10-24-2018, 09:41 PM | #51 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Killing Slavers
Winning is for board games. At least in my mind, the point of tabletop games is the story, not whether PCs are victorious. If the PCs are the only people ethical enough to oppose slavery and brave enough to do something about it, that means that they are heroes living within a heroic epic and that the story is about their heroism.
Heroes fail to change the world everyday, but they make it just a little better each time that they try. If they kill slavers and liberate slaves, it does not matter if there is always another slaver to kill or if there is always another slave to liberate, what matters is that slaver is dead and that slave is liberated. Now, they may face death for their actions, but I think that some of the best campaigns are the ones that end with noble deaths for the PCs. |
10-24-2018, 11:29 PM | #52 | |
Join Date: Oct 2011
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Re: Killing Slavers
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Slavery really only works in a story which is "about" slavery or some related topic (like power or oppression). One example which immediately comes to mind is Small Gods, which demonstrates the oppressiveness of the fundamentalist Omist society by contrasting them with an island where even the slaves are more free than "free men" serving Om. Of course, if you're willing to delve into stories deeper than "The goblins are evil nasties, kill them," slavery is a potent tool for characterizing a society and the people living in it—as well as people in other societies. It's also good tool for asking "What matters in life?" After all, if slavery is bad, there must be something about being enslaved that makes it bad. Is it the lack of freedom or quality of life? The dehumanization or loss of agency? Or is there just something inherently bad about being property—and what does it mean to be property, anyways? I'd love to play a TRPG which explored these kinds of ideas, but the rest of my gaming group probably wouldn't be as interested. I guess I'll have to get that kind of narrative satisfaction from VRPGs instead... |
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10-25-2018, 01:34 AM | #53 |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: Killing Slavers
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10-25-2018, 02:40 AM | #54 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Killing Slavers
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10-25-2018, 02:55 AM | #55 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: Killing Slavers
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10-25-2018, 02:59 AM | #56 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Killing Slavers
Slavery works fine as a background nasty thing about a society or person. I'm just not likely to particularly highlight it unless it's also a significant plot point.
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10-25-2018, 06:01 AM | #57 | |
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Re: Killing Slavers
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Apologists for slavery regularly made arguments similar to Malloyd's. The idea that rich northern industrialists could treat their factory workers as essentially disposable, eternally impoverished, interchangeable cogs was deeply offensive to many people in the South, who argued that the expense of owning slaves meant that the slave owner had an economic incentive to look after them. As to slavers being less socially acceptable than slave-owners, it depends on the setting and the situation. At least in antebellum America, slave catchers and overseers were generally looked down upon because their jobs required them to regularly bully or torture slaves. They were also usually men from the lower classes, and sometimes aggressive social climbers, hence not quite as respectable as the Southern aristocrats. Think Simon Legree from Uncle Tom's Cabin. On the other hand, you have men like Nathan Bedford Forrest who eventually made a vast fortune before the Civil War by dealing in slaves and was a well-respected businessman. Of course, as a major slave-dealer, Forrest probably delegated a lot of his dirty work to employees creating the fiction that he was a gentleman, albeit a self-made one. Last edited by Pursuivant; 10-25-2018 at 06:16 AM. |
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10-25-2018, 06:09 AM | #58 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Killing Slavers
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10-25-2018, 06:30 AM | #59 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Killing Slavers
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I'd also note that reading ANY literature from past eras is a skill that has to be acquired, and that a lot of people, at least in the present-day United States, seem not to acquire. The Odyssey may stay in print, generation after generation, in a succession of new translations, but it's not a bestseller like, say, the Harry Potter books, or (in their day) the novels of Charles Dickens. You have to identify the intended audience for a work before you can judge the content and presentation of that work.
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10-25-2018, 06:36 AM | #60 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Killing Slavers
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It's also a bit unusual for being industrial in nature. Though slavery in large empires often has at least some of that. You do need a trade economy that will support large plantations or mines for that though, so it tends to be a bit out of place in sort of fantasy and post-apocalyptic settings that are fragmented and monster plagued enough for wandering adventurers to make much sense.
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