Posts made by Arkandel

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Say you put your fantasy setting in a arab inspired setting. How much research is expected? And how much from the game maker, and how much from the players? Who gets to decide what is appropriate, or too cliche, or downright offensive?

And here's a different way to do it - which harbors as many if not actually more pitfalls.

Let's say you don't want to do a ton of research or you actually want to avoid triggering people, so you run a faux-Arab setting instead and make it 'inspired by' 1000 Nights or the Second Crusade or... something. I think there's just as much potential for things to go terribly wrong with that because of this change in narratives since you, or even just a minority of your players, may treat the now-fictional nationalities as a carte blanch to write some pretty racist tales instead - and how dare you be offended because the ArabsSarcenarians are depicted as scum of the earth in the plots?

On the other hand I can see a gamerunner who makes that 1000 Nights MUSH with the very best intentions getting blasted because they didn't read multiple sources and dissertations to properly depict the staggeringly complex politics, racial tensions and socio-economic issues of the time so that the wrong people are depicted as villainous. Hell, if someone perceives it that way and suddenly the gamerunner is being portrayed as wildly racist on MSB.

So let me make a vast exaggeration (but hopefully less offensive than my poorly selected video in the original post) just to offer it as a debate point: At some point you might as well run a WoD game set in Maine just to be safe. No?

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

The thing is, these are a lot more workable in smaller sit-down games with friends.

I think that's been why I've viewed table-top games much differently than I have MU*, since almost the sum of my physical games have either been with friends I already knew pretty well outside of gaming, and on a couple of occasions with coworkers.

I am not going to push the envelope with coworkers in any regard. There won't be kids dying or graphic depictions of people's guts hanging out! As for people I know well there's both more knowledge of what (if anything) creeps them out but also more trust; my spouse has a phobia of underwater terrors and I'm not sleeping on the couch just to get to spring that giant mutant piranha on the party.

Online the expectations can be tempered but the line does blur. Yes, a World of Darkness universe can and should be 'dark'. On the other hand if every scene seems to somehow incorporate women enthralled to vampires perhaps there's something more to it than generic dark themes, right?

@rinel In a parallel, even more imperfect universe he'd have done this after dropping a deuce and not before.

One of the things that caught my attention in the original video was a DM's thoughts in a forum whose community seemed to otherwise certainly care about offending others.

On that post she expressed the concern that she can't always afford the time to do a deep dive in all of the material presented in her campaigns. She could handle the broad strokes of a historic campaign set in the Middle Ages for example but she might misrepresent the sides of a conflict, miss context on wars or even massacres that took place around that time (they happened a lot!) unless she did a lot of footwork. She said something like "at some point it feels like work, and I already have one of those".

I think it's fair to expect players joining - for example - a Vampire game set in the Balkans around 1200 to be prepared for some dark themes, and not expect the game runner to be familiar with every injustice committed at the time. On the other hand it's reasonable to expect the GM (or STs) to not fixate on the victimization of minorities to the point of turning them into spectacles either, at least without warnings offered well ahead of time.

@ominous said in Sensitivity in gaming:

@tinuviel

But, come on, just going to UEG's videos section and looking at the first 20 videos shows such gems as The Fall of Society, You Have Been Convicted of Wrongthink, The SJW Mindset Explained, and Everything is GamerGate. A cursory check of the content should tell you "This guy is a tool."

I didn't look at any other videos made by the same creator - in fact I didn't agree with much of what he did have to say (which I said in the original post of this thread). I don't know who this guy is - I follow very few YouTube channels and almost all of them are about WoW, the NBA or ancient history. He's certainly not one of them.

I thought the video would serve as a way to spark a conversation. If I was wrong that's fine. I do admit it's surprising to see it spark 'is Arkandel evil?' tangents but here we are.

This video about sensitivity in table-top and video gaming was shared on my Facebook yesterday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkPUFH9kLfQ

With the disclaimer I don't agree with everything this video discusses or advocates (he cherry-picks extreme interpretations of sensitivity a bit too much for my liking) I do think it merits a discussion.

In your opinion how much effort should game runners (be that for a D&D game or a MUSH) be reasonably expected to put into not offending players? Or if that same question is flipped around, when are a player's demands to not be triggered crossing a line?

What do you think?

@tributary Thank you for that, I greatly appreciate it.

My oldest dog, Daphne, has gotten quite old. She's almost 17 now, which is hard to fathom since when we picked her up from the streets as a stray dog she was limping and didn't know whether she'd make it through the week.

In fact Daffy was always a runner and she managed to escape on a number of occasions (running beneath my feet while carrying groceries in, finding a couple of doors open in a row all the way to freedom, etc) so I always thought her end would be met much sooner underneath a truck or something.

But my badass bitch can't walk very well any more and lately she's had a couple of seizures within a few days. I've been more than happy to carry her in and out of the house since she can't handle stairs very well but it's getting to the point where a call needs to be made and I don't know quite how to process that.

@kumakun I am really sorry.

Hello folks,

When @EmmahSue asked me to take over MSB in what seems like yesterday but was actually a long time ago I was still very much involved in the hobby and spent a fair bit of time on this forum.

However that hasn't been the case for a long time. I haven't played on a MUSH in almost two years and even when I did it wasn't for long. I still occasionally post here but MSB requires better than that; it requires someone who can do the community justice and pay this place the attention that it deserves. It was a fun run, but it's reached its end for me.

@Ganymede has made the foolhardy decision to take MSB. From now on the law-bot is in charge. Please offer congratulations and/or condolences as you see fit.

Many of you have been advocating for changes to our policies I have been reluctant to make so perhaps this will serve as a new beginning in that regard as well. Either way, I have every confidence Gany will knock it out of the park.

I'll continue to stick around to support MSB mainly in a support capacity until I fade into the sunset or perhaps find a game that makes me active again - who knows!

Again, thank you everyone.

@silverfox said in General MSB announcements:

@ganymede

I mean - would it REALLY be a bad thing if some parts of the forum lose all their data and we never recover them?

Yes, since we'd be losing continuity. And it wouldn't be selective.

@aria Well, they aren't going to watch themselves you know.

@aria How about the third season of Cobra Kai?

Oh my FUCKING god.

The Mandalorian's season finale.

@tnp Yeah, we went out of memory shortly after the reboot. I'll keep an eye on it.

I upgraded MSB to nodeBB's latest version (v1.15.5).

Please let me know if anything is on fire.

Episode 4 of The Mandalorian featured probably the best photography and lighting I've ever seen on TV. Visually it was simply magnificent.

Disney has thrown money at people and production values and it shows. This show is movie-level good across the board. I can't imagine what it costs to make per episode, it must be insane.

(Please be careful with spoilers if you reply).

@silverfox said in Brandon Sanderson:

I had to archive 7 pages of nook books before I could download Rhythm of War onto my Nook.

WTF kind of monster did you WRITE Sanderson?!

... How many books do you have on that thing?!

I never delete anything from my Kobo and it's barely at 30%. I've had it for years. Books are relatively small files!

@bear_necessities said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@tek said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

A Downton Abbey type thing where the two spheres are the nobility and the servants in one big manor house.

That wouldn't be hard at all to make on Ares. I'd definitely play even though I assume it'd rapidly dissolve into "nobles TSing servants: the MUSH" lol

If you look closely enough a lot of games are really "<X> TSing <Y>: the MUSH".