Posts made by bored

@Ganymede

You're the lawyer, but I assume the split you're describing between 'this action causes a person to lose their job' and 'this action causes a person to become a victim of subsequent physical violence' is largely a division of the same basic concept into civil and criminal realms, right?

So obviously the standards (and potential consequences) are going to be (maybe very) different. This is why I am saying more robust laws are important, because it delineates what is acceptable and what is not.

I think what's acceptable isn't for me alone to decide, and it's going to vary across a wide continuum of actions and consequences. Maybe getting caught at a KKK rally should get you fired (but again, we'd have to concede that attending an Occupy Wall Street event might also preclude one from future employment). That lady who lost her job for making an AIDS/Africa joke (that was intended to be shedding light on the situation, not mocking it)? Probably not.

Intentionally trying to get someone fired from their job is fairly serious, and should be treated as such, particularly given the potential run-on effects (dependents, suicide, maybe even the risk of violent outburst).

@Ganymede What are you really asking?

Is it doxxing, definitionally? Depends on the definition. Aforementioned hacker version: nah, the information is too public. Modern twitter definition? Probably.

Are you asking if I'm happy about the outcome? Lizard brain says: hey cool a nazi got in trouble, take that. Just like lizard brain can watch Richard Spencer get punched in the face repeatedly to great glee, while realizing that the guy doing it is definitely guilty of assault and punishing him for it is a basic requirement of modern civilization. Logical brain might also posit that having good laws on this topic would help when, say, the theoretical KKKer's bros gather to launch doxx campaign against <leftist target du jour>.

So my bigger scale answer is 'I would prefer there be some good laws about this stuff,' but as someone pointed out earlier (not sure if in this thread), our lawmakers have a tendency of treating online shit like it's make-believe, which is problematic. I'm not a legal scholar myself. In your example, I imagine a public rally to some degree mitigates expectation of privacy. But then again, this might also affect, say, one's college-aged activist-minded but still immature child getting spotted at a left leaning rally and losing out on future job opportunities when their would-be employer googles them.

It always cuts both ways.

@surreality said in Separating Art From Artist:

ETA: I don't support the 4chan trollstorm approach. Not even when it's 'my team' doing it.

I think this is kind of the key. If you allow/support this kind of discourse, well, then it's the discourse you're going to get regardless of who is speaking. Which leads perfectly to:

@insomniac7809 said in Separating Art From Artist:

I mean, when we get into actual doxxing or death threats, that shit is evil and the people doing it need to be in a fucking cell.

The first time I'd ever seen 'dox' used in the mainstream (as opposed to a decade+ earlier when it was purely hacker lingo) was on a feminist blog calling/asking for info on some right wing target of theirs (another younger blogger). Every time I see it brought up as a right-wing tool, my mind jumps to this. So the point still stands. You don't want this horrible behavior, regardless of the team.

@JinShei Only one of the streets? Amateur:

@Rowan said in Firefly - Still Flyin':

At least they're not using 'observer objects' like Firan, which would be on you 24/7 logging everything both IC and OOC.

I always counted it as a matter of pride when I struck my tent and an observer popped out. My TS was clearly a topic of great interest.

@Groth said in Good TV:

@Ghost said in Good TV:
The single wierdest casting choice to me is Fringilla because unlike a lot of other characters she has a lot of family and is supposed to hail from what is basically fantasy france. Does that mean all of Toussaint will now be sub-saharan African or what?

I don't see too much trouble with her, tbh? Fringila is almost a non-character in prior media. She features in a chapter or two of one book (in which all she does is sleep with Geralt), and a brief appearance during one quest in W3 (in which she mostly is part of some background dialogue joking about how nearly everyone present has slept with Geralt), and in ensemble with a few other sorceresses a couple more times beyond that.

TV Fringila is essentially a new character, so its hard to say there's heavy expectations of what she should be like. I like that they've made her family prominent, since Artorius was another interesting but highly obscure character but putting him on the council and highlighting the obvious nepotism was a good story beat (and arguably, the casting makes it easier for the audience to read that when the names otherwise might go over their heads - ah, the two black mages are related!) I'm not sure having one Toussaint char means the entire Duchy has to be black? It might affect Anna Henrietta's casting (since they're also relatives at some distance) but... OK?

@lordbelh said in Good TV:

@Jaded I've only ever heard good things about Anya Charlotra's portrayal of Yennefer. Personally I think she's the best part of the whole show.

