Posts made by Ghost

@BobGoblin CAAAAROL. CAAAAROL.

lolol.

Just had an idea.

How rad would it be if HBO capitualted to the demand to "redo" Game of Thrones season 8, but then recast Jon Snow as being played by Robert Pattinson.

@Tinuviel oh, man I remember Fights n' Tights. Never played there, but I remember hearing about the ban.

Though I'm not sure how I feel about a ban on straight guys on a gay-focused game TBH. I can totally get not wanting your gay bar being taken over by Toby Keith/5 Finger Death Punch straight dudes, or having every 3rd scene be an R.E.M. Losing my Religion scenario. I always feel a little guilty when my SO and I get dragged to a gay bar and she leaves me for 10 minutes to come back to see me getting hit on and I have to explain I'm not on the market. I was a male standing alone in a gay bar. It was fucking plausible.

Sometimes ya just want a bunch of guys that all want the same thing in one place. I get that. Though, now that I've written this I'm thinking about the saying that "if the reverse of something is wrong, then it's usually wrong both ways". I mean, no one barred me (a breeder male) and my non-gay-male SO from going to a gay bar. So, straights-not-allowed is really technically and spiritually no different than gays-not-allowed.

Sigh. Life is confusing and complicated. Love the complexity some of the time. The rest, I can totally get why people have social anxiety.

Sidebar? My mental television is playing this scenario where one player makes a peddler of German amputee/proesthetic porn, and then suddenly 10+ characters app in as being amputees. Then, staff goes "HOLY FUCK, PEOPLE, STOP. ENOUGH." and then people are like "Y U HAET AMPUTEES???"

Like, would that be kink shaming, protecting a minority, or bigotry against amputees? SOMEONE CALL KENNY LOGGINS, CUZ WE'RE IN THE DANGER ZONE.

(I agree with your brainmeats and the thought process by the way. I think it all comes down to philosophy and honest intent. The sell is often based in the packaging and the salesman. Ban on amputees is far more socially dangerous than a temporary restriction on former pro wrestlers given the current social climate of both mushing and the world alone.)

@Lotherio said in Disabilities and Mental Illness as Character Traits:

@Ghost said in Disabilities and Mental Illness as Character Traits:

holding a Chihuahua in one hand and a bottle of Strawberry Fanta in the other.

Gonna be honest. A Chihuahua holder drinking strawberry fanta drops my drawbridge everytime, being 56 is just insult to injury.

Yeah, definitely could be a Bond villain concept.

@Tinuviel said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

And to be fair, the whole "what next" argument isn't really as invalid as it might ordinarily be, given staff (or someone speaking as if they are staff) mentioned that they had restricted applications for British characters in the past. So there's two rather legitimate questions to ask, regarding this policy: What next? and How many of X is too many for staff?

I think this is a good approach, here; at least a better one than assuming bigotry. To be fair, they said there was an influx of amputee apps, so by that alone it was a decision based on census rather than bigotry. It seemed pretty clean, to me.

You and I know there could be reasonable cause to limit specific character types. Not a lot of trans people were in the WW1 trenches, for example, or a Sengoku Era Samurai game probably wouldn't have a large population of anything other than Asian characters.

It's always polite to ask, but I think sometimes that quick jump to bigotry borders on being nearly as rude as the offense one claims was being made.

ETA: In the end (it doesn't even matter) policy decisions that are truly bigoted are the ones that start with "Because I don't like..." Bigotry is an intolerance of those with opinions other than your own, which could very easily be twisted into a bigoted person claiming someone else is bigoted based on the oyher person's refusal to capitulate to their own opinions. It's a slope. A slippery slope. Still, "we don't want too many of this particular concept" is objective. One can choose to believe it's because of a dislike of amputees (in this example), but that's really just a conspiracy theory that is refusing to believe the reasons staff gave are a lie. That's very hard to prove, and often people take the "prove youre not a bigot by doing what I want" approach.

@Snackness said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

Maybe they, like me, were taken aback that a temporary embargo on an overdone character concept was taken as WE HATE DISABLED PEOPLE!

Because let's be honest, the number of people who can actually play a disability respectfully and realistically is MUCH lower than those who use it as, as @Ghost noted, a schtick.

