21 KiB
Rationalist RPG: Shepherds in the Frost
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Author: u/trekie140 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4k3jk7/rationalist_rpg_shepherds_in_the_frost/
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Score: 12
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Created: 2016-05-19T17:15:49
Post:
First, some background. Skip to this paragraph to get to the actual setting. Dogs in the Vineyard is a tabletop RPG where the players are traveling pseudo-Mormon priests in the old west that protect communities of The Faithful from Sin and Demonic Influence, and have been granted the same authority and autonomy as Judge Dredd to do so. It's an interesting game about the ties that bind people together, the strife that threatens to break them apart, and the uncertainty of what is the right thing to do in a socially conservative culture. It's also very easy to adapt to different settings.
This idea started off as a post-apocalypse setting for the game where instead of preserving your religion, you're preserving science and knowledge. Partway through I realized my premise had basically become, "What if LessWrong survived the apocalypse and tried to rebuild civilization?". Since I've never heard of a rational roleplaying game before, I thought I'd put it here for you all to see. Keep in mind that I'm purposefully leaving much of the setting ambiguous, like in the original game, so the players can develop the specifics as they go. Yes, the game is built to do that.
You play as the Shepherds, an organization dedicated to protecting humanity from Entropy by preaching Reason to all. This is the principle of Scholarship, that those who know better are responsible for those who don't. From the Shepherds Academy you travel to communities, delivering supplies and solving local problems with rationality whether the locals want you to or not. It is your duty to protect people from Fallacies and Entropy by instructing them in the errors of their ways and, if you deem it necessary, punishing them for the irrationality that endangers them and others.
There's no way I can recant all the rules here, but I think it's a brilliant system for generating drama and social problems so I'll focus on what I'm changing. Sins are now Fallacies, though they're defined more broadly than in reality. Fallacy refers to action taken for irrational reasons that results in the person who commits it having a false conception of reality. Demonic Attacks are now Entropic Disasters, events that disturb the community that might have happened anyway, but due to the prevalence of Fallacy result in the establishment of institutional bias in the form of False Doctrine.
Even though the supernatural may very well exist in the setting, although Reason demands it be studied rather than ritualized, I've replaced Sorcery with Zealotry and people possessed by Demons with Fanatics. As Demons are the ultimate enemy of The Faith in the default game, it only makes sense to replace them with the ultimate enemies of rational thought. I've substituted Nomads for The Mountain People, the Apocalypse for the Back East you've fled, and the Territorial Authority can easily be replaced by Local Authority. I'm not sure how to convert Ceremony, since it's explicitly religious in nature, but it's a minor part of the game. So, what do you think?
Comments:
u/CCC_037 [+4] (17 hours later)
...I think it sounds like you're taking an existing game and renaming concepts to fit the memes you associate with rationality, to be quite brutally honest.
Aside from said renaming, how does your proposed game really differ from the original?
u/trekie140 [+2] (21 hours later)
You are correct, renaming concepts to fit a different ideology is exactly what I'm doing. Dogs has a very specific structure to its design that's mean to facilitate a particular kind of game, changing that structure would change that experience, which I already find engaging. The difference this setting makes is that the characters exist in a different cultural context, so their beliefs and interactions take on a different flavor, and the nature of the conflicts they encounter is different. Considering the Values Dissonance of the default setting, I though some would find this more palatable.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (a day later)
Okay, so then you end up with a game that promotes memes associated with the idea of rationalism?
Aside from the promotion of said memes, is there any way in which your proposed RPG could be considered more "rational" than the original? (It looks - from the point of view of someone who knows nothing of the original RPG you're basing this off - like your proposed game will strongly encourage the idea of shooting irrational people in the face, which seems to me more cathartic than educational. I mean, that's fine if that's the sort of game you're going for...).
