@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And I still haven't seen anybody answer why the 'right' to pursue that RP unfettered is more important that somebody else's fun.

Probably because nobody has said it is?

People have expressed their personal distaste for games set in historical time periods that remove negative social attitudes to cater to modern sensibilities. That's...it.

I'm a Jewish woman. I wound not approve of a game set in 1930s Germany that removed the abhorrent antisemitism present in German society at the time, even if the focus was on playing time-traveling super hero vampires. I think it's far too important to the setting.

That's my opinion. You don't have to agree with me. You're allowed to have your own. It can be different from mine.

@arkandel said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

But let's say you're setting a game in the fifties (or the Victorian age) and you're trying to be at least somewhat historically accurate. It's quite feasible even then to accept or even to require PCs to be more liberal in their outlooks; certainly there were plenty of individuals back then who didn't look at a free black man or a self assured woman as a bad thing, but societies as a whole did. Doing away with those parts ("in our version of London all races are equal") can still be done of course, it's simply not the same thing.

I think my problem with this would be that it borders on the cliche at this point, because it seems like that's what every game set in a (quasi-)historical period is doing these days. Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but speaking only for myself, it doesn't work for me.

As someone who sticks around these games for the day-to-day narrative/social RP aspects rather than the endless cycle of PRPs, I get frustrated when a game's setting goes out of its way to remove every negative societal trait that I would potentially have to deal with. Maybe sometimes I want to play Joan Holloway or Betty Draper, you know?

Games set in crappy/oppressive worlds have flourished before, but it seems like there was some seismic shift over the last few years where everyone got worried they'd be labeled some sort of '-ist' and now everything's sanitized and pretty boring. People don't seem to leap to OOC accusations of the player behind a character being a murderer when that character kills a bunch of people, and I'm confused why we seem to have decided that's self-evident but a character being a sexist or a racist is legitimate cause for OOC concern.

@surreality

Coo. That actually kind of sounds like what I'm looking for, because at this point I still have no idea what one actually does on WoD games. You'd think I would, hanging out here, but the impression I've gotten is that it's mostly, "I'm a vampire, and also I work at the bait shop."

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

If the point of engaging in IC discrimination is to demonstrate that a PC is a bastard, there are innumerable ways to do the same without engaging in IC discrimination.

What if the 'point' of engaging in IC discrimination is to demonstrate that the PC is a sexist or a racist?

For me, the key question is: why would a player engage in IC discrimination? And as I have yet to hear a solid reason as to why a player must engage in IC discrimination, and cannot find any situation where a player should engage in it.

This is actually a really good example of what I meant when I said it felt like there had been some kind of shift in the hobby over the past few years. Nobody would be asking this question, as @surreality already pointed out, about murdering another PC. You can end my character that I've worked on for five years in the blink of an eye, and that's not wrongfun, but playing a construction contractor who won't hire me because I'm a woman is somehow far worse and somehow has far more impact on my enjoyment of RP? I genuinely do not get this point of view.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I did however, expand that point to suggest that you're using historical realism as an excuse to allow abuse, it's not actually ethical to do so unless you insure that every character is hit by awful stuff out of player control and preferably randomly.

I'm not a historian, but I think one's chances of surviving the Old West without contracting tuberculosis were slightly higher than the chances of an openly gay black man being elected sheriff of an Arizona boom town.

Aside from that, I actually like the idea of a random-bad-things generator, if only because it would separate the people playing characters with a healthy IC/OOC disconnect from the people playing thinly-veiled author-insertion fantasy personas.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@rebekahse

I didn't say it should be a huge chance. But it should be there. If the historically accurate misery is going to rain, it should rain on everybody, right?

Sure, I have no problem with that.

Though I'll admit being intensely interested in your view of "bad things happening to my character = fun tax." Do you feel as though that's kind of revealing as to where you're coming from in this discussion?

@faraday said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Back when I ran Sweetwater Crossing (a western), the policy allowed PCs to have modern sensibilities (making them outliers for their day and age) but permitted IC discrimination as long as it was kept IC.

