Posts made by bored

Lol, I was confused why I was getting upvotes on a years old thread suddenly. Confusion alleviated.

Reincarnation #132 banned yet?

@Botulism Oh, I meant more for the arching plot in the Facility than the individual stories.

In an episodic game I wouldn't care if an individual episode was an IP (the Aliens one was my favorite! sorry I tried to blow up the station), but making the framing story Dr. Who (or whatever) would be a negative to me as well. I imagine if you don't want to come up with excessive amount of details/answer lots of questions, you could do something like the Facility where the 'outside' or 'between' adventures is just a mystery and you're not obligated to answer shit. But if the in-between was a bunch of people arguing Who-lore... meh?

Yeah I think a more generic theme is better here. It means you can write your own metaplot, temporal mechanics, etc to fit what you want to do. Anything IP-based invites appeals to canon.

HorrorMU did it pretty well. It wasn't Nightmare on Elm St. MU where everything was some kind of layered dream construct under the rules of that movie, it was just 'horror stuff'. There was a metaplot, but it was a mystery, which made it interesting. In an IP-based thing, you couldn't have that mystery layer, and you'd have people trying to tie things into the lore instead.

I didn't stick with HorrorMU that long but the basic concept still really intrigues me. I feel it might even work better without the supposed trope-y character of the horror game; one of the things that always peeved me was when I felt people weren't being 'true' to the spirit of the genre, which is as much my issue as theirs, but nonetheless something that made it hard to enjoy. Something where the characters have more inherent agency might alleviate that.

In the dark days of oWoD, I was definitely once called to judge a vampire chick biting off some dude's dick. Agg damage, good plan. A+.

@Auspice I'm not unaware of this, but I think the other option is worse, because it means you're literally applying a higher standard to people of the minority sexuality. There's no scenario I can imagine where that works out better. In fact, it's the status quo we used to have back in the old days, when people were pretty aggressive about 'catching' people and policing this stuff (remember when Firan had a rule against male players playing female prostitutes? that for sure wasn't out of respect for RL sex workers, it was a homophobic 'I don't want to accidentally TS a dude!')

Not everything has a perfect solution, and a lot of things in MUing, despite us trying to massage complex solutions, boil down to 'bad players can ruin anything.'

I am sure all of this is true.

Personally, I'm as worried about the fetish gays and lesbians as I am about the giant sex-vikings and 4'9" waifus: its all garbage tier, hyper sexual RP from horny people, but unless its disruptive, I really don't care if they enjoy it. If it's disruptive, I'd prefer they kindly moved to Shang.

But worrying about this stuff does not actually seem to be supportive of the community it's purporting to be supportive of, since you're basically promoting policing gay portrayals and witch hunting for impostors. Surely there's better things to be doing than worrying about two clearly very straight dudes RPing as big-titted schoolgirl besties?

@Prototart I'm willing to bet that some of the time you're wrong, and that some of the bad lesbians are the lesbian equivalent of the guys who play 7 foot tall sex-vikings. IE, lesbians can be crap RPers too.

E Q U A L I T Y.

@HelloProject I don't know, to me, sexuality actually feels like an area where there's been huge improvements in the hobby. As in... holy shit it is waaaay more queer than it was when I started. You're not as massively an ancient a player as some of us so maybe it's less apparent. But I can't think of any game I've played on recently that didn't have a variety of non-straight couples, individuals, etc, enough for them to not seem special or unusual. Which I would think is the goal? I know this isn't a call-out thread, but I'm curious where these egregious examples are. Maybe I don't see them because I'm straight? IDK. 'All the lesbians are guys' seems a whole lot like 'there are no girls on the internet,' which is itself a really pervasive sexist attitude.

My reaction to 'these lesbians are all trope-laden sexpests' is mostly that we're all playing trope-laden sexpests, all the time, 24/7. Behavior that we consider normal for ye olde straights is being treated as suspect, which seems kind of the opposite of what you'd want, right? Also, it feels like it's a wholly different thing than talking about ethnic minority inclusion because sexuality is something where people actually explore and evolve. There are people on this board who have come out and/or transitioned during their tenure in the hobby. Surely 'just stick to RPing what you are' isn't something you'd have wanted to have told them, right?

@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

It's the same for Russian characters -- except in that case, I haven't even seen the one that isn't somehow involved in organized crime.

It's worse than MUSHing, really. Think about when you saw one of these anywhere in media. This is what I was getting at with the really blatant slavic (and really any non-Western European ethnicity) racism thing earlier; you only ever see Russian mobsters (or even worse, Albanian mobsters, who are real bad dudes unlike the friendly wise guy Italian mobsters), spies, and maybe the occasional warlord or arms dealer. Naturally you never see these roles played by the actual ethnicities, either (holy shit this Black Widow movie is going to be an accent trainwreck).