u/trekie140 [+1] (a day later)
No that's not what I'm going for, but I was similarly confused over the original game. The point of the game is to give the player characters authority and autonomy and allow them to decide how to use it when they're job is to protect people from subtle evils. That doesn't mean they have to follow the philosophy the NPCs expect them to serve, the point of the setting is to provide social context. It's a launching pad for character drama and moral choices.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
Okay, so, let me get this straight - in the original game, you have sorcerers and demon-possessed people wandering around, mixing in with ordinary people and being hard to tell apart; and the players, as people with the authority to shoot at Evil Things, wander around trying to spot any hidden Evil Things which they can then either shoot or turn to Good Things, right? And half the problem is that the Evil Things are good at hiding and pretending to be Good Things?
u/trekie140 [+2] (a day later)
Not quite, though that's certainly an option. The focus is on the social structure of the towns and the people within it. Evil Things don't infiltrate towns, they have to be invited in by the locals and always serve someone's agenda. It is only your philosophy that declares them Evil, people can invite them out of genuinely good intentions. The Faith teaches that Demons try to lead people who Sin astray by subtly encouraging cults, but I changed it to Fallacy leading to irrational responses to Entropy that catch on.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 days later)
It is only your philosophy that declares them Evil, people can invite them out of genuinely good intentions.
Okay, I can see that working - the end does not justify the means and all. And you could make quite an entertaining philosophical game by setting up a situation where the player's sympathies will be with the villain, at least at first. I can even see how rational-thinking type scenarios could work in the original game.
But "good" and "evil" don't map simply to "rational" and "irrational". It is quite possible to be rational and evil (Voldemort in HPMOR being a prime example); because "good" and "evil" are characterised mainly by empathy, while "rational" and "irrational" are characterised mainly by effectiveness.
u/trekie140 [+1] (2 days later)
I may not have explained this effectively, and I didn't get this impression from the game the first time I read it, but the philosophy your characters serve does not describe the metaphysics of the setting. The Faith preaches that committing Sin allows Demons to attack the town and turn women infertile, but that isn't necessarily true just because people believe it. Town creation merely describes the theological interpretation of the situation the town is in.
I didn't adequately explain that Reason basically preaches science and utilitarian humanism, where it is virtuous to preserve human life and teach things that accurately reflect reality. A Scholar is one who is responsible for teaching others what to believe and how to think, while a Shepherd passes judgment on people's decisions and what should be done in response. If Scholars are priests and monks, Shepherds are crusaders and witch hunters. But for science!
u/CCC_037 [+2] (3 days later)
Hmmm. Okay, so it's less a game about shooting demons and more a game about moral dilemmas, then. And... you're proposing a cult, that's come across the basic trappings of the rationality movement, and internalised them? So, from their point of view, the two greatest evils are bad premises (usually due to bad data) and bad logic, and the Shepherd basically has the authority to do anything he likes in order to weed out both bad data and bad logic?
...then the greatest threat to this civilisation is, surely, a Shepherd that's making a mistake. A Shepherd that takes fact A and fact B, reaches erroneous conclusion C, and then doesn't listen to anyone who tries to correct him because he is a Shepherd, he is therefore right, and he has the full authority to punish anyone who disagrees with him.
Following on from this, it seems that the obvious reaction of your average fellow, on meeting a Shepherd, is to agree with everything the Shepherd says and/or run away as quickly as possible...
u/trekie140 [+2] (3 days later)
Yep, that's pretty much exactly what I was going for. The risk of Shepherds going rogue might be why they travel in groups and often don't know each other before they set out. They most definitely are expected to enforce the rules of Reason for each other, and have undoubtably been warned against the possibility of succumbing to Fallacy themselves. Whenever you are uncertain about something, Scholarship demands you consult someone who knows better.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (3 days later)
Yeah, but how is a Shepherd supposed to know whether it's him going wrong, and not an entire community going wrong around him? And a group of Shepherds is just another type of (very small) community...
And, often, the Shepherd is going to be the ultimate immediately available authority on matters of Fallacy and/or other Doctrine - at least while out in the field.
