Do you prefer to apply present-day moralities and sensibilities to your campaigns and adventures...

People die when they are killed.

Gilgamesh was Chaotic Good

>If the GM talks about a setting where slavery is commonly accepted, your entire party shouldn't be angry abolitionists

Real abolitionists came from a society where slavery was the accepted norm. If my group wanted to run a campaign about social reform of a society their characters saw as unjust, I'd be in for that.

>Wat Tyler
>The Levellers
>The Chartists
>Abolitionists
>Suffragettes
>Unions vs Pinkertons and strike breakers

All of those historical examples could inform and inspire really good RPGs, with the players as radicals trying to change society.

>mud-faminepunk setting

Well, there's mud and there's famine and not much more except greedy clergymen and callous nobles. It's grimdark to the point of being fun in an ironic way. Peasants are treated like cattle, women got no rights at all, there's only heavy labor and an aching stomach waiting for the lower classes. Getting shitfaced rolling in the mud is the closest thing you'll get to happiness as a prole. It's a fun setting.

Obviously if only one player is interested in a political reform story, then they should come to a compromise rather than derail the game over a personal canard, but if my players care enough about the people populating my created world to want to play revolutionaries, I feel I've created an engaging world.

Saber "Kill the Weak" Alter is Lawful Good.
And yet Nasu is someone who's played a fuck load of D&D.

Lawful Good doesn't mean Softhearted Nice

What about being able to relate to your characters?

It also doesn't mean killing good aligned people because they're weaker than you are.

I can relate to people with different beliefs. It's part of the fun of 'roleplaying' user.

I don't know, I just read about The Diggers and 17th century Christian pseudo-communist hippies are the exact sort of background flavor I like to give my campaign.

Can you actually put your modern western beliefs of freedom, empathy and equality aside and relate to the fact that most of the muslim world supports ISIS, extremist terrorist organizations and even support dictatorships based on rules written 1500 years ago?

500 years ago in europe we believed slavery was perfectly fine because that fitted into our economic needs at the time, and now it became something only supported by badly written BBEG types of characters.

Can you relate to actual medieval european culture, where people had no qualms about exterminating people from slightly different cultures?

Or are you just distancing yourself from any kind of judgement by hiding behind a false relativistic morality wall?

Get outta /pol/
How can I prepare for a hex blade with demon summoning.

i let the players choose whatever morality they think their character would choose

I tend to play good-aligned characters as pretty progressive and modern.

Honestly I hate applying present day morals and sensibility to a medieval fantasy world, it just waters down the setting.

>Can you relate to actual medieval european culture, where people had no qualms about exterminating people from slightly different cultures?

Wazzat?

People had no qualms about "exterminating" each other regardless of culture, which strikes me as still fundamentally true in a sufficiently high-stakes situation. But on the other hand true genocide is a more modern invention. People just didn't think in those terms.

I like to keep things "historical".

That way you can get shit like Timothee the Arse Raper getting the wheel for unrepentant sodomy, while Willard the Buggerer of Men visits a female prostitute each month and no one bats an eye because Willard might be a sodomite, but he's a sodomite who plays by the rules.

Women are worth less than men - on paper. But in reality, it's the noblewoman who holds most power on the fief, with the nobleman away for wars and macro-politics so much.

The starving peasants do not dare to even point a finger at Paul the Glutton, their lord and master - but when they find out that John the miller has been cutting the flour with sawdust, they murder him and hang his balls dangling from the oak in the village square. Medieval society had various ranks of importance, and if you take a medieval village as a microcosm of society, millers and smiths would count as middleclass. But the thing is, being a miller isn't really hard. It's just owning a mill and milling. So unlike smithing which was a tricky job, milling was a field often envied by the peasantry, which can be seen in medieval songs and stories, where people play pranks or try to kill the miller. Or sleep with the miller's wife.

Medieval laws and rules are pretty weird to us today. And that's why I love them. It creates a nuance to society, an area of shades of grey.

That's all pretty good shit desu.

How do you bring it across to the players, though? Do you just give them a full medieval law gazetteer or do you give them the basics on their character's class and profession? What if someone wants to play outside them?

Osmosis. Just have scenes play out in front of the players. Players are always a bit more passive at the beginning of the session, the whole "You enter the smokey tavern..." deal, you know. So make use of that.

Also, it helps having players that are more into roleplay than rollplay.

You can also tie little bits of "daily life" in with quests.

I meant to quote

>Do you prefer to apply present-day moralities and sensibilities to your campaigns and adventures

Yes.

dependsonthesetting.jpg

>false relativistic morality
Explain. You're not retarded enough to be a moral realist, are you?

