Gailbraithe's page

Well if you made 50k a year, got fired, and could get 30-35k a year unemployment for almost 2 years, how quickly would you be motivated to look for work? I'll be honest, it wouldn't be a top priority till around week 80 or so if it were me.

That depends a lot on what your living expenses are. If you earn 50k a year and spend 51k a year, as many Americans do, then living on 35k a year for two years will leave you $192k in the hole.

I'm guessing from the fact that you don't think shaving $15k off your budget would be a big deal that you are unmarried and don't have kids. The median household budget in America is about $30k. The median income is about $50k.

If you're the head of a single income family, which describes a lot of blue collar working class men, and your income drops from $50k to $30k, your quality of life takes a huge hit. You're still getting by, you can still afford housing, health care, food, transportation and child care -- which are the things accounted for in the average family budget -- but you can no longer afford anything but the basics. You're not going to spend the next two years sitting on your duff waiting for the bennies to run out, because scraping by and having nothing for yourself at the end of the day is not a good life.

Putting people on unemployment is a band-aid at best, not a fix. How do you get people who run businesses to hire more workers? How do you actually create real jobs?

The government puts a lot of people to work, they start buying stuff, that causes companies to hire more people, and the system bootstraps itself back into functioning. Once labor shortages start becoming an issue, you cut back on the government jobs.

America has no natural enemies - it borders only two nation states and both have such small armies that they are literally incapable of invading the US. If either tried they'd run out of troops to garrison their conquests after a few hundred miles - an American citizen militia would simply toss them back out.

A very angry Canadian once told me that the US wouldn't win if we invaded Canada. Naturally I scoffed at this suggestion, but he made a compelling argument that before we got thirty miles beyond the border (and had thus overrun 50% of the Canadian population) they would have blown up all their bridges, airfields and oil refineries. So we wouldn't get anything of significant value when we invaded.

It almost broke my heart to explain to him that when someone commits suicide in response to your attack, and thus you can't defeat them, that's not actually "losing."

On the other side of things, how hard done by and disenfranchised do you have to be, exactly, to justify brutally bashing and robbing a foreign student during the riots? Society has treated me so poorly, I think I’ll break this recently arrived exchange student’s jaw, threaten him with knives and steal his stuff ... then when he was lying there in the gutter, another group came along and stole more of his stuff. Nice.

And then there’s the people / persons who drove over and killed three guys trying to protect their neighbourhood (as mentioned above). Social justice? I don’t think so.

I don't understand why its so hard for you guys to understand this:

The poor and disenfranchised who riot and destroy their own neighborhoods aren't protesting. They're rioting. Thanks to society's neglect, they are underemployed, undereducated, stressed out, and have no outlet for their frustrations.

No one out there is thinking logically. No one is acting in a rational manner. They're just going nuts. Because that's what happens when you take a bunch of human beings, keep them just this side of starving, confine them, poke and harass them, treat them like crap, and otherwise ignore them. You deny them everything that makes people better, and you end up with a bunch of dumb animals.

Why does a abused monkey fling itself against the bars of its cage until its broken and bleeding? Does it think that will accomplish anything?

NO! It just needs to do something, and its only option is something self-destructive.

Shifty's right, I'm not very sympathetic to the shopkeepers and middle class folk that are victimized by these riots. That doesn't mean I'm sympathetic to the rioters. The rioters are a bunch of dumb, animal thugs acting out of exuberent, festive violence. They're acting exactly like I'd expect abused children to act.

Society doesn't want to deal with these people, so it ignores them. This is the cost of ignoring them. This is chickens coming home to roost. Are the rioters sucky jerks? Yes.

So is everyone else in the world.

I'm not sure how entitlement program make people dependent on them. SS and Medicare are what are usually called entitlement programs. Pretty much everyone over 65 is dependent on Medicare, since private healthcare would be unaffordable at that age, unless you're still working at a good job. Which isn't possible for everyone indefinitely.

More retired people have at least some income beside SS so some might be able to survive without it, but very many do not. Or don't have enough.

For most American families, it would mean a return to multigenerational households as your parents move in with you when they reach retirement age. But it would be far more horrific than that implies, because the last time Americans typically lived in multigenerational households, old people rarely lived past 75 or 80, and there was little that could be done for them medically.

Now, with current technologies at current prices, families would be forced into making the impossible choice between seeing their entire life's earnings being sucked up by their parents health care costs, or putting their parents out on an ice floe.

No American family should have to choose between keeping grandma alive or letting junior go to college, but that is exactly what would happen if we killed social security and medicaid.

Gailbraithe, we agree on something? How the hell did that happen. I guarentee you we disagree on why people arent buying anymore, though.

I think it's because they don't have jobs. What other possible reason could it be?

If you want to invest in infrastructure because we need it (bridges collapsing, roads undrivable, etc), I'm all behind that. But using infrastructure as a means of increasing the labor force or getting money moving, I have to disagree. During the Great Depression, I'm sure it worked well enough, but nowadays, you don't have 800 guys working to build a project by hand, instead you have 8 guys running machines. You now get the average cost of a job created by such things as $200,000 per job. Because all the money is going into largely expensive projects, but not into large individual salaries or large numbers of smaller salaries.

This is a good point, which is why we need a carefully structured stimulus package with a Buy American clause that directs the money for the machine towards American manufacturing jobs.

Like right now, here in Seattle, we're planning to build this massive tunnel to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct (a major commercial traffic route) because its a huge raised highway that was damaged in the quakes we had a decade or so again, and it'll likely come down San Francisco style if we have another serious quake. And the biggest single expense is, of course, the tunnel boring machine. Which we're buying from Japan. Now, I actually don't really have a problem with that, because Japan is cool in my book, but I'm patriot enough to wish it had gone to an American company with American factories.

Since a lot of the manufacturing in America is gone, one thing we could do is create investment bonds to fund a manufacturing bank, which would be under private ownership -- specifically worker ownership -- to build the tools and machinery we need for these infrastructure projects. Then they could expand and reinvigorate the American manufacturing sector by competing with these destructive transnational corporations, which could lead to a permanent solution to many of the problems of corporatism, while preserving both the free enterprise system and the benefits of corporate economies of scale (whcih are key to meeting consumer demand in a nation of 300 million+).

The Mondragon Corporation is a model of the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's basically a worker-owned corporation rather than a share-holder owned corporation, so its produces far more social stability than the nearly sociopathic megacorporations we've come to know and loathe. And it's a 100% free market entity, so its not a growth of government at all, which should make conservatives happy.

We need to stop stacking the deck against small businesses - they have historically been what has pulled America out of recession. But they are severely hurt by the credit crunch which the nanny state created.

As someone who works for a family owned small business and is intimately familiar with the workings of such animals, I'd just like to point out that this is 100% the opposite of my experience.

If you think credit is what small businesses need, then you really don't understand how an economy works. My family's business has excellent credit can borrow far more than we need - what we don't have is demand. We're staying afloat, but its lean and until people start buying again we have no reason to expand our operations.

You want to help small businesses? Invest in infrastructure. Put a bunch of people back to work building bridges, highways and high speed rail over the Rockies. All of the money has accumulated at the top, and the top can't spend it fast enough to keep the economy going. There needs to be a huge transfusion of wealth into the working class so that they can buy things so that small businesses like my family's can sell things so that we can expand production and hire more people.

I said literally -nothing- about whether small business thrives or not in regards to the strength of the social net. One of the issues I was sort of alluding to is the ton of regulations the federal government piles on business (many of which make no sense and raise the barrier to entry for small business). But I never implied that the only way to provide a strong social net is to clog up the market with a tangle of regulations.

In twenty years of business, we haven't once encountered one of these so called onerous regulations. I'd love an example of one of these horribly onerous examples.

In fact, the only time our business has had an issue with government regulations, it was over some large rocks we installed along the perimeter of the law to keep people from parking on it (no sidewalk or curb). The city said we couldn't, but our lawyer sent them an angry letter and suddenly we had a waiver.

At our operation we have a 28 ton press that is almost completely unregulated. We had to have a state qualified electrician install the power converter to kick it up to 220, but its not like we were ever considering hiring some unqualified schmuck to install something that could set the building on fire.

The only other regulation I can recall us dealing with is we can't dump some of the paint and grime strippers we use in the sewers, because they're technically acids. We have to bring them to a special transfer station (it's about 15 blocks away), and there's no cost involved. Onerous!

Government regulations surely do keep some operators out of the market. Mostly its the operators who would reduce costs by increasing externalities like pollution and worker injury. We don't actually want those people in the market.

People who don't want Lovecraft in D&D are, no offense, displaying quite a bit of ignorance about where fantasy fiction comes from.

Fantasy as a genre would not exist if not for a small handful of pulp writers. One of the most important of these writers is Robert E. Howard, who created Conan, defined the sword and sorcery genre, and more or less created the adult fantasy genre. The only person who has had the same impact on fantasy as Howard is Tolkien, and Tolkien wouldn't have gotten Lord of the Rings published if Howard hadn't created the genre of heroic fantasy adventure. So, without Howard, we would likely have no Tolkien, and we would almost certainly have no D&D.

But Howard wasn't much of a fantasist. He didn't actually care much for fantasy - his tastes leaned more towards historical fiction, westerns and stories about boxing and sports. He did heroic fantasy for the money.

So where did he get his ideas for Hyborea and the fantastic elements of Conan? He got them from his contemporary, H.P. Lovecraft. That's what most of their correspondence is about, how to develop a fantastic setting. And if you read that correspondence, its mostly Howard asking Lovecraft how to do this thing he has to do.

