10-25-2018, 06:38 AM | #61 | |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Killing Slavers
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An employer won't pay me if I refuse to work, so I may starve as a result of that. But my owner can remove and sell my children, beat, whip or torture me, geld me, rape or kill me* (or do all that to my enslaved family members), sell me to something worse. Maybe not all slave owning societies enshrined all that in law (but most had some or most), but very few had meaningful ways for their slaves to protest behaviour that wasn't condoned anyway. If nothing else in theory as a worker I'm free to go and pursue other forms of employment (or sources of food). Slaves however don't get that choice. Now of course some employment contexts crossover the boundaries in different ways at times (some fo the more extreme forms of indenture). But in general it's "you have to do what I say or I'll punish you" vs. "If you choose to do what I say I'll pay you" so no not maybe better. *this last being more a warning to others in terms of eliciting work!
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Grand High* Poobah of the Cult of Stat Normalisation. *not too high of course Last edited by Tomsdad; 10-25-2018 at 06:50 AM. |
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10-25-2018, 06:45 AM | #62 | |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Killing Slavers
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Grand High* Poobah of the Cult of Stat Normalisation. *not too high of course Last edited by Tomsdad; 10-25-2018 at 07:22 AM. |
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10-25-2018, 07:15 AM | #63 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Killing Slavers
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I don't recall any classmates concluding that 100% of the cast of the Greek epics are villains because they support slaveholding societies, nor do I think that the Iliad 'does not work'. I expect roleplayers to be more used than schoolkids are to exploring societies and situations different from our own and reacting appropriately. |
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10-25-2018, 07:29 AM | #64 |
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Killing Slavers
Yeah I generally speaking run historical stuff, and some of that has involved settings that had some kind of slavery or other systems that near enough for this thread's purposes. And well different PCs & NPCs have different views on it. Just as I suspect did real people in these societies did. Not every Roman was fine with the form of slavery they had (Roman slavery wasn't just one kid fo slavery either) and so on.
There is a difference between running games in a setting that includes slavery, and running games that are more centred around slavery in that setting. Either way, IME possible to run successful games with varying focus on slavery and it repercussions. But as ever personal perspective is key, I wouldn't run a game that involved slavery if a player wasn't comfortable with either the way I presented it in the setting, or dealt with it in game
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Grand High* Poobah of the Cult of Stat Normalisation. *not too high of course |
10-25-2018, 07:34 AM | #65 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Killing Slavers
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I suspect genuinely unregulated they aren't so different in a plentiful labor market - the owners who would badly abuse their slaves will probably be just as willing to abuse employees and vice versa. Its only when labor becomes scarce enough that leaving for another job is a serious option that things get different - the free laborers now *can* leave, so you need to treat them better, and conversely the slave owners now have to start cracking down more because slaves start thinking there is something the could run away *to*. This is probably part of why industrial slavery tends to be worse than the more domestic or small scale agricultural versions - an economy that will support buying and shipping slaves in big lots is probably not one where labor is in oversupply.
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10-25-2018, 08:06 AM | #66 | ||
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Brighton
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Re: Killing Slavers
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*although you have to feed them for while before they can work, but equally you can sell them when they're more manageable and susceptible to indoctrination. Quote:
So equally such a society that relies on industrial scale slavery will have less issue with making examples of individuals as each individual slave is worth proportionally less. Plus of course any society that is so reliant on slaves to have them in such large numbers will also be keenly aware of the threat of one slave revolt away from hanging from branches themselves. And so will do their best to discourage it. *but even then generally speaking free people even without employment rights, tend to have overall better legal protection in terms freedom of action and recourse than slaves.
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Grand High* Poobah of the Cult of Stat Normalisation. *not too high of course Last edited by Tomsdad; 10-25-2018 at 08:38 AM. |
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10-25-2018, 09:19 AM | #67 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Killing Slavers
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And in any case, those students are not Homer's target audience. Homer was writing for a bunch of ancient Greeks who took slavery for granted, both in that they might well own slaves and in that they might become slaves through misfortune. Achilles and Agamemnon's dispute was no more exotic to them than air travel or casinos were to James Bond fans. Those students are, if anything, the target audience for teachers who are trying to teach them to read a work written in the historical past for people in an unfamiliar culture by an author who made no effort to explain his story to non-Greek readers. That's a secondary use of the work; it wasn't one that the author could have foreseen.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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10-25-2018, 09:32 AM | #68 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Killing Slavers
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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10-25-2018, 10:00 AM | #69 | |
Join Date: Mar 2014
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Re: Killing Slavers
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Last edited by Andreas; 10-25-2018 at 10:11 AM. |
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10-25-2018, 10:30 AM | #70 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Killing Slavers
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There can be strange gaps in understanding of the past. For example, I'm a fan of the manga series Otoyomegati (usually translated as A Bride's Story, though Brides' Stories would be more accurate to the content). When I looked at reviews of it, I was perplexed to see the recurrent comment that it was an attractive story but had no conflict. I was seeing all kinds of conflict in the first issues: Amir is married to Karluk, and desperately in love with him, but she's twenty and he's twelve and not ready to consummate the marriage, and she's struggling with herself to wait till he is, and also her relatives are saying that marrying her to this town boy was a waste and they should take her back and marry her to a powerful older man who beat his last wife to death! But when I talked with a friend who's a huge manga/anime fan, she said that what was going on was that many readers assumed that every arranged marriage was also a forced marriage, and that any woman would rebel against such a marriage, and reject her husband, marriage, and her society; and when they didn't see that rebellion they took it as "there's no conflict" instead of seeing the conflicts of a woman trying to make the best of a situation with good and bad points. Or, as Bernard Shaw put it (in lines that Heinlein quotes), "He is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
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