@bored said in Good TV:

there's also the Polish fandom, which in general wasn't positive toward any race bending

This I've caught. While part of that is surely a touch of old fashioned racism; the Eastern Block isn't exactly short on it, it also seems a bit more complex. Something along the lines of not wanting to get caught up in the American race and diversity politics, when in Europe its Poles who have gotten shit on for centuries, and this being their time to shine and be seen. As opposed to being portrayed in ways to suit American sensibilities. Anyone following Brexit'll have caught on the general 'shitty polaks coming to steal our jobs' sentiment simmering, and that's common enough across the board. From the Polish perspective, there's little conception of white privilege, or guilt, having had no slaves, no colonies, no empire, mostly just being victim to them. The places they're likely to go, they're the second class citizens from the second class culture (though its changing, at least where I live - white Slavs doesn't quite get the usual suspects' blood boiling like it use to, not when there's Syrians and Afghans - anything muslim really - and Africans to panic about). Its one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe, too, with the vast majority of migrants being from Ukraine (especially the Ukraine that used to be Poland) or other Slavic countries. So when its their fantasy culture on display, they're like to expect it to be pretty darn white.

Is that naive? Sure. Is there a bit of racism there? Yeah. Is adding a bit of diversity a sign of American Cultural Imperialism, or Cultural Appropriation? Heh. Though reading this one guy going on a bout it made me chuckle, and I've been searching for that article (or blog post, or whatever), to link, but to no avail. But there are some complex currents working through the responses that I've found interesting to read and ponder a bit on.

This is a good analysis and I have some mixed feelings, myself.

Obviously it's racist. But you hit the nail on the head about how they feel about the use of what they see as a (rare) cultural export from their country that has gained such fame being co-opted by others and then wrapped up in a political discourse that simply doesn't exist in their country. There's also a parallel issue, both for Europeans but also (moreso) for immigrant Poles - and basically for all slavs - that Western media tends toward highly caricatured, racist depictions of these groups when they bother to identify them: IE, everyone from anywhere east of Germany is either a Niko Bellic-esque tracksuit wearing vodka-swilling mobster, or a low-class, smelly, Ruritanian (look up that word) dullard. So I can understand that it's divisive. Of course the counter-counter argument is that the Witcher is spreading a broader view of some of their cultural elements and that having one or two black people won't instantly ruin that.

On the plus side, thanks to the show, the books are now NYT bestsellers and keep selling out physical copies.

@Ghost I don't know what your source really is on 'it didn't happen.' There was an entire narrative around the showrunners being total SJWs and turning the whole thing into a farce (there's still a rumor that the Nilfgaard armor looks like balls as an attack on the patriarchy?), and yes, a lot of 'if Ciri isn't white we riot,' etc. It was fairly evident on r/witcher source

There's also the Polish fandom, which in general wasn't positive toward any race bending. I think you may be reacting to a lower level of blow-up than say, Star Wars, without taking into account that the fandom there is several orders of magnitude larger.

@Ghost said in Good TV:

Even better? I get the sense that the fans of the books and games didn't care at all about the casting of Yen and Triss that it didn't even register. People WANTED this.

It must be nice being this naively positive

@Ghost While I agree that games using systems should, in fact, abide by those systems (as should be obvious by some of my pot-shots at people who posture about being 'above' dice) , I think you're missing one really obvious reason that you see this weird ambiguity. It's especially relevant to WoD, if not exclusively: the games are IPs that people like.

And while, sure, its possible to play free-form versions using the same world (as ye olde AOL chats proved), or use the setting while substituting a lighter dice system, its probably a bit counterintuitive and may dilute the experience. D&D without levels and d20s is generic fantasyland, and without the structure that informs you why a small armed militia may no longer be a match for a single 5th level spellcaster, it may feel loose and arbitrary. Ditto WoD. 'My vampire has supernatural charm' does not have the feel of ticking particular dots of Presence/Majesty, Dominate, etc and seeing those discrete tiers of power.

For D&D, old as it is, this is actually a well-tread topic, and the linked data isn't the first time they've reported on it. It's been fairly well established over many editions that most groups don't play past level 10. It's why you had E6, for instance (a 3.5 D&D variant that capped at level 6, but allowed some continual non-leveling progress thereafter via feats), which conveniently hits the same popular range this article mentions.

I tend to imagine, in the D&D case, this is DM driven as much as anything, because higher level chars are increasingly difficult to balance and provide good games. On MUs these issues (for STs) are further exacerbated since you spread the PCs out over vastly different XP points. We hear about dino issues all the time, and the historical answer has mostly been to shrug and pretend it's not really a problem / "omg why do u care about stats?!?!! roleplay not rollplay hurr hurr"

Advancement is an option. You can have none at all, picking any power point and fixing people there, you can allow it but only to a point (caps), you can allow it in full, you can offer tiered characters, etc. I'm somewhat dismissing 'standard @Arkandel survey questions' but it's because there probably isn't a single best approach and will vary by game (to use the orignal example, a D&D Planescape game will almost certainly require higher power levels). However, I do think the straight D&D version of 'continually accumulate xp and grow in power until you can control the fabric of reality while some people are still hitting goblins with sticks' is very likely the worst.