And Howard was far from the only fantasy writer that Lovecraft influenced - another was Lin Carter. Now, Lin Carter wasn't a great writer (I like his stuff, but he's the definition of a hack; nothing he writes is original, its all pastiche of better writers), but he was a fantastic editor and literary historian, and had a huge impact on the development of fantasy as a genre in the late 60s and early 70s. Guess who his two favorite authors were. Lovecraft and Tolkien. Guess who the two most influential fantasy writers of all time are. Lovecraft and Tolkien. That's Lin Carter's influence right there.

So when people say they don't want Lovecraft in Golarion because it doesn't feel right, I just have to laugh. Lovecraft is a lot more than Lovecraft's own stories, and Lovecraft is everywhere in fantasy. You know those demon summoning wizards that are behind so much of the evil in fantasy worlds? That's Lovecraft's influence. In Lovecraft's stories, men of reason and science are driven to madness by confrontations with such supernatural evils. But that's just one take - Howard wrote stories featuring entirely Lovecraftian horrors, he just feature them in stories with Nietzschean supermen who respond to such evils with a sword. That's totally D&D.

And for all of Cthulhu's cosmic terror, try to remember that when he rises in Call of Cthulhu, he's driven back and defeated (for now) by ramming him with a large fishing vessel. Sure, everyone on the ship goes hopelessly insane, but still. They knocked out Cthulhu with a boat.

(That means no space hippos in admiral outfits. Sorry, Bulmahn.)

Oh yeah? OH YEAH?

TRY AND STOP ME, SUTTER! YOU JUST TRY AND STOP ME FROM ADDING VICTORIAN SPACE HIPPOS.

And hamsters. Giant space hamsters.

::gleeful cackle::

Oh yes, they will all suffer.

::ahem::

What were we talking about?

See, I disagree about conservatism. I believe that there are more than 1 type of conservative...

Sure. Given a broad enough definition of conservative, I'm a conservative.

When I say conservative, I mean the modern conservative movement exemplified by the Tea Party, the Republican leadership, FOX News and the right-wing establishment. You know, the guys who are responsible for pretty much every bad thing that has happened in American politics and the economy in the last thirty years?

You know, those guys? The ones that are conservative right up to the moment where they completely screw everyone, and then suddenly they were never conservative? Like George Bush. He was a conservative until the economy imploded thanks to conservative policies, and then suddenly he was a liberal all along.

Myself, I do want to see the government cut, but just the programs that hurt us. Things that really do curtail our freedoms. Not things like social security or Medicare, but things like the Military-Industrial complex. I do want to see a lifting of many regulations. Not the important ones that we need (like clean water), but the ones that are written by the big corporations and passed into law by their cronies in Washington, only for the purpose of stifling innovation and curbing new competition.

Great. Me too. I 100% agree with what you're saying. I'm a liberal Democrat.

And if you vote for liberal democrats, what you'll get is exactly what you're asking for. You want sensible reform of regulations? Democratic party platform position. You know who oversaw the most dramatic reduction in the size of government and elimination of burdensome regulation since WW2? Al Gore, liberal Democrat. That's what he was doing while the right was distracting everyone with impeaching the president for getting a hummer and not gloating about it afterwards.

Do you think you'll get any of that voting for the people who run as conservatives? Do you? Because if you do, I have a bridge to sell you. It's in Brooklyn. It's amazing, great view, real cheap.

Yet, you lump all of us into "Fascists" and "loonies". I dont deny that some conservatives are, but we all aren't. So I guess that I agree that we probably will see more violence in the near future, but its attitudes that stereotype people who have a different viewpoint as fascists or arsonists that will certainly lead to it.

Allow me to offer you a different interpretation: I'm not the one lumping you in with the crazies, you are. You're the one who has decided he's a "conservative."

Do you hate gay people? Do you support legislation that targets gay people for discrimination or protects the rights of oppressors to discriminate against gays?

Because if you vote for the politicians who call themselves conservative, that is what they are going to do. Screw over gay people.

Do you hate women? Do you think a woman's proper place is in the home, pumping out children, and not in the workplace? Do you want to remove women's real choice from them, and force them to choose a career and celibacy or a love life and the family that will entail by denying them access to sex ed, contraception and abortion?

Because if you vote for the politicians who call themselves conservative, that is what they are going to do. Screw over women.

Do you hate black people? Black people are far more likely to be unemployed than whites, and blacks who have middle-class incomes are far more likely to be government workers than middle-class whites. Massive cutbacks in federal employment rolls disproportionately affects black communities, who are already in a precarious position due to centuries of institutional racism.

Because if you vote for the politicians who call themselves conservative, that is what they are going to do. Screw over black people.

Should I go on? You want to destroy medicare? Because if you vote for the politicians who call themselves conservative, that is what they are going to do. Destroy medicare. And social security. And unemployment insurance. And the schools.

Do you want to see a crippling loss of infrastructure, watch our schools fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world, and give huge tax cuts to the Koch Brothers?

Because if you vote for the politicians who call themselves conservative, that is what they are going to do. Screw over everybody to help the increasingly international and unAmerican rich at everyone's expense.

I don't think you want any of that.

But that's what the politicians who call themselves conservative are offering you. Ignore all the rhetoric, all the slogans, and all the posturing, and just look at the legislation they actually bring up and pass.

If you support that, then yeah, you're a fascist. Sorry. Hate to break it to you. If you don't support that, then for god's sake man, why are you calling yourself a conservative?

This is the thing that blows me away, every time. You find self-identified conservatives on the internet, and 9 times out of 10 they don't support anything that conservatives in power actually do. Half the time they actually support a moderate Democrat position.

And then they go vote for Michelle Bachmann, as if she'll deliver anything but tax cuts for the rich and Christian dominion for the rest of us.

GM to one of the PCs: "You wake up in the middle of the night feeling an intense need to pee. You stumble out of bed and into the privy, making use of the chamber pot. When you're finished you stagger back to your bed and the sweet embrace of sleep. That's when you notice an assassin standing over your bed, dagger in hand. He seems surprised to see you out of bed. Roll for initiative."

Doesn't punish the player for not thinking like a paranoid bastard, but allows you to realistically use an assassin. Also, it's generally a huge wake-up call to players who forget that they have to be paranoid bastards to make it to level 20.

Remember that the PC will be unarmed and unarmored when s/he fights the assassin, so make sure its not a high level assassin. The first one usually isn't. And have the assassin be smart - have him run when he's sighted. Just finding an assassin in your room is wake-up call enough, and there's plenty of good reasons why an assassin who found his target awake would choose to flee rather than risk getting caught up in a fight long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

Top Five Monsters

5)Darkmantle
I think these things are one of the creepiest looking creatures in the game, and definitely one of the best monsters from 3rd Edition - vastly superior to the Piercers they replaced. At low levels, darkmantles are completely terrifying.

4) Iron Cobra
One of my favorite constructs, these things just plain look awesome (in 1E at least). They are just so metal (no pun intended), looking like they just slithered off an Ozzy Osbourne album cover. I love putting these in treasure chests. I'm mean.

3)Kobolds
Once a party I was running a game for encountered a tribe of kobolds. These kobolds begged and pleaded for their lives, offering the PCs a tribute of gold if they would just leave them alone. The PCs accepted their tribute - except the chest wasn't full of gold, it was full of springloaded arrows that captured the entire party in its meager 60 degree arc of fire. Kobolds 1, Players 0.

2)Otyugh
Encounters with otyughs in my campaigns are almost always role-playing encounters, and I always play otyughs as extremely cheerful and happy, if mildly retarded. Giant cuddly poo monsters that just want to hug everyone.

You know what's really funny? Otyughs with hand puppets.

1)Flumphs
Gotta love an underdog. I always thought these guys were hilarious and made for a great joke creature, but with the expanded background paizo gave them in Misfit Monsters Redeemed they instantly became my favorite, and now I want to have major NPCs in my campaigns be flumphs. Flumphs from across space to warn humanity of the doom that is coming.

The rules (and common sense) say exactly the opposite.

The rules I quoted above, both in their class descriptions and in the atonement spell.

Common sense has also been argued above. If you are a paladin and somebody dominates you and you fail the save, then they send you to slaughter some orphans, you will still feel guilt for that. You will still feel responsible. Their blood and the stain of the sin are still on your hands. It is easier to be washed clean, but you still must be washed.

My common sense says that's wrong, so nyah. Sure, the paladin may feel guilt, but that doesn't make him actually guilty.

The paladin might need therapy, but not atonement. His god isn't going to be angry at the paladin, he's going to be angry at whoever dominated the paladin.

Oh, and the best line came on NPR's News of the World today. Some BBC wag was reading comments posted to their Facebook page, and a dude from Africa nailed the problem with their whole commentary on these riots so succintly. I'm paraphrasing here, but what he said was basically:

"When poor people are taking to the streets and rioting in Africa and the Middle East because they want jobs and opportunities, [the BBC] cheers them on and supports their cause, but when people do it in London, then its just an embarrassment, because the West doesn't want to admit that it has the same problems."

He's got a point there.

...this book includes guidelines for traveling from world to world and exploring the dark depths of outer space.

Pathjammer?

::arches fingers::

Excellent.

I use a system I developed years and years ago that works basically like the basketball game "Horse." Each side in the chase takes turns choosing a skill and a DC for skill check. If both pass or fail, then neither side gains ground. If one passes and one fails, then the character that passes gains a letter. The first side that completes the "chase word" wins the chase.

So consider two rogues chasing each other through a city. We'll call them Bob and Doug. Bob is chasing Doug. Doug, being the pursued, gets to go first.

Doug choose to climb up a wall and run across a rooftop. He decides the DC will be 18 and makes his roll. He passes the check, and its Bob's turn. Bob rolls and also passes the test.

