@marsmrsmars said in The Savage Skies - Discussion Thread:
... so they were bombing innocents, instead of beheading them? Phew. Dodged a bullet with that one, I guess.
If you're not comfortable with characters associated with a force that bombed civilians, you're going to have a really hard time with any airman or woman who comes from any WW2 participant nation.
@saosmash said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
But if a staffer wants to create sexually themed story, there's nothing at all wrong with that, and assuming that all scenarios in which sex happens with a staff NPC are in that category is bullshit. Pretending that this is what is always happening does a disservice to like... everyone.
To me there is a meaningful distinction between sexually themed and TS which is about as wide as the difference between HBO and Porn. For instance if the King is getting a blowjob at the same time he's holding an audience with a PC, that is sexually themed but it's not TS because the scene is about the audience and not the blowjob. I don't think anyone has a problem with scenes that have explicit sexual content in appropriate context.
That said the worst staff scene experience I've ever had was when my character was sneaking into some building and the staff basically powerposed my PC giving the guard a sexual favor to get past and I was just too shocked at the fact he did that to object. To some extent that experience colors my view on sex in scenes with NPCs because if the NPC initiates it can put the players in a really awkward position.
Having one of the people whos poses you most appreciate tell you they like your writing feels really nice.
@mietze
I don't think I would call expecting your immediate family to be treated with respect and dignity a radical position.
@Runescryer said in Wheel of Time:
I like the idea of removing the 'Main Characters' so that the focus can be on the PC's. However, just playing Devil's Advocate here, that leads to another problem, IMO. If the setting and events of the WoT series are in use, someone has to be the Dragon Reborn to fight off Tarmongaiddon. So, you seem to be trading Super-Special NPC's for a group of Super-Special PC's that all the prophecies revolve around.
Just something to think about and plan around.
Depending on what you're looking for in a Wheel of Time game, you could ditch most of the apocalyptic storyline and just keep the setting, an alternative history where Tarmon Gai'don happens 100 years later.
The Witcher is so much better then I ever expected it to be. When I first read that Henry Cavill would play Geralt I didn't think he'd be able to sell it but the finished product...
He's basically perfect. He must have spent an ungodly amount of time perfecting the voice and the combat movements.
My only real complaints about the series would be that it involves a lot of jumping backwards and forwards in time and they never explain when a particular scene takes place. To spare the rest of you the same confusion, Cirilla's storyline takes place in the 'present' while Geralt and Yennifer start their stories about 30 years in the past and eventually over the course of the season Geralt and Yennifer catch up with the present.
@Quinn said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:
I'm a cisgender, straight woman and I find playing a guy pretty tricky unless I'm just going all out frat-boy stereotype as a one off NPC. I just can't get that into it and feel more comfortable playing women. I'm not sitting there constantly like "is this how guys scratch their balls? How much ball scratching should one pose have?" when I'm playing a woman. I know how many times I scratch my balls a day, people.
This is one of those things that you almost only see in those who 'crossplay'. Most guys who play guys won't put ball scratching into their poses because while that might be something they do in their daily lives it's not something they think about. If you just want to 'pass' as being the same gender as the character you're playing, all you need to do is avoid bringing attention to weird things and just focus on your characters personality/dreams/goals etc, don't try to play a 'male' or 'female' character, just play a character who happens to be male or female.
I don't think anyone reasonable would ever object to you taking a well deserved break. Whatever happens on the board, your health comes first.
I have essentially two problems with children in most MUs. The first is that many MUs tend to have a lot of mature themes that I'm not comfortable seeing children participate in, even if we disregard sex I'm not fond of seeing child characters get maimed/tortured/abused and I don't like having to deal with the possibility of a child being present in a scene where that kind of darkness can play out.
The second is that the kind of player that is likely to play a child is usually the kind of players you don't want to play a child.
I don't play on Savage Skies and I am pretty unlikely to play on Savage Skies in the near term simply because I am absolutely terrible at playing multiple characters at the same time.
However as an outside observer whos only familiarity with the game is the wiki. I really get the distinct feeling that neither @marsmrsmars nor @juneko are coming at this issue from a genuine concern of playing this game.
The premise of Savage Skies is that a group of ex-military people and civilians join the Sky Guard to fight fascists together. It should go without saying that members of an anti-fascist militia are not going to be fascists. The game also clarifies that you're not allowed to play ex-nazis and in light of this debate they added the additional clarification that all characters from authoritarian states need to be explicitly opposed to excesses, war crimes and atrocities.
As such I think it's very clear that the way this game is intended to be played is that no member of the Sky Guard is meant to be assumed to be associated with any kind of war time atrocity regardless if whatever military branch they are associated with performed those atrocities in the actual WW2. Not only are those atrocities by and large scrubbed out of this timeline but you should assume those Sky Guard characters are opposed to them happening and would presumably have found some way to avoid participating.
While it's fine to raise questions regarding how Hirohito should appropriately be handled, the game appears to be clearly set in the European theater and anything happening in Asia is only background. A background where even though the game is started in 1938, the 1937 invasion of China isn't on the timeline yet so assuming that a fellow member of the Sky Guard participated in the Nanjin Massacre comes across as somewhat ludicrous as you have no reason to think that event has even happened.
