The Shelyn/Calistra duality intrigues me. Lust, when combined with an honest love, is a beautiful thing, and one that Shelyn would probably support. Lust turned into a tool and abused to hurt, shame, and mock is more Calistra's domain.
I for one thing have DM'd players that seem to spring into the hay for a roll with whatever is sitting in the bar. I find it getting into it means too much of one player hogging the table. If I deal with it then again it is monopolizing the table. Yes, mu opinion is the cleric should consider changing which kinda girl she wants to follow but I would make sure to keep the table time to a minimum unless the problems can drag the whole party into his mess.
As far as the Love Lust subject that has popped up. This is not going to be resolved on a message board by a bunch of geeks, let alone our best philosophers through time. Society's views on everything changes constantly, as with anything that is ruled by perception. Your view will never match mine or anyone else's since we all have had different lives and DNA. Morality is absolutely not an absolute!
Lust turned into a tool and abused to hurt, shame, and mock is more Calistra's domain.
I don't think it is necessary for it to be that purposeful. Someone only caring about their own selfish pleasure would probably be enough, that is not intentionally trying to harm the other person(s), just not caring one way or another.
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Lust turned into a tool and abused to hurt, shame, and mock is more Calistra's domain.I don't think it is necessary for it to be that purposeful. Someone only caring about their own selfish pleasure would probably be enough, that is not intentionally trying to harm the other person(s), just not caring one way or another.
Calistra, dark mistress of the disappointing quickie?
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Shelyn strikes me as an oddly puritanical goddess of love: the virginal muse of wildflowers, hair care products and adult contemporary music. She seems so passionless. The dichotomy between her and Calistra has the shadings of the madonna/whore set-up, where love sits neatly on one plate and lust on the other.
I like love gods who encompass (and actively participate in) a rollercoaster mix of love, passion and obsession without having to relegate them to 'good' or 'evil' activities.
Not that I think the lothario cleric shouldn't be challenged for his trysts, but the idea of goddess of love handing out punishment like a divine marriage counselor is pretty bland.
If you take Shelyn only as the goddess of love, yes, she would be bland. Keep in mind that she is also the goddess of art and beauty and music, which might not exactly cry out "Adventure!!!" but is pretty important to the people who live on Golarion.
I would love to see that turned on its side.
DM: A big hairy ugly orc comes up to you and says "Hi there." *DM rolls diplomacy check* He ends up talking you into going to bed with him.
Player: But I'm a dwarf and male and straight!
DM: You know what they say, "What goes around comes around."
Dude, that's funny.
Nice abuse of the Diplomacy skill (which is a pretty abusable skill in my opinion).
And if you don't think Diplomacy carries enough weight, you can always have something yucky (Aberration? Ooze?) rack a bunch of Dominate spells and fire them off at the PC repeatedly until he blows his save.
DM to player: "Do you want me to describe all the terrible things that happen next?"
Player: <<SHUDDER>>
After an experience like that, the PC will probably lose his "appetites".
As far as the Love Lust subject that has popped up. This is not going to be resolved on a message board by a bunch of geeks,
True dat.
But an amusing threadjack in any case.
Shelyn strikes me as an oddly puritanical goddess of love: the virginal muse of wildflowers, hair care products and adult contemporary music. She seems so passionless. The dichotomy between her and Calistra has the shadings of the madonna/whore set-up, where love sits neatly on one plate and lust on the other.
I like love gods who encompass (and actively participate in) a rollercoaster mix of love, passion and obsession without having to relegate them to 'good' or 'evil' activities.
The Love-in-all-forms-goddess is an old hat. I like how Shelyn is mostly the goddess of beauty, with things that are considered beautiful (love and art) added to her portfolio.
She's not the Goddess of Platonic Love, Of chastely written love-letters for your loved one while adoring each other from afar. People in love can have sex without Calistria jumping up from her throne (or rather the heavily curtained canopy bed she reclines on while reigning) going "*ZINGGG!*"
It's just that if you go into a tavern, chat up someone, land in bet with her/him, and in the morning go your separate ways, it's not in Shelyn's domain. That's what enables Calistria to pay her bills. (If you lie to her to ged her in bed, its a double victory for her. And if she's the daughter of your enemy, and you tell him all you have done with his daughter, Calistria's probably doing a jig and shouting "Who's your mommy? I'm your mommy!")