I think the general assumption of people being shitty is somewhat telling of some of these mentalities, to be honest. People are very willing to suddenly believe that everyone is bigoted or ugly before asking for clarification. It says a lot about the latent amount of respect and trust people have in others.

@Tinuviel I was being sarcastic, too. I getcha. Of course it's gonna be commented on. I was just jawing on the 0 to BIGOT in 60 seconds factor.

@Tinuviel said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Ghost said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

very little question or input from the policy-maker's point of view.

Which makes it all the more damning!

Hah. SO SUSPICIOUS. I imagine GH staff is well aware that talking about this decision on MSB is way more dangerous than saying what they said and letting it stay that way. Barracuda infested waters, these be.

Everyone knows that there's a 98% probability that "Too many people at once were apping amputees, so we put a cap on it to avoid there being too many amputee characters" meant "Too many people at once were apping amputees, so we put a cap on it to avoid there being too many amputee characters"

But people gotta take it as...

"First you nix the amputees, then the blacks, then the gays..."

Way more entertaining with way more opportunities for platforming when you take it that way.

@Lotherio said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

rhetoric

Key word.

I agree with you, for the record. I see a lot of ramping up, speculation, and the building of an accusation with very little question or input from the policy-maker's point of view.

V5 did a great job in handling this.

(Wut, Ghost is gonna V5 fanboy again? Yes.)

One of the big problems with WoD (especially oWoD) is the smorgasbord of mental, physical, and social flaws. When you pick a flaw, you get extra xp to build your character with. One really bad WoD player habit (and by really bad I mean it's damn near endemic) is taking a flaw for the extra XP, and then either choosing one that they can either get the extra points for with relatively low risk of it coming into play OR roleplaying around it (like it doesn't exist, that the negatives are mitigated, or simply not pointing out when they have a -2 dice penalty unless the ST remembers it).

Stuff like:

• HATRED: INUIT in a game that takes place in Brazil.
• MISSING LIMB but then has Blade Runner leg that they claim doesnt impede them at all.
• MPD triggered by being in the presence of a 56 (not 55, not 57) year old dwarf holding a Chihuahua in one hand and a bottle of Strawberry Fanta in the other. Otherwise they're normal. Thanks for the extra XP!

V5 addressed this in ways by simply referring to these things as an existing condition that will always add difficulty/dice penalty to a scene. You see this really well in the Malkavian clan flaw section, where a player cannot detail the exact terms and conditions of how and when they're affected, but their mental state will often manifest as a base difficulty at nearly all times to perception.

I'm getting off topic with mechanics, though. This thread was more about the spirit of whether or not it's okay to role play disabilities, to which I still say that everyone should feel welcome to RP whatever the fuck they want so long as they're being respectful and not using said disability to cheeseball the rules for xp bonuses.

@Auspice said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Ghost said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Auspice I'm team Cersei. Well, team Lena.

Yes, but only one of them lost a limb. Follow the bouncing ball, Ghost. Gawd.

Derp. Right. Jaime is an amputee.

On the other hand...

(EYYYYYyyyyyyseewhatIdidthere)

Lena played MaMa and MaMa amputated a guy's dick off with her teeth.

#AlwaysPayYourDebts

@Auspice I'm team Cersei. Well, team Lena.

Whats interesting about this thread, is that some of the same people who promote themselves as being sensitive to people's triggers regarding other players roleplaying disabilities are immediately assuming anti-disability bias on a request for "no more people apping in with the amputee flaw". I didn't see anyone ask if these two worldly approaches intersected, but then again if someone asked me if I was OOCly an amputee to justify RP or a staff decision regarding amputees, I'd tell them to mind their own business(if I felt like giving the polite version of telling them to pound sand).

ETA: (What I mean is, perhaps someone on staff is sensitive to this and it bothers them. In that case, who wins? Potentially triggered person who doesn't want amputation role played or player who wants to role play an amputee? Who has the right of way? Interesting rhetorical headspace, here.)

I think it was pretty straightforward. No one said that PCs couldn't end up amputees through role play, nor was it said that there was a bias against a particular disability. A trend was spotted regarding cgen of amputees, and staff/story direction didn't want to overload the story with too many characters with the same shtick.

There's an old writer's trick to use a different letter for each character name. GRRM didn't do this, but you may see a lot of stories where the first letter of a character's name isn't used twice. I think it's smart that this game isn't QUADRUPLING down on a sudden influx of apps involving amputees.

