Mad props. This is one of the best quotes EVER.

1. It's fun and despite buying several rulebooks to play it it is still cheaper than clubbing

2. It lets me act out all my anti-social and criminal fantasies without harming anyone while still allowing me to interact socially unlike Grand Theft Auto

3. It indulges my imagination and creativity in creating or solving "criminal mind puzzles" as well as telling a story

4. I enjoy the setting and the rules in their current form (find out about new form in a month or two).

Style of play: well currently I am playing a professional decker who suddenly goblinized into a troll in 2050 and got fired from his job (Int 2 and Cha 2 and a whole bundle of rage).

Games I run tend to be a mix of straight, one off runs where the players are working together to solve a puzzle using their skills and gear (etc) and storyline driven episodes, eg:

1. Group's mage lived next to a hooker he regularly saw working near the Johnson's favorite meeting place. Her pimp would often come and beat and rape her so one day the mage finally got tired of it and chased the pimp off. He and the hooker started getting friendly but in the end it turned out they were both officers part of a LS sting to get the Johnson

2. Group finishes a run and Johnson gives them all a vacation to a fancy resort in Haiti as a reward and a way to lay low for a while. Group hangs out on beach for a couple of days and the face starts falling in love with Johnson. Suddenly Johnson gets gunned down in the local market. Turns out he had another group operating down there and he brought the group as a backup. Johnson's boss was actually taking money from Aztechnology to give away shadow ops in Carribean so he set up Johnson to take the fall because corp was onto him

I really don't know how to describe my style of play so I hope this helps

That's a really neat narrow definition which conventional society doesn't seem to limit itself to when discussing horror. I really don't see how it relates to horror, in general.

You're welcome.

Hear Hear.

These are many of the same reasons why I enjoy both playing and running SR myself.

For my campaigns I usually write a background story outline, much of which never actually comes up during a given session but does provide the colour for various settings & personalities that the PCs meet. Most of my major NPCs have fairly extensive backgrounds written up and even notes on interactions with other characters (both player & non player). For me, the story has to be there first. Political and corporate intrigue are what usually drives the missions I set up (I love a good spy thriller).

I find the one difficult part (and rewarding challenge) of running an adventure is staying that couple of steps ahead of the player team. Even when you think you have every base covered, along comes a curveball that you must adapt to without sacificing the basic theme of the mission/campaign

Not really. What it comes down to is that fact that we cannot be 100% certain of anything. There is nothing wrong with this. We can aproach very close to 100% certainty in many cases. But, no matter how close we aproach complete certainity we should never forget that we could be mistaken. To do so invites tragedy.

One of the most fun things about existiantialism is the ability to play around with multiple levels of "reality".

However, I think that I would run if I personally saw Ubyr even if I am not in the fantasy universe of Earthdawn.


I agree with Crusher Bob on this one....... It is okay to eat the Irish.....

Once you slap a label on someone he or she becomes that label. Those you label cease to be people in your eyes. You cease to treat them like people and instead treat them like a label. Usually, you get back what you give. If you treat people with respect you'll usually get respect in return. If you treat people like animals, they will act like animals toward you.

Has anyone actually tried being nice to the Horrors? Some of them wouldn't care, but others may apreciate a little kindness.

<cough> Um. This is /not/ to imply that Horrors in general are open to the finer emotions of Name-givers or that this is ought but the very rarest (nearly unique) happenstance, but there is a single reference of a Horror shedding a tear (in sorrow or remorse) and a single reference to one that might possess something that could be construed as love (although that is open to considerable debate, other Horrors have claimed as much with less to show for it).

What were those instances? Did one of the involve a certain white haired elf?

I don't think the second statement supports the argument used in the first; if you are (quite sensibly) refining your position, that's great. If you intend to support the old position, then you have to deal with a relentless regress-argument attack against anything with "very close to 100% certainty". If such an attack can be thwarted, then perhaps an attack against definitions of evil can also be thwarted.

Don't be silly. It's perfectly within the realm of human capability--and within my capability--to use labels as incomplete descriptors of a particular object or class of objects. Indeed, without labeling, it is extremely difficult to communicate to someone else what properties are possessed by an entity. If I label someone "nice", I don't cease to remember that they eat lunch, like other human beings (and might get upset if I eat theirs). If I label someone "Islamic", it doesn't mean that I cease to think that they need oxygen.

A label provides a means of classification, but it doesn't preclude other classifications, and it certainly doesn't necessitate dehumaniziation.

You, on the other hand, are an anti-labelist. Don't you feel threatened and dehumanized, and haven't you become that label to me?

Weeeelllll...there was the Weeping Stone of Ta'bel, and the Dark Warrior. No Aina. None. Zippo.

While I agree that he's oversimplifying, that's a nice straw man you've built there.

