(Gah, denial of service attack detected! Roll for willpower or lose two hours of your life! … Failed, dammit.)
Very nice. I remember an older attempt at a D&Dis system soon after the comic came out, but yours is much more unified and internally consistent. And all classes have lots of nice spells and the pun level is adequate. Looks fun.
Before reading, I thought, “Hey, let’s try to roll a Discordian!”, but then I wondered what I have to choose to cast “dispel colonialism”. I guess I’ll have to enter the dreaded halls of the continentals.
(This is a bit of a pet peeve. Don’t take this as serious criticism. It’s not even representative of the whole work, but if I go continental, I might as well quote-mine, summon the subtext and cast Wall of Text to further my own agenda.)
Logic is the purest of the disciplines, and does not permit alternate opinions; all students of logic learn the same spells regardless of their beliefs.
Dialetheists would like to have a word with you. (And its not just an obscure position. Many Mahayana philosophers have fully embraced it for centuries.)
Asians may follow non-dualist philosophies like Buddhism or Taoism that eschew the material world.
First of, Asian? The bloody European traditions get 3 out of 5 races, but Asian philosophy gets one?! The Confucians, Vedantists, Jains and whatnot really appreciate being lumped with the depressing Buddhists and crazy Taoists. Ancient Indian philosophy alone already had all the other classes (well, maybe not Objectivism). If you mean non-dual, just say that.
(And Hades, throwing the Greeks together also just… makes my eyes twitch. I’m really not a fan of lumping philosophies by whatever geography made it most prominent (in the West). “Anglo-American” and “Continental” is fine, as both have a fairly unified attitude and there are no better labels. But Greeks and Asians are way too diverse, especially when you identify them with one example that has nothing in common with other, equally important traditions. “Aristotelean” and “Non-dual” or something like that would be better.)
And Taoism is not really non-dual. I can see why you would mention it, as some branches are (particular the visible western ones), but it has the frigging yin-yang as its symbol for a reason. Also, Taoists have spent most of history trying to become physically immortal and to have as much fun in the process as possible. They are outright (physical) hedonists. There is nothing about renunciation in Taoism at all.
Greeks are the original philosophers.
As someone learning Akkadian, I’ll put on my philosophy hipster hat and would like to remind you that, as a rule of thumb, everything is Older Than You Think. “Archetypal” philosophers, alright. They really made the profession cool. But “original”?
(Loving the Elves, though.)
If Theist: Catholicism | Protestantism | Syncretism |Fideism | Evidentialism | Serve God | Serve Mammon
I understand that this list is not meant to be complete at all, but theism = Christianity? At least a token polytheist or something? I’m way too underground for this Jesus stuff, I totally want a Heavenly Court or some dragons. You cannot be good without dragons.
In D&Dis, Absolutists get −2 morality, and Anarchists get −1 phronesis.
It’s nice to see that in Sophia, the Anarchist scare is over.
DERRIDA’S DECONSTRUCTION HEX (4B) Cast during an argument between a player and the GM over a rule interpretation. You analyze the rulebook for hidden meanings that may be opposite to the apparent intent of the text, ensuring victory to your favored interpretation of the rules. GM can nullify this spell at his discretion if abused. Starting an argument over otherwise clear rules just so you can use this spell is definitely an abuse.
So you favor a totalitarian GM, a gatekeeper of the Truth? Any criticism can be dispelled as attacking a “clear” rule (ignoring that the existence of the attack and the viability of an alternative interpretation question this “clarity”)? What, exactly, did this GM do to gain privileged access to Truth? And what constitutes “abuse” depends on the abuser and the abused and their socio-cultural frameworks. Simply silencing an interpretation as “abuse” is an exertion of power, not an argument. Any power must be questioned. You are clearly including this exception so you can protect your pet weltanschauung and existing power structure. Your subtext speaks louder than your text. Also before, Nietzscheans are the only ones to summon dragons, without which you can’t be good, so you give away your immorality. That you give Absolutists a −2 morality is clearly just signaling. You imperialist. (Am I doing this continental thing right? Do I need more being?)
BANISH P-ZOMBIE (R)
But… how do I know who I can cast this on?
Looking through your item list, I’m kinda divided. On the one hand, it makes sense, is funny and represents all the branches I wish would constitute philosophy. On the other hand, I see only a single continental book. There really should be a Heidegger or Hegel. How else am I to cast confusion, negate any spells into their synthesis or get into a greater state of dasein?
Materials are not priced like other items: the exact price of an object depends on the size of the object, the quality of the material, and the purpose to which it is being used. The price mentioned here is only a guide for the DM to determine context-appropriate prices for these objects—if you can find them at all!
