46
AW:Dark Age / Re: What Is a Right?
« on: September 15, 2014, 12:39:28 PM »I have a hard time seeing "You have a Right to X" as different from "Most people agree that you have a Right to X". After all, it's not like the right is an objectively extant thing you can put on your shelf and point to; it functions only if people respect it.
Except if people don't respect it you get a lot of dramatic potential/screen time. I'm better at examples. Say there's a a particularly urban stronghold. They hold to the New Nobility ways to the extent that the Old Ways aren't just absent but actively disbelieved. There's never been a troll in living memory and they are chalked up to old wives' tales. A Wicker Wise is not going to have her right to a sacrifice respected by these people because human sacrifice is horrifying. A Troll Hunter won't have his right to kill someone who is a harbinger of worse things because those worse things are just fanciful stories. So there's no assumption that you right will generally be respected but there is an assumption that when its not, something important will happen.
By playing one of those characters, though, you're telling the other players and the game world that these things are important to you. By the very fact that the Wicker Wise exists, we know that in the fiction, sacrifices to the Wicker Man are important at least to that player. Anyone can still deny those sacrifices but doing so is explicitly consequential and the Denied Right moves are the vehicle that the player has for making it consequential.