Playing Against the Trend: Non-Villainous Anti-PSR, Reactionary etc. Characters

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

I remember a long time ago, in a discussion of forumite stances on Pan-Sapient Rights, one expressed a clearly anti-PSR position, and another commented that this is a good thing to have diverse opinions as opposed to the more uniform abolitionist tendency of the subforum*.

That makes me wonder: just how viable are characters who are clearly anti-PSR, reactionary, realflesh-eating, irrational, or otherwise 'backward', and yet are also clearly not villains / stupid / evil / jerks / BrokenBirds / psychologically damaged / etc.
Whswhs mentioned Gianni as a conservative character (I skimmed some parts, and will be coming back to that page). I also remember a character who just didn't accept non-vertically-hierarchical relationships with other people; but IIRC she was very much shown to be psychologically damaged, so that's not quite what I'm talking about.

In my take on the concept, I came up with a character who just so happens to be perpendicular to the whole PSR. He started out as a corporate-owned bioroid, but, being a social interface / social analyst, enjoyed a rather good life - reasonably high Status and even semi-formal Rank in limited areas combined with being Valuable Property. Between EU banning ownership of sapient persons and his age reaching 20 or so, he gained freedom, but for quite some while considered it not that big a deal. Being treated more seriously as an authority figure was the main thing he liked about it. Long story short, he eventually went for more freelance work, but is still very loyal to his old corp. He also owns an AI and a bioroid, and treats them rather well (keeping the bioroid at his own Status level; bioroid is built as a genuinely happy minion ally in order to drive the point home; AI is off-the-shelf equipment, and doesn't have much in the way of needs/wants/personality). Simply put, he doesn't see abolitionists as inherently Right, but he does see keeping one's sapient property happy as an essential part of its maintenance (just as he would never misuse a microscope in place of a hämmer).
Furthermore, he sees the tendency of properly-built sapient tools to be happy doing their jobs as a very important point, and is outright freaked out by certain models of bioroids that are clearly made not to be. (Yeah, OOC I also share sir_pudding's horror at those.)
He's not a biochauvinist, but still sees bio- stuff as preferable to cyber- (he's a Ghost by now).

Anyway, that's my take, and I'm preparing to join the campaign in about a week. What stories or musings do you have to share about non-negative characters of the sort?

Thanks in advance!

* == Actually, I'm not sure just how uniform it is. But the reply was something like that.

[whswhs]

"Gianni," but yes. And the psychologically damaged character was Blake.

Bill Stoddard

[ClayDowling]

A lot of the answers to your questions are going to be dependent upon the group you play in.

You mentioned, for instance, somebody eating dead animals as anti-social behavior. If you're playing with a group of vegans lacking a science education, this might fly. Everybody I play with has killed their own dinner at least once in their life. They'd never accept a world where people didn't eat dead animals.

From a biology perspective, there's also no ethical way to make it work. Without predation herbivores will eat human food crops, so farmers will have to kill deer to protect their crops (there's no way to keep deer out of crops without killing some). People are unlikely to be willing to kill deer without eating the deer, or at least giving it to somebody else to eat.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ClayDowling

You mentioned, for instance, somebody eating dead animals as anti-social behavior. If you're playing with a group of vegans lacking a science education, this might fly. Everybody I play with has killed their own dinner at least once in their life. They'd never accept a world where people didn't eat dead animals.

From a biology perspective, there's also no ethical way to make it work. Without predation herbivores will eat human food crops, so farmers will have to kill deer to protect their crops (there's no way to keep deer out of crops without killing some). People are unlikely to be willing to kill deer without eating the deer, or at least giving it to somebody else to eat.

In the THS setting, the standard option is to eat "fauxflesh"—animal muscle tissue grown in vats that never had a central nervous system.

As to keeping the deer out of the crops, this is a world where AI is so ubiquitous that in the Fifth Wave nations, individual bricks and tiles are smart and can flex to respond to stress. Cybershells are cheap, especially small ones. Farmers aren't going to be dependent on sitting up all night, or keeping dogs; they can have tireless AIs watch over their fields and harass intrusive wildlife. So I doubt that killing deer will be needed.

But the more basic issue, for me, is the idea of players saying that they wouldn't accept a world where X is true, for any given X. The shift from realflesh to fauxflesh is a premise of the defined game world, and the players agreed to play in that world when they said they were interested in the campaign. Admittedly they didn't necessarily know that the world had that specific feature, but they did know that it was a world where cultures and technology and ethical values would be different, and in particular where there were different attitudes about which beings had which rights. And in any case—I would be fine with a player wanting to play a character who had atypical (for the world) attitudes toward carnivory; I would just ask them to give me a life story that made sense of those attitudes. But a player, or a group of players, wanting to dictate features of the game world? No.

As it worked out, Gianni did have nonstandard attitudes for the setting; in particular, he believed that uploading killed the uploaded person and created a copy that wasn't truly alive and didn't have a soul. This went along with his being a Traditionalist Catholic, born to Sicilian parents; we worked out the theological explanation that the Church held that treating a ghost as a person was idolatrous. And he had other unusually retro attitudes for his society. That was good roleplaying and I encouraged and rewarded it.

Bill Stoddard

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

As it worked out, Gianni did have nonstandard attitudes for the setting; in particular, he believed that uploading killed the uploaded person and created a copy that wasn't truly alive and didn't have a soul. This went along with his being a Traditionalist Catholic, born to Sicilian parents; we worked out the theological explanation that the Church held that treating a ghost as a person was idolatrous. And he had other unusually retro attitudes for his society. That was good roleplaying and I encouraged and rewarded it.