Playing a female ranchhand, I was fully prepared to deal with era-appropriate discrimination. I saw that as an important thing that shaped the character and something I didn't mind exploring - even as a woman iRL. It was actually a little jarring when she would go around talking about her struggles in a town full of PCs who had no problem with her whatsoever. Off-camera discrimination just didn't resonate with people.

On the flip side, a situation arose where some PCs wanted to form a lynch mob to get an African American PC who was romantically involved with a white woman PC. Holy cow was that a horrible situation. Yeah, it's historical, but it was really uncomfortable (as, probably, it should be) trying to moderate that kind of thing. Not only did it pit the characters against each other, there was no small amount of anger and "You're a horrible person!" at people for playing within the game's setting.

So I can see both sides of the argument ... not wanting to sugar-coat history vs. not wanting to throw the worst parts of history into peoples' faces. But for me personally? I prefer fantasy/sci-fi settings where the discrimination is because "You're from Tauron" and not "You've got dark skin."

I know this post is two weeks old and I apologize for dredging it back up, but it hit on basically the reason I avoid historical games: importing modern sensibilities into historical or quasi-historical settings always bugs me when I go to play in them, because it robs the setting of credibility.

And I feel guilty about that, because it's probably the height of white privilege to want to take a vacation into oppression, but I can't help feeling that while progressive utopias would be great to live in IRL, they're excruciatingly boring to play in.

@Thenomain said:

@rebekahse

We are more mega corporate than anytime before in history, it's just not something we feel we can, or need, to do anything about. A radio piece I heard from a pop culture analyst had superhero movies and now tv as popular because we feel that we have no control over impossible situations, mostly terrorism and rising control of our every day lives.

Sure, we absolutely are. But the lack of paranoia about it is what makes the difference, because Shadowrun's all about the paranoia. It's not a game that would get made in today's climate, I don't think.

I find the conclusion that you can't put in wireless or social networking into ShadowRun to be kind of strange, because Cyberpunk2020 is ready for it right now, and CP2020 has a heavy dose of world building too. (Five corporation books, four cybernetics books, etc.)

That wasn't really the conclusion, though.

So why do people flip their lid at idea of updating the game world?

I don't think most people do. I think the people that flip their lid flip it at 4th Edition's change to "WOD-style" dice mechanics, and thus don't want to play 4th. If you're not playing 4th or 5th, you're stuck with non-wireless 3rd/2nd/1st and all its clunky, 80s-era predictions of future tech. You could theoretically put wireless, social media, etc. into all of those, but you're basically having to write a lot of new rules for an old, established game system at that point, and I've never seen that work really well.

Aside from the dice mechanics thing, 4th and 5th don't feel as "cyberpunky". The writing of 1st/2nd/3rd editions just have an 80s feel to them that I can't describe but know when I see. I like that, personally, but it does feel dated and incongruous with where technology has actually advanced to. Being set seventy years in the future becomes a lot less plausible when people can't get on the internet stand-in without finding a physical jackpoint or setting up a satellite interface. But going with the recent editions of the game that aren't completely unaware of the technological advancements of the 90s/00s/10s loses out on the 80s cyberpunk vibe that I think attracted people to the game in the first place.

You can't have one with the other, basically.

If you're Oz, or if you know him, I'm looking to get in touch with him!

@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

ETA: Like, why does my PC have to suffer the same crap I do IRL for somebody else to be having fun?

Verisimilitude?

I dunno. I'm subject to sexism IRL, and it doesn't bother me when it makes an appearance in pretendy funtimes. Its absence were it would be realistic to have it strikes me as false, if anything.

@Jennkryst said in Anyone kind enough to help me with oWoD?:

@rebekahse Join the crazy evil ones. It is the best.

A useful kinfolk varies, based on what useful you want to do, as well as if you want to... er. Multi class. In oWoD, it is possible to be a Kinfolk who is also a Mage or Changeling. Or a Vampire, but that might get you killed faster than playing the crazy evil ones.

