Posts made by faraday

@il-volpe said in MUers in the news?:

I've always found the "we don't allow concept Y because we can't think of a reason such a person would be in our setting" to be, eh, arrogant. As if game-runner being unable to think of a reason for a woman to be at Guadalcanal means that nobody can possibly think of one.

Sure, I don't like blanket prohibitions either. I think every character should be taken on their own merits. But at the end of the day, character plausibility is always going to be a judgment call.

With well-established settings, whether a concept did exist is often easy to establish. There were no women nurses at Guadalcanal in actual history.

It's when you ask whether a concept could have existed that it gets sticky. What one person considers a plausible explanation will tweak someone else's suspension of disbelief. Also, having 1 one-in-a-million character in your game may not be a big deal, but what if you have 10 in a small town setting? It can definitely have an impact on the thematic feel.

The main thing for me is to be careful that our bar for suspending disbelief isn't rooted in implicit biases or ignorance.

@Runescryer said in MUers in the news?:

The problem I have with @Nymeria's approach is that it's forcing players that want to play non-white characters to justify that character's existence. To a degree that white characters don't have to meet.

Yeah, again I think it comes down to the nuances of how it's handled.

Take TGG's Guadalcanal campaign for instance. I couldn't play a female front-line marine because that just wasn't a thing in 1942, and I had to work harder to explain what the heck my Australian missionary nurse character was doing there.

But that didn't bother me. It wasn't some arbitrary decision based on someone's narrow interpretation of 'canon'; it was a well-understood aspect of the setting. More importantly, there was no judgement attached. Staff was encouraging and accepting of those of us with atypical characters.

@Derp said in MUers in the news?:

Racism. Is. Wrong. This is not an argument, this is a statement of principle.

100% agree.

But... some settings may have systemic prejudice. It's hard to skirt around in historical settings. Sexist gender roles in LoTR are pretty key to Eowyn's storyline. Shadowrun has its own form of racism (actual races, elves/dwarves/etc. not skin tone). Even a setting like BSG has oblique references to real-world ethnic discrimination.

All of these things are Wrong with a capital W, but that doesn't mean there should be a blanket prohibition against all Wrong things in storytelling.

I think it matters how it's handled. And I think there's a core difference between a world where you're injecting unnecessary prejudice based on your own assumptions/biases, and ones where the prejudice is more explicit in the setting.

@Arkandel said in MUers in the news?:

If that is not an ongoing thing then neither should be skin pigmentation.

Granted my knowledge of genetics ends at about the high school biology level, but as I understand it - the things that make up our physical appearance are not as simple as folks think. Recessive genes can be carried through many generations, and it's often multiple genes at play (124 for hair color, 16 for skin color, 150 for skin pigmentation according to a quick google). There have been documented cases of "throwback" genetics where you have things like a white baby born to black parents, or a black baby born to white parents.

All of that is rare, sure, but so? Lots of MUSH characters are rare in some way or another. Throw in adoptions, IVF, surrogates, fantasy lands where you can literally change the rules of genetics or involve magic in the equation... it's really not that hard to explain away families with differing skin tones.

Is this really something we need to expend our energy caring about or policing?

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

I love the dismissiveness inherent in "a white guy from the 1930's".

I'm not really clear on how that is dismissive. It was not meant to be - I believe it is an accurate descriptor of Tolkein. I am not saying that makes him a bad guy, but he is a product of the day and age he grew up in. Just as we all are. I have biases of my own having grown up a white girl in the 1980's, as previously acknowledged.

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

But anyway, not getting into this tedious discussion again. I am not changing my mind, which is don't screw with the canon for any reason.

Great. I am not changing my mind either, which is that the impact on real people is more important than canon. So I guess there is no need for further debate.

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

Why shouldn't someone be allowed to write a story set in an isolationist, monoethnic culture?

I don't recall anybody saying they shouldn't be allowed. In fact, I said:

@faraday said in MUers in the news?:

If you're making your own personal novel/story/etc. and want to do some kind of discrimination allegory - I can respect that.

So to reiterate - having a mono-ethnic culture is not intrinsically a bad thing. One just should ask why you're making it mono-ethnic, especially if that mono is all white. Is it really central to the story/world? Or is it just lazy storytelling (like sci-fi mono-climate planets) or implicit biases at work?

