake the Tarrasque. It offended WOTC so much that they forced the publishers to remove 'For use with D&D Third Edition' from the cover. Apparently someone -- maybe in Hasbro -- thought that Book of Vile Darkness was okay to be published by WOTC itself, while Book of Erotic Fantasy was so bad that it shouldn't be related in any way to D&D. BEF was eventually published anyway.
Mind you, I have trouble playing truly evil characters; even my most 'evil' character could best be called 'ethically challenged.' It's hard for me to potentially, actively ruin another player's fun even if they've been total snots to me. (Though I've tried....) So maybe I'm mapping my playing ability onto what 'should' be. So take this caveat for what it's worth. As I said, I think it's possible to play a party of 'evil' characters, it's just hard and all the player characters have to have parallel goals.
Keep this diatrabe about WOTC in mind as I move on to the next part. It kind of adds to the boggling I have towards the company.
Right, let's move along to the meat of this.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yotogi recently had a entry where he talked about necromancy in the world of Exalted. Basically, there's no question (or not supposed to be a question) that taking the souls of the dead, flaying them, torturing them, forging them into weapons in various painful ways, and forcing them into servitude towards you and keeping them from their next cycle of reincarnation... is pretty damn evil. I mean, it's pretty strictly evil. You're not going to find a paladin who will do that. Raising corpses that are merely animated probably itself isn't evil, so long as you're not dragging their previous occupying souls into the bodies as well. But you're probably not raising a graveyard of skeletons, zombies, and ghouls to do your bidding at the local bake-sale to support the orphanage.
tamahori pointed me over to the latest 'contest' going on at WOTC's site, which is basically pitting 16 of the all-time most popular monsters and NPCs against each other to see who comes out on top for a one-shot adventure. While reading it over and laughing, I came upon a 'Coming Soon' ad for the Magic of Incarnum. It wasn't a setting-specific book, and, curious, (and ever open to ideas to steal -- er, borrow) I clicked on the link and read up about it.
My first thought after skimming it was, 'Hey, kinda like materia from Final Fantasy. Cool.' But then this line jumped out at me:
Now, as you can probably tell by now, not a lot of things in games outright bother me. I might not play such things myself, but I'm pretty cool with just about anything. I'd even be cool with this sort of thing being in a game. The idea itself is not what bothers me. Honestly, I'm not even sure why this even gives me a bit of of turn. I'm unlikely to buy the book, I'm even more unlikely to use ideas like this in any game or setting I come up with. Unless it's insanely munchkiny -- and judging by some of the posts on the WOTC forum, oh, it so very much is hoped to be by too many people -- I wouldn't even be adverse to letting it in a game I was running.
But it's definitely not going to be something a paladin is going to use. If you could incur Dark Side Points in D&D, you'd get them by using this. ^^ At least in any game I run.
I don't know. Maybe I'm taking this way too seriously. Maybe reading too many esoteric things makes me overly sensitive to the topic. Maybe my bias against WOTC just makes me more critical of what they put out. Maybe the way they bashed the BEF, and promoted the BVD and this book with it's (to me, at least) 'evil' magic, got my goatling. Or maybe talking withyotogi made me think more about about what's considered moral and ethical within a game itself and in a larger context.
Just as a side note: As if this really needed saying, I'm an avid gamer so of course I see nothing wrong with it. And I'm not against anyone developing ideas or concepts or systems or what-have-you. There's nothing immoral about RPGing, no matter what flavor of character you play or what campaign you choose to play in. I don't even consider this book, or the BVD, (or even the BEF, natch) to be 'immoral.' Just something about this idea bugs me. So I figured I should give words to my thoughts and see if anyone wants to comment on them. And yes, you can tell me I'm one HP away from being a ninny. =)
That's all for now. Been doing a lot of work lately but my mood has been such that I'd like to try to get a spot of writing in -- and, horrors, some drawing! -- in by the end of the week. So more later. Pax!
For starters, I should confess that I'm am strongly biased against Wizards of the Coast. I was stunned when WOTC bought TSR. A small and growing game company that came up with some gems as Robo-Rally and The Primal Order and Ars Magica, and developed Magic:The Gathering (which while I'm not too fond of it myself, did spawn an interesting gaming dynamic and helped to keep the FLGS afloat, I'm sure.) I mean, it was the ultimate triumph of the "little guy" over the "big guy." WOTC came out of left field and blindsided TSR. There was something kind of uplifting about that story.
And then, as all things do, WOTC changed and became even more of a giant wooly mammoth than TSR could have been. Though to be fair that might have been when Hasbro bought WOTC. Either way, WOTC has made some decisions and choices that I disagree with and I'm none too fond of them.
Now, that being said, I will readily admit that WOTC -- together with the contribution of SJ Games and some other game companies -- revitalized the RPG/Gaming industy from the wasteland it had become and which some companies ("Pudding Workshop," for example...) seemed intent on making the industry into.
All right, enough about me harping on my bias. You now know I consider WOTC to be a misguided empire. Let's move on, shall we?