Bob decides that Doug will have to jump across an alleyway from one roof to another roof - an Acrobatics check of DC 15. Doug rolls and makes the check. Bob fails the roll - he barely clears the gap, and is left clinging to the edge of the roof, losing vital seconds as he pulls himself up. Doug gets a C.

Doug decides to jump down to the street below, a DC 10 Acrobatics check. He makes the check, Bob fails it! Doug now has a CH, while Bob has nothing.

Bob hopes that Doug doesn't know about a shortcut that will let Bob cut him off. Bob declares the next challenge a Knowledge (Local) check with a DC of 24. Bob makes the roll, Doug fails it. Bob now has a C, Doug has a CH.

This goes back and forth until Doug spells CHASE while Bob only has CHA. So Doug escapes, leaving Bob in his dust.

That's... less than efficient.

It's extremely efficient. It cuts down on a lot of fiddling with math while playing.

I know you meant something else, but what you're describing as "efficient" just strikes me a very metagamey.

You know what I don't get? Why the health care law "forces" people to buy insurance. They should have just taken the money and called it a tax. Then the entire "forcing us to buy stuff" argument just goes away. After all, you don't see people (successfully) arguing that they shouldn't be "forced to buy" roads, courts, or national defense. What a load of B.S.

Because if it was a tax, that would mean that the government was the insurer, which would be commiesocialifascistsharialawnaziism.

Gailbraithe wrote:

Don't you know, jeff? If we would just let poor people starve, they would discover their magical bootstraps and pull themselves out of poverty.

What? They don't have magical bootstraps? Then they must be bad people.

Everybody knows if we gut social programs and throw the poor to the wolves, Prosperity Je$u$ will reward us with a shiny new Mercedes Benz.

The Prosperity Gospel (a real thing) is one of the most damaging false doctrines to visit Christianity or this country.

The prosperity gospel is like someone intentionally set out to become the Anti-Christ by spreading a gospel that was literally the exact opposite of everything Jesus stood for.

Heal the sick? Jesus Yes, Je$u$ No.
Give to the poor? Jesus Yes, Je$u$ No.
Renounce materialism? Jesus Yes, Je$u$ No.
Turn the other cheek? Jesus Yes, Je$u$ No.
Forgive others their sins? Jesus Yes, Je$u$ No.
Render unto Caeser what is Caeser's (i.e. pay your taxes)? Jesus Yes, Je$u$ No.

It just goes on and on. I'm not even Christian and I find myself offended on behalf of Jesus. This is the end result of a theology that says the only important thing about being Christian is that you believe Jesus died and came back to life, and what he said is irrelevant.

The premise of this thread is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of cultural appropriation by the OP. Allow me to quote Wikipedia: "Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group." The article goes on to explain that cultural appropriation is generally negative, otherwise we would call it cultural assimilation.

White Americans adopting black music is the ur example of cultural appropriation. It is generally considered negative because in most of the contexts in which the term is used (such as the music example) the culture doing the appropriating is oppressing the culture being appropriated, which becomes problematic when the dominant culture is claiming that the oppression is necessary because the oppressed people's own culture is inferior. Or more simply put: If black culture is inferior to white culture, why do whites keep adopting the artifacts of black culture? Why would you adopt the artifacts of an inferior culture to your own? Answer: You wouldn't, thus obviously black culture is not inferior to white culture.

Role-playing games are not an example of cultural appropriation, because role-playing games are mostly played by white Americans and are a product of white American culture. We didn't steal RPGs from a minority group we oppress while denying them the credit for its invention.

So when we talk about things like Tien and whether it references Japan and Shinto, we're talking about something other than cultural appropriation. We're talking about cultural reference cues in the context of a work of fiction -- Creating signs within the work that point to something outside the work in order to create the illusion of greater depth in the setting of the fiction.

Referencing a culture in a fictional work isn't the same thing as adopting that culture or its artifacts. The purpose of referencing a culture is only to suggest that which fills in the gaps.

Ex: If I say "You are in a land of Ninjas and Samurais. You are approaching the home of Shogun Maztihuri. His guards stand ready with their naganata." then you are probably imaging the guards in some form of Japanese armor, and the house you're picturing has rice paper walls and a sand garden. If I say you sit on the floor across from the Shogun, you fill in the blanks and imagine you're sitting on a bamboo reed mat.

Referencing a culture in a fictional work only becomes an issue over which people can reasonably get righteously indignant about when the reference is made in such a way that it produces significant negative implications about the culture being referenced. When this done on accident, its an example of unfortunate implications

Ex: Creating a game setting in which all of the blood-thirsty, marauding Orcs speak in urban slang and listen to hip-hop is making a cultural reference with unfortunate implications. Unless your intent is denigrate black people, you don't want to do thing like imply that black people are violent, subhuman beasts by attributing references to their culture to violent, subhuman beasts.

The references to Japan and other Asian cultures in the Jade Regent AP and the Tien supplementsare very unlikely to carry these sort of unfortunate implications, given paizo's track record so far.

You cant make statements like this without qualifiers...otherwise though lying is considered immoral, there would be no such thing as a white lie, and as parents we would be immoral for lying to our children about Santa Claus. Ethically our society makes allowances for lying to prevent causing a greater emotional hurt to others, or to allow our children to believe in magic while they are young and formative.

I'm sorry, I don't follow your argument. White lies and telling your children about Santa Claus are not ethical. We do many things that are not ethical, mostly because we can't be ethical all the time, and its easier to just let somethings slide than get into fights over them.

And there is always context in ethics. His plan may be ethical in the context of how Thieve's guilds (or gangs) do business, just not the same morals or ethics our LG paladins and clerics use, or the NG ethics of the shopkeepers. Or in terms of his own code of ethics and morals.

I'm not sure what you mean by "there is always context in ethics." We discuss ethics in the abstract all the time. Ethicists, those who professional consider the concept of ethics, always work in terms of hypotheticals, which are non-contextual.

We apply ethics to contexts, and that is the fundamental difference between ethics and morals -- morals are the rules themselves, ethics are the rules applied to specific contexts. But ethics themselves are universal.

So if the actions of the paladin and the shopkeeper are ethical, they are ethical in the same context. The answer to the question "What is the ethical thing for a shopkeeper to do?" is going to be different than the answer to the question "What is the ethical thing for a paladin to do?" but we'll use the same reasoning and the same moral principles to arrive at the answer to both.

It really has to be defined whose ethics and morals we are talking about. Thats why I said, it depends on what the city is like he is planning this venture.

Ethics don't belong to anyone. Ethics are like mathematics. You can't say that "1+1=2" is right for some people and wrong for other people. "1+1=2" is right, and if you have a different answer, you're just wrong.

If we were going to assess the alignment of the character in the OP's example by the actions of the character, he would be chaotic evil.

Killing all of the thieves in the city is not good, because killing people is not good. Any moral system that suggests it is ever good to kill someone is deeply flawed.

Sometimes killing another person is justified. Generally it is justified by the intent of the action. Ex: A soldier who kills another soldier in defense of his countrymen and homeland is considered justified, because his intent is not to kill the enemy soldier, but to defend his fellow countrymen -- we recognize that as a good intent. That doesn't make killing the enemy soldier good, only justified.

If the OP wanted to kill all of the thieves in order to make the city safe for ordinary citizens, we might consider that justified, but thankfully we don't have to consider that possibility because the OP has told us his motivation: To trick people into thinking he is this urban legend, The Severed Hand, as part of a larger scheme to get fabulously wealthy. So the intent of the OP is very clear. He wants to kill people to increase his wealth to the maximum extent possible.

We know this is not a good motivation, because if everyone acted this way the world would cease to function in any coherent sense. If we all killed people in pursuit of wealth, we'd all be dead. If we were all dead, there would be no wealth. That's completely incoherent.

In fact, because we know that result of everyone acting this way would be an incoherent world (one in which we are all killing each other to steal the wealth that none of us is creating because we're all too busy killing each other!), we know this is an evil intention.

This also assumes that these government worker don't actually help anyone. That they are in fact just paper pushers with no use other than to collect and spend their paychecks. But they are, for the most part not. They may regulate industries, trying to keep them honest and ensure a level playing field. They may audit files looking for tax cheats (One proposed 'savings' was to IRS enforcement who bring in more revenue than they cost.) They may process SS or Medicare claims. They may build or repair your roads and other infrastructure. And through grants to keep the states afloat, they may be your teachers, police or fire fighters.

Exactly!

Or consider poverty relief. Poverty relief helps turn the poor into productive workers and consumers (generally more the latter than the former). You can't monetize helping the poor deal with poverty in constructive ways. All you can do is turn it into charity, and charity is far less effective than direct government spending -- and charities become even less effective the more of them there are and the more they are asked to do, as more and more money that should help the needy is lost in attempts to secure patrons and more and more money is directed inefficiently based on popular fads (one year everybody is all "Save the dolphins" and the rainforest gets nothing, the next year it's all "Save the rainforests" and the dolphins get nothing - then Hollywood does a movie about rescue dogs and suddenly the pounds are swimming in more money than they can spend).

If you fire all the social workers, you won't see an increase in private sector spending as the private sector monetizes social work and turns it into an industry. Nor will you see the private sector grow -- What ends up happening is you get more crime, which means any money you saved on the social worker is lost tenfold (there are studies backing that number up) in increased security costs and profits lost to theft and corruption.

If there are some 'paper pushers', who's ever seen one of those so efficient corporations without it's share of paper to be pushed?

Exactly. The problem with guys like NPC Dave is that they latch onto these weird theoretical models (I think he's an Austrian), and they have no idea how things work in the real world.