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

If you're using an existing setting, the roots are defined already. I dislike tearing them up.

Skin color is rarely an essential, defining quality of those roots.

For instance, my son (an avid LoTR fan) recently did an essay on diversity in LoTR. He acknowledged that Tolkein's original lore did define the kingdoms with certain skin colors (loosely based on real Earth geography, with the region of focus being European and predominately white). However, he argues that people of color like to watch these shows too and "they deserve to have fantasy heroes that look like them." He also noted the benefits for white people seeing people of color not always being the bad guys (as Tolkein originally defined them). It would make no difference to the story if the kingdom of Rohan were patterned more after the steppe peoples of Asia, for instance, or if some of the dwarves in the Hobbit movies had different skin tones.

If an 11-year-old can see that the impact on actual modern-day humans matters more than the beloved lore of a white guy from the 1930's, I think more adults could stand to come to that realization.

@hobos said in MUers in the news?:

It's like... stealing someone's appearance for pure aesthetics, with none of the burden of that appearance, and not even trying to respect its roots.

In a modern/real-world context I can understand that. But we're talking about fantasy settings here. The only "roots" are what you define within the context of the fantasy world.

It's just as easy to snap your fingers and say "denizens of Fantasyland have a variety of skin tones due to the mixing of various ethnic groups umpteen thousand years ago" as it is to say "Fantasyland is majority white and the only darker-skinned people here are foreigners or slaves".

If you're making your own personal novel/story/etc. and want to do some kind of discrimination allegory - I can respect that. But more often the white-washing of Fantasyland is completely unnecessary and brings nothing of value to the story. It's just implicit biases and assumptions at work.

What it does cause is that people who want to play non-white characters are forced to jump through hoops to justify their presence, made to play "the other" or face IC discrimination, limited in their opportunities to join the story, etc.

So like Ghost said...

@Ghost said in MUers in the news?:

Don't racelock your games, people. It's uncouth.

@hobos said in MUers in the news?:

I kind of like the approach of "Well, the history of this country is white, and you have to think about how a black character would have gotten here if you want to play one here." more than I like the approach of "Yeah play whatever characters you want! Black or white! A black person applying into a family of all white people? All great! Skin color doesn't matter in genetics at all!"

I think you're missing the part where the history of this country is white is kinda a crappy core assumption for a fantasy setting.

In the real world, sure, we're limited by the established demographics of a particular region/history setting, but there's no need to extend that into a fantasy world. You can establish that a place has a diversity of skin tones without saying "skin color doesn't matter in genetics".

@Ganymede said in MUers in the news?:

@Derp said in MUers in the news?:

Seriously? Are we going to do this dance again? Can you maybe, I dunno. Just fucking stop with the insistence on people having the "proper" skin color in 2022? Because that is SUCH a big "oof."

You know, it may very well be that the material itself is inherently racist.

"Racist" isn't necessarily the word I'd use, but I do think there's a lot of implicit bias in world design, and a degree of ignorance (in some cases willful) among those who cling to "book purity" as an argument against diversity.

I wrote a fantasy novel when I was a teenager. In my mind, it was modeled after medieval Europe, so in my mind all of the denizens of the main kingdom (and thus all the main characters) were white. This is not because it was somehow essential to the world or story for them to be so. It was just the implicit bias of an '80s Euro-American white kid who didn't understand the value or importance of diversity.

In the (laughably unlikely) event that someone were to make a show/movie today set in that world, it would be asinine to argue that all the main chars should be white just because that's how the book describes them. We can be better than that.

I'm just disappointed that it wasn't in the news about mushing. Because I would have loved to see a journalist try to describe this hobby, lol.

@ZombieGenesis

FS3Skills is a separate plugin from FS3Combat. Many games have used the skills system without automated combat. I continue to advise against option #1 because the game will not be properly balanced as previously discussed.

The RPG plugin lets you basically use raw dice and a text/PDF sheet to manually use any TTRPG, so that's an option.

Or, of course, find someone to code the real 7th Sea system in Ares.

@Misadventure said in 7th Sea with Ares?:

You could do a comparison between the two sets of dice pools, and see how different they are.

Except it's not just about the raw dice pools. There are so many other factors that come into play when comparing two systems.

@Runescryer said in 7th Sea with Ares?:

Basically, you're going to average 1 Raise for every 2 dice in the pool. I believe that FS3 averages out to 1 Hit/Success for every 2 points, as well?

