@kitteh SOOOORY... 
A mermaid player
A player of mermaids
A mermaid who plays mermaids.
Mermaids have feelings, too, and I assure you that I would never do such a thing.
Because mermaids also have access to the kraken, sharks, and schools of jellyfish and hell hath no fury like a mermaid scorned.
Anyone remember this story? Conservative Christian would-be Congressman by day, blood-sucking coke of whores asses badass vampire by night?
http://www.businessinsider.com/floridas-vampire-candidate-future-of-american-politics-2014-4
WoD is like Cheerios.
You ate it for 20 years and then switched to something far more superior, like Honey Bunches of Oats.
After a few years of HBoO, you will see your ex-girlfriend cereal, Cheerios, on the rack at a store. HEY. 20 years of Cheerios, why not right.
You invite them Cheerios over. Pour milk onto them. Put them in your mouth..
...and then you realize, past the point of no return, that you're committed at least to that one tryst with Cheerios, and that you didn't really miss it that much.
WoD can totally be like regretful ex-sex.
Was just talking with @surreality about this and i said: The idea of someone OOCly berating me "How dare you treat <insert char name> like that! She has feelings, you know" makes my skin crawl.
The sheer number of people who MU that treat their characters as an extension of their OOC selves, one-upped a step further to be assumed sentient friends with feelings and human emotions, then inserted into fictitious settings with monsters, character death, and romance?
NopeNopeNOPEnopeN0pEnopeNOPENOOOOOOPE
"...dude, I used an industrial facility to make minigun barrels all the time. IT'S NOT THAT HARD, DUDE. I WAS MIXING AMMO WHEN I WAS TEN."
While I approve of sexy Viking maidens with assault rifles...no. Not in my Game of Thrones MU.
...Jesus Christ.
How much of a blanket this reality fucking sucks statement is it if you choose to no longer be yourself and live the rest of your days as an imaginary My Little Pony character?
@Misadventure Right. I mean, discovery is important to the mental/high intelligence character. I don't think there's anything wrong with discovery and creation of gadgets, etc, within the confines of the setting.
Where I draw the line:
If I get into the tuplamancy thing, can I be this?
Because FUCK YEAAAAAAH BOI
@Miss-Demeanor The existence of how-to guides on the internet does not, by existence, justify the handwaving a roll needed to translate that information into a success. Time to complete the task (a recipe you know by heart is always prepared faster than if you need to keep reading directions), absorption of information, and the ability to translate those instructions accurately are all factors that should not be decided merely by the existence of online how-to guides.
In short, just because there's shit about it on YouTube, doesn't mean it counts as "ghost dots" on a character sheet, thus enabling people to min max their XP in other ways.
Let me give you an example
In RL, I write shell scripts. If you look up sh/bash/ksh scripting in Google, you're bound to find hundreds, if not thousands, of sites that include methodologies, discussions, tips, bad advice, scripting examples, and in some cases, entire guides on how to write scripts. Now, going in, my computer score is in the 3-4 range, and when I go to these sites, it's usually to find an answer as to why some syntax in one string isn't working like I think it should.
I'll take a snippet, test it, see if I like it. I apply it to my current skill and attribute levels to translate it into an action based on what I currently know.
Now, let's say you've never played around with shell scripting EVER
The existence of online guides doesn't guarantee you any form of timely success in understanding functions, variables, syntax, which text editors to use, regular expression, how to do math using code, if/then/elif/fi, for each in, conditionals, loops, etc. Applying those guides to your current level of knowledge will be good experience in raising your skill/attribute levels, but the existence of guides will not result in a solution in a timely, accurate, or immediately useful manner. In the end, even if you plugged together a script after hours of learning shell scripting for the first time, you might come away with a script that echoes commands, but it's sure as fuck not going to be some kind of java-based LowOrbitIonCannon DDoS tool.
Theres guides for making a boat, making knives, guns, bullets, sewing, cooking, fishing, Krav Maga, etc on the internet, but the existence of those only serve to allow practice to (in game terms) raise those skill/attribute ratings to use them effectively.
Some online guides are more within reason, but a GM should take care to not equate a player's ability to think to search for find these guides as a replacement for proper use of skills, especially if the result is critical to anything involving plot or other players.
tl;dr Online guides don't​ teach skill, accuracy, or guarantee absorption of the knowledge. Using 'online guides' ICly for little, non-plot things (bake a cake!) is more acceptable, but cutting corners by citing online guides to handwave dice rolls (by the PC or ST) is lazy and, in my definition, cheating the shortcomings of their XP expenditures. Not everyone can do everything, and online guides are no great equalizer. Online Guides=+1 bonus to existing skill/attr roll, and NOT an excuse to not roll.