I've worked for corporations, and I find it absurd that anyone could suggest that they aren't labyrinthine bureaucracies full of useless paper pushers themselves.

That makes perfect sense if you assume that money would not have been better spent by someone besides corrupt bureaucrats who did not take that money by force.

First of all, it's very hard to take you seriously when you claim that the money bureaucrats spend is taken by "force." It's taken by law, through a power enumerated in the Constitution that allows for taxation. The government doesn't come to your house with guns and shake you down for whatever you've got. It's all very regular, done with paperwork, prescribed by laws, and nice and non-violent.

So claiming that government spending is taken by force is just ridiculous hyperbole that indicates a lack of seriousness. Claiming taxes is theft is great and all, but that's an anarchist argument. The idea that the government is just a bunch of thug who give themselves authorization comes from Pierre Proudhoun. Pretty awesome guy, but the next part of his battle cry of "Taxes are Theft!" was "Property is Theft!" Guess what prevents workers from claiming the means of production as their own? Because guess what protects the merchant from having his goods stolen?

The same law that taxes him. The same law that says property is more than what you can hold on to. And that law is applied with force -- and in reality, a lot more force than taxes. Steal a car and you're a lot more likely to get assaulted by a police officer than if you "forget" to declare your third house on your taxes.

The American government, the one created by the constitution, is not the descendants of a bunch of hopped-up feudal warlords (i.e. aristocrats) who think they can mercilessly steal from the commoners to fund their lavish lifestyles. That would actually be the corporate class, which you may have noticed tend to move back and forth between the "private sector" and the "public sector" a lot.

Dick Cheney, first a Wyoming Congressman, then Director of Defense, under which he gave oil equipment manufacturer Halliburton choice defense contracts, became Halliburton CEO, then became VP of the United States. Revolving door?

I mean, have you ever worked for a corporation? I don't mean an incorporated business, I mean one of these giant corporations with tens of thousands of employees. Or just hundreds of employees. A place like Boeing. You ever worked for a company like Boeing? Bureaucracy up the wazoo.

You think Wal-Mart isn't a massive bureaucracy? You think General Electric isn't a massive bureaucracy? What makes you assume they'll spend it better?

And yeah, I do think the government will spend it better in a lot of cases. Because there are a lot of things we need in order to have a well-functioning economy and in some cases the government can address these needs more efficiently than the private sector can. The governments revenue is tied to the overall economic well-being of the nation, so the government is the best caretaker of those tasks that are most effective when widely distributed throughout the population, and difficult to capitalize.

You say we don't have a spending problem when the federal government consumes a quarter of the GDP. I gather that you don't want to lower that number, but in order to balance the budget you would have to raise taxes by trillions of dollars per year.

You know, Germany spends 40% of its GDP on government and is doing much better than us in terms of education, infrastructure and development.

And you don't have to raise taxes as much as you need to get people working again. More people working means more wealth created, more wealth being created means more tax revenue, more tax revenue means that government spending as a function of the GDP shrinks.

Though as the Germany example points out, government spending as a percentage of the GDP should probably be much higher if we hope to remain competitive.

You want an example going the other way? Afghanistan spends 6% of its GDP on government. And they have no paved roads. There's a connection there, if you want to see it.

You seem to think that all of Greece's problems came from lowering spending after they spent themselves into bankruptcy, but they spent themselves into bankruptcy with social spending, IIRC.

You don't recall correctly. Greece went into bankruptcy because the global recession reduced their tax revenues below the point where they can afford to maintain their current government, which is magnified by their poor tax collection and rampant tax fraud.

EDIT: It seems to me that the lesson from Greece is that state control and centralized planning aren't as good as you say.

Then you really don't understand the nature of the Greek debt crises (which is nothing like our "crises"), or what state control and centralized planning mean. We are not in remotely the same trouble Greece is in. Our debt is 60% of GDP, their debt is 120% of GDP. We control our currency, they use the Euro and have no control over their money supply. We are the most powerful economy in the world, they are a tiny country with minimal exports and decades of lagging development. They also have massive tax fraud and evasion that they have done little to control. Using Greece to talk about America is completely nonsensical. It's apples and horseshoes.

Furthermore, Greece did not use centralized planning. Greece is a free market economy. China uses centralized planning and has a command economy. Notice that China is doing really well? I'm not suggesting we emulate China at all, but get your facts straight.

But people in this world are all deluded into thinking their positions correct. Even those thinking themselves armed with cold hard facts and the power of irrefutable and dispassionate logic often have barrels full of baseless propaganda masking itself as verity. This leads to bigger troubles and questions than I personally feel the need to call out specifically as they pertain to gaming.

Sure, and if you read back over my posts you'll see that I use a two tiered alignment system. People in my world are deluded into thinking they are good. Even evil people in my world have a conscience that yearns to be clear, and that can be appealed to.

And I often use my game for exploring real world issues - the campaign I discussed in this thread has a major conflict between Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral forces that is entirely gray vs gray.

There's also the issue of a tribe of lizardmen (Neutral!) who have lived in a nearby swamp for millenia. They're very unfriendly and xenophobic, and if their land was drained it would be great farmland, but they aren't evil and all they want is to be left alone. That's gray vs gray, you can't solve that problem by beating it to death.

But the monsters in my world aren't people. The orcs aren't some horribly racist analog to troubled minority groups (which is how a lot of "good orcs" come off), they're anti-people. They are what the evil side has instead of humans. They all think they are good too, but their concept of "good" involves a lot of pain, suffering and ultimately the destruction of the universe - which is why they worship foul and hideous alien forces that are seeking to blow up reality. Orcs have a conscience to, and it cries out in pain when they pass up an opportunity to inflict pain and misery on the weak and helpless. A happy, well-adjusted orc with healthy self-esteem is a nearly unstoppable berzerker that will decorate the walls with your innards for a laugh.

And its not because they were raised wrong, its because every living thing really does have a soul (it's a fantasy world!) and some things have dark souls that are bound for Hell from the moment of their conception.

And you don't have to worry about killing things with dark souls. Most of them don't have young, they don't form societies, they exist entirely as marauding bands of nastiness that tend to multiply in the summer months and make life hell on the borderlands, where they haven't been exterminated and their birthing grounds have been blessed, purified and destroyed.

But sure, people telling me that my ideas and what I enjoy is juvenile would certainly suck and hurt my feelings. Is that happening to you often? <--I'm not baiting. I'm really just asking because you seem really peeved about this.

It's been a constant trend in discussions of gaming since the early 90's when White Wolf and storyteller games became popular, and pretentiousness became the new thing in gaming. Most people don't even realize they are doing it.

Well listen, I prefer Mariana Trench deep roleplay to combat oriented wargaming.

Like see, you just did it there. My campaigns are not "combat oriented wargaming." I play Warhammer (beastmen, brentonians, dark elves) and Warhammer 40K (orks, space marines). If I want wargaming, I've got wargames. The campaign I've been describing is about exploration, colonization and nation building. It has deep political struggles brewing under the surface, scores of NPCs going about their lives to interact with, and it also happens to have wild lands full of slavering beasts to fight.

Because, you know, I'm playing Pathfinder. I assume when I put together a gaming group to play Pathfinder, I will get at least a few guys who want to have some high combat sessions. I assume I'll get some role-players. And I can easily accommodate both without having to throw the combat players into a moral quagmire to satisfy the role-playing interests of the role-players.

I played a game of Sorceror...

I've got a copy of Sorceror. Its a cool game. Much better for pure role-playing purposes than Pathfinder, which - as you might notice - a very combat oriented game, with lots of combat abilities to take advantage of all the combat maps and miniatures.

Playing Sorceror with Pathfinder is kind of silly when you think about it, because the rules for Pathfinder minimally support that kind of play, and the vast majority of the rules support a far more simulationist/gamist style of play.

Also, I once played a Mexican house-cleaner named Jaunita who had discovered healing powers in a six hour game of Don't Rest Your Head, so hah.

I agree which is why however i am making the point that in a magic heavy society guns would evolve faster than our own magicless world (or so they say the voices tell me its an illusion so the goverment can keep the leprichauns gold)

I think an alternate theory could be that a magic heavy society develops technology at a much slower pace.

The technology of the average gaming world (Golarion included) seems to stuck in a perpetual quasi-medieval era, with some small regions that are as advanced as the renaissance or even early victorian era, and many more areas that are stuck in bronze age (or stone age) - often for thousand year stretches.

I mean, look at medical technology in Golarion. Its not advanced at all - there aren't even doctors as a profession, and there have been doctors since Hippocrates. But why would there be doctors? Why would anyone bother to research medicine when cure light wounds is easy to cast, and most priests can do a "mass heal" (for a 1 HD commoner, a 1st level channel is indistinguishable from a mass heal) and cure the daily wounds of work from a whole congregation three times a day?

Yet at the same time, these societies tend to be as socially advanced as our own with (for the good side, at least) modern attitudes towards race (as in white, black, etc.), gender, religious tolerance (between good religions at least), etc.

It makes sense too. Technology is driven by an innovating artisan class, which is composed of the brightest, most determined individuals acting out a desire for intellectual mastery of their world. In a world where gods are real and magic is taught in colleges, the vast majority of intellects will be drawn in those areas of research.

Which means Golarion may have seen a dozen minds like Edison born in the last 100 years, but seen no technological development because of it - Edison studied evocation magic and invented a better continual flame!

If people think their game is more mature and evolved because they introduce moral quagmires and gray on gray, what of it?