If I'm playing a modern setting, play with modern morality.
Playin' a fantasy setting I ask roughly how far they are long the tree of human rights and general era. Then go off that.

That is, when I'm not the DM.

>Can you relate to actual medieval european culture, where people had no qualms about exterminating people from slightly different cultures?
You're retarded.

When the christianization of Europe began, the newly-christianized people were scared shitless about their now dead pagan former-fellow-villagers rising from the grave to haunt them or worse. They were so afraid, they would stake bodies to coffins, cut off limbs and ram stones in the mouths of the dead to avoid them rising up as revenants or vengeful ghosts.

They certainly had many qualms about exterminating people from slightly different cultures.

Abstractly I prefer the latter, but in practice I do the natural thing (which is to do the latter but look at it from a modern perspective). For example, I might have nig-nog scalpers genociding other nig-nogs because the Euros give them money, and it's sort-of-religious, and it's for the home country so it's justified. But that would be played up as a Fucked Up Thing, if that makes sense. It's like...the characters might all think it's fine and natural, but you're presenting it to the players as if it isn't.

t. foreverGM

What's the fucking point of having slavery in your setting if the players can't be abolitionists?

Yes.

user, you have problems. Empathising with these moral systems shouldn't be difficult for you. Empathy isn't the same as sympathy.

Yeah, but the point in this scenario is that now you will be one of these people. Your character will either actively participate in many of these acts, or at least passively condone them.

To a lot of players, myself included, that's a lot harder to swallow.

Doubtful. Like some user said, that's what roleplay is. If you actually want to roleplay, this shouldn't be difficult. Plus, let's not pretend you can't make modern heroes within a historical framework. You just need to delve into what actually makes up a person's character, i.e. not their beliefs.

Seriously, have you ever read literature that's even remotely old? Read Gilgamesh, or the Iliad, or the Canterbury Tales and tell me you can't empathise or even sympathise with any of the characters.

In my setting the people are generally more worldly and less insular than humans were, owing to the fruitful rewards of exploring the unknown and taboo in a fantasy world. A greater sense of morality has developed in general, but suffering and exploitation are still vast. Cavaliers and adventurers have the most familiar sensibilities, but they are a tiny minority in the setting and the working people usually hate them. Adventurers are outcasts with high psychological openness/liberalism and are willing to challenge deeply held traditions in favor of justice/wealth/power/knowledge/glory/fun. Players are usually adventurers and this adventurer mindset is easy to emphasize with. Peasants and townsfolk are more insular and will treat players with either scorn or innocent curiosity. Political figures, merchants, and academics may still loathe adventurers, but they want to understand them and will try to make deals with them because they know they can benefit from an adventurer's knowledge or possessions.

There are other quirks which I guess are a bit subversive. I figured that edginess would naturally manifest itself in characters when there are so many people bravely seeking the unknown. It's not like some random mercenaries and pirates have a concept of "edginess", if they see a ruthless guy dressed in foreign black clothing with occult runes with a magical sword and a claw, they're not going to make fun of him, they're going to think he's cool or intimidating. The most learned adventurers are edgy as fuck because that's the product of their environment.

I mean I can to an extent, but there's a limit to it. I've read most of the things you brought up and I can empathize with them, but again, actually playing as one of the characters would be harder - like actively participating in the sacking of Troy, murdering civilians and throwing babies off the walls, you could tell me it's the right thing to do and perfectly reasonably argue that my character would be all down for it, but I couldn't play through that.

Hell, I probably would've taken the side of Troy, even though historically speaking they were pretty much depicted as the bad guys in the scenario.

you made me feel bad, so you're wrong!
RREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I don't care if you want to marry your cousin or own slaves but if you touch my fucking peasants or burn my lands I will drown you in your own blood.

I don't put up with egregious shit like characters being morally outraged at things that are 100% standard in both the society they are residents of and the society they are from, but a bit of muddying of the waters in regards to more unclear things is fine.

So no Dynerryses dismantling slavery despite being someone who hasn't got any legitimate reason to give a fuck, and actively has a more central motivation they ignore to go on a moral crusade, but a pc being less xenophobic than is normal or a pc being atypically charitable or permissive to the worthless scum of society doesn't bother me.

Obviously sacking Troy would be played as your characters doing a bad thing -- that's exactly how it was played by the Greeks. There's a reason most of the heroes involved (and hero did not mean "good person" to the Greeks) died horribly.

And I could play through that, and I think most people could. In fact, I'd bet it's what most people want -- the ability to roleplay as some fantastic character from a fantastic land. Maybe you're so sternly moral you cannot bear the thought of "you" doing something bad, even if it's not really you doing it -- and, I don't think that's some kind of bad thing -- but I don't think that's how most people are. Certainly it's not how I am.