I was kiiiinda thinking about the crazy evil ones, since the background I was going for was like...deep South redneck trailer trash, and the crazy evil ones kinda seem to have a Rob Zombie movie vibe going for them that would work for that I think. But there don't seem to be all that many of them around.

I was thinking of taking a lot of street/crime Connections, and Streetwise and social skills, but I don't know how useful that would be.

An old friend has finally convinced me to play on an oWoD game, but I know next to nothing about the system or the setting. The sphere he's involved in is werewolf (the good ones, not the evil crazy ones), and I decided to make a kinfolk. The trouble is, I have no idea how to make a useful one.

I don't need anyone to build me my sheet or anything, I'm just looking for advice on what skills or areas of focus or sorceror/psychic powers (if I go that way) would be useful for a werewolf pack's kinfolk. The suggestions I've gotten so far have all been based around crafting (through enchanting or something, I think?), but that doesn't sound all that appealing and doesn't really fit with the background I had in mind. So I guess anything other than that.

Thanks in advance!

Okay, cool.

I'm giving chargen a shot at the moment, and I'm already lost. You only get 10 points for traits, and every adjustment to one of the 13 paired traits takes a point, so...are you supposed to start with just a very minor tilt in one direction in only a few traits, or what?

This place sounds really interesting, but how's the population for off-peak hours? The biggest limiter for RP for me is always the fact that I'm rarely available during US prime time and tend to only be around when the other Euros or Aussies are.

I've only done it on Firan, where my experiences were universally negative - either the guy was a truly uninspiring RPer, or else he lived in Australia and was only available every other Tuesday from 9AM to 10AM.

I've wanted to play a totally dysfunctional marriage somewhere since forever, but either the game shuts down before the potentially dysfunctional boyfriend has a chance to become the dysfunctional husband, or else the person who's willing to app in as a married couple doesn't want to play on Game X because he prefers Setting Y.

So I can't really tell from the website, but are non-superpowered characters allowed? Mundane mortals, as it were? I love cyberpunk but don't really know anything about comics, just trying to tell if I'd have any fun here.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@ganymede

And when I asked if people were willing to put a notice like that in theme, the reply was variations on 'No'.

Keep in mind it's a pretty small poll, asking it here.

I'm sure I've seen some variation on that notice in games before, so the answer is 'Yes' in some cases.

(It was probably Firan, AKA "the best argument in the world for the idea that people are willing to play characters in games that poop on everybody except rich white men").

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@rebekahse

I didn't say 'bad things happening' equals a fun tax. Bad things happen to my characters all the time and that's fine. That's plot. BUT this specific category of bad thing, that the majority of players don't have to deal with shouldn't be an extra hurdle to my fun.

The majority of players very well might, depending on what kind of character they chose to play.

I may also just hang out in uniquely women-heavy games, but I think I could make an argument that the majority of us are going to have to deal with bigotry regardless in a historical setting that hews close to historical reality.

Unless we're saying that only certain types of bigotry 'count.'

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@rebekahse

I didn't say it should be a huge chance. But it should be there. If the historically accurate misery is going to rain, it should rain on everybody, right?

Sure, I have no problem with that.

Though I'll admit being intensely interested in your view of "bad things happening to my character = fun tax." Do you feel as though that's kind of revealing as to where you're coming from in this discussion?

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I did however, expand that point to suggest that you're using historical realism as an excuse to allow abuse, it's not actually ethical to do so unless you insure that every character is hit by awful stuff out of player control and preferably randomly.

I'm not a historian, but I think one's chances of surviving the Old West without contracting tuberculosis were slightly higher than the chances of an openly gay black man being elected sheriff of an Arizona boom town.

Aside from that, I actually like the idea of a random-bad-things generator, if only because it would separate the people playing characters with a healthy IC/OOC disconnect from the people playing thinly-veiled author-insertion fantasy personas.