You mean the price depends on the amount of labor that went into their production, right?
Most of the races were taken straight from the comics, but I endorse them. It’s like how D&D has a race “elf”, even though experts can distinguish betweeen the Calaquendi and the Moriquendi and so on.
I agree a lot of the options are very limited (you didn’t even protest the division of morality into Kantian vs. Utilitarian! That’s the worst!) because I wanted to create separate game mechanics and possibilities for each choice. If there were many different religions included, I don’t know how the Apologist class would look, but it would have to be pretty different from any of the other classes, and much more complex. And I wanted to make the system resemble the debates that most potential players would be a part of, and those are more likely to be Christian vs. atheist with a little bit of Zen Buddhism or something on the side than Mahayana vs. Theravada, or Gelug vs. Nyingma. And if I were to put in Gelug vs. Nyingma, I’d have to put it into the campaign somehow, and that would confuse 99% of people. So yeah, it’s very much western philosophy, and simplified Western philosophy at that.
...and as for the Continentals, I just don’t know enough about them to give them justice, even enough justice to mock them. I was going to have Heidegger’s Being and Time as a book with the power to Confuse every character within a certain radius, but then I realized I would give anything by Hegel exactly the same power, and so on.
...maybe you should write the first expansion book.
I’ll see if I can respond to some of your other issues at more length later.
you didn’t even protest the division of morality into Kantian vs. Utilitarian! That’s the worst!
Meh. I’m so far into moral relativism and nihilism territory that I didn’t really care.
...and as for the Continentals, I just don’t know enough about them to give them justice, even enough justice to mock them. I was going to have Heidegger’s Being and Time as a book with the power to Confuse every character within a certain radius, but then I realized I would give anything by Hegel exactly the same power, and so on.
I feel your pain. I’ve read the manifestos of paranoid schizophrenics that made more sense than Hegel, but he really oughta be there somewhere. Maybe you can read Philosophy Bro’s summaries of Heidegger and Hegel for some inspiration. PhiloBro does the impossible and makes them kinda comprehensible.
So yeah, it’s very much western philosophy, and simplified Western philosophy at that.
Understandable. It’s probably not very fruitful if you have traditions that don’t even agree upon what the important questions are or that none of the players really care about. It’s just… a total retcon of philosophy. I mean, the mere fact that some of the classes work at all is problematic for others. But then, Sigil) somehow manages to survive, so maybe a Bayesian and a Postmodernist, or an Atheist and a Shinto Priest can get along, too.
Oh, and. (All values kinda arbitrary.)
Knowledge of Predetermined Fate (Spell, Calvinist): The GM rolls 5 times, writes down the result in order and hands it to the player. Whenever the player has to make a roll, they instead take the first value from the list as their roll and then remove it from the list. Once all values have been used up, they roll as usual.
“His way is mysterious no more.”
Unity of Knowledge and Action (Spell, Confucian): For a day, all of the player’s changes to Righteousness based on acts are doubled. However, their Righteousness can not be changed based on arguments.
“If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself.”
Vow of Poverty (Feat, Apologist): Wealth level must always be Prole or less. +10 Righteousness.
“If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor.”
First Noble Truth: All Is Suffering (Spell, Buddhist): Cast on any square of 5. No healing spells or items work for 4 rounds.
Second Noble Truth: Attachment Causes Suffering (Spell, Buddhist): Target suffers 1d6 damage for each of their level of control, including those in other creatures.
Third Noble Truth: Suffering Can End (Spell, Buddhist): Target takes −5 mental damage from attacks for 4 rounds.
Fourth Noble Truth: The Eightfold Path Is The End Of Suffering (Spell, Buddhist): Target’s Righteousness is added to their mental hit points. (Negative Righteousness becomes damage.)
Doctrine of Two Truths (Spell, Buddhist): −2 Rationality, +2 Phronesis for 1 day.
Corpse Viewing (Spell, Buddhist): Reminds the target that they will die by mentally showing them their own corpse. Deals 5 mental damage, double against Hedonists and Transhumanists.
“If a monk sees a corpse dead one, two, or three days—swollen, blue and festering—he should think: ‘My own body is of the same nature; such it will become, and will not escape it.’”
Freedom From Samsara (Feat, Buddhist): Permanent −2 from mental attacks. May never come back from the dead.
Temporary Cessation (Spell, Buddhist): Target becomes paralyzed for 1d6 rounds, but is also immune to mental attacks.