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The Love-in-all-forms-goddess is an old hat. I like how Shelyn is mostly the goddess of beauty, with things that are considered beautiful (love and art) added to her portfolio.
As I envision her, she started as the goddess of beauty from the beginning and later became the goddess of love when her mother (the original(?) goddess of love) died. Previous to becoming the goddess of love, as the goddess of beauty she was pretty shallow and selfish. Now she's much less so.
She's not the Goddess of Platonic Love, Of chastely written love-letters for your loved one while adoring each other from afar. People in love can have sex without Calistria jumping up from her throne (or rather the heavily curtained canopy bed she reclines on while reigning) going "*ZINGGG!*"
Agreed.
It's just that if you go into a tavern, chat up someone, land in bet with her/him, and in the morning go your separate ways, it's not in Shelyn's domain. That's what enables Calistria to pay her bills. (If you lie to her to ged her in bed, its a double victory for her. And if she's the daughter of your enemy, and you tell him all you have done with his daughter, Calistria's probably doing a jig and shouting "Who's your mommy? I'm your mommy!")
Yup.
Calistria is the goddess of the one-night stand.
Shelyn is the goddess of expressing love physically.
Hmmm...Without trying to get too tangled in this, I have a question. Two people are friends, both date people on occassion, but for the sake of this question they will be single at the moment. They get hanging out one night at the local tavern, ale might or might not be involved, and they end up in the sack together. Afterward their still friends, and still not dating eachother, they just had a one night stand. Calistria or Shelyn?
Pres Man...he didn't get to sleep with everyone he wanted as long as he rolled high enough. The choice had to make some kind of sense. If the cat has blood on it's claws and feathers sticking out of it's mouth, it doesn't matter how many ranks in bluff it has. Though I did do something similiar in Shadowrun.
If your familiar with the book Prime Runners you might remember Hammerhead, Shoot-To-Kill, and the other one who's name escapes me. They are three troll bank robbers. Trolls in Shadowrun are about ten feet tall, their lowest possible strength score is about equall to a human's starting max, and their body (basically constitution) is higher at it's lowest than a human can start with. Their warty and have calcium growths all over their skin, making them quite unattractive. Shoot-To-Kill is female by the way, and has some pretty impressive stats, the vast majority of it being combat oriented. So whenever I'd get an anoying player at the table trying to be a cop/civilian killing maniac I would just figure the gang recently got done robbing a bank, and Shoot-To-Kill was out cruzing for someone to "celebrate" with. The moment I could get said manian into a bar, the trio of trolls would show up, and the guy would get trollhandled into a back room somewhere and thoroughly abused...
Hmmm...Without trying to get too tangled in this, I have a question. Two people are friends, both date people on occassion, but for the sake of this question they will be single at the moment. They get hanging out one night at the local tavern, ale might or might not be involved, and they end up in the sack together. Afterward their still friends, and still not dating eachother, they just had a one night stand. Calistria or Shelyn?
Shelyn. Love includes caring and respect, neither of which are compromised by this scenario (they're still friends). Sex, as part of a caring and respectful relationship, is a wonderful thing. Sex, without a caring and respectful relationship (i.e., just getting your rocks off), definitely falls under lust IMO.
Hmmm...Without trying to get too tangled in this, I have a question. Two people are friends, both date people on occassion, but for the sake of this question they will be single at the moment. They get hanging out one night at the local tavern, ale might or might not be involved, and they end up in the sack together. Afterward their still friends, and still not dating eachother, they just had a one night stand. Calistria or Shelyn?Shelyn. Love includes caring and respect, neither of which are compromised by this scenario (they're still friends). Sex, as part of a caring and respectful relationship, is a wonderful thing. Sex, without a caring and respectful relationship (i.e., just getting your rocks off), definitely falls under lust IMO.