No, it does not. The number, type, and distribution of successes are all different in FS3 vs. 7Sea. The way FS3 does difficulty modifiers is vastly different. And 7Sea 2e also has other important mechanics like the various bonuses you get at different ranks (like exploding dice at rank 5) that dramatically affect the dice statistics.

It's apples and bananas, really. Unless you want a weird fruit salad of a skill system, you shouldn't try to combine them.

@Runescryer said in 7th Sea with Ares?:

Also, now that I think about it...It could just be a straight FS3 port, since the new edition is based on 'raises' of 10 instead of the Roll & Keep system. Change the names of attributes and skills to match the game, directly translate FS3 successes to Raises one-for-one...

The problem is that the "feel" of the game won't be the same because raises and successes aren't statistically comparable. Certain abilities might become overpowered, while others wouldn't work effectively.

You could certainly do swashbuckling in the 7th sea world with FS3 rules. That's similar to what The 8th Sea MUSH did, though they had the advantage of not trying to mimic 7th Sea's specific magic system. But trying to hybrid 7th Sea's rules using FS3 dice just isn't a recipe for success.

Re: the original warning... I don't feel anyone did anything wrong, but it didn't feel particularly useful to me. "There's maybe a creeper on some game somewhere who may be OPP!" Like... what am I supposed to do with that? It kind of feels like a "there might have been a stalker somewhere in America last night!"

I generally assume that at any given moment there are probably multiple creepers afoot in the MU community. Does it matter if any of them are OPP specifically? Do we actually have any reason to believe he left in the first place, much less returned? Like I said - I'm not throwing shade at the intent, just kind of agree with @ZombieGenesis that it might have been preferable to wait until more details were available.

Re: playing a mysoginistic character. I think in today's climate this needs to be treated with just as much sensitivity as playing a PC with any other offensive tendencies. "What's the big deal? My character's just a racist. It's all IC" just doesn't cut it any more. A lot of us don't want to deal with that sort of thing, unsolicited, in our fun times. I'm not saying nobody can ever play a bad person, I'm just saying you have to go out of your way to make sure you're not making other players uncomfortable. Express consent, trigger warnings in logs, making it crystal clear that you respect boundaries, etc. It's a fine line to walk, and I think you've gotta ask yourself whether it's really all that important to the character to wade into that minefield in the first place.

@Arkandel I had not, thanks for sharing. But looking at it now it still seems pretty uncanny valley to me. Also honestly the UI is not very intuitive.

@Macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

And, admittedly, 2 people saying "I'm not trying to judge, but it feels a little soon."

They're literally judging. Everyone's different. You do what's right for you.

Tangentially, this twitter thread describing grief as a ball in a box is the best explanation of grief I've ever seen.

I like the idea of those. I'd rather use fictional representations than celebrities. But every one I've seen is either cartoonish or uncanny valley or just ... not great looking. It's jarring. I hope the tech continues to improve though.

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

"Ya lost 10 HP, Steve, so... <dumps pile of Shadowrun books on table>...you get to play again after passing the fucking bar exam."

After so many years playing Shadowrun, I feel this so much lol. But you're right that it definitely depends on the game.

Also, TTRPG chars don't require the same degree of backstory/personality generation that most MUs demand. "She's an archer from a small village in the Delaris Mountains" was about as far as my TTRPG chars ever went. So even if the stats are onerous, overall the character creation process is probably not as big a deal in TTRPG.

What you lose with PC death in a TTRPG is progress. Progress towards a character story goal, or all those carefully-planned XP spends. There's generally not as much social capital lost, and it's not like you need to worry you're going to get left out of the story.

It's not better or worse, it's just apples and oranges.

@Ganymede said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

What other storytelling medium has 134 main characters.

Apparently, the Stranger Things series.

Very few MUs have 134 main characters participating in the same story at the same time. There are factions, groups, etc. that can sensibly divide things.

It's more like a big franchise like the MCU or One Chicago or CSI where each separate storyline has its MCs and they cross over occasionally.

Honestly, treating every MU PC as a main ensemble TV character has never been a problem for me as a game-runner. Some may get more "air time" than others due to their respective schedules and inclination to get involved in Stuff, but nobody's a supporting character/extra unless they choose to be.