~J

Regress argument is thwarted by "I don't know but it seems to work" in this situation. "I don't know" is okay because one isn't seeking absolute certainty. "That is the way it worked before so it will probably work that way again" is okay because one isn't seeking absolute certainty.

Certainty can be converted to a mathmatical term. The limit as Experience aproaches infinity of Certainty is 100%. However, one can never reach infinity in the mathmatical sense. Infinity isn't an integer. Inifinity is a state of being for variable. It is that state of increasing without bounds.

If you throw a ball into the air 100 times and it falls back to the ground each time, you can be fairly certain that it will always fall to the ground when thrown in similar conditions. If you throw it in the same conditions 1000 times you can be even more certain. However, there is always a chance that gravity will fail. To be 100% certain you much throw the ball and infinite number of times. That logically impossible. Throwing it 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times will bring you no closer to infinity than throwing it once will. Of course, I could be wrong. Experience suggests that I am not.

The mistake is the Rationalists is that they believed that absolute knowledge is necessary. In fact, people function very well without absolute knowledge.
Empiricism is the only functional philosophy when it comes to dealing with the physical world. Senses can't be absolutly trusted, but they seem to work well enough.


The problem of defining evil is that evil is not a physical concept. It is, depending on your perspective, emotional, intellectual, religious,, or metaphysical. For that reason, empirical observation does diddly-squat toward defining evil. To define evil, you either have to hit psychology, sociology, metaphysics, or theology. I prefer metaphysics. This is, unfortunatly, where one hits the brick wall of knowledge.
With theology you get the dogmatic definition of evil. With psychology and sociology you get the crackerjack-of-the-week pseudo-emperical peace&love or personal policital agenda definition of evil.

Of course, I am oversimplifying. Also, I meant less flattering labels such as murder, paedophile, in-sync fan, prisoner #1173245, terrorist, and etcetera.
Persons are smart. People are stupid stampeding cattle who tend toward a "kill the monster with fire" mentality. Take the phrase "Horrors are evil", and replace "Horrors" with "Jews". What do you have? A blatent invitation to invoke the Godwin's law, that is what you have.

And yes, "stupid stampeding cattle who tend toward a "kill the monster with fire" mentaity" is a negative label. I really don't like crowds.


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Weeping Stone of Ta'bel and Dark Warrier, I will have to look into those. Thanks, AH.

As for Aina.....The difference between love and obsession is a restraining order.

Step one: slap a label on someone.
Step two: they are that label.
Step three: they cease to become people.
Step four: only the label remains.

Sounds very Zen, or something.

If labels contained lots of extra information--for example, that the target was a person--then #3 wouldn't apply, and treating the person like a label might not be a problem.

I still don't see any straw here.

It is an argument-from-absurdity, but not every argument-from-absurdity is a straw man argument.

(Added in edit: my whole point was that hyzmarca was oversimplifying, which is where the absurdity came from, and he's now said as much, so that's pretty much closed. Except he didn't unsimplify much, so now I'm not sure what the reasoning is.)

Agreed.

Also, agreed. Added in edit: empiricism and existentialism are not at all the same thing, however!

Eh, I suppose as a simplified approximation, this is okay.

The term is used by us, though, in the physical world. So let's think for a minute about how terms acquire meaning. Suppose there is a term--let's call it "weme"--that is in use in a given population. What meaning does the term have? Well, that depends entirely on how it is used; there's nothing special about that string of four letters that gives it inherent power over the universe. Some groups might use "weme" to mean motherly love, and others to mean the metaphysical essence of the group as an individual, and others to mean a really rotten day. The word "weme" is just a tool to convey a concept.

So the question is, what concept are you trying to convey, and is use of the word "evil" actually going to convey that concept? You have to be careful here, because if your definition strays too far from the societally accepted definition, then you won't be communicating with others in that society.

You can argue for one particular definition, but first, why not use the dictionary definition? "Which one?" Any one that fits--preferably as many as possible that make sense. That's how you can be understood while using the term.

This isn't, "Evil is what I define it to be, nothing more or nothing less." There's a set of things that go into the definition of evil; some are hard to argue for ("morally wrong") and some are easy to argue for ("injurious"). If one can argue that Horrors fit the description of the easily arguable definitions of evil, then in a very communicable sense, Horrors are evil.

You may then need some clarification to refine the idea of evil, but not nearly so much as if you declare "evil" to be "whatever the heck I want". In that case, you haven't really communicated anything by using the term.

Ah, I remember the Dark Warrior From Harlequin's Back. I havn't had much of an opertuninty to studie earthdawn, so I hadn't heard the other.

Add also, the assumption of a common frame of reference, absolutely required per:

If you're trying to communicate a concept to me and you call someone "nice", how do you know my "nice" means the same as your "nice"? and if you don't, how are you communicating anything?

