I'm rolling an idea around in my head for a game setting, where when humanity went to the stars we discovered that something about our planet was repressing latent magical/psionic abilities in some large percentage of the population, so people leave the planet and start developing powers.
I'm thinking FATE just because that's what I've been studying, but I'm not sure about the fit. Can anyone weigh in?
Erm, as far as actual play, I was thinking that the players would be marines in an elite peacekeeping force.
A wild structuralist Marxist appears! Samuel uses linguistic critique! Samuel uses Thompson's empiricist critique! Samuel uses the need for diachronic analysis! It is adequately effective!
I think about five people said, "He's just one of those guys, you know?"
in other news, nvidia optimus support finally hits linux properly
well, "properly"
and now I have to ask myself: I know what you're thinking.... will the driver completely break the system or only... mildly concuss it? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a Ubuntu 12.10 install, hacked for optimus support... , and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
@Novian and until one can prove something true it has the potential to be false. So-called facts are defined by their in-contradictability; Ie. their truthfulness is guaranteed. Language is imprecise in this manner, such as the different times one might say that they "know" something.
Not at all! Our book was set up chronologically. Unfortunately it skipped some, along with the curriculum skipping some chapters, but it was wonderful to explore the evolution of human thought
Plato gave way to this and then Kant gave way to that and then Locke gave way to this...
It didn't strike me as odd that he didn't write about the holocaust or Nazi Germany. He didn't want to become a martyr, whatever. It did strike me as odd that he just cast off his teacher like he was a nobody. More a following strategy than a surviving strategy IMO
A large one. It doesn't gather so much psychologically but we are more than simply neuroscientific specimens and mental constructs. Philosophy represents not only our understanding of the world around us but whatever order (or not) we might project onto that world
@BESW Same with any schema. If you tell me you are into astrology and categorize people by signs I know something about you. If I tell you I favor Jung's work to Freud's then you know something about me. The categorizations themselves reveal much about the person doing the ordering
To what extent does the philosophy of an age (widely considered in the modern age to be an exercise in esoterica, and in earlier ages restricted to the educated few) allow us to generalize a perspective or attitude held by the multitudes?
That is, to what extent does the history of philosophy represent the history of human thought, as opposed to representing the history of philosophers' thought?
Well, their credentials for one thing. Some were well cared for. Descartes, for instance (IIRC). This lends itself to the idea that their ideas were taken well. Others notsomuch, like Socrates.
@BESW I don't make that large a distinction. The philosophers were human, after all
How I see it is that Wittgenstein had access to all of these philosopher's works. Still he chose to write his own, deferring to some but not all. It seemed to refine itself. Not saying he's the end of the line by a long shot, just that there's tempering. It's a very personal thing, too, beliefs. Some would side with X being cut out of doctrines and some with Y
either way there's more information added. New issues get addressed, and old issues keep being addressed
Well, even if not mountains - take people like me for instance. I get many stares most places I go because I'm over six and a half feet tall. It was really accentuated when I lived in New York
some of the hanging signs in stores out there came to my sternum and lower
Dwarves would be inspired by this same way. Then add some projection (which is really just unconscious personal contents anyway) and bam, instant archetype
Jung collects a lot of these. Where he finds repetition throughout history he names them archetypes, latent within everyone. That's 'collective unconscious'
I'm not sure it's oversimplified. On the micro scale (civilization who employs it) I would be but on the larger scale, well that's what Jung was positing.
For example, the history of the unicorn is buried in guesswork, but the Biblical mention of the unicorn is actually a poor interpretation of a word that probably originally meant "bull."
So you get the modern unicorn rising from a combination of poor reporting by travelers, poor translations being legitimized by Biblical literalism, and fakers passing off real animal parts as supernatural to unsuspecting buyers.
These connotations may persist throughout history and many separate civilizations, independently (as far as can be known). Collective unconscious. If this race "came up" with this idea same as these other seventy and they did so without influencing one another (opposite ends of the Earth in tribal times or some such) then this idea seems to be human as opposed to cultural
I do think there are probably some manner of universal symbols and concepts, but I'm not sure they're as prevalent or specific as people like Jung would like to think.
On that note Jung didn't seem to believe in coincidence as it's commonly stated. He wrote and talked a lot about what he called synchronicity
I don't know enough about the way the brain functioned before language was introduced, as well as how language functions within the brain, to say much on universal human connotations
It could make sense. But so could morphogenetic fields, UFOs and a bunch of other things.