If you have advancement, your ideal is probably the bell curve curve some might expect, of beginners quickly becoming intermediate (while learning the ropes, setting, game culture, etc along the way) and rarely, slowly, and with luck, some making it to advanced and then (this is important) completing their stories. This doesn't actually happen on MUs though, because of two problems at the opposite ends of the same issue: player drop-out means that a lot of newbies don't stick around, while the general aversion to character death and lack of set narrative arcs means that intermediates always survive to become advanced and then never ride off into the sunset.

So there's a variety of solutions approaches. You can not have advancement. You can have caps (we've circled back to E6). You can do tiers to have different layers of play on one game, which I actually kind of like so long as they're open to all players vs. getting an elder because you TS headstaff are a 'trusted player.' Or you can do full advancement... but not wuss out about death and other endings. A fair way back, I experimented with offering a variety of perks to players re-apping after death (including access to snowflake options), and some people did take it up.

Back from X-mas (the preferred pronunciation of the 31st century).

I am a pretty huge Witcher fan and enjoyed it immensely. Casting someone who actually likes the material? Man, it shows. If the larger industry takes away nothing else from the show, it should absolutely be that. Don't treat these IPs like disposable content that you cast some bankable but disinterested actor to 'I'm just here for the paycheck' their way through. Find people who are excited to do it.

Similarly, Yen blew me away. We had a good idea from trailers and leaked shots that they'd be filling out her BG and doing Sodden, but it was really far better than I could have hoped for. She's dead perfect in the role.

I loved the time stuff, but <insert read the book smug> (Poll: What's our Red Wedding equivalent?) Still, it didn't seem super obscure. The person I was watching with (who has only 'I saw the unicorn video on youtube' level prior Witcher experience) was wondering where Ciri's mom was right off, so I feel like the holes/inconsistencies primed the audience to anticipate the subsequent revelations.

Gripes are the things most folks are griping over (ballsack armor, and maybe Nilfgaard in general - hael Ker'zaer). I do wish the season was maybe 10 episodes, as there were clearly places where they had to cut and jam in stuff to make it fit (episode 2's non-Yen plot). Or well, just more money so we could have had Borch in his full glory. But who doesn't want more, better? I am mostly annoyed that I have to wait more than a year for more.

@Jennkryst said in Good or New Movies Review:

I salvage my viewings of the prequels pretty okay by pretending four facts are true for them.

1. Darth. Darth. Binks. No, I'm not joking. If you follow the ring/rhyme theory, 'powerful force user hiding their identity behind goofy idiot facade' is... Yoda. There's a ton of other little snippets I totally pretend is FOOL PROOF EVIDENCE to support this.

I'm low-key on this one too. I know people think its ridiculous, but based on stuff the actor said about his role being drastically revised (after the negative public reaction to the character), plus George's rhyming stuff, etc. There have been some very good efforts of people looking at clips and footage for clues that might have survived edits, as well.

While I agree there's a story they could have explored from TLJ (the whole 'the force rises everywhere' idea), it would have realistically taken a lot of new characters and 2 movies. So rather than blaming Rian Johnson, I think the shit falls on Kennedy and the overall lack of leadership/vision for the project. 8 would have worked if it was 7. Do all your deconstruction then build anew from the ashes. Instead, the whole plays out as JJ and RJ going back and forth retconning each other. Kind of ridiculous, and mind boggling such high-stakes interests would let it happen.

Because we're doing it

Empire->ANH->RotJ->Rogue One->Sith->Rise->FA->Solo>AotC->TLJ->TPM

Revenge of the Sith has come up for me a lot over the years, while I originally hated the prequels in general. Attack of the Clones is still hard to watch due to the romance and Count Dookie being a confusingly unnecessary character in the same fashion as Snoke/Palpatine, and Phantom Menace has a little kid and fart jokes. But if I had to rate them as trilogies, I'd put the prequels over these new movies. Lucas' aged excesses aside, he still clearly had a wider vision he's building, and one of the greatest tragedies of this whole thing was Disney throwing out his notes. I buy into his whole cyclic epic nonsense (that he was doing it, anyway) and it's... kind of a damn shame we'll never get to see the full product.