Then again, for all any of you know, these amputee characters may not be written by some player that's struggling with their amputation in RL and just wants to play a character they identify with. These characters could be played by straight-up German amputation/prosthetic porn fetishists.

So, I wouldn't use Gray Harbor Mush as ground zero for assuming some grand scale disability bias that will potentially turn into banning asians and gays. That's just...egregious.

@Sparks said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@krmbm said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

@Goldfish said in Gray Harbor Discussion:

But did they have a wave of amputee apps and had to be like. STOP. All limbs now.

Yes.

I like Jim. He's very disarming.

@Auspice said in Disabilities and Mental Illness as Character Traits:

I also don't feel comfortable when someone has a disability for their character and they always have an 'escape' written in (is wheelchair bound, but can walk sometimes, is blind, but can see shapes and light now and then... etc.) that always comes into play when it's... convenient.

I hate that shit, mostly because the player took extra freebie points for being blind, but then doesn't roleplay it. Or, they took the points for taking some kind of BLIND flaw only to negate it with cybernetics.

It's like: "Dude, BLIND means CANNOT SEE. If your guy has cybernetic eyes, they can see, and therefore are no longer BLIND. If you can barely hear and then get a hearing aid or cochlear implants, the -4 to awareness checks doesn't apply."

But yes, I agree. Disabled but not is a peeve. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, I just think it's stupid, metagamey, and usually tied to jerking around with a character sheet.

Play what you want how you want, just do so with good intentions.

The moment you start justifying your character concepts based on your gender, race, orientations, RL diagnoses, or religion, you're setting yourself up for being told what you cannot play.

Be creative. Have fun. If you're a heterosexual white woman who was raised Christian and wanna play a biracial male bisexual hockey player with PTSD who dabbles in Gardnerian Witchcraft? Swing for the bleachers.

Fiction is about writing people you are not.

I wholeheartedly oppose recycling of the same character between games that are not connected to each other.

By that I mean if MushA ran for a long time, closed, then opens as MUSH-A-PART2 where former players can continue their stories? I'm alright with that. To me it's no different than Firefly getting canceled and then the PCs are rebuilt for Serenity, the movie.

However, I tend to see a lot of weirdness and shenanigans in the wake of players who rebuild the same characters over and over again. Once someone tried to dupe me into remaking an IC romantic interest from 2 games ago. The players who do this tend to regurgitate story and attempt to get players to recreate the story elements that they want. There's also often little room for flexibility because the players who do this have something very specific in mind. In the end, there's very little surprise with recycled characters, and it's exhausting to me. Come on, be like the rest of the kids. Make something new. Have new experiences and put effort into it rather than replaying the same routine with the same character over and over again.

I make jokes about WoD players asking if they can bring "Their ________" (i.e. "My Tremere" or "My Get of Fenris") because it's a WARNING SIGN that you may also get slapped with an ubercharactercheese concept.

I have a RL friend that won't play Vampire: The Masquerade unless he gets to play His Gangrel, who is a 6th generation Gangrel with maxxed out stats, somewhere around 8 different maxxed out Disciplines (Wuuuut? A Gangrel with Fortitude, Auspex, Animalism, Potence, Celerity, Presence, Vicissitude, and Obfuscate? Ya don't say...).

So, in some cases recycled characters have less to do with a concept and more to do with recreating a character sheet of stuff some other staffer approved.

I just couldn't do it. For me? Fresh game equals fresh content.

Well, yeah, its the right idea in theory.

But we all know that staff remembers. Taking issues to the faux-BetterBusinessBureau or the hobby's version of a proxy YELP! is great in theory. I'm not judging Shel, I'm just saying that taking the issue to MSB and suggesting staff favoritism, it's a creature that's once it's out of the bottle is hard to put back in.

Heck of a way to show staff that after approval you're gonna be one of the chill ones.

Should probably just reconsider playing before/after taking it to the mats on MSB.

My spider-senses detect a hot scoop for the Daily Bugle.

We should seriously just alter the title to GoT Current Status (Spoilers). I don't mind using the spoiler code, but I have a feeling everyone in this thread is expecting spoilers.

Having said that...
***=Not NSFW content, but theories, which aren't spoilers per se but relate to Sunday's episode.***