If I was to back Jung's collective unconcious idea as anything more than another schema like astrology (worth more than interest and with hard rules, in other words) then I would want to back it from a neuroscience/literal brain angle
@BESW This is a constellation within the human mind, according to Jung's theory. All people have an understanding of this concept. Not all understand it in the same way or attribute as much, but all have this. That's even corroborated by the skeptic's book I'm reading. "We're hardwired to believe in God."
I wouldn't settle on divine, but I would agree with guidance.
On some days lol. Others I'd be less inclined to even take the guidance part
@LitheOhm Yeah, I laughed out loud when I first read someone saying that the brain's being hardwired for belief in a higher power is evidence against the existence of said higher power.
Shermer is the founder (?), editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine. He also is known for The Believing Brain, I'm reading it
lol
Shermer's more professional than that. But he admits that he does contend with his own confirmation bias.
His main argument appears to be that belief comes before correlation. Ie. if I want to believe in God then I secretly do and will thus find evidence, as confirmation bias goes
He's not just talking about religious beliefs, he examines how belief itself works
wonderful book. I'm in the market for something written by someone who is more of a fluffy artsy fartsy hippy after, this one's gonna require some counterbalancing
I'm not sure. I am subject to the Dunning-Kruger Effect in the case that I underestimate my expertises. I simply don't want to get rusty and lazy in my knowledge. I'll be searching for a long time to come and would rather not cap it
:D after reading the nonfiction stuff I've been in (haven't even had a metaphorical reference in a while) I'm going to try composing a campaign while learning the material, whatever it is I'm reading
Can't do that very well where the Alexander Technique or neuroscience are concerned
I have tried incorporating a secret society in my campaigns with little success. Either I get too excited about their plot and reveal too much to players too fast or the whole organization just ends up sitting there. Watching the grass grow.
Not sure what the official phrase is (I probably did when I designed the campaign... 6, 7 years ago?) but I designed a valley divided into eternal day and eternal night.
I took an idea from The Phantom Tollbooth for it.
Those on the dark side valued beauty over truth. Those in the day valued truth over beauty.
It was very much about making the metaphysical literal. The daysiders had no concept of fiction, while the nightsiders had no concept of nonfiction.
The idea, of course, was that the two needed to be brought together: again, literally. The Prince of Truth and the Princess of Beauty were in love and needed to be married.
It was very much Phantom Tollbooth meets Magic Flute.
@LitheOhm The key to a secret society you want the party to discover is to make it so influential and subtle that anything they do will return to it eventually.
I was trying to foreshadow it through a few campaigns. 1st, then 2nd some years later, then 3rd some years after that. Ultimately I learned that in such cases less is more
I had an entire campaign built around the idea that a single surviving yuan-ti was trying to rebuild his empire by alchemically converting humans into new yuan-ti.
The first level of conversion is almost imperceptible, and the second level is almost as hard to spot. So he'd have spies and allies in all the work forces and all the noble houses.
I like to think it says something positive about the community's interest in avoiding needless conflict, rather than the community's desire to make certain topics verboten.
Because to discuss each of them in an RPG context, foundational assumptions must be made about the nature of RPGs.
Because of the nature of RPGs, these assumptions are often different for each person in the discussion.
And because of the nature of online communities, a) it's easy to assume that people within your community share your experiences and beliefs, so people don't think to make their assumptions explicit.
This leads to people saying things that don't make sense to each other because we're talking about subtly different things.
and b) it's the Internet. When someone doesn't make sense, they must be wrong. And when Someone's Wrong On the Internet...
Monks: monks are awesome concepts and can be fun to play in many campaigns. In campaigns that don't have group choices which accomodate monks (higher emphasis on RP, certain fight/build restrictions on monsters and PCs, etc), monks are painful to the point of masochism.
Each person assumes his own RPG experience is representative, so when you get two people from opposite ends of the monk-friendly-campaign spectrum, each is speaking about something the other cannot fathom as being the same game.
In order to defuse the situation, the participants need to step back from monks and realize their gameplay experiences are in conflict, rather than that their ideas about monks are in conflict.
@MaurycyZarzycki no way. It's interesting how it is discussed here, my friends and I years back never sat and discussed RPG theory or the social contract in a gamer's context
Both are exacerbated by provably untrue statements made by the developers and marketers of the systems, which are tempting to believe and which some gameplay choices can provide erroneous support for.
@LitheOhm I was happier in ignorance of theory for a very long time.
@LitheOhm My answer to the question I ask would probably take as much space as "Because people are stupid. And they are jerks. And they are self-centered, stupid jerks".