@Wizz See? It's totally normal; totally harmless.
@Apu @Thenomain Or, in my preferred way of thinking, that kind of like how some people nowadays are really into Greek Mythology (or at least enjoy a good toga party) that somehow, despite the passage of time, someone thought the Hello Kitty (perhaps an image in an archive, a museum, or an old photograph of teenaged girls from Earth that was) was fucking cute as hell and had it printed it on a tee shirt.
Digging up old culture references from the past is way more explainable that drudging up pop culture references that haven't happened yet.
For the record, I thought Kitty's Hello Kitty shirt was badass, even while she was tasing my character and two others in an ill-advised, completely accidental shower brawl incident.
"HAT TRICK"
Gods help me.
My dad has been busy as fuck since I was a baby, and is now nearing retirement age. Currently, his schedule is pretty empty, so for the last few weeks he's done nothing but sit in front of his TV with his cell phone and blather on about politics on Facebook. I don't want to block his posts, because he also posts family stuff, but it's a nonstop tirade of the following:
BlargaBlargaBlargatheGaysBlargaBlargaLiberalsBlargaBlargaClintonBlargaBlargaBlargaMakeAmericagreatagainBlargaBlargaBlarga**LiberalsAreScum
Took him 60+ years, but my dad just now discovered what internet trolling is.
F.M.L.
DOUBLE POST
One of my favorite ways an RPG system approached stuff like this was in Eclipse Phase. In the setting Earth is a destroyed nightmare wasteland, which requires all of society to live in space on stations, habitats, etc. It's a trans-humanistic setting.
In the flavor text around culture and how it's approached, they mention that since money isn't needed anymore; that old, obsolete Earth concepts had become a sort of fashion.
@Arkandel I KNOOOOOW, but my dad's typing is very ineloquent and filled with spelling errors.
Example: "MAGA! Trump firs people that don't do there job, Obama didn't!"
...And it's hard, Ark. It's hard to read.
Once, in D&D, we were trying to sneak past a sleeping, blue dragon. We were too weak to fight it, but the only way was through its cave, so we opted to try to sneak (turning back around would have taken days off of our travel).
Half of the group was past the point of no return when the thief in the group decided to sneak attack the dragon in the EYEBALL. We were successfully sneaking past it before Douche Baggins decided to try to SOLO the fucking dragon.
It woke up and threw electricity everywhere.
80% party death. Right there.
(Taken from famously epic fan-fiction entry named My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie)
Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). And then the murders started.
Edit: http://myimmortal.wikia.com/wiki/My_Immortal/Chapters_1-11 (enjoy!)
Normal until the difficulty makes it a cakewalk, then I step it up.
For story-based games, it's the story I want. For challenge/grind type games, like Diablo 3, I'm currently running on my seasonal bit on Torment 4
Once, my SO and I found out, due to a failed stamina roll at an IC house party scene, that the guy running the game was really into date rape roleplay.
Or should I say my SO found this out because it was her character.
He was booted out of our apartment after he told her to stop being so sensitive about it.
@faraday said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
That separation going !!!KABOOM!!! and causing a flashback or panic attack is the actual thing that occurs when an actually real trigger gets tripped. As such, if it possibly might happen? Then, yeah, the way you initially put this... they are simply not welcome.
There is a huge difference between saying: "This game has mature themes. If that has the potential to stress you out, then you should take steps to protect yourself." and "You're not welcome here."
I have immense sympathy for anyone who has to police their own entertainment for the sake of their emotional well-being. I can only imagine what it might be like to walk into a movie and not know if you're going to half a flashback in the middle of it. That's horrible.
But I still don't feel that anyone has a right to foist the responsibility for their well-being onto someone else. Be proactive. Communicate with plot runners. Communicate with staff. Make your needs known. Most people, I think, will be reasonably accommodating.
Expecting people to fill out a "what might bother you" questionnaire or expecting people running an improv scene to try and forsee all possible triggers in advance just seems unreasonable to me.
I wish you were my spirit animal.
I think you worded this very eloquently and appropriately, and I think this approach is very reasonable.