...that brings me to another point. I really don't have a ton of empathy for people who 'don't see it'. I need to work on myself on that, but it aggressively frustrates me. Again: clueless high school students in the 80s could see examples of sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and other bigoted gross all over the place without any trouble. Less enlightened time, even!

But these things are not fucking subtle.

I genuinely do not understand how people 'don't see them'.

I think it's less a matter of not seeing, as it is to seeing what is presently culturally normalized, encouraged, and subconsciously desired. Media representations are a lot less accidental than we tend to treat them.

Certainly the horrific stuff you see in Sixteen Candles isn't the product of someone just being confused and thinking Asians are really like that maybe? It's propaganda meant to satisfy audience anxieties and prejudices (in this case, reflective of American fear first of Japan's economic rise and then the subsequent 'Tiger Economies' in the 70s, 80s and 90s) by mocking those cultures. And this is a broader trend. While we identify 'outsiders' by appearance, how we treat them is much more socially contextual. Asians are 'good' except when we think they're up to something (WWII, or the period above). Muslims are weird not-Christians, but we don't care that much except when they're obviously all terrorists (80s after Iran Hostage crisis, 2000s, etc). After 9/11, we get 24, a vastly popular show where we cheer a dude torturing people (who went from 90s holdover Balkan-types as the first season was produced pre-9/11, to typical nuke-wielding Muslims, to Mexican cartel types, back to Muslims... eventually getting to Chinese agents as we culturally decided who our next enemy was; see a pattern here?).

Uh. This has gotten long and convoluted, but yeah. The worse it is, the less likely it is to be accidental.

Yeah, I think it's mostly skin color as @Coin says. I can't say I translate 'Spanish' (from Spain) as POC as part of my American menetal construct of race, any more than I would a French person or Italian. But then again I grew up in the 80s and not on twitter, where there's an effort to make everyone POC, which, as I said before, seems very dubious because it both seems to continue to mark Anglo-Saxons as special and also erases the very different issues different groups have. The experiences of Blacks (or Native Americans) in the US are not comparable to every other vaguely darker than lily-white group. Other POCs sometimes get upset to hear that, but... oh well?

But color and other visible evidence of race is always the big factor. My neighborhood saw the Dominican population organize to (sometimes violently) defend businesses from looting: some folks quickly called this racist (against blacks). But among the Caribbean-Hispanic population (which is a mix of Spanish, African, and Native ie. Taino ancestry), Dominicans are one of the darkest skinned groups and often treated poorly by other related groups (and, edit for emphasis, by cops). They felt they were being left out of the protests, despite having the same kind of tension with police (even years before the protests, you'd hear 'Hands up!' shouted by people whenever a police car drove by the street here).

Even with the religious-oriented hate, it tends to follow those visible lines. Muslim-owned businesses are quite common in several places I've lived, but even at the height of 9/11 furor, who got targeted and who didn't was very much racial: brown Pakistanis moreso than basically white looking, well-assimilated Arabs. Jews too: I don't look it, and so I'm a generic white American if you don't see my last name on a document. But if you're more visibly Semitic, people are way more likely to comment on the heritage (even in the weird fetish-y 'friendly' way 'nice' Christians often do, which I've definitely seen happen to friends).

This is so amazingly off topic but also so painfully stupid I feel like I can't NOT answer.

@Admiral She's a former IDF fitness/combat trainer, and knowing nothing about you, I'm pretty confident to say she'd beat your ass.

In the realm of 'this is Hollywood and we have to cast someone conventionally attractive or our movie will not receive a budget,' casting someone who could do the work seems reasonable (to say nothing of the fact that the rest of the Amazons got precisely the casting you're asking for, with MMA fighters, boxers, and other martial artists among them). And bear in mind that it is work. As with other comic action stars like Hugh Jackman, actors don't walk around with action bodies in their normal lives. It takes months spending more time working out in a day than most people do in a week (generously, more than most of us probably do in a month) to get in shape for those roles.

Also my personal take is that calling a real person a 'skinny little twiglet' while you're supposedly promoting body positivity makes you sound like a jackass.

@HelloProject I don't know how well your definition works for the Mediterranean & Middle East, where the definition is often cultural (the Muslim ban you're referring to) as much as phenotypical.

A nice mass media example was the 'discussion' (to put it mildly) of Gal Gadot's casting for Wonder Woman, and the dialogue was extremely illustrative of the whole 'what actually counts as a white person.' She's Ashkenazi Israeli cast as a (crazy fantasy origin but basically) Greek woman. Some POC advocates got upset about it in the vein of 'She's a European being cast as a POC!', which implies Greek = not white and European Jew = white. Some went the other way, declaring it important POC casting, which hilariously (to me at least) seems the more white supremacist take since it's effectively asserting that neither Jews or Greeks are white.

