OOTS #1239 - The Discussion Thread

[KorvinStarmast]

The only conclusion I can draw is that the game is , to some degree, being played by players who have no problem whatever with killing kids.

Most DMs when I played, as a teenager or a young adult, DIDN"T have the enemies be kids. A notable exception was a DM I had who'd been to seminary, and he made a big deal about the bugbear young in the caves of chaos, and the moral issue of slaying monsters.

Spoiler: Gotcha DMs

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This campaign was in about 1981. My ranger, whose raison d'etre was to have special enemies, like bugbears, slain agreed with the paladin to tie them up and leave them be. DM played the gotcha game. As we came back, they had all chewed through their bonds. So I killed one of them, and told the other three "flee to the east if you don't want to die also." DM rolled a die, and the little bug bears fled. He then tried to play the moral dilemma game with me, and the entire table, not just me, pushed back at him. Classic case of "what kind of game are we playing?" discussion that basically ended the session. As the paladin player noted before we stopped for the evening, "If you wanna play {effin} mind games with us, I'm asking you to stop. We get enough of that crap at work."

It's not that these people are ignorant and need educating in the ways of righteousness; it's that they know very well what morality is and have deliberately chosen to ignore it. And for them, this is "fun". Otherwise why are they doing it in their spare time?

Indeed, we wanted more game, and I suppose more war game, and he wanted to play moral argument that evening.

Spoiler: more on that session

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The very premise if that module was that it was, in a very war gamey sense, based on an existiential conlflict of repelling monsters from their efforts to disrupt the attempts of the humans to settle those lands on the borderlands. (Rather like the problems with the Wain Riders in Middle Earth coming from Rhun, or like the nomads of the steps encountering settled lands in Eastern Europe, et cetera) . That's excatly what, in AD&D 1e, Rangers are all about.

The following session, we went back to trying to clear out the caves, and trying to get various groups of monsters to fight each other by offering them our assistance. (which is IMO the smarter way to clear out the caves). The back stab we got from that {effin} cleric when we got back to town after the third session cost us two PC deaths. To a certain degree, the most dangerous creatures to us by that point were two humans in the keep, not the monsters in the caves.
It's a very interesting module, that's for sure.

Morbleu, what is that about the english of 7th century?

It was not French, it was a Germanic / Saxon tongue IIRC fused with the Angle-ish Germanic tongue and of course there was some Celtic (Briton) and Latin stuff floating about ... but it wasn't French. I don't recall the French impact on English becoming profound until after 1066. (Though with trade and how noble families intermarried, it was probably at least somewhat there).

We're talking about paladins, the honored french knights of Charlemagne!

8th Century....

Spoiler: when?

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The Paladins (or Twelve Peers) are twelve fictional knights of legend, the foremost members of Charlemagne's court in the 8th century. They first appear in the medieval (12th century) chanson de geste cycle of the Matter of France, where they play a similar role to the Knights of the Round Table in Arthurian romance.[1]

You are completely correct that by my logic, the entire evolution of natural language can be likened to a multi-generational game of telephone. It doesn't follow we need to go back the chain all the way back to 7th century England when talking about D&D, specifically.

Correct. We do have one poster hrophila, who could probably converse in that tongue, but most of us can't.

Though if someone wants to make a point about Charlemagne's Paladins and how they in turn lead to Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which in turn lead to D&D Paladin, and how the concept changed in those transitions, that would be an interesting argument.

You left out the literary influence of the Arthurian Cycle (Knights in Shining Armor) on Paladins (lay on hands, Lancelot, Morte d Artur IIRC, after a knight in a tourny was felled by his lance) and the Historical Templars (as well as the knights Hospitlar which informed the original Cleric) but we need not dwell on that. It wasn't just Holger Dansk / Oiger the Dane.

Look dude. You're talking about paladins in the story, which is explicitly 3.5, in terms of Paladins from AD&D, which has nothing to do with the story, .

That's not quite correct, though. Paladins in 3.5 did not arise ex nihilo. They were a 25 year old trope/archetype that was first fully fleshed out in AD&D 1e. (Greyhawk was an 80% solution that you can see went final in PHB AD&D 1e). How paladins are and were perceived was already well grounded in AD&D. (And OoTS wise, Haley's dad was a 1st edition thief, so at least Soon is an AD&D 1e paladin. And he founded the Sapphire Guard. )
Granted, WoTC did something novel: anyone could choose to play a Paladin in that edition, unlike AD&D where you had to qualify for it by a bunch of better than average die rolls ... so in that respect, 3.5 edition undid a crucial feature of paladins: their rarity.

So I’ve been re-reading Odysseus.
Wow, what an immense amount of casual piracy.

Why are you disparaging against the ancient Greeks? It's their story. Your cultural condescension is noted.
(On a related note, I wrote a paper in college on the Odyssey, with a particular focus on the leadership skills of The Protagonist. TLDR: my conclusion was that, by 20th century standards of leadership, he was rated way down near the bottom. I got an A on the paper. The prof noted in red a strong agreement on my low scoring with particular regards to him losing all of his ships and all of his men by the end of his journey home from Troy...paper written in the late 70's. Was I ahead of my time?).