If your interpretation of someone having an RP hook about being a monarchist or communist is that they're a fascist complicit in war crimes, I don't think this kind of game is suitable for you. I honestly don't think there's anything the game staff can do that will make you happy because the game relies upon you taking the point of view that everyone in the Sky Guard are on the same side and you are actively looking for reasons to think they're not.
I think there exists a certain irony in that the person responsible for the most bans in the history of the forum and managing to squeeze that into a single day talks about being against ostrazisation on loose grounds.
I think comparing exclusion from online communities to physical abuse or the justice system is inherently misguided. Being part of an online community is not a right, it's a privilege and the primary goal of anyone managing a community is to do what is best for that community.
Waiting beyond all reasonable doubt to verify that someone is a bad actor often leads to that bad actor having plenty of time to poison your community, just like a gardener can't afford to wait until the blooms wilt to do something about the weeds, so does a the manager of a community have to be pro-active. They need to encourage the behaviors they want to see and they need to root out what looks to be a weed even at the risk of it sometimes not being one.
This is no great injustice, there's countless of other online spaces out there for anyone to join or even create their own ones.
I will agree that MSB has had a dogpiling problem for a long time, it's part of the reason the downvote button had to be removed (the other part of the reason was people going through other peoples history and downvoting every post they've ever made).
Dealing with that sort of thing would require a lot more pro-active community management then we've had so far.
I agree with lordbelh that the call for silence was misguided and doomed to fail and it follows that all bans related to that call for silence are poorly justified.
That said, this is a community not a court. I think it's much too common of a mistake for people in the hobby to consider themselves arbiters of justice rather then caretakers of the community. What matters isn't the rules or procedure or any such nonsense but what kind of community you want to build.
Right now this isn't much of a community, there's like 3 people posting outside of the ban drama but that doesn't mean it can't grow into a community again. However that requires you to sell people on what this is supposed to become.
My expectation would be that rapid weather changes will harm crops that reliant on particular weather conditions whether that's hot or cold but if you have space and time, best way to find out is to just plant them and find out.
I just got strawberries going - but considering getting some berry bushes, but I need to dig out spaces for them!
I used to have blackcurrant, redcurrant and raspberry bushes. They were pretty nice since they required essentially 0 maintenance and all you needed to do was collect the ripe berries during the summer which you could then make into jam or juice.
I don't think anyone reasonable would ever object to you taking a well deserved break. Whatever happens on the board, your health comes first.
My general feeling on perfume and cologne is that if I can smell you in public, it's always an extremely unpleasant sensation.
If you are going to spread a scent around, one of the nicest ones is probably fresh bread.
I've always liked the idea of Exalted a lot more then how it feels in actual play and for MU* especially the 'grandness' of many of the rules create tons of headaches.
I think the best way to run an Exalted MU* may just be to take the theme of Exalted but implement entirely custom rules designed for MU*.
@ganymede said in The Work Thread:
I have read articles similar to the ones you posted. I understand what is being said. In many ways, my suggestions follow; in others, they don't. Norm criticism is no different than what I would call "regularly checking in with people" or "keeping my eyes and ears open." And master suppression techniques are what I consider "being a fucking asshole."
Norm Criticism is distinct from "regularly checking in with people" or "keeping my eyes and ears open." in that rather then specific actions it's a framework of thought that encourages you to question things you take for granted. The nature of norms is that you normally don't think about them because they're the social default in your social group and that creates a burden on those who don't comply with the norm.
And master suppression techniques are what I consider "being a fucking asshole."
They are being a fucking asshole but the reason they're being widely taught about is that people in groups have a tendency to be blind to many kinds of asshole behavior. For instance even though countless studies have shown women on average talk less then men in meetings, the pervasive perception is still that women talk more.
The general idea is that by identifying and calling out asshole behaviors, you can make them less prevalent and by having them explicitly described you can counteract attempts to gaslight you into thinking they're not asshole behaviors.
@ganymede said in The Work Thread:
I don't recall Juniper saying anything about discrimination.
I think being assigned tasks outside of your job description solely based on your gender is discrimination.
I can attest that what happened to her can and does happen everywhere regardless of the race, gender, and lifestyle of the "boss."
This is the reason for "Norm Criticism" as the appropriate tool for doing something about it. Norms are not created by the "boss" which is why they tend to be enforced regardless of what kind of person is the "boss". Norms are created by social groups but they're not fixed and can be changed.
I'm not very good at explaining it which is why I tried to link to resources that do but I was surprised how few English resources there are dedicated to the concept, where I live it's been one of the most popular tools for addressing things like workplace inequality for the past 20 years.
Only slightly related, another social theory that's popular in Scandinavia and I have not seen much in the anglosphere is master suppression techniques. They're a study of the ways women in the workplace are commonly socially punished and by being aware of them, you can try to counteract them.
@misadventure said in The Work Thread:
@ganymede how do we all work to change that dynamic?
http://www.equalityjourney.eu/blog2/2019/4/3/norm-criticism-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-necessary
https://www.includegender.org/facts/norm-criticism/
By making social expectations explicit and evaluating them critically it's possible to have good conversations about if they bring any value or should be abandoned. Most discrimination of this type is done for no other reason then 'this is the way things are' so the solution is to force explicit justification and evaluation.