Bill Stoddard

I'm scanning the logs. So far, among other retro/non-progressive attitudes, there's the quaint fact of giving his AI a name of 'Computer', the implied 'if they know their place' about bioroids (BTW, what was the exchange with the catgirl?), and his (predicted) reaction to Constanza's choice of outfit. Also, I remember from another thread about some issues between him, Constanza, her AI, and her privacy. Though I'm unsure whether to classify his choice to leave her a certain measure of privacy as against-the-trend. I suppose it is against the trend of THS societies, but aligned with the stronger pro-privacy trends among THS players.

How was Gianni seen by the characters and how by the players? As a nice fella with a few oddities? As a person with virtues but also with terrible flaws? With detachment worthy of a moral relativist?

Actually, come to think of it, given the clash of radically different outlooks on essential issues, in a solar system that became smaller than modern Terra*, the setting seems rife for the taking by an ideology of moral relativism, with acceptance of the fact that disagreements about right and wrong are inevitable and to be tolerated.

* == It takes about 7 hours to travel to Pluto, which is less than it would take an average modern citizen to move across Terra.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

How was Gianni seen by the characters and how by the players? As a nice fella with a few oddities? As a person with virtues but also with terrible flaws? With detachment worthy of a moral relativist?

The players seem uniformly to have recalled Gianni with affection. The views of the characters were more varied:

* Aki was seriously attracted to him, and conflicted over it, because she found Gianni's attitudes too conservative.
* Blake's feelings toward him were a peculiar mixture of indebtedness and the affection one feels toward a cherished pet.
* Louis regarded him with ironic detachment, but then Louis regarded everyone with ironic detachment, perhaps because of his own involvement in a underground pansapientist organization.
* Neville thought of Louis as a good friend and enjoyed drinking, gambling, and sparring with him.

In no case were any character's attitudes toward Gianni determined solely by Gianni's political, ideological, and cultural slants.

Bill Stoddard

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

It takes about 7 hours to travel to Pluto, which is less than it would take an average citizen to move across the world.

Near-lightspeed is achieveable if you are willing to risk both creating a xox and fatal corruption. Proper due diligence will require a three phase commit (original transmission, destination acknowledgment and verification request, origin acknowledgment and verification confirm) that takes a minimum of 3x lightspeed time plus bandwidth usage, and the bandwidth usage needs to be multiply redundant if you want to avoid repeating phases 1 and 2 to correct transmission errors: I recommend 10x for calculation simplicity and complete reliability on all but the worst quality links.

EDIT: this tangent has been independently enthreaded here.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Near-lightspeed is achieveable if you are willing to risk both creating a xox and fatal corruption.

Both can be avoided without a reduction in speed. Just use enough bandwidth for a error rate of less than 1/10^12 or so, and have the sender always shut down their copy unless told that transmission failed (the Pluto receiver still wants to send an ack, but there's no need to wait for a response before activating the infomorph). This does use more bandwidth than just sending packets with checksums and resending any packets that have errors, but only by a factor of 2-3.

[ClayDowling]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In the THS setting, the standard option is to eat "fauxflesh"—animal muscle tissue grown in vats that never had a central nervous system.

I was curious, because I didn't remember that from the setting, so I did some reading. The actual text says that eating real flesh is viewed about like hunting, fishing and trapping is today.

Based on that, I would expect that outside of the E.U., where raising and eating meat animals is outlawed, it would be considered socially acceptable. I live in Ann Arbor, one of the more liberal cities in the U.S., and even here, anti-hunting and anti-fishing sentiments are rare, and raising your own meat animals is not only socially acceptable but considered an honorable activity, even among the very liberal. Even the vegetarians I know are fine with other people eating animals taken through predation.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ClayDowling

Based on that, I would expect that outside of the E.U., where raising and eating meat animals is outlawed, it would be considered socially acceptable. I live in Ann Arbor, one of the more liberal cities in the U.S., and even here, anti-hunting and anti-fishing sentiments are rare, and raising your own meat animals is not only socially acceptable but considered an honorable activity, even among the very liberal. Even the vegetarians I know are fine with other people eating animals taken through predation.

My campaign was set in Montréal, which, though a free city and not part of any bloc, is entirely surrounded by Québec, and thus pervaded by European attitudes. I specified that eating realflesh in Montréal was not a criminal offense—but there was a substantial faction that favored making it so, and public attitudes had been influenced by EU public attitudes, to the point where people with respectable jobs didn't want to be publicly exposed as engaged in carnivory. In contrast, the USA still had a realflesh industry, and indeed exported modest amounts to Montréal, for high prices—but north of the border this was viewed as part of Americans being weird.

You seem to assume "either it's illegal or it's completely socially acceptable." There are lots of things that are neither. For one example, if you look at people's attitudes toward atheism, you will find that American surveys typically report that more people would be willing to have a person of any race, or a gay man or lesbian, or a Muslim, as president than would be willing to have an atheist as president. Atheists are widely regardless as amoral and untrustworthy. And yet atheism has been legal in the United States for a long time.

In any case, it's the GM's prerogative to define how the world works, at least in areas that the source material does not make fully explicit, of which this was one. So I figured out how things worked, and told the players. It wasn't really their function to tell me that this fictional world didn't work the way I said it did. And it seems to me that your argument is could be read as near to telling me that I wasn't entitled to make that interpretation and/or that my players were entitled to reject it. I would reject any such claim, were it made.

Bill Stoddard