From: Alex Ferguson (alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Sat 16 Jul 1994 - 00:22:09 EEST
Barron Chugg:
> There seems to be a difference of perspective here that I'd like to
> comment on. I can certainly postulate a culture where men's and women's
> roles are seperate, but equal (note: charged language). I can even retool
> Western society to make men and women equal in "power" (not easy, but
> doable).
But this is quite evidently not the case for the Gloranthan West, where the question isn't whether the genders are equal, but how unequal, and how separate they are.
> [...] So Sandy (and I) want women to have a wider choice of
> roles so that female characters can run in any game I choose to GM (without
> having everyone of them be some weird outcast). Reasonable culturally?
> Maybe not, but it plays better, and that is my bottom line.
I don't think Gameability should be the a priori overriding consideration in deciding questions of background. I'd rather decide on what a particular region "should" be like on the grounds internal and inspirational evidence, and look for the "natural" sources of, and hooks for, adventuring afterwards, or at least not at an "early" stage of development. Advocates of the "sauce", as opposed to the "gravy" school of world design may disagree at their leisure. This doesn't preclude the taking of certain liberties with a region for the sake of The Game, on either an Official or an ad hoc basis, though.
> I have seen (well, read descriptions of) games where all the characters
> must be male (regardless of the gender of the player). This might work in
> a _very_ limited arena, but I don't think it is a good policy at all. I'm
> not flaming you, just pointing out a difference in perspective.
Please note that I'm not, as you seem to have inferred, trying to denigrate "traditional" female roles. I'm just pointing out that Sandy is on the one hand advocating that Loskalmi women be admitted in the "male" castes, and hence do "male" things in society, telling us this follows from Loskalm's egalitarianism; while on the other, telling us that the sharp gender distinctions of G:G don't contradict the Greggly maxim that women have "important" roles in all Gloranthan societies.
Elias:
> > I find it especially hard to believe that a living hero
> >is going to meekly turn into an abstract construct of rituals as
> >the price of apotheosis.
> I guess this is the main place where the question of whether the god is a
> free entity comes up. I tend to believe that as the hero becomes more and
> more powerful and well known they tend to fall into more and more of a
> role.
Absolutely. See the "WILL" business in the old HQ quasi-rules. As you become a more and more important hero, your free will is progessively eroded, your actions curtailed. Eventually your "apotheosis" comes about whether you intend it or not: you simply get "stuck" on the her/godplane, whether you want it or not.
> I'd think of the MM as the zeroth order approximation to the mythology of
> Glorantha.
To inject a note of domain-theoretical nerdishness (or is that geekery? I'm never quite sure), I'd say a 1st approx., the 0th one being a blank sheet of paper. But it's not as if it's a very good one, and certainly not a "safe" one, in any obvious sense.
> The error is not so much in using the framework as confusing it with
> absolute truth. I use physics all the time that is at best a weak
> approximation to what is really happening.
But at least in such cases, the physics would at least be correct (one hopes) for an "idealised" situation. For the Monomyth, it's not clear that the "ideal" it describes is anything other than a cobbled-together ad hockery.
Alex.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:35:57 EEST