Spoilers ahead

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Unfortunately it was a spoiler and by the very  definininiton of a spoiler this is not revealed until the very end of the movie...

If a work is based on historical fact or historical literature, it's extremely difficult to say a statement about it is a spoiler.  You may not be aware of it, or its context, but it's no more of a spoiler than if I note that the term "Achilles' heel" is based on the literary event of Paris killing Achilles with an arrow to his heel.  

I just recently read Saramago's "Cain". I did not lose anything from the story because I already knew that Cain killed Abel.

Now, that doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't, but when we're talking about global media, it's very, very difficult to know what is or isn't known by another based on culture. The only way you will likely avoid it is if you simply make no reference to it.  

On 12/7/2019 at 4:21 PM, soltakss said:

Spoilers should definitely be used for fairly new material, especially when Scenarios are concerned.

I think this is the only reasonable place to include spoilers, and it makes sense as this is content that new GM's will turn to, and their players may well be here on the BRP or FB forums. 

However, there are threads such as the Tribal Edits threads where you should just expect the content to be laden with spoilers. It's not reasonable to expect posts to those threads to have hidden text as it makes them almost unusable to those collecting the feedback. But I would expect a "Spoilers below" in the thread heading or OP.

On 12/7/2019 at 4:21 PM, soltakss said:

What is difficult for us oldies is where someone who has just bought the RQ Classic material to run for their new gaming group of Gloranthan Newbies, and expects Spoilers around things from Scenarios that have been discussed for nearly 40 years. I can't put Spoilers around every single thing from every single Scenario, or from every bit of information gleaned from nearly 40 years of Gloranthan usage.

Agree. I'm running an HQG session now based on SKoH. It was published originally in 2009. I fully anticipate that scenarios from it may be discussed here. I fully expect that at least some of my players will have read it. My last session was based on the intro scenario in the HQG book, published in 2015. Same deal.  And my RQG group is off to Snakepipe Hollow.

I did run the Broken Tower right after it was released. And in that case I cautioned my players not to read the QuickStart guide beyond page X. Whether they did, or not, I don't know. 

But,... the story in the books is NOT the story I am telling nor the one the players are playing in.  And I think this is an important distinction for an RPG book vs. a film or a literary work. It's a guideline with divergent paths, not unlike Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths".  The players may have seen/read a "spoiler" to a specific scenario, and I have no way of knowing whether they will or they won't. What that means to me as a GM, though, is that a scenario book, just as any other RPG text, is simply source material - suggestions - that I may or may not weave into the tale.

On 12/15/2019 at 12:42 AM, g33k said:

I'm ambivalent about spoilers on the RQClassic content.  Yes, it's all several decades old... And yet, it's only recently become re-available, with much of the spoilers buried on old ML archives &c...  For the Glorantha newbies, it's likely to be UTTLERLY FULL of spoilerbait, and new discussions likely to unearth secrets better left buried...

I've also run the classic RQ scenario The Harvest Bride/Melisande's Hand from the old Sun County work (a great scenario to plug into ANY Sartarite clan, btw!). If you've read it, then you know a very definite spoiler of a very key plot hook. Again, no way to know if someone has the work, has read the work, etc. given it was released in the early 90's. 

Overall, I'd likely suggest that discussions of scenarios (new or old), particularly by GM's looking for ideas on running, have a Spoilers Alert in the thread heading. 

If you're in a thread discussing interactions for known plot hooks and want to include a reference "as an example", that's likely a good piece to put into Hidden Text. 

If it's content that's in a sourcebook though (the Guide, any of the Cults books, KoS, the Glorantha Sourcebook, etc), I think we have to treat as fair game to be openly discussed. 

On 12/7/2019 at 4:21 PM, soltakss said:

I'ts like putting a Spoiler around "Luke, I am your father".

I was in college when the Empire Strikes Back came out, and went with a group of friends to see it. One of my friends actually did know this, and bet the group that no one could guess the movie secret.  I rather randomly replied something like "Darth Vader will probably turn out to be Luke's father."  He laughed, and shrugged it off. None of the others guessed. But after the movie it made for good conversation.  

[And it did not lessen the movie for me that I had guessed correctly.  After all, there aren't an infinite number of plot lines out there.]

Edited February 18, 2020 by jajagappa

[Bill the barbarian]

19 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Now, that doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't, but when we're talking about global media, it's very, very difficult to know what is or isn't known by another based on culture. The only way you will likely avoid it is if you simply make no reference to it.  

Okay I suppose I do not have to post anything.  I can stop bringing any of these items and ideas to others attention, ever, Well, that’s easy and is one solution though not one I like (and I am hoping others like me posting enough to not suggest that I stop posting to avoid spoilers)... but I suppose if I see no evil it will not exist.

I am absolutely astonished that asking for two words two sets of () and a / be added if someone would like to be surprised or to hide a surprise is so hard to do.There is another solution. I do not have to read postings from folk I fear may use spoilers, but I realize too much would be lost by doing that, so I am not even contemplating such a drastic solution.

Edited February 18, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[jajagappa]

4 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

I am absolutely astonished that asking that two words two sets of () and a / is so hard to do

It's not necessarily hard to do, but if the goal is to ensure there are never spoilers, than almost anything we say in ANY historical reference/context requires it. 

I could simply say "Saul changed his name to Paul and wrote a lot of letters, and guess what, he became one of the Founding Fathers of the Christian Church." I've spoiled half the New Testament for you. But we all make assumptions every day about what others know and don't consider putting spoiler tags around them. 