So... I think that "shepherds going rogue" is almost inevitable... which is probably what you want, because it sets up all sorts of dilemmas for the players to have to deal with, I guess.
u/trekie140 [+2] (3 days later)
What better kind of dramatic role playing is there? Dogs is, to me, all about playing characters who serve a black and white morality with deliberate values dissonance having to make controversial decisions to protect their communities, why would Shepherds be any different just because they believe in science and rationality? It's even possible that Reason isn't completely rational due to the knowledge lost in the apocalypse, but I'm leaving that ambiguous.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (4 days later)
Alright, I can see how that could make an interesting and engaging post-apocalyptic roleplay centred around a cult founded on dressing itself up to look like rationality with little if any understanding of certain core principles, and with an underlying theme of moral dilemmas that need to be resolved. (It doesn't sound at all ambiguous to me that they've lost something important in the apocalypse).
u/trekie140 [+2] (4 minutes later)
If you're wondering what the "Frost" is, I don't know. There are no vineyards in the original game, it just seemed like an appropriate as a possible metaphor along the lines of the original. Also because I once considered building a town's history using The Quiet Year, which ends with the arrival of the "Frost Shepherds" during the time of greatest danger.
u/callmebrotherg [+6] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (an hour later)
You should probably know what your title means. The original game's title refers to the "Vineyard of the Lord," which is a running theme in Jewish, Christian, and Mormon scripture, starting with Isaiah but becoming most prominent in Mormon-exclusive scripture (the "allegory of the olive tree").
It wasn't just picked out because it sounded neat.
As for the rest of it: I like the initial idea, but the way it's being carried out is pretty heavy-handed. If this were Objectivism rather than Rationalism then it'd be Atlas Shrugged: The RPG.
Why is "Shepherd" being used? Why would (presumably nontheistic) aspiring rationalists use such explicitly religious terminology?
How are you going to represent the often complex causes of fanaticism? More than anything else, I'm worried that some issues are going to be given a very simplistic (and boring) treatment.
Where is the risk for bias among the Shepherds, or how does that come into play? One of the worst things for an aspiring rationalist to do is to forget about the "aspiring" part, or to think that any human can be get to a point where "aspiring" no longer needs to be appended.
u/trekie140 [+3] (5 hours later)
My rationale for why the Shepherds are so heavy handed is that I imagine them being as self righteous and determined as HJPEV, and considering all of civilization has collapsed and much of humanity is at risk of descending into barbarism I thought the heavy handedness of their methods would be considered acceptable or even necessary. The final step on the ladder in both settings is Hate and Murder, where people in the community start killing others and justify it with their beliefs. The Shepherds seek to stop this madness.
While the title does have a religious connotation, I thought it would make sense for the Shepherds to believe the apocalypse happened due to people acting irrational and rejecting the advice of those who knew better. Therefore, the principle of Scholarship (similar to Stewardship in the original game) demands they take action to protect and help those who don't know as they do and educate them as best they can. Each town has its own Scholar, who serves a role not unlike a priest.
If that seems unlike rationalists to you, then that could make for interesting roleplaying. Even in the original game, the point of the Faith is not tell the players the right thing to do, but to provide a cultural context for their actions and decisions. The Shepherds may very well be a religious order that happens to worship science and technology, but it's your choice for how your character views them. If a character is biased, then that would be represented on their character sheet under Traits and Relationships.
Looking at the way the game handles Demonic Possession, I thought it would work well for representing Fanaticism. Demons are purely non-physical in the default game and, aside from possession, don't have any special powers beyond what could be attributed to natural causes. Possession itself also has strict limitations that mean it can only happen to practitioners of False Doctrine, and must be intentionally triggered by the person about to be possessed or one of their leaders.
I think Fanatics can be modeled this way, since it supports both people choosing it of their own will and being pressured into it by others. It comes down to the GM to write and play the NPCs, though it can happen to the players too if they want. Of course, Demons/Fanatics are a completely optional tool for the GM to use. The town creation rules just provide structure to creating a situation for the players to enter, after that it's just character drama, moral choices, and problem solving that's completely player-driven.
u/callmebrotherg [+2] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (5 hours later)
I imagine them being as self righteous and determined as HJPEV
I was going to say, this sounds like some of the worst aspects of MoR. Right here you're describing something that was a turnoff even for a lot of people in the LW community. Notice how e.g. Alexander Wales' stuff is pretty pro-rational, but doesn't carry the self-righteousness.