Yet more generally, while Greeks might get a little of the 'greasy, hairy foreigner' racism that's targeted other borderline groups like Italians and Eastern Europeans (heck, Greeks are basically the mid-point between those) they generally aren't getting hassled by police.

So, I don't know. I think this shit is really complicated and context dependent, and any quick definition of 'who counts' is going to fail to be useful for anything other than twitter-based tribalism and points-scoring, as the Gadot debate sort of illustrates.

@insomniac7809

@surreality My maternal grandmother was also super racist against Hungarians. I think we've chatted about PA stuff so maybe you've heard this one, but here's some info on a fun white people slur popular in the region! She'd say it all the time around me as a kid.

@insomniac7809 said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

The Italian, Irish, and German diasporas to the USA are a really interesting topic, IMO.

The short version is, these days we're all white, but back when we really weren't.

Goes double for slavs, with a bonus of almost universally being depicted in... like hilariously openly racist ways in the media, even today, and people generally being totally OK with it.

I'm not sure the 'back then but not now' is even true, it's just less obvious (mostly). Of course, all light skinned people (even in groups that white people don't necessarily agree are white, see even Ashkenazi Jews) benefit from not physically looking black and being targeted for that reason, but when you get into things into wealth and education etc., it's hardly uniform, even today.

My current (only!) PC is non-white.

That said, he's from a culture I've lived and worked in so I have confidence to play him, if not wholly accurately, at least with a degree of verisimilitude that is acceptable to my own standards. I don't really know how I could play anything else decently. People sometimes say 'do research.' I think if current world events show anything, it's that the gap of experiences is something far larger than simple 'research' could cover.

There's also another problem. Based both on channel chatter and this very thread, I often find myself self-restricting what kind of RP I engage in. Not to avoid stereotyping (obviously I am conscious of these), but to avoid engaging almost any topic of cultural relevance at all, because I don't trust the very people suggesting this to be anything but unbearable in their effort to police RP. I picked my current character to engage with some uncomfortable history, but I really can't do it, because I know it will cause a shitstorm of people getting offended. So instead I do pretty generic RP. I'm not sure this has accomplished much, in the long term.

@surreality said in Good TV:

@Aria said in Good TV:

there's still, like, five or six books worth of material to cover

...how is his name not Job already

hahahaha

I binged through whatever seasons were on prior to this last one a while ago, so obviously it hooked me enough to keep me watching, but definitely in a sort of 'this is so bad its amazing' sense at times. How many times can you do 'Uhtred literally saves your entire fucking Kingdom' -> 'Uhtred makes some small social gaff' -> 'UHTRED IS A VILLAINOUS HEATHEN AND BANISHED'? HOW MANY?

(Runner up: how many times can you hand him a random new love interest and then kill/otherwise remove her? that fridge must be getting crowded)

The issue I found with the game was a lack of focus, or perhaps it would be better to say a skewed focus. As some people have said, the name didn't exactly make things clear and there seemed to be multiple themes at once. Dieslepunk is its own thing, that is quite distinct from 'golden age comic books,' but there seemed to be some conflating of them.

Another thing is that I don't think these narrower themes work for 'broad' superhero games. Sometimes you can find a point of commonality that makes sense (ie the 1960's game makes sense combining the mutant and RL Civil Rights stuff), but often they do not. Some characters are timeless in a way that they can be re-interpreted in any setting, while some characters are timeless in a way where they simply do not interact with the setting at all. Get too many of these, and your game loses any sense of being about anything in particular. It's probably better to approach as OC-only, or with a specific kind of cast.

In your case, it was weird to make a point of banning Superman as a PC and yet ending up with a large number of Superman knock-offs and equivalents among the early PCs. There's not much point being Iron Man with a gas-powered suit when everything is alien eye lasers.

I don't think 5e really requires a map. There's no 5ft step, everyone can move-attack-move, and AoOs are usually pretty binary (did you leave the reach of the person you were fighting to go somewhere else?). Spell effects may be a little more complicated, but that's really just on the DM to try and be reasonable and everyone to be clear on their basic movement/positioning (ie; 'I stay next to name to protect him with Sentinel,' or 'we all move with an X-foot gap between us to avoid AoE').

If you really want a grid... Aside from TGG, there was also that 4e game that Nuku ran, which had a similar kind of grid system (which that edition more or less requires). I believe that similar code may exist in one of the Star Wars Saga codebases floating around, as I've seen it there as well.

I will say that both of these were pretty cumbersome, and definitely add a lot of time to a combat. This is something plotrunners usually want to avoid, so it's a bit of a consideration. A better solution, if you really want map combat in 5e, is probably using a secondary program to handle any map/token management and just reference back and forth from the MU (where the sheets are still maintained, HP tracked, rolls calculated, etc). People have used google sheets for this and similar, so you don't even necessarily need something as fully fledged as roll20.