Hello!
Let me share with you my scenario inspired by the TV series Sparcatus: Blood & Sand / Gods of the Arena.
http://www.4shared.com/office/pBC7C0L3/Burning_Ludus_EN.html
I’m introducing a new emotional attribute called Primal.
I hope you like it.
I await your feedback.
If you want to upload it to the wiki … excellent!
Replies: 0
Views: 54
:sad:
Not even one reply!
Is that bad?
You’ll probably get better feedback from someone who liked the show, but…
It disturbs me that you chose the name of Spartacus, yet enshrined slavery (and specifically, the lesser significance of a slave’s life) as part of the natural working of the world. You describe Primal as pertaining to “the extent of sex and violence the character has been exposed to,” and apparently the death of a slave is less violent than the death of a citizen? Is that because citizens have more blood or extra organs that slaves lack?
Tridents are statted up as just plain better than spears, so why does anyone ever use regular spears? It’s not as if Rome is too poor to afford the extra pokey bits, yet her soldiers carry the inferior spear rather than the superior trident. (In this world, tridents are heavier without being more effective, which is why anyone who gets to pick grabs a spear instead. But they are flashy and theatrical, which is why gladiators were forced to use them.)
The Long Flail is also worrisome. Yes, Add 3 is a serious penalty, but then again both Power 4 and VA 3 (!!!) are serious advantages. No armor in the Roman world could stand against that.
Is that in the TV series the slaves were worthless, even to the other slaves.
They were killed almost for fun. Killing an ordinary citizen had consequences.
Tridents are statted up as just plain better than spears, so why does anyone ever use regular spears? It’s not as if Rome is too poor to afford the extra pokey bits, yet her soldiers carry the inferior spear rather than the superior trident. (In this world, tridents are heavier without being more effective, which is why anyone who gets to pick grabs a spear instead. But they are flashy and theatrical, which is why gladiators were forced to use them.)
You said it, the gladiators would be forced to use it, even unknowingly use or requiring special training. So knowing how to use a spear does not mean knowing how to use a trident.
The Long Flail is also worrisome. Yes, Add 3 is a serious penalty, but then again both Power 4 and VA 3 (!!!) are serious advantages. No armor in the Roman world could stand against that.
Honestly … I got it from here: http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?3926-Stats-for-the-Flail&p=36966#post36966
Thx
Gracias por tus comentarios!
There is an important difference between what the other characters think and what the rules say. If someone steals in a movie, that doesn’t mean the movie is pro-theft. On the other hand, writing rules that say slaves mean less than real humans is kinda like listening to the commentary and hearing the director come on and say “Yeah, we had like a hundred slaves dying here, but it’s no big deal really. Next episode, a citizen gets old and dies in bed. That was really brutal, hard to film.”
As I said, I dislike the show so I’m hardly the best person to be discussing this with. I didn’t get the impression that the show itself thought slaves’ lives were worth less than anyone else’s. Obviously, the characters did, and I don’t know that the show made any particularly nuanced or impressive efforts to grapple with that question. But here’s your chance to do better: Are you gonna make a game in which slaves’ lives are worth less? And what do you want your game to say about that?
(I’m not saying you shouldn’t, by the way. There are some really interesting things you could say about that. I didn’t get the impression that you were really trying to, though…)
You said it, the gladiators would be forced to use it, even unknowingly use or requiring special training. So knowing how to use a spear does not mean knowing how to use a trident.
…So what? Let’s take your stat line as reflecting the real world, right? I’m a Roman legate. Because I am a Roman legate, I like to watch the games. After watching thousands of fights, I notice that tridents seem to beat spears most of the time (which they would, because by your stat line they are better.) Finally, after a few years of mulling this over, I go in to the camp one morning and start to bellow. “SPEARS DOWN!” I bellow. “THIS IS YOUR TRIDENT! THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT BUT THIS ONE IS YOURS!” The next year, my trident-trained legion beats the other, spear-using legions in the interlegion sparring contests. The year after, everyone’s using tridents. The rest is history.
If it’s actually harder to use, make it add an obstacle penalty to actions or something. But honestly, I’d suggest just using the Short Spear stats.
Honestly … I got it from here: http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?3926-Stats-for-the-Flail&p=36966#post36966
Err… Norwood’s Fantasy Footman’s Flail is the closest, but you boosted the VA. It’s hard to say how serious a disadvantage Add 3 will be in that context… Normally I would say it kills the weapon, but this thing is brutal enough even on an Incidental (especially with the huge VA meaning there’s no reason not to put your Great Strike bonus into Power) that it might still be troublesome. Try it out, though. I don’t think a situation where unrealistically brutal flails dominate the battlefield is going to wreck a S: B&S game, just make it a little more metal. (In contrast, a situation where picking up a spear instead of a trident is the equivalent of trading your Lexus for a Yugo… Well, that’s thematically weirder.)
Umm … I don’t think he’s trying to say that slaves’ lives actually are worthless. Nor that the director of the Spartacus series thinks that slaves’ lives are worthless. The point here is that in ancient Roman times, the prevalent worldview was that slaves lives were worthless. That is what people believed. The OP is trying to make a campaign setting that reflects this worldview. I don’t see anything wrong with that. This is a role-playing game, after all.