While the title does have a religious connotation, I thought it would make sense for the Shepherds to believe the apocalypse happened due to people acting irrational and rejecting the advice of those who knew better.
I'm not saying, "Title is religious, therefore your version of the game must be religious." I'm saying, "Title does actually have meaning, so it isn't a point in your favor to make a title that just sounds deep but doesn't actually have an intended meaning."
I like the gist of things--feels like a proactive Canticle for Leibowitz, maybe--but the execution, like I say above, feels overly close to the Author Tract qualities of HPMOR. In other words, if you look at some of the most popular r!fic to come out after HPMOR, there are some qualities that they've left on the wayside, and this concept seems to be picking them up rather than passing them by.
(I'm also not sure whether this really counts as anything more than a reskin of a preexisting game, and if that's all that's needed for a "rational roleplaying game" then I'm pretty sure that some already exist.)
u/trekie140 [+3] (6 hours later)
By "rationalist RPG", I didn't mean that the game fits the principles of rationality or rational fiction, but appears to be made for rationalists to play. It places them in situations where they are expected to use their knowledge and reasoning abilities to make intelligent decisions with the best possible outcomes. I co-opted that aspect of HPMOR as a way to justify the players having the in-universe authority they do, since that authority is an essential element of the original game. It is a reskin in a different setting, which I thought would be of interest to this community.
u/callmebrotherg [+2] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (7 hours later)
If this doesn't fit the principles of rational fiction then it is probably best to save it for the Monday General Thread.
It places them in situations where they are expected to use their knowledge and reasoning abilities to make intelligent decisions with the best possible outcomes.
I mean, this can be applied to a host of games that nobody would expect to see on /r/rational.
u/trekie140 [+2] (12 hours later)
One thing I forgot to mention about the game is that the philosophy the players are expected to uphold is supposed to be controversial. The Faith explicitly advocates sexism and homophobia, which I admit turned me off the game at first. Eventually I realized the designers wanted players to get outside their own head when playing characters. You had to consider how someone's moral compass would be colored by growing up under strict social expectations, and the GM was explicitly advised to challenge the characters beliefs and allow the players to challenge social norms.
Dogs in the Vineyard, to me, is ultimately about being social conservatives facing challenges to their community and the ideals that hold it together. With Shepherds in the Frost, I want to deliver the opposite experience. The fundamental goal of science is to uncover the true and destroy the false. As Shepherds, you are the ultimate rebels against tradition. You look at the world and say, "this is wrong, we must do better or people will die", and try to change things. You are free from the judgement of any but yourself, but have the power to pass judgment on others. What will you do with it?
u/serge_cell [+2] (3 days later)
Who will guard the guardians? Assuming technological and organizational superiority Shepherds can keep their dominant position for some long (but not indefinite) period of time. However the question remain - what would prevent organization from fracturing? In the real history somehow similar authority (USSR, French Revolutionary Government) was kept from fracturing by hostile external environment, with potential or actual enemies always and obviously surpassing it both military and economically. If there is no external enemy, constantly repeating large scale outbreaks of rebellions could be the similar in scale threat. But that would change the role of Shepherds from evangelists and enforcers to kind of gendarmerie. Or author can invent some kind of wonder tech to keep Shepherds in shape.
u/trekie140 [+1] (3 days later)
Congratulations, you have created an interesting myth arc for a campaign. Like the default setting, many details are left ambiguous for the players to develop at they go. The Dogs duty is to fight injustice, Sin, and False Doctrine that can take the form of rebellion. There's the corrupt and decadent Back East the Faithful fled from to escape discrimination, but they are still under the governance of the Territorial Authority that doesn't condone the Dogs' actions.
I figure something similar can easily be worked into this setting. Communities outside the reach of the Shepherds Academy have collapsed or become dictatorships and theocracies. People's tendency to be Fallacious puts communities at risk of suffering the same fate. Many of the towns the Shepherds visit may already be like that, but they're allowed in as missionaries because the supplies, technology, and knowledge they bring are so valuable.