Cultural Shock

See here.

Felt the above was worth having a look at, since it's core to my personal ideology of game setting.  I was going to say something more slavery.  As yet, it's not even incorporated into the description of the setting's identity, though it's implied.  Slavery has been a part of human culture since the bronze age (that we have any evidence for, at least) ... but somehow the institution failed to possess the stigma that began to appear in the minds of Europeans just prior to my game's chronological date (1650).  For the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, for the Chinese, for the Greeks and Romans, even throughout the middle ages, slavery was a class ... one from which an individual could rise and obtain respect, with society acknowledging that the individual's past had no relevance with regards to the individual's present.  But that ceased to be so with the American experiment (and here, I refer to both continents of America, not the country of the United States alone).

So, in D&D, it's tricky.  Players exist with the stigma version in their heads.  It would therefore be sensible to abolish the whole practice, vine and roots together, arguing that it had never taken place in history at all.  Or maybe that it happened only long, long ago, and had been abolished around the Dark Ages or some such.

This strains reality quite a lot, however.  It's easy enough to pretend that witches were never burned, that only applies to some tens of thousands of victims, spread over many centuries.  But at any time in human history there were millions of slaves; and their collective labour built the world.

Additionally, it's hard to vouchsafe that orcs, ogres, hobgoblins and such wouldn't enslave their enemies.  Or that there isn't a tremendous benefit in the gamespace of player characters working diligently to free slaves, or destroy slavery-based institutions.

Still, no doubt, most DMs would prefer it this way.  No slavery.  Clap hands, problem solved.

I am not one of them.

Reasons for this can be assigned to the usual things: I'm a white male, I was born nearly 59 years ago, I can't possibly understand what it was really like, or what the repercussions were.  But for those who take me for standing on the wrong side of the tracks in the real world, let me stress that this is not how I feel.  How I really feel about slavery, CRT and the 1619 project, and the insidious proliferation of racism that continues to be expressed from parent to child, I can't say it better than Tim Wise.  Watch all of it, and keep in mind that I agree with all of it, before you rise to condemn me for something I do in a D&D game.  Where no actual person gets hurt.

My best argument is the one that's made on the wiki page.  The 17th century was a very different world.  Very.  And better than the exploration of fantasy, better than pretending to be something we're not, better than waving make-believe wands to make magic, I feel the strongest experience players can have is to visit a real place that's very different from the place we are now.  Because a real place is a thousand times more effective at conveying to the player that he or she is doing something that other human beings used to do, and without condemnation, because once upon a time it was acceptable to do those things.

The cultural shock of this when the player realises what it means in the larger picture of their lives, as they comprehend the horrible past of human folk, having spent a little time wallowing in it ... is, I feel, instructive.  It sends a message that those people were not us.  Those people lacked awareness.  Those people were uncivilised.  Those people, our forebears, were monsters.  Not people to be put on pedestals.  Not people to be respected and worshipped.  Not good people doing the best they could in their time.  But people who were ignorant because the things they should have known hadn't been conceived of yet.

And what, we need to ask ourselves, would they have been like if they'd known what we know?  If they carried some of the empathy and morality we carry?  If they had not been monsters in a monster's world?

That, my dear readers, is what's answered by a player participating in that world.  That is where much of my fascination as a DM lies, as I want players puzzle out and resolve what they're willing to do, and what they're not willing to do, when faced with the power to do anything.  Not because I'm shaming them, and not because the general community behind dungeons and dragons would shame them ... but because, being free to act, they choose to decide for themselves.

Laudable?  I don't care.  I do care that in a society that praises free-will and personal experimentation, there's still a game where this is possible with human culture and history.  Even if it gets dirty and unpresentable.

At least, while I'm still running games.

Slave Trader & Auctioneer

I was supposed to write something on learning to design D&D today, but ... well, what the hell, I'm not in the mood. Instead I want to show & tell something I finished last night, the result of work I did over the weekend.

Up until August 2011, I was regularly working on a series of equipment lists, which I posted on this blog, and which can be looked at here. It had gotten up to the S's, with Sculptor, and then I'd run out of steam, intending to get back to it. I did not until August 2012, when I put up ONE table, that of Shipwright ... and then I realized I really should rebuild the availables list on my Prices Table.

I started to do so, and then I crashed. I haven't looked at it seriously in more than a year. Ah well. Can't rush these things. To be honest, it was the same problem as the Hear Noise thing I mentioned in the last post - no real solution had presented itself, and why work if its not going to work?

Well, I had a small epiphany on Friday and so I dug out the table and started reformatting the algorithm for item availability. I am at last ready to start posting tables again.

Technically, the next table is 'Silversmith' ... but its very close to the goldsmith table and somehow that didn't seem all that interesting for a grand re-launch. So I decided to do this table instead:

revised image

Outwardly, it looks more or less alike the other tables I've already posted ... but that is one of my mandates: whenever possible, make it so the players can't tell the difference. There are differences. For instance, I've rebuilt it so that now all the prices show even though the item is unavailable. I've gotten rid of the selling to the public feature (players did not use it). But the biggest change, what's available and what's not, that's all hidden.