Permanent Cessation (Spell, Buddhist): Target has to make saving throw or becomes p-zombie.
Karma’s a Bitch (Spell, Buddhist): For one day, any temporary change to target’s Righteousness is applied as physical damage as well. (Positive changes heal, negative ones damage.)
One With Everything (Spell, Buddhist): Cast on any square of 5. Any mental damage or healing dealt to one being within area, is also applied to all other beings at half value.
Prayer Wheel (Item, Buddhist): Negates a temporary Righteousness change once a day.
A dragon also told me the specs for a Shingon class, but unfortunately has sworn me to secrecy. But trust me, it’s really neat.
(puts “play Buddhist offensive mage” on bucket list)
(Gah, denial of service attack detected! Roll for willpower or lose two hours of your life! … Failed, dammit.)
Very nice. I remember an older attempt at a D&Dis system soon after the comic came out, but yours is much more unified and internally consistent. And all classes have lots of nice spells and the pun level is adequate. Looks fun.
Before reading, I thought, “Hey, let’s try to roll a Discordian!”, but then I wondered what I have to choose to cast “dispel colonialism”. I guess I’ll have to enter the dreaded halls of the continentals.
(This is a bit of a pet peeve. Don’t take this as serious criticism. It’s not even representative of the whole work, but if I go continental, I might as well quote-mine, summon the subtext and cast Wall of Text to further my own agenda.)
Dialetheists would like to have a word with you. (And its not just an obscure position. Many Mahayana philosophers have fully embraced it for centuries.)
First of, Asian? The bloody European traditions get 3 out of 5 races, but Asian philosophy gets one?! The Confucians, Vedantists, Jains and whatnot really appreciate being lumped with the depressing Buddhists and crazy Taoists. Ancient Indian philosophy alone already had all the other classes (well, maybe not Objectivism). If you mean non-dual, just say that.
(And Hades, throwing the Greeks together also just… makes my eyes twitch. I’m really not a fan of lumping philosophies by whatever geography made it most prominent (in the West). “Anglo-American” and “Continental” is fine, as both have a fairly unified attitude and there are no better labels. But Greeks and Asians are way too diverse, especially when you identify them with one example that has nothing in common with other, equally important traditions. “Aristotelean” and “Non-dual” or something like that would be better.)
And Taoism is not really non-dual. I can see why you would mention it, as some branches are (particular the visible western ones), but it has the frigging yin-yang as its symbol for a reason. Also, Taoists have spent most of history trying to become physically immortal and to have as much fun in the process as possible. They are outright (physical) hedonists. There is nothing about renunciation in Taoism at all.
As someone learning Akkadian, I’ll put on my philosophy hipster hat and would like to remind you that, as a rule of thumb, everything is Older Than You Think. “Archetypal” philosophers, alright. They really made the profession cool. But “original”?
(Loving the Elves, though.)
I understand that this list is not meant to be complete at all, but theism = Christianity? At least a token polytheist or something? I’m way too underground for this Jesus stuff, I totally want a Heavenly Court or some dragons. You cannot be good without dragons.
It’s nice to see that in Sophia, the Anarchist scare is over.
So you favor a totalitarian GM, a gatekeeper of the Truth? Any criticism can be dispelled as attacking a “clear” rule (ignoring that the existence of the attack and the viability of an alternative interpretation question this “clarity”)? What, exactly, did this GM do to gain privileged access to Truth? And what constitutes “abuse” depends on the abuser and the abused and their socio-cultural frameworks. Simply silencing an interpretation as “abuse” is an exertion of power, not an argument. Any power must be questioned. You are clearly including this exception so you can protect your pet weltanschauung and existing power structure. Your subtext speaks louder than your text. Also before, Nietzscheans are the only ones to summon dragons, without which you can’t be good, so you give away your immorality. That you give Absolutists a −2 morality is clearly just signaling. You imperialist. (Am I doing this continental thing right? Do I need more being?)
But… how do I know who I can cast this on?
Looking through your item list, I’m kinda divided. On the one hand, it makes sense, is funny and represents all the branches I wish would constitute philosophy. On the other hand, I see only a single continental book. There really should be a Heidegger or Hegel. How else am I to cast confusion, negate any spells into their synthesis or get into a greater state of dasein?
You mean the price depends on the amount of labor that went into their production, right?
Most of the races were taken straight from the comics, but I endorse them. It’s like how D&D has a race “elf”, even though experts can distinguish betweeen the Calaquendi and the Moriquendi and so on.
