Wow
Its amazing that in 2023, my last post is still 1st page of recruitment board, whereas 5 years ago, itdve been swallowed up within a couple days after posting.
Wow
Its amazing that in 2023, my last post is still 1st page of recruitment board, whereas 5 years ago, itdve been swallowed up within a couple days after posting.
These kids today, rather play their VR games! :-)
These kids today, rather play their VR games! :-)Wow
Its amazing that in 2023, my last post is still 1st page of recruitment board, whereas 5 years ago, itdve been swallowed up within a couple days after posting.
damm kids and there rock and roll music!!!
We lost our Aes Sedai. But if you're not familiar with the books I'd recommend something else.
Also, we need someone who can post four or five times during the week.
Based on this comment about losing the team's Aes Sedai, I've converted an old alias over to a new character for this, using the rolls that I made previously (here).
I have read most of the books and I am pretty familiar with how the Aes Sedai work.
Jocasta here is a bit unconventional by the standards of the White Ajah: While she is a philosopher and logician, she believes that "total logic" and absence of all emotion is actually a hindrance to understanding, because people have emotions, so any thinking that ignores this is automatically flawed. As one might expect, she is not especially popular with her Ajah, or the Tower in general... which is why they "encouraged" her to go out in the world a bit.
Jocasta is a defender and healer. She doesn't have any offensive weaves yet, just warding, healing, a little conjunction. Of course as she grows in experience she'll likely learn some other Talents and pick up some battle magic! (Also, I can always tweak the character and pick up some Elemental weaves instead if we need some blastin'.)
add 5 more known weaves to your known weaves collection.
hmmmm.... idk about the back story. Whites are known for their absolute devotion to logic and philosophy, to the exclusion of everything else, sometimes at a severe social and current events disadvantage.
for what your backstory is suggesting is a foundational shift for a white ajah to go through, and one that could actually lead to a white ajah, applying logic, would actually leave the white ajah and attempt to join another ajah. Or, even attempt to stay colorless.
I think the only way your backstory would work is if your character was actually out in the world, sent by the First Reasoner, to find yourself. To explore the populations, cultures of the world, to rigorously defend yourself to/from yourself. heck, i could see this working even better as an Accepted who has doubts about her intended Ajah vs an actual white ajah who suddenly has a "crisis of faith" moment.
First off, apologies for the wall of text as I defend my dissertation. ;)
I didn't spell it out in so many words in the backstory, but what Jocasta has stumbled across is called (in our world) the Falsification Principle, as elucidated by philosopher Karl Popper. Basically it is the dividing line for what constitutes science: If you have a hypothesis that can be falsified—you propose a rule or idea or pattern and there is a way that you can test it that might show that it is false—then it is subject to the scientific method. If a claim is not falsifiable, then it is not scientific (which in turn has ramifications for its applicability to logic). Jocasta would not express it in that way, but that's essentially what she has stumbled across in her "learning from failure" methods.
It's also the same argument that the Greek philosophers had in epistemology, about whether truth can be ascertained purely by reason or through observation of the world. Plato, for instance, believed that experimentation and observation did not yield truth, because truth (knowledge) was fixed (Platonic ideals) whereas the world and the objects within it were changing and mutable, and therefore observation and experimentation yielded results of change and thus could not discover eternal truths. Jocasta has tumbled to the notion that formal logic is a useful theoretical tool but it is only valid in practical terms when it is tested against reality—that you only discover what is true in the world by actually challenging the world, not by just thinking about it in a (possibly literal) ivory tower. It's a rejection of the Chicago school ("that idea is great in practice, but how does it work in theory?").
So this character's built as a deconstruction of tropes (something I tend to do a lot). At the base, the White Ajah is looking for truth via philosophy and logic. Jocasta is taking that underlying approach, the search for truth, and saying, "In order for our work to have any meaning, we must accept as true that we exist in a physical world with these observable qualities. Therefore, our research must acknowledge these qualities when we try to ascertain truths that are relevant to our material existence." This doesn't preclude the search for truth in the abstract, as theoretical models and pure mathematics are still valid forms of inquiry (albeit with the caveat that it's unknown whether mathematics corresponds tightly to descriptions of reality for some reason or just happens to coincidentally match), but Jocasta is then applying logic to the process of inquiry itself and saying, "Ok, you have this beautiful abstract hypothesis, and... what is the point of it beyond a mere intellectual exercise?" If your thought exercise cannot survive collision with the real world, or describes nothing relevant to the real world in some way, then why are you spending time on it? (Notably, Jocasta's rigor in this regard could be seen as flawed: Abstract thinking provides alternative ways to view problems and manipulate models, and the human capacity for thought and troubleshooting and imagination provides its own rewards. But she only has a 15 Intelligence, she has blind spots philosophically.) She applies this standard to the White Ajah as a whole: if the work of the Ajah never has any practical use, then how does their existence benefit the Aes Sedai and the world at all?