That's not something I can argue against without reference to an alternate logic system ... and I've learned not to do that. (ie. It is what it is because this is what I've defined it to be.) Internally, it's consistent.

I keep asking people to attack anything I come up with in just that way. It's easy to slip from a "very close to 100% certainty" pov to equating it with certainty: at which point suddenly you're no longer debating and examining the argument with the intent of discovering its internal weaknesses and finding out how to resolve them; you've started defending the argument against all comers regardless -- and if hit by something which has the potential to undermine it, it's the attack (and sometimes attacker) that starts getting counterattacked.

In fact, I'd suggest that perceiving debate and examination as an attack might be one of the first signs that a held position has slipped from a "very close to 100% certainty" to an a priori tenet of faith.

And on that note:

There is no certainty in mathematics. Ask any pure mathematician

The difference between love and obsession is the focus of the love and the degree of one's own self-certainty. For whom is the true concern? for the loved one's well-being, or for one's own? Even if you have the other's "best interests" at heart, how far are you willing to go to demonstrate that you're the only one who can really know what's best for them?

I think it's fair to say that everyone who is using this board is operating under this assumption, since without that assumption there isn't much point trying to communicate with each other in words. It is certainly an assumption, but it's not "straw" (in the "I am constructing a straw man" sense) because I am not building up a set of assumptions that the original poster doesn't share so that I can argue against those assumptions instead of the poster's actual statements.

I know this because we have a shared experience of using the English language, and "nice" is a very common English word. Thus, it's very likely that we use "nice" in similar ways. There are, of course, ways to detect when this is not the case (which is why irony works, for example).

The attack goes like this: how do you know how certain you are? How do you know that? How do you know that? How do you know that? How do you know that? (Repeat ad infinitum.) It's quite tricky to get out of this without having to admit at some point that one is completely uncertain, and then having to conclude that one is completely uncertain about everything. I don't think it's impossible, but the same strategy that leads one out of that trap in the case of deciding whether there is a chair in the room also, I believe, leads one out when talking about definitions of evil.

Actually, people who know me would tell you that it's highly unlikely that we'd be using this word in the same way -- pulled it specifically from your examples btw -- and that's basing it upon exactly the same English language definition, but a completely different world understanding.

It's not entirely clear to me what you mean by this, and how that impacts the scenario I set out. You'll have to be more explicit if you want me to continue the discussion.

I agree that it's not a personal failing, but that doesn't mean that it's trivial to explain in a satisfactory manner why this uncertainty doesn't cascade into complete uncertainty about everything. I think it's explicable, but I've not figured out a way to make it easily explicable.

If you use "nice" in a different way than I do because you think that different things are nice than I do because you have a different understanding of the world than I do, that's fine. To some extent, your usage will let me infer something about your understanding of the world. If your usage departs too drastically from the English language definition, or your experience and motivations are too drastically different from mine, then we may have difficulty communicating. However, I think we're doing a sort-of-okay job communicating so far. At least, had we not shared enough word-meanings, our conversation would have been very unlikely to proceed in this manner (with points and counterpoints, and use of language that is not only valid English, but also related topically).

But my point wasn't to focus on the word "nice". Rather, word-usage is neither a matter of universals nor a matter of personal choice--correct word usage is determined by the utility for transmitting information within a societal context. My point was also that words, used as labels, are always incomplete descriptors of those things they label, and confusion between object and label is rare/minor in most cases (although it can be made severe and common). Therefore, firstly, one cannot simply define evil to mean whatever one wants (e.g. "a characteristic that horrors do not have"), nor does labeling something as "evil" (or anything else) necessitate a response based solely on the basis of that label.

That said, to get back to the original point, an overwhelming number of horrors, as presented in ED, possess traits and commit acts that are well-described by the customary definition of evil. Therefore, "Horrors are evil" (to a high but not infinite degree of confidence).

It isn't a trap because it's the logical conclusion. I am no more certain of the existence of a chair in the room (or of this discussion, or of my existence or perception) than of anything else.

~J

Ahem.

I think you're underestimating guilt and attachment, being so liberal with the word "evil" as to render its meaning indistiguishable from any other pejorative ("bad", "mean", "harsh", etc.), and/or taking a hypothetical view that is short-sighted even for a typical child.

Perhaps a myopically sociopathic child would think their parents were evil; there's also some small chance that a relatively normal child would recognize it if they had parents widely regarded as evil. I do not think punished children typically regard their parents as evil, however; despite disliking the punishment, they can nonetheless distinguish between their parents' behavor and "evil" behavior (or pretend to due to emotional attachment even if there is, sadly, no difference).

However, since we're off topic I'll stop there. (With only the statement that I consider the other examples almost as bad.)