The Glorantha forum, the Cthulhu forum - they all make contextual assumptions. 

If we want to reasonably communicate with others on these forums though, we simply have to expect that some "spoilers" are inevitable.  Where we can exercise restraint is in relation to scenarios and potential plot hooks. 

[Bill the barbarian]

12 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

  Where we can exercise restraint is in relation to scenarios and potential plot hooks. 

Good luck with that, there have already been posts of people saying they will not respect this dictum you offer.

[seneschal]

The [REDACTED] of this [CONTENT HIDDEN] eludes me, but in general I think [CLICK LINK TO REVEAL COMMENT].

Or you could simply conceal the cover and title of your commercially produced, decades old, long forgotten and generally unavailable except at outrageous Amazon.com prices adventure behind a GM screen, preferably for a game system other than the one you are actually running, change the names of major NPCs, and be done with it.  I tend to steal bits and characters shamelessly from scenarios written for other RPGs or from books, comics, movies, TV and radio shows.  My players never need know that Lord High Whatshisname in my D6 Star Wars one-shot began his existence as a Bond villain or Power Rangers henchman.

YMMV.  Your players, for instance, may wonder why the clan chieftain or sinister high priestess they're up against feels compelled to scream "Coooooobraaaaa!!!" at the top of his or her lungs when charging into battle.  They don't need to know, and knowing is half the battle.  😉

[Lordabdul]

While I think we should be mindful of spoilers, I don't think what happened with the Bilal movie was a spoiler. What Qizilbashwoman did was merely mention that the movie was based on a historical figure (as opposed to being completely fictional), and cited the date of that figure's death to place his life as much later than the Bronze Age. It was the equivalent of someone watching the Spartacus movie while knowing absolutely nothing about the Romans, and someone telling them "oh you know Spartacus actually existed? He died in 71 BC". It doesn't spoil anything about the movie. And it's not even the equivalent anyway, because as I understand it, Bilal's death isn't even part of the movie (I could be wrong on that, I haven't seen it).

Knowing that a historical figure dies shouldn't come as a shock -- humans tend to die after a while. What might be considered a spoiler (I wouldn't) might be the date, because then if, say, the movie mentions the year and it's that year, then you might know what's coming... but you might not know how. And even if you know how, is it a spoiler? Would people use spoiler tags in messages talking about how Jesus dies by crucifixion in his early thirties? Or that Caesar gets assassinated by his senators? Does knowing these things actually "spoil" any movie about Jesus or Caesar or any other well known historical figure? I guess not, otherwise they would stop making biopics, or even teaching history in class, for that matter. And it starts a dangerous trend of having to hide basically any historical event... should we use spoiler tags when talking about how D-Day's secret was kept by French rebels in case someone makes a movie about it? I don't think historical facts need spoiler tags. I don't think they should have spoiler tags.

Spoilers are for entertainment media. But it's an interesting matter, because we are on a forum where people have a good chance of (re)discovering 40 year-old RQ/CoC/etc. adventures. I wouldn't blame anybody from spoiling old stuff like that by forgetting to add some spoiler tags. I personally think old RQ2, RQ2, and HeroWars adventures are well past their statute of limitation for spoiling, just as movies like Annie Hall, Shindler's List, Bravehart, or Lord of the Rings are also past theirs, but that's just me. I'm not sure about what others would think... At least, I think we might be able to all agree that, say, The Iliad doesn't need spoiler tags? So the limit is somewhere in the last 3000 years...

Edited February 19, 2020 by lordabdul

[Qizilbashwoman]

how did my "hey here's a neat thing you should know about Bilal!" turn into this? it's irrelevant to the film and all i did was clarify 1. he was real and the origin of the popular name 2. he lived a lot earlier than was originally stated

[Atgxtg]

A good part of the difficulty is that not everyone has the same level of prior knowledge on any given topic, so it's not always easy to know if someone will be a spoiler for someone or not. Especially with something that has been around awhile. Films and TV are somewhat protected in that the specific story being told is secret and only known to the creators. But an RPG is more problematic. There is more communcation between the creators and the fanbase, and a greater overlap than with most other forms of creative expression, or hobbies. And things that have been around for years might be "new" to a player who hasn't been exposed to it before.

 

I remember joining a D&D campaing where everyone was warning me about some new monster called Broo and quickly shocked everybody when I knew a lot about them. More than the GM. It seems the D&D players were not aware that Broo came from Glorantha or about an RPG called RuneQuest. I've gamed with people who would wistfully say that it was a shame that  some popular setting or other didn't have an RPG, and then surprised them when I pulled out a long out of print RPG for that setting. I still run into gamers who are surprised than you can play a duck in RuneQuest.

 

The big problem with spoilers and trying to self censor them is that It's difficult to tell if a given piece of advice is a spoiler or not. Really recent stuff, you can be confident about, but some bit of info that's been floating around for decades. might be news to somebody. 

 

So I think we just have to make an hoest effort and be tolerant of when someone lets the cat out of the bag-especially for the old stuff.

 

[rsanford]

11 hours ago, lordabdul said:

 

Knowing that a historical figure dies shouldn't come as a shock -- humans tend to die after a while. 

I plan to live forever and so far so good 🙂

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, rsanford said:

I plan to live forever and so far so good 🙂

Until someone finds the mirror in the attic!

[Atgxtg]

On 2/19/2020 at 1:21 PM, jajagappa said:

Until someone finds the mirror in the attic!

Or the AC breaks down (wish this was the Cthulhu forum for that one).