OOTS #1213 - The Discussion Thread

[Jasdoif]

So, all in all, I don't think they get much done.
JUST LIKE REAL Technical difficulties, please hold.

Maybe it's only the TN gods whose agenda consistently gets fulfilled?



"OK, this policy is non-Good, so you Evil gods can live with it - and non-Evil, so you Good gods can live with it. And us TN gods are certainly fine with it. It gets put into practice."

There's a reason bureaucracies and corporations tend towards soullessness as their size increases.

[drazen]

Drazen, given that the whole goblin backstory is Rich showing the effects of the standard gaming trope of treating humanoids as 'hit button, get XP and loot', yes, it is truth. With the gods standing in for game developers.

And why would Thor care about something his followers will smash to get more powerful? More powerful souls means better snack food to feed on.

Well there are a few different things that *could* be the nature of the Stick-verse.

One is gods as analog for game developers, creating goblins as "easy" XP fodder, as Redcloak says.

Another is that the non-goblin races do have a strong general prejudice, and Roy and O-Chul are the exceptions, not the rule.

Another is that the general population is somewhat apathetic toward the goblin races, but the leadership pushes it (and adventuring murder hobos are more than happy to go along with it; Haley mentions

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how much faster she levels up as an adventurer after quitting the Thieves' Guild

in On The Origin of PCs), or the Sapphire Guard attacks on the goblins. Meanwhile, there's goblins like

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Tingtok saying he only "vaguely" or "passively" hated the humans when his leaders blamed their problems on them

in Good Deeds Gone Unpunished - showing this might cut both ways.

It does seem like it would matter a lot if what Redcloak says about TDO's insight is actually true or not -- if the goblins were set up to be fodder and the Good gods directly instructed their clerics that attacking the Evil races was OK, I'll put most of that blame of the gods, but if non-goblins came to that conclusion on their own, that's the fault of the population for their own prejudices. We do have direct confirmation from Thor that crayon drawing strips are NOT always fully accurate, or are at the very least misleading; Shojo's secret lore said that this is the second world created by the gods, which we now know not to be true (unless Snarl+Rift World have something to do with this in some sort of infinite regression or something, but that seems far-fetched).

[Rogar Demonblud]

You do realize you are essentially saying the author lied about his work? The goblin backstory is truth. They were literally created to be XP for PC races to slaughter at will so they could level up. It is a design decision Rich finds deeply offensive, almost as much as the gamers who gleefully use it to justify genocide attempts.

[hamishspence]

It is a design decision Rich finds deeply offensive, almost as much as the gamers who gleefully use it to justify genocide attempts.

Yup. In his own words:

Our fiction reflects who we are as a civilization, and it disgusts me that so many people think it's acceptable to label creatures with only cosmetic differences from us as inherently Evil. I may like the alignment system overall, but that is its ugliest implication, and one that I think needs to be eliminated from the game. I will ALWAYS write against that idea until it has been eradicated from the lexicon of fantasy literature. If they called me up and asked me to help them work on 5th Edition, I would stamp it out from the very game itself. It is abhorrent to me in every way.

[ijuinkun]

Is oppression violence?

If no:
Is violence justified against non-violent oppression?
If so:
Are the oppressed allowed to engage in greater violence then the oppressor?

Seperately what if you condemn both - are you then defacto standing with the oppressor? same for if you condemn neither?

To link it to the online comic - when was the last time we saw a goblin oppressed (ideally by someone who wasn't a goblin or in a way that non-goblins would not be oppressed).

Sorry to be so late to the party, but I would like to point out that "violence" constitutes any form of severe irreparable harm willfully inflicted upon somebody, not merely the variety in which the victim's body is damaged. For example, inflicting psychological damage upon somebody to the point where they will never again be lucid is just as great an injury to them as is damaging their body to the point where they would be in a coma for the rest of their lives.

Also, indirect-but-intentional harm can be considered violence--who would claim that forcing someone to walk the plank does not constitute homicide even if it's the drowning that kills rather than a weapon held by the ones forcing them off the plank?

Because there are ways of violence other than wrecking up somebody's body, this implies that oppressors can indeed violently oppress through means other than bloodshed and beatings--fear of being robbed of vital resources such as access to food and medical care, for example.