One might get the idea that Stormbulls fill the role of Ducks in your games...good for nothing but to be the butt of jokes...(note to supporters of the notion that Ducks can be serious PCs...please don't bother trying to convince me :)...).
> The setting of a game restricts what can be reasonably done in it. The
> narrower the setting, the more restrictive it is. When you are playing a
> a member of a group that tries to spend it's time fighting chaos, looking
> for chaos to fight, getting drunk, looking for a fight, looking for a
> place to get drunk, trying to pick up women, fighting women's relatives,
> recovering from being drunk and beaten up, plotting to kidnap women from
> another tribe, etc, it can be a lot of fun. But there are lots of classes
> of scenarios that are just not going to work.
You're relating a completely sterotyped version of what it is that Stormbulls do all day...seriously, how many people play Stormbulls like this? They must be same people who speak in a gruff voice when they play Trolls and do absolutely nothing but talk about eating everything that the GM describes to them...playing this way shows a lack of imagination. Depth can be applied to pretty much any character, no matter what cult they're in.
> But Brian was not talking about this. He was complaining (sort of) about
> the cult of Storm Bull not being considered "worthy" of having the "depth"
> of Orlanth or the other cultural gods. Well, that is of course true.
> When you have hundreds of thousands (or milions) of worshipers in a region
> you get a rather different dynamic than a small band of young male (or
> female) warriors. So the motivations of the players are likely to be much
> more diverse.
You can have incredible depth while playing in a village with a dozen huts, or have absolutely no depth playing in Glamour...this depends on the GM and players, not on inside-the-game factors (to a significant degree).
> From: "Nick Brooke" <Nick_Brooke_at_csi.com>
> Subject: Compromise, Humakti, Praxians
>
> They're from "Nature of the Cult", subheading "Social/Political Position and
> Power". This section is not about how outsiders perceive the cult, it's
> about what the cult *is*. No other cult write-up in CoP seems to use this
> section to spread jokes and misinformation about the basic nature of the
> cult it describes. Why assume Storm Bull's been singled out?
Social/political position and power is determined by how others perceive you, not what you think of yourself. Stormbull was singled out here, and no, I'm not sure why, other than it's the funniest line in Cults of Prax, and perhaps was too hard to resist?
> > The only important number is how many interact with PCs..."
>
> I am surprised you forgot the Smiley after that sentence. With it, it would
> be a nice piece of self-deprecating humour. Without it, it is an inane and
> fatuous cop-out.
I'll try to get back to this point next week...don't let me forget :)...
> Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:00:18 +0200
> From: Mikael Raaterova <ginijji_at_telia.com>
> Subject: HW vs RQ, sort of
>
> Brian in response to Dan McCluskey:
>
> >Your points make a lot of sense, but they're also based on an
> >as-yet-unproven assumption that people really do want to play
> >Storytelling-focussed games more than they do Combat-focussed games.
>
> You don't have to choose between Storytelling and Combat. You can have
> both. With HW, combat can be storytold, and the told stories can be
> conflict-focussed.
Storytold combat is utterly worthless. I think others have been through this before...I don't want to get everybody into that issue again...
> player's attention which should be reserved for the *situation*. I'd say RQ
> is combat-hostile; combat situations shouldn't be an exercise in tactics
> and strategy, but an experience of dramatic action. But then again i'm not
> a wargamer.
The typical ploy, eh, to take anyone who prefers a few actual rules and label them simulationists or wargamers? Hard is it may be to believe, there are lots of people who don't want to play in a game world where combat consists of 20 people swinging from chandeliers Errol Flynn-style, with nobody on the ground actually fighting... ;)
BTW, a short musing from my scanning of the Chaos=Copout thread:
Hmmm, I think you should take it one step farther...if you're going to get rid of Chaos to make people think about their actions in-game and their moral consequences, why not a add a Star Trek style moral-of-the-story theme to every adventure...then every game session can just be bulging with socially redeeming value and valuable lessons...
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