Because that implies that if undertake the herculean effort of constructing my game world so that it portrays a universe where Good and Evil are locked in a perpetual state of war, filling in all the blanks in D&D's implied cosmology in such a way that it all still holds together rationally, that I am somehow less mature and less evolved than people who have accidentally designed their world to be a nihilistic moral quagmire in which no side can ever truly be heroic, while deluding themselves into thinking that they have created a gray vs gray morality.

I started playing D&D when I was 11, running total mindless hack n slash for my eleven year old friends in the fourth grade. By the time I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was running what I thought was a sophisticated and far more evolved game of gray vs gray moral conflict.

Then I went to college and studied ethics and the law, read Kant and took philosophy courses. And you know what I realized? What people were calling gray on gray was actually a nihilistic moral quagmire, and that these people really had no idea what "gray vs gray" meant. And I was one of them.

So I went back to the drawing boards, and spent years working out how to get around the problem. For awhile I embraced the whole moral quagmire, and deliberately crafted worlds where "murderous hobos" was the point. I went straight into D&D Noir, even working up rules for post-traumatic stress and the slow corruption of violence and gore.

And eventually I realized that's just not fun for most people. It's depressing. But heroism is fun, and getting to be heroic is awesome, so I went back to the drawing board and decided to get to the basics of the game, embrace the alignment system, and make the game an experience that would give players a chance to feel genuinely heroic and good for using all of their optimized feats and combat abilities to totally whup ass from levels 1 - 20, and still leave room for actual moral gray areas.

And after that twenty+ year journey, I'll be ****** if I'm going to let anyone tell me that they are more mature and evolved a gamer than I am because they play in a style I abandoned seventeen years ago.

About Hellboy being a good guy, I'm in no way arguing that point nor was his mention intended to address any of your points, I was saying that if a demon can be turned good in a universe where they tend to always be bad, and I enjoy that occurence, then I can certainly enjoy a world where evil races have exceptions. The existence of such exceptions would give me pause before considering genocide of an evil race, which is an absolute judgment of and punishment for all beings of a certain race.

And I'm saying that the existence of such exceptions should give you pause before killing any member of that species. But if you read through this thread, very few people are taking the time to pause and work out the actual consequences of what the existence of such exceptions demonstrates.

----

And I agree with TOZ that this thread is winding down, so I'll just throw out one more point to screw with everybody's head:

If exterminating every member of an evil species is evil, then is killing the Tarrasque evil?

Because if genocide of an evil species is evil itself, and the Tarrasque is a single example of a unique species, then killing the Tarrasque is genocide, and thus evil.

Which really makes no sense.

Our evil fantasy races in literature are often just juiced up metaphors for those who would in the real world invade us, bully us, kill us, rape us... real people acting as basely as our animalistic potential allows. They are... the enemy. And yet we all know there are so many exceptions to every rule that real life is not the black and white of fantasy. So in game, must we play with black and whites as is the traditional standard, or are we allowed to meddle with the form and play with a wide range of grays of it suits us? Must I say this orc baby is a creature of pure that will never change, even if given proper nuturing to help reform its nature, or are we allowed, as game designers and roleplayers, to play whatever the hell we want to play based on our preferences?

You certainly can play whatever you want. All I want people to do is be honest about what they are doing.

And I get a bit insulted when people act like taking a game of heroic fantasy adventure and turning into a nihilistic moral quagmire somehow makes you more mature or more evolved as gamers. It really doesn't.

I personally find that style of gaming deeply, deeply depressing. What I want from gaming is a opportunity to escape reality and go into the fantasy where good and evil are objective and good can defeat evil through combat. I want to both play and run adventures for the good guys, not for the deluded imperialist dicks who think they're the good guys.

I also don't want to play or run adventures in a world where any course of action that will result in good ends is going to take a lifetime of hard work requiring soul-crushing compromises for almost no reward. If that's what I was looking for, I'd work for Doctors Without Borders or volunteer with the Peace Corps.

You'll notice that the D&D game 100% supports that style of play, and is built around supporting it. The alignment system is deeply integrated into the game, the good guys are all shining paragons of ass-kicking and the evil guys are all completely depraved black-clad nightmare things.

The style of play I prefer, Iomedae is the goddess of valiant heroes who resolutely commit themselves to battling the forces of evil to keep the world safe. In the style of play being contrasted against that, Iomedae is the zealot god of a bunch of Aryan Supermen out to conquer and destroy half of the universe because its ugly and the victim of bad parenting. Paladins aren't shining virtuous warriors, they're either fascistic zealots of the worst stripe - or worse, they're super social workers who have been granted a massive set of powers that mostly serve to get them stripped of their paladin status if they use them.

Hellboy made a DEMON friendly, and cat loving. And that's what made it fun for me.

Hellboy also made that demon the good guy.

Now I agree with you, the government defaulting is going to be very painful, very ugly. It will cause people to get wiped out, riots, etc.

But the default is going to happen. The longer it takes to happen, the greater the pain.

Wow. It's pretty rare that you see a conservative admit that the end goal of their agenda is to trigger the deaths of Americans and provoke riots.

There are so many ways we could deal with our problems that wouldn't result in a wave of death and destruction, but hey - NPC Dave is sure it will happen eventually, so let's just pull the band-aid off and get a bunch of our fellow Americans killed by making it happen now.

Republicans new motto "Let's Rebuild America From The Ashes Of The Fire We Set!"

As for the development of firearms in a world where spellcasters can throw fire or water at great distances, I doubt muzzle loading weapons would have ever caught on. When you have the ability to so easily ruin your enemy's ammunition, why would they use a weapon vulnerable to such an attack?

Because spellcasters and soldiers don't exist on equal parity. In a typical fantasy world, soldiers outnumber spellcasters by a very large ratio, probably in the neighborhood of 100:1 to 1000:1. You can't work on the assumption that soldiers routinely engage in battles with equal sized forces of spellcasters, or with spellcasters at all.

Using the logic of this argument -- that the existence of magic capable of nullifying a weapons technology would prevent the development of that technology -- there's little reason why weapons technology would have developed beyond clubs and rocks.

The first level spell entangle is sufficient to make the entire concept of massed soldiers inefficient. If the ancient britons had had 1st level druids in D&D, the Romans would have been destroyed by the celts. The celts loose, unorganized fighting "formations" are optimal against any kind of ranged spell caster (the fewer targets within 30' of each other you have, the less damage a spellcaster can do to your forces), while the phalanx formation favored by the Romans is just spellcaster bait. Every attempt to charge, retreat, or simply turn would be ruined by one casting of entangle with its massive area of effect potentially targeting dozens of soldiers and pinning them down.

If the phalanx is easily nullified, then the entire history of the development of weapons is radically altered. You'll never see the rise of massed troops, which means you'll never see the development of everything from the longbow to lances to pole-arms.

And while heat metal is a second level spell, and thus available to a much smaller cadre of casters than entangle, it still should have prevented the widespread use of metal weapons and armor, shouldn't it have?

Since the standard gaming world presents both massed soldiers, and the whole range of weapons developed from massed combat, we should assume that spellcasters are of such limited frequency that they do not have a significant contributing effect to the development of weapons technology. They may turn the tide of battles where they are involved, but they simply aren't involved in most battles.

I think that is a bit to simple Gailbraithe; though might work if you do not want shades of grey and want the 'evil' guys to be doing stuff for the evulz and good guys being obviously good.

I don't really get the point of playing D&D/Pathfinder in shades of grey when pretty much everything about the game is geared towards heroic high fantasy with epic battles between good and evil. It's kind of like taking the magic out of it.

Plus, how real is the "shades of gray" when on one side you have the god/dess of love, art, beauty, wine, partying, good luck, family, home, community, and protection, and the other hand you have the guys responsible for every crime, monster, broken heart, sexually transmitted disease, bad batch of beer, zit, and plot to destroy the entire universe.

Compare Heaven and Hell. In Hell you have the world if there with no Good. In Heaven the world with no Evil.

However you do bring up an interesting thought, that all good creatures are good looking to some degree. So a cleric of Asmodeus could argue that 'good' clerics could pick on ugly people for the fiends are ugly thus ugly=evil and beauty=good;

Except good clerics don't pick on ugly people, because that would be mean. And thus not good.

in additon one can argue that good people bind their souls to celestials just the same as one binds a soul to a devil save the celestial expects more and gives less.

Is there anything in the RAW that backs that up? Because its always seemed to me that the evil powers trick you into eternal slavery with contracts you can never get out of, while the celestial grants you eternal life in paradise if you can earn your way in. Heaven is hard to get into because its awesome, Hell is easy to get into because it sucks so much.

thejeff wrote:

Though I could argue that while wizards could strengthen metal to make guns or use rare, costly metals like adamantine to do so, why would they?

Because they're being paid to. Also, it doesn't actually need to be a wizard; you just need someone with the master craftsman feat, who is likely going to be even less scrupulous about it because his effort isn't going to include re-organizing reality to suit his will.

I don't really think that argument is plausible. Here's why:

While a wizard (or master craftsmen) could certainly make an pistol in this context, and could be motivated by a paying customer, there's still the problem of how did he come up with the design?

In order to get to the flintlock you have to pass through a long chain of developments in weapon technology. Before you can have the flint hammer of the flintlock, you have to have the matchlock's lever trigger. Before you can have the matchlock's trigger, you have to have the hand-held fuse (or punk). Each of these developments was necessitated by previous developments.

Anyways, it wasn't until you had a lot of these developments that the pistol became a worthwhile weapon for the lone fighter. It wasn't until the flintlock that you had a pistol you could carry as a sidearm in case of ambush - everything that came before the matchlock (and including the matchlock) had to be prepared for battle. You charged into battle with your match already lit, and you got to fire that pistol once in the fight. And you had to be within 15 feet of the guy you were shooting to have a better than break even chance of hitting him.

