If all your Nobles are either decadent or incompetent or corrupt or evil, and all your religious authorities are cruel and secretly the bad guys, you may be infected with post-modernism. And if all your game worlds look like that it gets boring fast.
In this day and age, the boldest change you can make to a DnD setting is to make knights and nobles and priests actually heroic.
RPGPundit
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ReplyDeleteBlue Rose is a great setting for this! It's good to see that you're finally coming around...
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I would call "In this day and age, the boldest change you can make to a DnD setting is to make knights and nobles and priests actually heroic." that being bold. I would call that doing something that is fun. When someone does the "If all your Nobles are either decadent or incompetent or corrupt or evil, and all your religious authorities are cruel and secretly the bad guys," it is not only boring because it is an exact duplicate of real life, it is also depressing. I don't play game to get depressed, I play them to have fun and garner a small measure of happiness in an otherwise sad world where authority figure is all to often a synonym for criminal.
ReplyDeleteYours is a slight exaggeration, but let's figure you're mostly right, and today way too much of the political class (religious leaders today are mostly irrelevant, but it's true to them too) are hopelessly corrupt, self-serving and decadent.
DeleteHave you thought about how or why that happened?
It wasn't by accident. It was a product of a post-modernist world that declared "All Authority is Illegitimate"! This meant that:
a) a bunch of illegitimate people got into Authority thinking that's where they belonged
b) people who could otherwise have been good either didn't get into positions of Authority or if they did it was with no true belief as to the power of Hierarchy to do GOOD, and thus encouraged the decline.
I saw your video and I agree with your statement in most of its entirety, and yes, I do agree that post-modernism is a dead horse at this point and not very much fun.
ReplyDeleteIf you are interested, feel free to check out my new blog I made today, I just posted an article about the genre of Medieval Fantasy and how I viewed it when I was young.
Post-modernism came out of the 70s, right? Can't get much more D&D than that.
ReplyDelete