This particular table is for prices in Constantinople, where part of my online party is going. Constantinople is, and should be, a central hub of commerce; it is more so now, with regards to the Pricing Table - I've heightened the impact of large trading cities over smaller ones (though not as much as I might have liked ... will have to work on that in future).

So let's talk about slavery.

I'm guessing that a LOT of DMs and players will be greatly offended by the presence of this table, and the availability of items on this table, and argue with me that these things should not be included in D&D. I'm a bit amused by that. It is like the total German ban on the swastika, which is presented as though the image itself has the magical power to spontaneously create a 4th Reich if it is not gainfully suppressed. Arguably, it's a tourist thing, the Germans not anxiously wishing to be identified with the period 70 years ago, but there's still an odd sort of paranoia involved there.

People tend to treat slavery the same way ... as if to say, if we deny its existence, or at least speak of it ONLY in terms of how bad it is and how WRONG it was and why it should never have happened, this will magically remove its effect upon society and somehow we will grow to be brothers. The mindset totally ignores that there are literally millions of slaves in the world right now, who receive little or no attention at all, digging up the precious minerals that construct your cellphone or tablet or enable the wedding ring you give your spouse, both diamond and gold together. As a culture we choose to be guilty only of things we choose to pay attention to, and we point our fingers in condemnation at only those things that chance to fall into the orbit of our gaze. There will be those who will express angry at this post, which merely takes the position that slavery 400 years ago was common and ordinary, but who will do nothing whatsoever to combat real slavery, in fact rising and escaping the efforts of those who dare to talk about the need to do something openly.

Moral outrage works like a convenience store.

So yes, the year is 1650, and slavery exists, just as it does now. Serfs are exchanged for debts, prisoners are worked to death in mines and upon plantations, slaves are raised from birth to do both, and to provide entertainment, to offer sex in slave cathouses built for the purpose, people who cannot pay their debts are given over to masters for six year periods, deportees are gathered for religious and social reasons and shipped to the Americas or Africa to die of disease while building a new colony, ownership deeds are written out by the hundreds and lines of slaves stand at every port waiting to be processed, their noses and ears punched and fitted with rings and their ankles fitted with manacles.

Would I allow a player in my world to own slaves, to punish slaves, to kill a slave, if that player so desired?

Yes.

Why? Because we're not talking about real people. D&D is a fiction. It isn't real. For those people who believe somehow that speaking of it in game somehow 'makes it real,' I'm sorry, I cannot buy into that delusion ... and it is a delusion. The idea that this happens - that watching guns fire on television creates the gun culture, or that rock music causes suicide, or that internet porn creates rape or any other ridiculous association that is drummed together in order to assuage infantile fears - is a manifestation of the mind. It is a belief. A belief that, like religion, feeds upon fear.

I don't accept it. I do believe that fear, and the manipulation of fear, by censorship or contrived morale superiority, is the engine that actually produces the crime. It is not discussion of the crime, it is the refusal to discuss the crime, that produces evil. Discussion ended slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, that presented slavery as it existed in her time, prior to the Civil War, compelled millions of people to rise against slavery.

But I don't pretend that my little D&D world exists to end slavery. Just as I don't believe my willingness to present a 17th century world in all its evil and nature produces slavery. Either end of the see-saw is utter nonsense ... which will not stop many a gentle reader from spouting nonsense all the same. Fear is a powerful motivator.

What will a player get out of owning slaves? It is not for me to say. It is not for me to judge. I don't care to judge. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that any person at my table who receives a vicarious interest in possessing a fictional slave through the running of a fictional character is a citizen upstanding enough to recognize the difference between a fiction and a reality. Why? Because I talk to my players, O idiot who might ask. I know them, I know where they stand. I would no more presume to think a player who owned a slave was any worse than a player who robbed a purse or a player who murdered a hundred villagers in a fit of berserk rage. It's a game.

Are there players at my table who would be offended by a player who would own a slave? No. The reason for 'no' is because I do not have infants nor fools at my table. A few weeks ago I listened as people cried out in mock-indignation, "What about the other players, who have to endure someone wanting to have sex in a game?" What a crock. I don't run Mrs. Grundy at my table. I don't know people like Mrs. Grundy. If we're talking about the sort of creature who gets his or her knickers in a flap at the mention of sex - or slavery - then it should be known I wouldn't have a prig like that in my house. I wouldn't give a prig like that the time of day. There are too many prigs in the world, and too many frozen, empty islands to where they could all be deported.

Alas, I don't believe in such solutions. More's the pity. It only means I must tolerate the silliness of a small group of children who may squawk and shrill about my immorality while tacitly approving the system they proport offends them.

Let's end actual slavery. Let's not waste our time weeping over poor fictional creatures that don't exist.