This is discounting the people who just aren't that interested in roleplay to begin with.

>Hell, I probably would've taken the side of Troy
Damn straight.
>even though historically speaking they were pretty much depicted as the bad guys in the scenario
I don't think they were. I've only read Homer (because the other stuff sucks) but with him the Trojans and Greeks seemed depicted as two equal forces, equally strong and equally righteous, which is why the conflict was so bloody.

This is like saying "no my fantasy setting doesn't have guns that's not realistic, instead we have pistol-crossbows".

But hand crossbows were a thing, user.

/thread

no

I'd love to run something with a strong setting-specific culture like Pendragon or Tekumel, but I know that my stupid players would just fuck it up. And as a player, it makes no sense if you're the only one doing it. If you want to be a product of a culture in the world but the GM portrays every culture in the world as blandly modern, then you just have to play as basically yourself just like everyone else at the table is doing.

>then you just have to play as basically yourself
literally hell

Honestly 97% of all worldbuilt settings are bland copycat shit that make you wonder why the GM bothered in the first place.

Yes.
Do your research, ignoramus.

Shouldn't be hard to prove me wrong then ;)

Ummm yeah, they were... user, have you tried reading a book?

I hadn't, but on your suggestion I opened the nearest I had to hand (the Holy Bible) and at once I realised the unmatched might of the medieval pistol-crossbow.

pretentious and confusing ???

To end this dumb argument, no there weren't pistol crossbows - crossbows predate the concept of a pistol. Yes, there were tinyass crossbows that can be seen as "pistol crossbows" with our modern 'hindsight'.

And no, they weren't very effective weapons. Unless you used them to hunt rabbits, or rubbed some poison on the bolts.

Mostly, yes. I usually present different cultures in my settings with differing values and opinions on certain issues. Humans are almost always very progressive in my settings though, and also the most populous.

Elves and especially dwarves tend to be conservative, halflings more centrist, and gnomes are too busy being weird to care about politics.

>at the given time and era?

Given that the bulk of tabletop gaming isn't historical, this is a fucking meaningless statement.

MONOCULTURED

Yeah it's not like the whole point of mainstream fantasy is and always has been to ape actual historical literature.

Mainstream fantasy is some kind of bullshit amalgam of the post-Roman period, the Crusades, and the early Renaissance, rife with things that existed in none of those times.

What's the fucking point of having clothes in your setting if the players can't be nudists?

>Do you prefer to apply present-day moralities and sensibilities to your campaigns and adventures, or would you try to keep the characters thinking as they would at the given time and era?
I like exploring characters different from nyself, so I usually tend to give them era and setting appropriate morals and beliefs.

>If you do the latter, how will you keep the characters sympathetic even at the times their actions and behavior come across as decidedly not so to our modern eyes?
The characters I like to play are results of their upbringing. Sometimes that means I play a racist 1920s cop, other times that means playing a peasant that sees mutilation of thieves as just, other times it means playing a character that for some reason decides to defy their social norms and stand up against precieved injustice in their society. Wether they end up as sympathetic or not isn't something I ever consider or care about.

>Can't talk about averages and generalizations without being accused lf muh monoculture

tbf mainstream fantasy is currently really shit and mostly tries to ape actual historical periods, as you say. It all went downhill in the 90s. I blame Martin.

>modern day morality
Belongs in modern games, not midevial settings, such as my D&D campaigns.

fpbp

Morality doesn't exist in reality. It's a relativism because even within the same society and even in groups as small as the same nuclear family, every individual has diferent perceptions of the same morality.

Two brothers know stealing is ok, that prevents one of them from eating an apple from the fruit bowl before asking permission, but not the other who knows from previous experiences that the apple is his for the taking if he wants it.

Neither is wrong.

I had to throw one of my players in jail because with SJW shit you give them an inch and they take a mile. I let her make a non-transitioning transwoman (fuck if I know why), I let her fuck whomever she wanted, I let her have inter-racial relationships. And then she tried to guilt trip a hunters guild from hunting a pack of dire/rabid worgs and attacked them when they blew her off.

Nice fake story fag. Rule #3.

Bet you would do all those things so long as the bad guys were goblins and the narrative sold you that they were doing very bad things.

Fuck off Jen, you're not bringing PETA into the setting.

Not really, no.

Do you also think that evolution doesn't exist in reality because some people think it does and some people think it doesn't?

t. nihilist

Consistent roleplay should be encouraged IRL, even if it should be dealt with appropriately in-game.

Goblins dindu nuffin is probably the most common Reddit-tier "subversion".