I slashed-and-burned a huge amount of text here. Let me summarize: WOTC came out with Book of Vile Darkness a few years ago. Basically BVD is "Things to up the power level of evil characters." Using anything in BVD -- classes, spells, feats -- is basically the short road to the evil side of the alignment chart. There was, predictably, some parental protest about this. For myself, it had some interesting ideas to mine, but it didn't appeal to me much; a lot of it seemed intended to be 'evil just for the sake of being evil' which doesn't jive with making dramatic villains.
Okay, a few years later, Velar Project releases Book of Erotic Fantasy and the uproar at WOTC seemed enough to wake the Tarrasque. It offended WOTC so much that they forced the publishers to remove 'For use with D&D Third Edition' from the cover. Apparently someone -- maybe in Hasbro -- thought that Book of Vile Darkness was okay to be published by WOTC itself, while Book of Erotic Fantasy was so bad that it shouldn't be related in any way to D&D. BEF was eventually published anyway.
Mind you, I have trouble playing truly evil characters; even my most 'evil' character could best be called 'ethically challenged.' It's hard for me to potentially, actively ruin another player's fun even if they've been total snots to me. (Though I've tried....) So maybe I'm mapping my playing ability onto what 'should' be. So take this caveat for what it's worth. As I said, I think it's possible to play a party of 'evil' characters, it's just hard and all the player characters have to have parallel goals.
Keep this diatrabe about WOTC in mind as I move on to the next part. It kind of adds to the boggling I have towards the company.
Right, let's move along to the meat of this.
yotogi recently had a entry where he talked about necromancy in the world of Exalted. Basically, there's no question (or not supposed to be a question) that taking the souls of the dead, flaying them, torturing them, forging them into weapons in various painful ways, and forcing them into servitude towards you and keeping them from their next cycle of reincarnation... is pretty damn evil. I mean, it's pretty strictly evil. You're not going to find a paladin who will do that. Raising corpses that are merely animated probably itself isn't evil, so long as you're not dragging their previous occupying souls into the bodies as well. But you're probably not raising a graveyard of skeletons, zombies, and ghouls to do your bidding at the local bake-sale to support the orphanage.tamahori pointed me over to the latest 'contest' going on at WOTC's site, which is basically pitting 16 of the all-time most popular monsters and NPCs against each other to see who comes out on top for a one-shot adventure. While reading it over and laughing, I came upon a 'Coming Soon' ad for the Magic of Incarnum. It wasn't a setting-specific book, and, curious, (and ever open to ideas to steal -- er, borrow) I clicked on the link and read up about it.My first thought after skimming it was, 'Hey, kinda like materia from Final Fantasy. Cool.' But then this line jumped out at me:
With this book, the players characters can meld incarnum—the power of souls living, dead, and unborn—into magical items and even their own bodies, granting them special attacks, defenses, and other abilities (much as magic items and spells do).This gave me pause. I read it over a couple of times. For some reason it bothered me. Souls living, dead, and unborn. And then it hit me, that this was nothing less than the same necromancy that was pretty clear-cut evil. Hell, it was more than that: it's tapping into whatever source of souls exists in the game and using them. Whoa. Suddenly it became a hell of a lot more creepy.
Now, as you can probably tell by now, not a lot of things in games outright bother me. I might not play such things myself, but I'm pretty cool with just about anything. I'd even be cool with this sort of thing being in a game. The idea itself is not what bothers me. Honestly, I'm not even sure why this even gives me a bit of of turn. I'm unlikely to buy the book, I'm even more unlikely to use ideas like this in any game or setting I come up with. Unless it's insanely munchkiny -- and judging by some of the posts on the WOTC forum, oh, it so very much is hoped to be by too many people -- I wouldn't even be adverse to letting it in a game I was running.
But it's definitely not going to be something a paladin is going to use. If you could incur Dark Side Points in D&D, you'd get them by using this. ^^ At least in any game I run.
I don't know. Maybe I'm taking this way too seriously. Maybe reading too many esoteric things makes me overly sensitive to the topic. Maybe my bias against WOTC just makes me more critical of what they put out. Maybe the way they bashed the BEF, and promoted the BVD and this book with it's (to me, at least) 'evil' magic, got my goatling. Or maybe talking with
yotogi made me think more about about what's considered moral and ethical within a game itself and in a larger context.Just as a side note: As if this really needed saying, I'm an avid gamer so of course I see nothing wrong with it. And I'm not against anyone developing ideas or concepts or systems or what-have-you. There's nothing immoral about RPGing, no matter what flavor of character you play or what campaign you choose to play in. I don't even consider this book, or the BVD, (or even the BEF, natch) to be 'immoral.' Just something about this idea bugs me. So I figured I should give words to my thoughts and see if anyone wants to comment on them. And yes, you can tell me I'm one HP away from being a ninny. =)
That's all for now. Been doing a lot of work lately but my mood has been such that I'd like to try to get a spot of writing in -- and, horrors, some drawing! -- in by the end of the week. So more later. Pax!