But long before gunsmiths were sophisticated enough to produce pistols, they were producing cannones. And cannones make pistols look terrifyingly accurate. A cannone is just about useless except in one very specific context: when you can field 200 of them, each carried by a minimally trained soldier, and capable of delivering a massive, super powerful volley of shot. The sheer destructive power of massed cannone fire made guns an instant hit on the battlefield, and pushed the development of gun technology, both upwards (towards canons and field artillery) and downwards (towards muskets, rifles, pistols, etc.).

Which is where the whole "A wizard did it" problem hits a snag. A wizard using magic to build you a weapon is going to want a lot of gold. Realistically, its going to be at least a thousand gold (the minimum cost of magic weapons) per gun.

No king is ever going to discover the glory of massed cannone fire if he has to hire a wizard and pay him the wages of a thousand peasants for a year to equip one soldier with a unknown and untested weapon. Cannones were given a chance mostly because they were so much cheaper than the (at the time) far more accurate crossbow. Cannones could be cast in molds and churned out by the hundreds by relatively unskilled workers in a foundry, while crossbows require much more intricate and sophisticated craftsmanship.

So I don't think a wizard could make a flintlock because I don't think he could just imagine a flintlock without going through the whole development history of the firearm, and I don't think that development would attract funding when a lone cannone is a pretty useless weapon. I think wizards would just give up on the potential of firearms long before reaching that point, especially when they could instead focus on developing the already existing body of magical weapon lore.

In other words, why would you develop firearms to the point of the wheellock when its a much shorter route (and far cheaper) to develop +1 explosive crossbow bolts or +1 acidic arrows?

I find that, for naval vessels, catapults and ballistae fail to excite. They don't evoke the same "coolness" of a galleon bristling with cannons...

This x 1000.

It actually really bugs me when people try to have 17th and 18th century style pirates (like Pirates of the Caribbean pirates) without gunpowder.

Because if you get rid of the gunpowder, you get rid of the cannons. And if you get rid of the cannons, you get rid of the galleons. Because what makes the galleon an effective ship of war is the fraking cannons!!! No cannons, no galleons! No galleons, NO PIRATES.

Oh sure, they're will still be pirates. But just not Pirates. I mean, a bunch of Somalians with RPGs (rocket propelled grenades, not role-playing games) on a boat that hijack your boat are technically pirates, but the people clamoring for a pirate based AP don't want Somalian pirates. They want Blackbeard, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Calico Jack Rackham, Long John Silver, Captain Jack Sparrow, etc. And that requires galleons, and that requires guns.

But seriously, there's a reason no ship like a galleon existed before the cannon. Ship to ship weapons before the cannon sucked (seriously, it was ballista and rams. RAMS!), and it made far more sense to build ships with as low a profile as possible, and as much under the waterline as you can do, so that you're harder to see from a distance.

The high profile of the galleon is all about presenting a wall of cannons to anything off your sides. Its a design that just doesn't make sense if you're not carrying cannons.

If, as TriOmegaZero, says "killing is an evil act," then I got to say...the game really encourages players to be evil.

I think that the moral quagmire that is created when one suggests that there are such a thing as "good orcs" (or even the possibility of good orcs) is a primary cause of "murdering hobos." I think murdering hobos is a direct consequence of DM's forcing a Gray Vs Gray morality on players who want to play Black Vs White morality. Or more specifically, I think murdering hobos is what happens when DM's force the post-modern ethics of moral relativism onto a game that is implicitly welded to a pre-modern ethics of tribalism.

I want orcs to be the indians in old Westerns: evil, vicious savages who need to be killed to protect the gallant and heroic settlers who brave the wilds of the frontier. I want Orcs to be the constant threat to those humans living on the frontier, and I want players to feel like driving orcs from the face of the earth and making it safe for humankind makes them heroes.

What I don't want is orcs to be the Native Americans of Dances With Wolves. I don't want orcs to be The Other, because that complete alters the challenge of the story.

I want to be able to run Keep on the Borderlands as a story of heroes destroying a vile nest of evil humanoids and thus securing the frontier and allowing for the positive growth of the "human empire." A "human empire" in which they can eventually rise to a leadership position, founding their own kingdoms on lands cleared of orcs and other monstrous savages.

But as soon as you introduce the possibility that orcs could be good, then Keep on the Borderlands (as written) is a story about the genocidal conquerors -- imperialist swine! - who viciously provoke attacks from native species by invading their sovereign space and threatening their own communal stability. The Caves of Chaos become a beautiful interspecies community of thriving diversity, destroyed by the Klansmen-like "adventurers" in order to make a quick buck.

And frankly, that seems like a real dick move to pull on the average D&D players, who in my experience is not looking to be thrown into a morally ambiguous quagmire from which there is no escape.

Introduce gray vs gray morality and suddenly Keep on the Borderlands, the classic D&D adventure, becomes pure murdering hobo territory if the players engage in the roles the adventure expects them to engage in. Which isn't to say that there's no room at all for that kind of morally ambiguous theme. This is why lizardmen exist (in general and in KotB specifically). They're totally peaceful and not a threat...as long as you leave them in peace. Invade their territory, destroy their habitat, and you make an enemy of them.

Or, you know, if you really want to play up the moral ambiguity, make the bad guys other human beings.

But leave orcs and other evil humanoids to their role as guilt-free targets of slaughter and mayhem. Because that's what a lot of people want out of D&D, a chance to go out and solve a problem through the most direct means possible (i.e. with a sword), and that's what orcs are there for. To give those players something to work out their frustration on. What those players don't want is a DM who pulls the rug out from under their heroics by turning those heroics into the acts of an oppressor.

This is why I go with WH40K style orcs, mixed with a bit of Tolkien. My orcs spontaneously generate from bloodstained earth, and rise as full adult males who embody the most bestial aspects of man, untempered by any conscience or redeeming quality. They are pure and elemental rage and fury, and you cannot redeem them.

I'm not sure if a humanoid cat would still have a cat's ability to land on its feet. The reason cats tend to survive great falls has less to do with agility and a lot more to do with mass - cats don't weigh very much, and like many small animals have a nonfatal terminal velocity. They may also flatten out and glide a bit, like a flying squirrel, but that's never been confirmed.

At any rate, while small housecats survive incredible falls that would kill a human, things like lions and tigers don't, because they are so much more massive. A human sized cat is going to get flattened by a fall the same as a human sized human would.

I can't see a reason that chain mail wouldn't work. (with plenty of padding underneath)

...
You make it tight in some places and loose in others. Its not absolutely free movement, but thats what the armor check penalty is for.

Snakes move by udulating a continious series of muscles downt he length of their body. These are not bipeds or quadrapeds, they don't have a foot that they place down, pick up and place down again. Their entire underbody works against a surface, moving them forward. Wrap a snake in armor and it literally cannot move - except to move against the armor.

We can walk in shoes because we walk by lifting our feet and repositioning them with our legs. But imagine you walked by gripping the ground with your toes and pulling your foot forward. Wrap your foot in a shoe and suddenly you have no way of gripping the ground.

Scale mail strapped on and held in place via bit in the snakes mouth with some extra armor on the head. Flexible, yet hard to accidentally wiggle out of. (just an idea).

Snakes can move backwards just as easily as they move forward. A mouthpiece wouldn't work, it would just back away and wiggle out the tail end.

Plus, snakes are HIGHLY compressible, so you can't really strap something onto to them that they can't get out of - unless its so tight its actually cutting into them, in which case you'd kill the snake trying to armor it.

And finally, it's physically impossible to build a flexible tube that captures both ends of the snake and it can't wiggle out of.

I've owned many snakes over the years (constrictors in particular - I've got a royal python named Kaa at the moment), and if you spend any time handling them, you'd realize very quickly how completely ridiculous this idea is. Iron cobras may look cool, but armored snakes is really pushing the Rule of Cool past the breaking point.

Again, as a GM I'd never allow it, and as a player I wouldn't try it, and if another player at the same table was allowed to do it, it might be enough to make me leave. I get that some people think its cool, but I can only assume those people have never actually held a snake in their hands and felt it move, because the whole idea is absurd. It would completely ruin my ability to take the game seriously. If that kind of think were allowed, I'd expect my character to be able to lift himself out of a pit by grabbing his own collar and pulling hard - because clearly the basics of reality have no place in such a game.

Here's something that I've always hated about D&D, and thus by proxy continue to hate about Pathfinder.

You know how in movies there's sometimes a guy who gets stabbed or shot and then lies there dying until the main character can get to him, and then he says something monumentally important to the plot and croaks?

You can't do that RAW in any version of D&D or in Pathfinder. In Basic and Advanced 1E you were either 100% alive or you were 100% dead. I think 2E introduced the -10 as an optional rule, and then 3E solidified it.

By 3.5/Pathfinder you are either 100% alive, disabled, dying or dead. But talking is a free action, so you do that all you want when you're disabled, and you can't do it at all when you're dying - because you're also unconscious.

Of course, you can totally handwave it and do it anyways, but sometimes that bites you in the behind.

Say you have an NPC general you want to die for the story after he gives command of his army to the players to fight the BBEG's army, your whole plan can be unraveled by one player with a cure light wounds handy. Not exactly hard to come by. This really sucks if his last words were, oh, let's say: "I am done for. You must lead my army into battle against the BBEG's forces now. Only you can do it. Gasp. Argh. I have faith in you. Grunt. Do not fail me! x.x"

And then the stupid cleric goes "Dear lord, please do not let this important plot point occur. Amen." and the general opens his eyes and says "Oh, I'm suddenly conscious and in no mortal danger! Huzzah! I'll take my army back now, thank you."

