Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
This might be cool if it were real
So imagine a world where:
- everyone knows at least some amount of (fantasy-style) magic
- everyone knows martial arts (to a competency akin to, at least, the kind of stuff you can see martial arts movies. So people can carry out minor sparring as easily as they can chat about the weather.)
- most people carry around a personal weapon with them, which can be "disappeared" into or "appeared" from each person's own hammerspace. this is normally the weapon fighting style they're most used to using. (And some people like fighting unarmed.)
For what it's worth, I came up with this around 15 years ago. What can I say; I was bored as a little kid.
Discuss.
Comments
Violent crime becomes the biggest issue of the era, in turn forcing the construction of a strict caste system where limitations are imposed on what kind of training one can receive and which weapon they can summon. The social capital of the society is based largely upon the amount of training one has received and the kinds of weapons they are authorised to use, and as a result, coercive force becomes an unofficially legitimate means of problem solving. This extends to personal relationships and economic success, where rape and large-scale theft become exceedingly common, and those without the training or weapons to compete are largely those campaigning for change.
The development of the firearm sends the entire world into a spin, destabilising the existing power structure and imposing a sort of coercive democratic state of violent affairs on society. Whether said firearms are controlled or not is the deciding factor on whether the impoverished and abused lower castes are able to enforce widespread change.
/thread
Dear MadassAlex,
Thank you for finally carrying out a thought-experiment on the societal dynamics of this premise. I gained the ability to do that only in recent years, and I've just been too lazy to do that.
Your fellow IJBMer,
Glenn Magus Harvey
Also, don't get snippy, Glenn. You asked us to discus; this is the most interesting direction of discourse. In fact, this is the only way we can really discus anything, for the only other thing we can talk about is how cool this or that would be in this world of violence.
Actually, that post wasn't sarcastic. I tried to think about how to indicate that but I couldn't figure out a good way. This really is a setting idea that I'd just never really gotten around to thinking through the implications of, or am otherwise too nostalgic for the idea to feel like doing so.
^ FWIW I know that this idea was heavily inspired by various wuxia tales that I got to watch live-action adaptations of on tapes that my parents borrowed or rented.
It sounds to me like Alex pretty much covered everything about that setting.
If you want to add to something though, what if how good people were at using magic/martial arts/weaponry was directly dependent on how peaceful they were?
This may sound pretty dumb, but I guess the idea would be that the people least likely to want to fight would be the most adept at it while the most aggressive or hateful would be rather weak. Do you think that would change things at all?
I was about ten years old and thought more about combat skill and expert moves than philosophy, lol.
^ Exactly what would the mechanism be? Unless you're saying it really is tied to an intangible measure of how peaceful you are.
What if it was tied to how little you used your powers/abilities?
Real life martial arts have their own ideas about what constitutes a combat-effective philosophy. For instance, the medieval German art of Kunst des Fechtens encourages its practitioners to be physically aggressive but internally peaceful. That is, your techniques and tactics should be aggressive while you feel nothing internally. Under this philosophy, combat has no room for cruelty or compassion -- both are inefficient, so you merely act according to what seems most effective. Most historical military combatives are based on similar psychological principles, although there are exceptions. Fiore dei Liberi's Italian equivalent actually encourages smack-talking in an effort to anger one's opponent, for instance, and Fiore's writing is filled with service towards his own ego.
The general idea, however, is that virtue should translate into some kind of combat advantage to an extent. For instance, "mercy" might not mean sparing an opponent or going easy on them in all or many cases, but it might mean that one kills without cruelty or malicious intent, or that one gives an opportunity for adversaries to surrender peacefully before engaging in combat. When it comes to violence, though, virtue only goes so far because of the desperate necessity of such situations, so every virtue has to be interpreted through the lens of pragmatic requirement.
glennmagusharvey,
^ Exactly what would the mechanism be? Unless you're saying it really is tied to an intangible measure of how peaceful you are.
What if it was tied to how little you used your powers/abilities?
If you mean to respond to my post above, I suppose I did not really think through things that much, but yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of "an intangible measure of how peaceful you are" instead of something like how often you used your abilities. My thought was something like your attitude and demeanor should be what determine your power so that people who would want to be powerful are weaker and those who want nothing to do with fighting are stronger.
As a game mechanic it admittedly would be pretty unworkable though, so maybe your idea about usage determining that stuff would be better.
This is a good analysis, but fundamentally speaking I don't think the availability of force to all would change anything except the extent to which the state must act in order to retain the relative exclusivity of the use of force. (In other words, I agree with the first sentence, but I don't see what makes this scenario substantially different than, for instance, everyone being able to own a gun in the US.)
Aside from that, I think from the original premises, what exactly "fantasy-style magic" means in this case would significantly change the outcome. If you want this setting with a more optimistic take, maybe defensive magic is really easy to cast, even automatically or reflexively--unless you're casting offensive magic or have your weapon summoned.
Well actually, one interesting thing with guns is that they are very lethal, while martial arts often isn't (though it can be very painful).
Let's go with fantasy-style magic being a mix of lethal and non-lethal, but on average being less lethal than firearms.
The difference is in martial culture and concealment. In US culture, the gun is an externalised kind of coercive force; the idea is, however inaccurate, that anyone can pick up a gun and have some degree of power. To lose the gun is to lose power. Martial culture is different, though, because it focuses on an internalised view of coercive force, and this is why many historical warrior classes had codes. The knightly code of chivalry, for instance, ensures that a knight had various different kinds of capital to balance; fiscal capital, moral capital, spiritual capital and martial capital amongst others. These were all bargaining chips that, in some cases, contradicted one-another. I think this was intentional; it prevented knights who just happened to be assholes with great fighting abilities from dominating society, since those who did good works would receive moral capital and often a financial reward, too.
Can you cut off a man's fists? Can you cut off his feet? Can you cut off his tongue? Can you suck the knowledge from his mind?
Yes.
The purpose of martial arts is to replace natural instinct with learned instinct, so technically speaking, you can't really force someone to unlearn that.
But you can totally beat it out of him.
Well, out of his head, to be a little more specific. With heavy footfalls and plenty of heamorrhaging.
How do you fight knowledge itself?
Mass burnings has proved effective in the past.
Similarly, the passage of time.
^^Yeah. And if I would want to win, I'd show up to the fight backed by the army I'd amassed by being the type of guy that cuts off people's limbs and burns books.
Gosh, talking like this makes me feel like a bad anime character.
Kung-fu is not learned through books. Kung-fu is learned through effort, as the word attests. Through living.
How do you quash life itself?
By killing, generally speaking.
Burning it. Obviously.
You two.
<3