In order to effectively RP in a campaign setting in which slavery is the norm, we have to get into a different head-space, one that is very different from our modern world-view in which slavery is viewed as an atrocity. If you really examine the evidence about what the prevalent world-views were a long time ago – and not just regarding slavery, but for all aspects of life and human nature – you’d find a medieval or ancient character to be almost completely incompatible with our current perceptions, and a real challenge to role-play. Most campaigns are RPed from an entirely modern worldview without anybody actually realizing it!
Or not. Roman slavery was actually considerably more diverse and humane than, for instance, American slavery. The phrase “white-collar slavery” doesn’t make any sense to us, but once you explained what “white-collar” meant a Roman would understand instantly: a citizen working as a tutor would be seen as unusual in a profession dominated by slaves, while slave-doctors and slave-clerks were familiar figures.
But, okay, here’s what tweaked me originally: There’s no allowance whatsoever for what kind of person or death we’re talking about. The ordering is non-Roman commoner, slave, gladiator or friend, citizen, noble. So the brutal back-alley stabbing of a beloved Athenian tutor is Ob 2, while watching a notoriously bellicose tribune of the 3rd Legion take an arrow through the eye in battle, dying painlessly and courageously as he would have wanted… That’s Ob 5.
We’re in agreement that a Roman would likely find the brutal back-alley stabbing of a beloved Roman tutor slightly more shocking than that of an Athenian slave. But either one would probably arouse the passions more strongly than the death of a soldier in battle, whatever his station in life.
(In a further oddity, let’s say I’ve hated the said tribune for as long as I’ve lived, on account of his many cruelties and humiliations. Let’s also say that I have a lifelong friend, we’ll call him “Dean,” who is a fine man, universally respected and loved for his many virtues. Watching this “Dean” die is an Ob 3 test. Watching the death of the hated tribune is far more upsetting because he is a noble: Ob 5. I can accept that many people have felt differently about the deaths of certain strangers on account of their social class (though I think the accounting given here radically misunderstands the nature of Roman slavery), but I don’t accept that the death of an anonymous stranger of high birth is radically more shocking than the death of a close friend.)
If I were to rewrite those bits of the table, I’d make the categories more like “A violent, but unsurprising death: a soldier, a gladiator, a sailor in a storm, etc.” “A surprising, but not shocking death: A traveler killed by bandits, slaves or laborers killed in an accident.” “A shocking death: A man of letters brutally stabbed, a friend killed in front of you.” I don’t, personally, buy into the idea that Romans considered noble deaths particularly affecting. We might find the deaths of politicians or movie stars more shocking than other deaths, but they lived in a time of lower life expectancies, when nobles died of the same bullshit that killed everybody else.
There are other quirks in the table. I suspect most of this is wording issues.
-“Seeing a violent death” is Ob 1. I can only assume this is meant as a catchall, but since slaves, citizens, and nobles are listed separately, the only folks I can see this applying to are freedmen (who, I would think, should rank above rather than below slaves) and non-Romans who are neither slaves nor nobles.
-Killing seems to trigger a wide variety of different tests. If I kill a gladiator, I will log an Ob 3 test (for killing a slave, and most gladiators were slaves), an Ob 4 test (for killing a gladiator), either an Ob 3 or an Ob 4 test (depending on whether the killing was done in the arena or if it was a murder), and an Ob 5 test (for causing a Mortal wound.) That seems like a malfunction: I can’t really be meant to log four tests just for that (unless Primal is meant to skyrocket). But if I only log the highest-Ob test, why bother with all the “Killing X” entries? There are only two that matter: Killing a noble is Ob 6, everything else falls under “causing a Mortal wound,” Ob 5.
-Similarly, there are conflicting Obs for killing friends. “Killing your friend under orders” is Ob 5, while “killing anyone who was your friend” is Ob 7. In this case, I suspect the first entry is perhaps meant to read “Being ordered to kill your friend,” with the higher Ob reserved for if you do the deed?
-What is the difference between “coercing someone to have unwanted sex” and “committing rape?” My lifelong habit of not coercing anyone to have sex has made it very easy for me to achieve my life goal of not being a rapist.
-I think the Ob 9 entry for “carrying out a conspiracy that seeks to end the life of 2 or more people” needs more clarification. I suspect possibly it lost something in translation; I’m guessing there’s supposed to be an element of treachery or betrayal? The wording as it stands means that if you and I are neighbors and we make a plan for self-defense from burglars, carrying it out earns us this Ob 9 test.
I like these suggested changes better than the old ones for sure.
I agree that noble deaths would more or less have just been taken in stride. But they probably would have been felt more by the masses than the death of some nameless slave in the pits. Witnessing a citizen get murdered in the streets would also have been more shocking than seeing a slave die in the arena. I think this was the general point the OP was trying to get at, or at least, that’s how I understood it.
I dunno why you chose my name for the murdered guy example though. What did I ever do to you? O.O
Thank you both, I read all your comments.
Believe me that everything zabieru said part of the series.
I could get a quote scenes from examples, but not much good if you did not see the entire show.
Death between gladiators, even among friends, not affected, so were their lives.
I’m just reflecting what I see in the series, the setting does not work if you do not like the show.
Slaves in the show are absolutely worthless, the characters have sex with all and all kill each other. ALL are highly individualistic behavior, only care about them.
Maybe I should have noticed this in some way, obliged not to take another emotionally related beliefs.