yeah the worldbuilding to dialectic materialism pipeline is underappreciated
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Is it just that idealists never think about causality, just events as isolated incidents?
well for a lot of people i think it's just that their worldbuilding is aimed at creating a good/fun/cool story so causality isn't all that important to begin with. like the magical kingdom of floating islands or whatever, nobody needs to especially care about verisimilitude. but then as you play it out it's hard not to at least notice the contradictions that develop from whatever you've created.
It's more like thinking of societies as a bunch of individuals instead of systems short-circuits ever reaching a material cause.
The peasants are poor because of high taxes. Why are the taxes high? Because the king is a bad king. No need to examine why the system selected for a "bad king".
One thing that is at play here is that someone was asked to create a world where there was a fundamentally unjust situation against which the players could rally against. It is only natural for them and anyone really to look around and mimic the injustices they can see.
I wouldn't say that capitalism is the bad guy here. Social stratification, disenfranchisement, government corruption, cooptation of minority leadership - all of these things happened under pre-capitalist conditions. So that first post about how there's no theming raound labour relations, rent, alienation and so on do make sense.
However we are in a capitalist society, and all those injustices do happen in a capitalist context. So I wouldn't fault anyone for saying that capitalism is the bad guy, because the bad guy is a series of systemic issues.
I mean, it's kind of innate to the setting
Even now that they've stripped slavery from the setting (which, yeah, they kind of hand-waved away, but moving away from using slavery for shock value was a good move) villainous characters are always going to be motivated by giving themselves power
And in systems where power is tied to capital, that means the villain is ultimately going to be a Capitalist
Even the Whispering Tyrant is ultimately a Capitalist, because the bones are his money and worms are his dollars
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I had a good time having a colonialist settlement on a large island that was otherwise populated by goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, and orcs, and let my players discover for themselves that the "evil" races were just fucking defending themselves and trying to survive against the invading "good" colonialists.
Without me directly suggesting it, they buddied up with the locals and eventually drove out the colonialists and had a big party afterward.
I love players do the good thing without my prompting. I DMed a campaign once where they fought a company the whole time, kinda based on "The Company" in Heroes, then a bad guy appeared who could appear as one of the players and was killing off company members. The company proposed a temporary truce so they could team up and take this person down who was ruining both their teams' lives, but the players said F that, we're taking this person down, and then we're taking you down. I had plans for the future of the campaign for both directions, but I was sooooo proud they went that route. It was such a badass moment.
I don't try to "moralize" with groups as much as I present evil intentions as just that: fucking evil. Sometimes all it takes to get players (and their adventurer characters) to do the right thing is for them to have a pleasant interaction with a character then see that character threatened by someone else.
Sometimes I've done classic Faustian bargain offers to players, where the villain offers (and really means it) power and the like in return for service, but it lightens my heart that more often than not, the players will say, basically, "no, fuck you. We saw what you did with our goblin friends back in the day!"