And yes, that is a true story (more or less) from a 2E campaign I ran.

But I just had an epiphany. Mortal wounds! I know how to model them! Just like diseases! Except you "catch" them by being reduced to disabled or dying by a critical hit.

Here's some examples of what I'm thinking:

Sucking Chest Wound
Type mortal wound; Save Fortitude DC 23
Onset immediate; Frequency 1/round
Effect 1d3 Con damage; Cure 2 saves

Gutshot
Type mortal wound; Save Fortitude DC 18
Onset immediate; Frequency 1/hour
Effect 1d2 Con damage; Cure 1 save

Head Trauma
Type debilitating injury; Save Fortitude DC 15
Onset immediate; Frequency 1/day
Effect 1d2 Int damage; Cure 4 saves

Thoughts?

I am anti-powergaming. I don't see how "optimizing" and "powergaming" become synonymous though. Optimizing is a subjective term that implies there is a goal that you're attempting to achieve. I optimize all of my characters to suit my character vision.

+1

I'm the same way. I've built 6th level characters that could deal 194 points of damage in a round (0.32% chance of that actually happening, but it can, and he does 45 points on an average round) just using the core rule (go Earthbreakers!), and I didn't even have to use two-handed weapon fighter to do it.

But that particular character's concept was heavily defined by "He smashes things real good." His giant hammer of whomping is an extension of his whole personality - he's this tactless, blunt and overbearing bonehead with no real awareness of how forceful he is. Is he optimized for being a hammer-based fighter? Heck yeah, he is. But is he powergaming?

No. If I was powergaming, I would carry a composite longbow built for my 20 Str (plus enchantments) and not have thrown feats into throw anything and ranged crush - because awesome as an earthbreaker is, it's a pretty lousy ranged weapon. But it doesn't make sense to my vision of the character for him to carry anything but his hammer, and he's the kind of guy who would totally throw his hammer at something if he couldn't hit it up close.

I also put a feat into Improved Sunder, even though its a seriously suboptimal feat (because sundering is not usually the best tactic), because he seems like a sundering sort. I knew the character was the sort who would be more likely to sunder a wizard's wand and demand he surrender than to do the most effective tactic and just knock him dead (and at his level there are few APL balanced NPC wizards who could survive one round of his full-attack).

That's very different than the guy (in my last group) who picked the clearly never playtested Sea Serpent (from Stormwrack) as the animal companion of his completely-not-sea-related-at-all druid because it quickly develops a sick AC that's impossible to hit (I was the GM, and I didn't manage to hit that damn snake with a single non-critical attack over seven levels of play.) and its poison is super-effective. Why did he have a Sea Serpent? Because it was the best mechanical option. He never even tried to explain it in character terms. It was all mechanics.

That's power-gaming. And every character this guy made was built around some mechanical exploit that made his character better than every other character in the group. Everyone in the group thought it was total cheese and resented the way he manipulated the rules, but this player was providing a place to play, so they wouldn't let me kick him out or piss him off. And telling him he wasn't allowed to use half of his complete collection of WOTC splats (of the four other players, 3 were playing straight core book, and one had two splats) because they were broken and introduced way too much power-creep was a deal-breaker for him, so I had to just put up with his nonsense. Eventually I got so sick of it I left the group and it disbanded without a GM.

Whether punctuation belongs in quotes is variable. If the punctuation is actually an element of what is being quoted, it goes in quotes. If it is not, it goes outside. If it belongs to both, it only resides within the quotes.

[citation needed]

Did they actually say "Your Face"?

I'm fairly certain this is incorrect.

Talonhawke wrote:

However when do you let common sense take over

The idea that common sense is even a thing is something that desperately needs to be put to rest. That phrase is violently mishandled.

Scott, I really think you should drop out of this argument. And, possibly, all future arguments. Here's why:

You are staking out a position that denies the possibility of a reasonable, common sense approach. Yet you are attempting to convince others of your position. There is a contradiction between your claims and your action.

If reasonableness is not possible, then there can be no point in attempting to use reason to persuade others to your position. There is no point to responding to any argument, because "Gleep glork glop glop!" is as exactly as valuable a response as a well-reasoned argument (which is impossible by your apparent point of view). This means your every post here is, by your own logic, a complete waste of your time which can serve no purpose at all. Since reason does not exist, attempting to reason with others is a futile waste of time.

However, here you are, attempting to make reasonable arguments. That would seem to indicate one of two things. Either you enjoy mindlessly wasting your time, in which case you're posting simply to throw monkeywrenches into the discussion and annoy the rest of us, or you do believe that reasoned argument is possible.

If you do believe that reasoned argument is possible, which your actions would seem to indicate, then you're entire line of argument is deeply dishonest and disingenuous. You cannot make a reasoned argument against reasoned arguments without engaging in some pretty extreme duplicity.

So seriously, I would ask you either to acknowledge that reason and common sense are possible, and that there is an actual point to making reasoned arguments (which would have the end result of negating everything you've argued so far), or alternatively kindly leave these forums and stop wasting all of our time by posting what you believe to be nonsense and leave the rest of us to our delusional belief in the possibility of persuasion by force of reason.

But you cannot have it both ways. You cannot sit there and make reasoned argument against the possibility of reasoned arguments, not without inviting accusations of being a manipulative and dishonest troll.

ciretose wrote:

Point me to a thread where the RAI is in reasonable dispute.

The fact that you have to throw the word "reasonable" in there undermines your entire argument.

No, it really doesn't undermine his argument at all. It just prevents you from finding an argument where someone is being deliberately obtuse and refusing to acknowledge the consensus on RAI to justify their nonsensical build based on twisting the RAW.

However, your arguments in this thread have been remarkably weak. You're essentially relying on the very solipsistic argument that everything is subjective and thus objectivity is impossible. Which will "win" you an argument, but at the cost of making all arguments into spurious wastes of time that can never accomplish anything. When you win an argument by destroying the very concept of a reasonable position it's a Pyrrhic victory at best, since it requires you to accept that everyone, everywhere is basically an idiot. Because if all positions are equally valid regardless of reasonableness, then the value of arguments falls to the lowest common denominator: pure, mindless idiocy.

So congrats, Scott. You're right, RAI is always subjective opinion. Now everything everyone says is meaningless hot air. I guess we should just nuke the forum and go home, since discussion can accomplish nothing, truth is meaningless, reason is impossible, and agreement is just an emotional reflex.

Tra la la la.

I feel that the art only becomes a problem when it starts driving players off from the game. Some amount of this is inevitable, yes, like KaeYoss says. But the girls I game with are not exactly repressed — they just react badly to a small number of very specific pieces, ones where I feel they have a point.

No, the girls you game with are ideological. They've bought into the Beauty Myth Myth.

I get that you think they have a point, but really...they don't. They don't like some of the art. Everyone doesn't like some of the art. The only difference between your friends and everyone else is that everyone else is expressing what is clearly a personal opinion, and your friends are masking their personal opinions behind a layer of what is, frankly, ideological nonsense in order to give their opinions the illusion of moral weight.

Paizo isn't going to sell one more book by giving into the demands of the ideologically motivated. Because that's a rabbit hole that has no bottom, and the only proper response to those kinds of complaints is to ignore them and focus on the people who are receptive to what you're doing.

People made these exact same complaints about D&D art way back when TSR regularly featured images of naked women being presented as sacrificial offerings and prizes to be pried from the hands of monsters. Thirty years later and the art has changed dramatically, with women no longer being presented as overly sexualized prizes to be taken. But you know what hasn't changed? At all? The nature and tone of the complaints. Now instead of complaining legitimately about naked women laid out on altars (which is a bit egregious), they complain that you can see Amri's bellybutton. Oh noes!

And they will never stop complaining. It will always be something. Because once you start giving people's opinions the illusion of moral force, they get addicted to the power of complaining. So they don't ever stop. The only way to deal with that is to ignore them.

And kudos for paizo for making a fantasy game for fans of fantasy, instead of caving into pressures from people who are just fans of complaining.

And honestly, I think ivy-covered buildings look better, as far as my imagination goes, and don't take much away from the fantasy feel.

It gets kind of boring when every single important building has to be 100% covered in ivy. It also really limits the amount of found art you can use as player handouts. For example a GIS for "castle" turns up hundreds of great images of castles that would serve as a player handout, but not a single one of them is covered in ivy. Or any kind of greenery for that matter.

There's also...I'm having trouble coming up the words to capture what I'm thinking, but here goes: You ever read MythAdventures series by Robert Asprin?

In that series the hero Skeeve is shocked (shocked!) to discover that his world, the dimension of Klah, is considered a bumpkin backwater by the rest of the multiverse. It's considered a unsophisticated, rural, backwards joke.

And of course Klah is a world of fantasy kingdoms, with wizards, castles, dragons, and all the other tropes of Middle Earth. It is, essentially, Middle Earth. The "Standard Fantasy Gaming World."

That's what I don't like about where epic level play takes the game. It turns the Prime Material Plane into Klah. A joke. Oooh, the Prime Material Plane, where those stupid little peasant idiots think a single ancient red dragon is a "threat." Hah! Little do they know of the expanded universe, where there are whole planets were ancient red dragons are considered pest creatures by the 70th level Fighter/Wizard/Cleric/Rogues who are able to secure jobs as exterminators (they save the real work for people with actual power).

You know on the Prime Material Plane they actually worship Gods, instead of just bending them over their knee and spanking them like the unruly brats they are? That's how backwards those Primers are.