I agree a lot of the options are very limited (you didn’t even protest the division of morality into Kantian vs. Utilitarian! That’s the worst!) because I wanted to create separate game mechanics and possibilities for each choice. If there were many different religions included, I don’t know how the Apologist class would look, but it would have to be pretty different from any of the other classes, and much more complex. And I wanted to make the system resemble the debates that most potential players would be a part of, and those are more likely to be Christian vs. atheist with a little bit of Zen Buddhism or something on the side than Mahayana vs. Theravada, or Gelug vs. Nyingma. And if I were to put in Gelug vs. Nyingma, I’d have to put it into the campaign somehow, and that would confuse 99% of people. So yeah, it’s very much western philosophy, and simplified Western philosophy at that.
...and as for the Continentals, I just don’t know enough about them to give them justice, even enough justice to mock them. I was going to have Heidegger’s Being and Time as a book with the power to Confuse every character within a certain radius, but then I realized I would give anything by Hegel exactly the same power, and so on.
...maybe you should write the first expansion book.
I’ll see if I can respond to some of your other issues at more length later.
Meh. I’m so far into moral relativism and nihilism territory that I didn’t really care.
I feel your pain. I’ve read the manifestos of paranoid schizophrenics that made more sense than Hegel, but he really oughta be there somewhere. Maybe you can read Philosophy Bro’s summaries of Heidegger and Hegel for some inspiration. PhiloBro does the impossible and makes them kinda comprehensible.
Understandable. It’s probably not very fruitful if you have traditions that don’t even agree upon what the important questions are or that none of the players really care about. It’s just… a total retcon of philosophy. I mean, the mere fact that some of the classes work at all is problematic for others. But then, Sigil) somehow manages to survive, so maybe a Bayesian and a Postmodernist, or an Atheist and a Shinto Priest can get along, too.
Oh, and. (All values kinda arbitrary.)
Knowledge of Predetermined Fate (Spell, Calvinist): The GM rolls 5 times, writes down the result in order and hands it to the player. Whenever the player has to make a roll, they instead take the first value from the list as their roll and then remove it from the list. Once all values have been used up, they roll as usual.
“His way is mysterious no more.”
Unity of Knowledge and Action (Spell, Confucian): For a day, all of the player’s changes to Righteousness based on acts are doubled. However, their Righteousness can not be changed based on arguments.
“If you want to know bitterness, you have to eat a bitter melon yourself.”
Vow of Poverty (Feat, Apologist): Wealth level must always be Prole or less. +10 Righteousness.
“If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor.”
First Noble Truth: All Is Suffering (Spell, Buddhist): Cast on any square of 5. No healing spells or items work for 4 rounds.
Second Noble Truth: Attachment Causes Suffering (Spell, Buddhist): Target suffers 1d6 damage for each of their level of control, including those in other creatures.
Third Noble Truth: Suffering Can End (Spell, Buddhist): Target takes −5 mental damage from attacks for 4 rounds.
Fourth Noble Truth: The Eightfold Path Is The End Of Suffering (Spell, Buddhist): Target’s Righteousness is added to their mental hit points. (Negative Righteousness becomes damage.)
Doctrine of Two Truths (Spell, Buddhist): −2 Rationality, +2 Phronesis for 1 day.
Corpse Viewing (Spell, Buddhist): Reminds the target that they will die by mentally showing them their own corpse. Deals 5 mental damage, double against Hedonists and Transhumanists.
“If a monk sees a corpse dead one, two, or three days—swollen, blue and festering—he should think: ‘My own body is of the same nature; such it will become, and will not escape it.’”
Freedom From Samsara (Feat, Buddhist): Permanent −2 from mental attacks. May never come back from the dead.
Temporary Cessation (Spell, Buddhist): Target becomes paralyzed for 1d6 rounds, but is also immune to mental attacks.
Permanent Cessation (Spell, Buddhist): Target has to make saving throw or becomes p-zombie.
Karma’s a Bitch (Spell, Buddhist): For one day, any temporary change to target’s Righteousness is applied as physical damage as well. (Positive changes heal, negative ones damage.)
One With Everything (Spell, Buddhist): Cast on any square of 5. Any mental damage or healing dealt to one being within area, is also applied to all other beings at half value.
Prayer Wheel (Item, Buddhist): Negates a temporary Righteousness change once a day.
A dragon also told me the specs for a Shingon class, but unfortunately has sworn me to secrecy. But trust me, it’s really neat.
(puts “play Buddhist offensive mage” on bucket list)
I like you. You’re fun. :D
Why thank you!
Maybe variant rules should be used? Yvain’s a rationalist- he’ll probably take any good suggestions.