>souls exist in the game
>this upsets some people
I really enjoy the idea of souls as a tangible concept in a fantasy setting, and I was wondering if there were any of people who didn't like souls in their games to explain why.
I sort of get the feeling that it's a matter similar to deities and alignment, where people don't like those existing in a game because they go against their personal beliefs, even if the form they take in the game is rather different than the concepts are in reality.
OP I don't know who you met or what happened to lead to this story but you sound like you play with some serious faggots if they even have to stop and say "wait no I don't appreciate the idea of souls", Jesus.
My personal distaste for religion in games is that "Kill God" is way overused.
Souls, I could get behind, but I can't help but feel it's just another twenty feet of track tacked onto the "Kill God" rail.
>>46220312
So much this. If anyone has to take a dump on the your game to force their theological belief, then you just tell them two things:
1) Shut up and enjoy the game
and if that fails
2) Fuck off, we're playing a game here
>>46220312
I play often at my local store with random people, and there's a lot of different viewpoints that come into play with random people.
And, one extremely minor opinion about some largely insignificant minutia within a roleplaying game hardly condemns anyone.
>>46220352
Not necessarily. You can have souls but no deity. Just a big ol' wheel of reincarnation and the universe subtly dishing out retribution.
I don't mind souls existing, but for the most part I prefer not to know about it. I like it when the afterlife is a mystery-- a mystery I have no problem discoverin either way, either, but I don't want to be level one and know what will happen when my character dies, I want to find out once it actually happens.
As an atheist, I am constantly annoyed by the actions of atheists.
And I always have souls in my fantasy games.
>Paladins are seen as badass
>Their power source is literally the power of friendship/love/belief/hapiness
>But souls are a no-go
Yeah no, it's fantasy, do whatever the fuck you want as long as it's consistent.
>>46220271
are you sure your friends aren't secretly demons in disguise?
>>46220271
i have an entire setting that revolves around the use of souls in magitech.
>>46220352
Grow an imagination.
Item A doesn't relate to item B if you don't want it to.
Souls don't bother me as such, but they immediately raise some questions for me that a lot of settings don't answer or answer unsatisfyingly.
Like, which one is the seat of consciousness? Is the soul just an organ that secretes (certain) emotions / "the will to live", or is the brain just a fatty conduit through which the soul "transmits" itself and contains no data?
Some settings try to go for an answer that cuts both ways, but that raises even more questions, or produces contradictory results. Like, D&D has the soul as the seat of consciousness, your soul contains your identity (as in the case of the Magic Jar)--but then it turns around and gives identity to things that demonstrably don't have souls, or has things like blunt-trauma induced amnesia (which makes no sense if the soul is where all your memory is).
Other settings like WoD or Shadowrun go wholehog on the first one, having your "soul" just be a battery, or a place where your virtues are stored, and not much else. This is internally consistent at least, but kind of defeats the purpose of having a soul to begin with for a lot of people.
I'm not saying the metaphysics of the soul should be common knowledge for characters or players, but the setting writers making a visible effort to think about it is nice.
>>46222758
My only issue is that the Christian/Egyptian idea of a soul appears in pretty much every fantasy setting. So it's kind of a cliche.
Otherwise it's fine.
>>46220271
>I sort of get the feeling that it's a matter similar to deities and alignment, where people don't like those existing in a game because they go against their personal beliefs, even if the form they take in the game is rather different than the concepts are in reality.
Yeah, nah. Your peers are cunts.
>>46223061
These are awesome points. Bravo for raising them.
In my games, I will have the soul as the seat of consciousness. Someone sells their soul, and they immediately teleport into a demon's gullet to be digested eternally. Meanwhile, their body and mind become well-compensated automata. Or, perhaps, automata operated by the demon.
It's like putting on the head of Vecna. Or getting a brain transplant to raise your INT.
>>46223061
I don't know, head-trauma still makes sense to me even if the soul is the seat of consciousness. If the soul projects itself through the brain, then it makes sense that fucking with the brain fucks with the projection. The memories and whatnot ate still intact, the body just can't access them.
Although I suppose the model in my head that makes that work is of the soul being like the body's hard-drive and the brain being like it's processors. You could certainly have it work differently.