The higher you raise the cap, the more trivial everything becomes, and the more and more it turns out that the players -- who thought they were accomplishing something when they defeated the Whispering Tyrant, or raised an army and slew Treerazer, or killed the last of the Spawn of Rovugug -- are just a bunch of chumps who haven't even accomplished anything of meaning. What does it mean to kill a CR 25 creature that terrorizes entire nations when eventually the game takes you places where a dozen CR 25 creatures is a roadbump on the way to the real threat?

I don't know. It just seems to me that the higher you raise the cap, the higher you raise the expectations, until eventually you've got a game where the vast majority of players and the vast majority of characters in the vast majority of campaigns end when those characters are still in diapers. Where the majority of campaigns end during the slog to the real game. You know, when the character's levels are still only in the double digits.

Pfft. I prefer D&D as a game where movies like Krull or LOTR or Conan can be shown to new players to give them a sense of what the game is all about. When the power levels start going off the chart (OVER 9000!!!!) then what do I show them? Dragonball Z? I hate Dragonball Z. It's stupid and boring. It's a wankfest, a powergamer's lame wet dream.

I don't know how to write adventures for that kind of stupid power. When players say they want that kind of power, I just point at them and laugh. "What a loser you are, that you can't just enjoy fantasy, you need it to be this ridiculous power fantasy, where you're unstoppable. Get a life."

That's why E6 appeals to me so much. 6th, 7th level, you hit that sweet spot where your characters are about as badass as the heroes you see in movies. Where slaying the ancient dragon is a possibility, but will require an epic quest to achieve it. Where you can take on twenty of the king's guard, and most likely win (but it'll be a real fight), and I (the DM) don't have to make them all 8th level to do it -- because while I'm sure the King has the elite guards, the fact is that a 5th level character is equivalent to the absolute best humanity has to offer in the real world, and the most elite of guards shouldn't be more than 2nd or 3rd level Warriors, or maybe first or second level Fighters.

And with E6 you can keep the game world sane, in line with common expectations, avoiding "Tippyverse," rooted in medieval europe or other real world analogues, and keep adventuring until the campaign ends for some reason other than DM burnout at having to constantly top himself until its all just too ridiculous.

Laithoron wrote:

Jiggy: Anyone offended by Seoni's dress or Alhandra's outfit should probably steer clear of beaches, swimming pools, the Internet, formal ballrooms, James Bond movies, beauty pageants, the magazine covers in the check-out aisle as the super market, prime-time television...

i do do most of that actually, lol i dont get why formal ballrooms? but i just wanted to say not trying to start a huge "thing" just asking is all i am well aware that what my choices are seen as extreme or what ever. in the words of bon jovi "it is my life and i will live it my way"

I just don't understand why it makes you guys so mad maybe i am misreading the posts.

It doesn't make people mad, so much as people have very strong feelings on the subject, and some people are slightly offended by the implications of what you're asking.

Mostly people get worked up about this because the implication of comments like yours (and I'm not saying that you think this) is that it's perfectly acceptable to promote extreme violence, but that it is morally offensive to have anything remotely titillating in art.

Pathfinder is a game where you can chop people into pieces with an axe, set fire to their corpse, and banish them to Hell. The implication of your post, in some people's eyes, is that you think that's appropriate for children, but a little cleavage will somehow cause them harm. Again, not saying that is what you think, but it does seem to be the implication, and it strikes many people as not just a bit backward, but a root cause of many of the problems plaguing our society.

I don't think anything can make high level play easier, because (from my perspective) the issues with high level play are intractable without completely altering the game and turning it into 4E. In fact I would go as far to say that 4E is 4E because it tried to solve this problem.

The first issue is simply game complexity. As one goes up in level, the sheer number of options available become increasingly unwieldy, and bog the game down. Some people, I feel, are responding to this issue by basically just insulting anyone who thinks this -- this topic has been discussed a lot over the last several days, and I've read a lot of comments that basically gloss over this problem by saying that GMs and players that find the game unwieldy at high levels are some combination of lazy and/or incompetent. That's not really a counterargument so much as it is making fun of people.

But the reality is that the huge number of buffs and debuffs that can be tossed around in a single round can get overwhelming. It leads to players and GMs being forced to recalculate attack roll bonuses on the fly, with enough different modifiers that some people need a spreadsheet. It's even more difficult if you enjoy "beer & pretzels" style gaming, and may have been drinking.

The second issue is a metagame issue. Yes, there are tactics that can nerf fairly obvious tactics like Scry & Fry, like having a lead-lined castle covered in ivy, etc. But the more of those tactics that are introduced, the less and less the game world looks like what many people imagine it looks like.

That, I think, is the problem for a lot of people. By the time you're done taking into account all these high level issues, you end up with a world that just doesn't feel like the classic fantasy setting. Or you end up with a world that just plain doesn't make sense.

Homebrew.

I got tired of players telling me the ancient history of my world and how it "had really happened" because they'd read source books I didn't have the money for, or paid more attention to a blurb than I had.

At least in homebrew worlds, I can always say "Sadly, you are mistaken"

Or alternately, when a player has a better conspiracy theory than any I dreamed up, I can appropriate and tweak it.

Years ago I had a new player join my Mystara campaign, after it had already been going for about five years (I started it in 7th grade, so this would have been my senior year of high school). He had the whole GAZ series, and would often try to correct me - especially on Glantri, which in TSR's Mystara is a weird amalgamation of orientalism and Louis XIV's France, with this whole Blackmoor background I didn't use. (My Glantri is straight-up evil magocratic China/Japan, ruled over by a uberpowerful Fu Manchu/Marvel's Mandarin exspy and his armies of ogre magi.)

Everytime he would start arguing with me about how Mystara "really was" one of my players, Carlo (who always played uber-smart wizards), would laugh and say something like "Obviously [character name] has been reading the Colgona Histories, which as anyone with a real education knows are more fantasy than fact." It became a running joke in the campaign that the new guy's character was a clueless know-it-all who was consistently wrong. Sometimes I even changed semi-established campaign lore just to make him wrong.

Often though I would just respond "The campaign setting is not Mystara, it's MYstara."

But here's the really cool part. Paizo designs stuff so well, that even if it isn't something I want or care about; it's still worth buying, just to read in the restroom if nothing else. AP's read like a good novel and I imagine most folks here like reading rulebooks in general or they wouldn't be gamers.

And you just summed up why I didn't buy a single AP between Rise of the Runelords and Kingmaker, and won't be buying any of them until they do another Kingmaker style sandbox AP. I find them fun to read, but utterly useless as gaming materials -- and $120 is a lot to pay for a story without characters, resolution or snappy dialog. That's actually my biggest complaint about some of paizos stuff (WOTC did this too): a lot of it doesn't feel like it's for gaming, it's for people who read games and think about maybe one day playing them.

Don't be a Debbie Downer.

Don't try to guilt trip me into silence!

By the way, I'm not convinced we are a minority; I just don't feel like arguing that point with you.

::looks around:: Are you talking to me? Because it looks like you're talking to me. But I never claimed you were in the minority. I just think its lame of you to try to guilt trip and insult people into not expressing their opinion because you apparently want it to look like your opinion is held unanimously.

And finally, you actually are being selfish in your desire for them to not make this product. Just as I am being selfish in my need for them TO make it.

Yeah, okay, whatever. If we're both selfish its the same as if we're both not selfish. It cancels out either way. That was my point. Saying I should learn a lesson about selfishness is saying I should shut up, but if everyone is being selfish, then me shutting up only helps you, and you're not going to shut up, so there's no reason I should.

See, this is a SILLY ARGUMENT. It can only ever go around in circles.

Gailbraithe wrote:

...don't try and sell people on this nonsense idea that we can all get what we want.

Well, we should.

But we can't. You gotta deal with the reality that is, not the reality that should be.

OK, how about learning a lesson about selfishness, then?

That's a silly argument. You're conflating self-interest with selfishness. I mean really, I could just as easily turn it around on you: I, and many others, have no interest in high level content, but you're being selfish and demanding that paizo expand the game (and then support the expansion) instead of just supporting the game that already exists.

Watch me do it: You're demanding paizo take time away from producing products we can all use (products that support play from levels 1-20), and put that time into products that are only useful for you, and you call me selfish? Hah, it looks like you could learn a lesson yourself.

See? Silly argument.

Part of time-honored debate tactics is to take someones argument, put it into different words and present it back to them for them to see how what they are saying is being perceived.

Actually, that's the pretty much the definition of a Straw Man Fallacy.

Part of the time-honored traditions of debate is to ask "did you mean" and then take someones argument, put it into different words and present it back to them. In order to gain better clarity.

Dismantling and reassembling someone's argument and then forcing them to defend your reconstructed argument is not a debate tactic. It's a disingenuous tactic.

I said: "Well, since the game and module writers don't write people as acting like actual self-interested people pursuing their own desires and instead write people as following their pre-determined plot points..." This is a restatement of "except when they, you know, do... as written in the books..."

No, brass, it's not. Not even a little bit.

What is wrong in how I restated your words?

You have inserted several assumptions into the argument that are nigh indefensible, in order to force the good Professor into defending things he never said.

Are you saying that I've misstated your point here? I think it's an absolutely valid way to restate your point. The fact that it doesn't do much to make your argument look very good is PRECISELY the point of it.

::facepalm::

Can I use this "debate tactic?" Let me try it out: So what brass is arguing here is that an effective means of "winning" a debate is to twist and manipulate other people's statements, load them up with indefensible assumptions, and then berate them for failing to defend things they never said. Since this is all extremely disingenuous and pretty brazenly underhanded, what brass is essentially saying is the best way to win a "debate" on the internet is to treat other people without respect and rely on completely dishonest arguments. After all, it's the internet, it's not like anyone can punch you for being such a dick.

Wow, brass, you're right. That is an effective "debate tactic." Your position looks completely ridiculous now.