Ergo, Jocasta sees herself as White Ajah in that she uses logic, deduction, and the scientific method in the search for truth. Her goal set, though, of discovering testable, falsifiable hypotheses—using the scientific method!—clashes with the White Ajah's cultural standard of being "total logic" machines. This means that Jocasta challenges assumptions of the usual White Ajah method. Why do members of the White Ajah decide to be totally unemotional? How does this improve (or worsen!) their pursuit of actual truth? What is served by devoting the intellectual resources of the White Ajah to purely abstract exercises that have no practical use in the real world? (It's kinda like Star Trek VI when Spock says "Logic is the beginning of wisdom.") It also means that Jocasta attracts disdain from other members of the White Ajah, because while what she is doing is an actual epistemological search for material truth, it does not fit the cultural standards of the White Ajah, and in the Aes Sedai, the appearance of cultural fit is sometimes more important than pursuit of the actual goals of an Ajah (that is, the Aes Sedai place a high amount of social capital on conformity; the Ajahs are very much like sororities, in that they push for people to sort into groups where they can fit a specific expectation, and they talk about those groups according to those stereotypes). Jocasta believes that she is doing what the White Ajah claims to do (pursuing truth through logic and experimentation) but she does so in a way that does not meet the White Ajah's social stereotype, and thus she suffers social consequences for doing so.
Anyway, that's the giant word salad at how I arrived at this unusual character that pushes on the boundaries of what the White Ajah does and how she's a deconstruction of their tropes. :)
|
First off, apologies for the wall of text as I defend my dissertation. ;)
...
Anyway, that's the giant word salad at how I arrived at this unusual character that pushes on the boundaries of what the White Ajah does and how she's a deconstruction of their tropes. :)
Just to level set expectations, as a point of personal experience, this group/campaign is not particularly well aligned to the deconstruction of tropes & canon, or even the extension of canon in ways that might be consistent with the Turning of the Wheel albeit not present in Jordan's works of over 30 years ago.
Good luck Jocasta!
First off, apologies for the wall of text as I defend my dissertation. ;)
...
Anyway, that's the giant word salad at how I arrived at this unusual character that pushes on the boundaries of what the White Ajah does and how she's a deconstruction of their tropes. :)
Just to level set expectations, as a point of personal experience, this group/campaign is not particularly well aligned to the deconstruction of tropes & canon, or even the extension of canon in ways that might be consistent with the Turning of the Wheel albeit not present in Jordan's works of over 30 years ago.
Good luck Jocasta!
Good to know!
I figured a more elaborate explanation might help to illuminate the character's perspective by adding context from actual philosophy and logic, so I wanted to take one shot at a more detailed explanation. (It's what a White sister would do...)
If the team doesn't like it, then off to the bin it goes!
BTW @RizzenMagnus since you have so many custom rules, if you like, I have an Obsidian Portal account, and I could set up a page for your campaign and build a wiki there with all of the relevant rules but including all of the custom material. That would make it searchable and linkable and hopefully easier for people to find class info, Talents, Feats, skills, and so on. It would take me a few days to build out the structure, but I could give you DM privs (if you have an OP account—they're free) and then you could have allllll of your rules in one place with the house rules directly integrated.
Offer stands even if I don't get recruited into the group!
First off, apologies for the wall of text as I defend my dissertation. ;)
...
Anyway, that's the giant word salad at how I arrived at this unusual character that pushes on the boundaries of what the White Ajah does and how she's a deconstruction of their tropes. :)
Just to level set expectations, as a point of personal experience, this group/campaign is not particularly well aligned to the deconstruction of tropes & canon, or even the extension of canon in ways that might be consistent with the Turning of the Wheel albeit not present in Jordan's works of over 30 years ago.
Good luck Jocasta!
Personal experience? What personal experience?
@jocasta
Yes, that is quite the world salad you have put forth. I will sit down with it tonight and give you a proper response.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
@jocasta
Yes, that is quite the world salad you have put forth. I will sit down with it tonight and give you a proper response.
"No" is a perfectly adequate response. :)
I am happy to rewrite Jocasta's personality and history into a more conventional Yellow or Gray Ajah.
Oh! One last thing to consider when thinking about an Aes Sedai who doesn't seem to mesh perfectly with the stereotypes of her Ajah:
Almost nobody in the Tower liked what Moiraine was doing when they found out.
I've not read any of the 'world salad' and I don't know if this makes any difference or not, but at 5th level your still an Initiate/accepted. Having not taken the three oaths yet, your officially not in one of the seven Ajahs.
Yeah, and it would be a while b/c this character doesn't have the requisite feats for the prestige class yet. Which gives time to develop more personality and interactions with the Tower!
At the end of the day the character is just gonna go through a bunch of harrowing adventures, try to get Accepted by the tower, and wind up in whatever Ajah decides they can tolerate taking her.
Anyway, like I noted above, I have a whole wild internal thought process for how she works, but I can always switch her over to be a hard stereotype of an Aes Sedai-in-training from a more conventional standard.
Anyway, like I noted above, I have a whole wild internal thought process for how she works, but I can always switch her over to be a hard stereotype of an Aes Sedai-in-training from a more conventional standard.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Personally, I'm not committed to stereotypes or tropes, but I do hope that you've read at least a couple of the books.
Anyway, like I noted above, I have a whole wild internal thought process for how she works, but I can always switch her over to be a hard stereotype of an Aes Sedai-in-training from a more conventional standard.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Personally, I'm not committed to stereotypes or tropes, but I do hope that you've read at least a couple of the books.
I've read most of the books. (I trailed off as they started getting really bloated and eventually Jordan perished and I just got tired of going through lots and lots and lots of stuff that didn't go anywhere...)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Apropos of nothing: I recently wrote an RPG campaign that I'm releasing soon that is longer than the first WoT book. :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I see that over in play the GM is back and ready to start up again, but I still haven't gotten a yes or no on this admittedly unusual character concept. Do I need to make changes? Punt and rewrite as a gray or yellow initiate? Go away and let you recruit someone else b/c nobody liked my idea? Where are we at?
jocasta, your good to go. ping the discussion board and do an ooc ping on the gameplay thread to get your campaign page showing your in this game.