>>46223061
In my setting, it it a fuzzy mixed bag.
Memory storage is the function of the mind and experience absorption is the function of the soul.
There is overlap and a disembodied soul can vary from confused to clear like Bootstrap Bill, whereas a soulless body might access memories if the one accessing is familiar with the filing system, but emotional memories would be lost.
Not a lot of practical application for use in game, but I've thought of it.
>>46220271
The English word soul came from and developed from the word 'sole' actually. Take this unrecognized etymological assertion of mine, please.
As in, "I am a human sole" in the sense of a Unique individual.
More on Uniques, I dunno consider Angband the game a little bit as to the matter of what a Unique may be.
"I am a human sole" it was said and somebody wrote it down as "human soul."
The word for soul in the Bible goes with 'breath' the person's soul is 'in there' during the breathing part of life and maybe before that but not much after the end of breathing.
>>46223239
>Christian/Egyptian idea of a soul
I always forget that Plotinus was Egyptian.
>>46220271
Eh, depends on the type of setting and what you are going for. If you are going for some sort of gritty, realistic stuff I would find souls to just be strange outside of some magic ritual of mind transference. If you are going for gods exist for a fact and afterlives are a known thing than go for it.
>>46223061
Particulary agreeable to your last phrase, it is 'nice' for setting writers to think about these things.
I do suspect that there is some real, actual benefit to having fantasy-world software writers work some metaphysical concepts,
like as it were the benefit of an 'exercise' but a conceptual exercise.
>>46223365
Note Tolkien's elves and humans have a deep difference. When will the game program get with that?
>>46223061
>I'm not saying the metaphysics of the soul should be common knowledge for characters or players
I have a player who is in school to become a Jesuit priest, it can be a bit annoying at times, but at others very amusing.
>>46223942
and I am to go look up Plotinus,
also though culturally-ancient Egypt was a cultural environment where a lot of our sense of religious 'service' comes from. While, everyone there was a bound servant or slave - some laboring, some dressed up (under command) priests and even the emporer Phoroah was bound to do the duty of adjudicating between the various claims and needs of national agency/temples.
Plotinus you would have been talking about will be later than the comment I made.
>>46224056
This might be the general type of conceptual exercise I was referring to.
btw Protestant not Catholic but Catholic thinkers whether they fail or pass labor with reason and are accustomed to examine reasoning when it is done. Sometimes bugs that come up in reasoning processes can be debugged or else a whole chain can be rewritten but if you do not have reason you can't modify the reasoning.
>>46224136
Phoroah: I made a typao
If I would check my material with more discipline I could avoid typaos.
>>46223942
I did go look up Plotinus on Wikipedia and thank you that was refreshing.
>>46220271
It may not be the fact that souls are depicted that your players are objecting to but the manner in which they are depicted.
If we look at Ghostbusters for example, the depiction of ghosts in that setting has some disturbing implications if you really think about it.
>>46220271
>play fantasy game
>get upset because there's fantasy things
shiggy diggy
>>46223365
For me the soul isn't eaten, but as the body is alive can be remote controlled by the now damned individual from within hell, and as they are using the body as their sensory input can kinda forget they are already in hell
>>46220271
>TG, what do you have to say about my very specific problem that happens because I play with retards? Explain yourselves!
Just play with normal people who don't get butthurt about FICTION because of their real world beliefs. The whole premise of a fantasy setting is that it features things that the real world doesn't, you might as well be upset about dragons or elves because those are make belief too.
If you played D&D with someone who got upset by killing because he personally isn't a murderer you'd tell him to give it a try and start with himself, this is basically the same situation.
>>46224421
Such as?
>>46220271
I could see the argument that it's less mysterious if you can hold a soul, but I dunno. I like the concept in itself and maybe limit manipulation of souls to very powerful entities do it doesn't feel cheap. Though I mean if one of those entities sticks a soul in a magic bottle then anyone can handle the bottle.
>>46223239
>My only issue is that the Christian/Egyptian idea of a soul appears in pretty much every fantasy setting. So it's kind of a cliche.