@Ghost It's actually an interesting design note on the o/nWoD change there. While nWoD looks more 'standardized' at the basic level (mostly uniform 5x5 chargen options, ie clan/sect, path/order, auspice/tribe), they also include tertiary customization options that are OOCly less 'weird' (bloodlines, legacies, lodges - plus all the changeling stuff, it obviously doesn't quite follow the formula of the others). This feels like an acknowledgment that while the 'rare and unusual' shouldn't be necessary to make a character interesting, 25 combinations might not be enough concept diversity for players in the long run.

Then if you look back at old Vampire, which really only gave you the basic clan selection for whatever sect your game was playing, or similarly Mage, its evident that there were fewer choices still (Werewolf did have a lot, by contrast). In both editions, this is often compounded by many of the powers being shared: most vampires use combinations of common disciplines, all mages have the same powers (especially as they advance), etc. So providing bloodline disciplines, legacy abilities, etc becomes a relevant way to mechanically distinguish PCs.

@Bananerz Yeah, the weapon from the card is part of what turned my char from 'ok' to 'Strahd-slaying menace.'. I'd forgotten about the tarot thing so that makes it a bit less of a spoiler to mention. There definitely is good loot, including some stuff way overblown for a level 8-10ish party, but like everything depending on how/where you explore you can miss a lot of it.

@Bananerz Obviously I don't know about your DM, but I don't think much of the stuff in Strahd would need to be bumped up to be incredibly lethal. As the published modules go, it is quite extreme in terms of letting you encounter stuff out of your league. You can also just run into a lot of problems with ubiquitous nature of physical resistance on monsters vs. the availability of class-appropriate magic weapons. I had no gear for 3/4ths the game... and then all the gear, and probably did 80% of the damage on Strahd. Now I want to wait till you're done to properly discuss it all!

I am curious about the whys of your party. The one thing we didn't have that I really felt would have improved our lot was an archer (although I'm not sure the module even has a magic bow! so maybe not), or just better dedicated long-range nuking anywhere. Our party was... Sword and board devotion Paladin, Fiend Warlock (who the DM did some fun setting tie-ins for), Knowledge Cleric and Duelist Rogue/Bladesong Wizard (me). Small party so there's always going to be issues, but i feel like if the Warlock had been a full caster, or the Cleric had been light, or I'd been a ranger or ranged fighter, etc, we would have been a little better off.

@Bananerz I think we finished at 10. If you're using the milestones system from the module it follows a pretty predictable curve. Although even that was its own problem, because the mod encourages exploring... and then yanks focus this way and that with the 'events.' But if you do half of x, and then go over and do y, you can go long stretches at the same level and then kind of jump a couple very quickly. You can also easily outlevel or encounter the wrong content, or end up skipping stuff. Plus there's weird backtracking (We didn't do the Mill, or finish the werewolves, and found another solution but... didn't bother to backtrack with it and just went and killed Strahd). A big issue is that Castle Ravenloft itself, while definitely deserving of its famous status in dungeon design, is not something that you can really tackle all at once. But the story can make repeated visits a very odd and artificial choice.

My own wonky character story was an issue with a forced alignment change. It wasn't a problem playing with friends but playing with people who know each other less well... I can see it being a huge issue.

@GreenFlashlight said in D&D Stew:

bizarre activation failure chance powers had back in second edition. It was bonkers, but in a cheerfully naive way I couldn't help appreciating.

Oh yeah, the hilarious flip-side of the afforementioned 'disintegrate at level 1' was the fact you could fail and dust yourself. I had that book when I was... I want to say about 10? Crazy shit.

@GreenFlashlight said in D&D Stew:

I want to play D&D.

I want psionicists to come back, with all the weird seventies bastardized mysticism that was in second edition.

Fifth edition is the best edition.

I figure you're aware of this, but they've put out a variety of approaches to 5e psionics via UA. Sure, none of it is the 'lol disintegrate as a level 1 character' level of madness that was the 2nd ed handbook, but it's something!

@Jeshin said in D&D Stew:

I will say for people who want to run a module or play in a module that DND Essentials is very well well and so is Curse of Strahd. I would avoid Tomb of Annihilation personally or Storm King's Thunder, though I may be biased.

Man, I did not care for Strahd, nor would I recommend it for beginners with all the 'haha this invincible badguy will show up and tool on you occasionally' stuff nor the general high danger & lethality of the setting overall. Maybe this is a nostalgia gap or something as I never played the old one, but there was a lot about it that annoyed me, including one element that made the 'temptations' of the Amber Temple feel very railroady and quickly skewed our game into evil PC territory. I've heard really positive stuff from my friends about Saltmarsh, though, and the intro stuff like Phandalin is quite approachable.

Last night no one died!

This was a nice change after the prior couple sessions where I kinda had to fudge things to reverse what would otherwise have been a TPK of a nearly brand new party.