Well I think the question in that case is did the sex enhance the relationship between the two? Did it deepen the emotional relationship they already have, or did it have no effect or a negative effect? Even if it had no effect, I would still say that fell into the region of lust and not love. So love perhaps for their overall relationship but lust for that one night of sex.
Unless ... they realized that after the sex, that they had more "love" (friendship no sexual) for each other as just friends, in that case the sex was a way to make their relationship stronger. Though such an idea might be possible in literature, I personally don't buy it in RL. I am more of the mind of what they said in When Harry Met Sally, that there is always some attraction on one side or the other of mixed gender relationships.
Calistria or Shelyn?
I'd say Shelya or Shelyia. Nothing's just black & white (not even black&white cookies).
Yeah, I'm seeing it as fairly grey myself. Just wondering where other people are coming from. To me there is such a fine line between lust and love that true lust, or true love only really exsists in the hypothetical.
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To me there is such a fine line between lust and love that true lust, or true love only really exsists in the hypothetical.
That's a pretty weird sort of statement to me. I assume you are refering only to love in the purely romantic sense. Its at time like this I like the greek concept of breaking the idea of "love" into categories and giving each its own word. Lust, or eros, is quite distinct from a familial love.
And I also wonder what you think of as "true lust" or "true love."
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Hmmm...Without trying to get too tangled in this, I have a question. Two people are friends, both date people on occassion, but for the sake of this question they will be single at the moment. They get hanging out one night at the local tavern, ale might or might not be involved, and they end up in the sack together. Afterward their still friends, and still not dating eachother, they just had a one night stand. Calistria or Shelyn?
Yeah, I think you're over-analyzing things and delving into the realm of semantics. I would not consider your hypothetical situation a one-night stand. In my mind (and in the mind of Shelyn, therefore), a one-night stand involves two people who aren't romantically attached to one another. You could spend all day coming up with corner cases trying to trip me up and make me contradict myself, but that doesn't help either of us. Just do what you want to do in your game. If you're the GM, you have the power to change whatever we print to fit your own definitions.
No no, when I think of mom and dad I can't quite decide if it's lust or love...;)
Yeah, romantic love.
True lust...my best description would basicly be masterbation. Which is why it's kinda hard to see it working out with another person. To have absolutely no feeling for the other person, other than getting off. Though even that, I don't know, I can see holes in it...
True love...uh, yeah right. I personaly think I'm a little too far removed from being a normal healthy person to even have a guess on this one.
Basically I just don't believe in extremes. There is always going to be some lust in your love, and love in your lust. Just the way I see it.
I think romanic love is a fusion of lust and love. That's why people can get confused by one or the other so easily.
Familial love and platonic love are just that: love. For instance, I love my mom. But clearly, there isn't any lust there. And now I feel kinda creepy for even writing this.
And then there's drunk one-night stand, meaningless lust, in which there is no love at all.
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I think romanic love is a fusion of lust and love.
Thus the decline of the Roman empire and its moral values. :)
on point...
I try and teach teenagers that they should not confuse physical attraction with lasting love. In a good romantic relationship, physical attraction will play a part but no amount of attraction can compensate for actually treating the partner in a relationship with respect, kindness and understanding. Those who fail to understand the difference between lust and love are on the fast track to bad relationships and bad marriages.
Unless ... they realized that after the sex, that they had more "love" (friendship no sexual) for each other as just friends, in that case the sex was a way to make their relationship stronger. Though such an idea might be possible in literature, I personally don't buy it in RL. I am more of the mind of what they said in When Harry Met Sally, that there is always some attraction on one side or the other of mixed gender relationships.
There is such a thing as friendship sex. It's less about romantic "love" and more about being comfortable with (and comforting) each other. It doesn't happen often (but more often than "true love") and usually lacks the highs of passion that romantic love includes. It also usually avoids ending in bad breakups, since it occurs as part of an already existing friendship (probably a deep and long lasting one). Sometimes it does turn a friendship into romantic love. Such relationships tend to be quite strong, as they are built on much more than mutual attraction.