I dunno about that, AD&D's take on souls doesn't really fit either of those, even if people within the individual settings thought that something else happened.
>>46220271
Interesting concepts of souls you could mention, universalism, your soul is just energy when that energy is used again the components that were once one person could comprise multiple different living things throughout different spaces in time. Memories and emotions leach out into the universe changing the feel of energy in that area or beloved objects.
Or go the way Ink used souls, depending on who you were in life and what forces were pulling your strings, if any, you become either an estranged lost spirit, or a helpful positive force, or a manipulative negative force.
Or elder scrolls style, your soul is generally eternal, but unless you're sworn to a daedric realm or have some serious mojo magic you lose all your Memories as you live out whatever afterlife you believed in, while your soul is recycled them reincarnated.
>>46220271
I don't believe in souls, but those people are retarded.
>>46220271
>where people don't like those existing in a game because they go against their personal beliefs
That is silly, lots of atheists love playing paladins.
>>46228781
I'm agnostic as fuck and I'd play the fuck out of a Paladin.
And while I don't support dogmatic, totalitarian regimes I'm enjoying the fuck out of Only War.
And while I'm far from anything you'd call an anarchist I'm enthused as fuck about Nomads in Infinity.
It's almost like people can differentiate between fantasy and reality, playing by a setting's own narrative rules while maintaining their own separate philosophies and ideals outside of it.
>>46220271
I personally like the idea of a person BEING a soul who HAS a body. Neurons firing off in the brain is mostly just a manifestation of greater metaphysical things going on.
That said, I've played games with people (actually, one game with one person) who actually threw a bitchfit when the DM said that divine magic came from gods. The idea was that a person is attuned and directly connected to a god spiritually, and this basically gave the priest a direct line to holy power, moderated by their own spiritual strength.
The guy literally said "WHY THE FUCK DID YOU HAVE TO PUT IN STUPID CHRISTIAN BULLSHIT; YOU UNEDUCATED FUCKS", knocked the map and minis off the table and stomped out of the house. The DM was the one who gave him a ride, though, so he had to walk about six miles in the middle of the night. So that was neat.
It was particularly funny, because I don't think that the polytheistic nature of divinity in that game had anything to do with christianity (in fact I'm reasonably sure the DM was agnostic/atheist). Did the guy legitimately want a game where there were no gods? Was is the presence of souls? To this day, I remain mystified.
People are triggered by that? What do they think ghosts are?
>>46229390
>Agnostic as fuck
>>46229786
In a lot of settings, ghosts are as likely to be "echoes" cast off by a dying creature as their actual literal soul.
In World of Darkness, for example, a skilled enough mage can create a ghost of someone who's still alive, as a way of reading what's most important to that person (because it'd become the ghost's anchors) and getting a neato servant out of the deal on top.
>>46229930
Even in settings that differentiate, it shows people can exist in some form and way without their body, and even for mere echoes to exist it would imply that part of a person is something more than the bio-computer we call the brain. It just sounds ridiculous if someone can accept ghosts and magic manifestations of people given what they are but a soul is too much for them. I can just imagine there being a whole game with this ghost subplot and they're echoes but then the existence of souls is confirmed later on, sperg reeees, bangs the table, and >>46229702 happens. It's hilarious.
>>46224136
Okay, I made a mistake and gave you the benefit of the doubt that you knew what the fuck you where talking about.
There actually isn't much Christianity took from Egypt other than Plotinus, and he was following Greek thought and giving lessons in Rome. Our religious services mimic closely the same type of services some sects of Jews did during the time of Christ, rather closely too.
>>46224420
Plotinus was an interesting guy. When I was younger I was really into his metaphysics.
>>46220271
>Play a Swedish roleplaying game called Eon.
>Religion book talks about all the different gods.
>Magic book talks about how all the gods are actually demons that are so powerful they are omnipresent.
>Christian friend tells me the setting sucks and that I'm going to have a bad time.
It's a game, bro.
>>46229888
Exactly, Khorne.
>>46223061
Excellent post, it's everything I would've said.
What if souls were only the source of things that RPG characters have but real people don't, such as levels and hit points?
Pillars of Eternity handled it pretty well IMO
