Best posts made by insomniac7809

So, a few days late to this one, but coming in to drop my $0.02.

Which is, mostly, that a lot of the (well-intentioned) ideas people seem to be having are, kindly, counterproductive.

Relying on actors to do the final checks on firearm safety means taking the final responsibility for set safety from (what should be) a trained professional working in their field of expertise to someone in a completely different field who might be getting some on-set training. And I'm sorry, but that is a terrible idea. Firearms would not be made more safe by having unqualified third parties who have other significant time and attention pressures messing with the dedicated professionals' safety measures on the last step before their use. That's not just unhelpful, it's actively irresponsible, to the tune of "voids the production's insurance" if they would even try. (There's a reason the last people to touch the fireworks are the pyrotechnics experts, not Gene Simmons.)

Actors might need to point guns at other actors. They might need to be seen loading bullets into a gun on-camera. They might need to act the part of someone irresponsibly handling a firearm. They might need to stick the barrel of a gun in their own mouths and pull the trigger. They need to be able to know that when the actual professionals hand them a cold gun, that gun is actually cold, so they can do their jobs because the other people involved did theirs.

From the looks of things, the armorer on Rust never should have had the job. So that is the one place Baldwin might be responsible. Even that I'd put as something of an open question; "Producer" is a notoriously vague role, that can mean anything from "final decision on every point" to "cut a check before the start of production."

@Darren said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

I thought we were supposed to have life figured out by the time we were my age

I think this is a mantra for everyone over the age of, like, 24.

@BlondeBot Assuming that "no sexuality/gender/orientation" means what it says is not a strawman.

@Groth It is an interesting sort of thought.

I'm really not entirely sure how it could work, with as easy as it is on a MU* to stick a finger over your lip and declare that you obviously aren't Groth, Groth doesn't have a mustache.

But I do think there are people in the hobby where, if you do know who they are on other games, it's better for everyone to just give them the preemptive boot instead of trying for this weird high-minded stance that no decade-long history of stalking and threats don't count if it didn't happen on this game, which is unspoiled frontier where anyone can make-believe themselves a fresh start (as if the hobby wasn't as incestuous as a Habsburg key party).

@arkandel said in Sensitivity in gaming:

On the other hand I can see a gamerunner who makes that 1000 Nights MUSH with the very best intentions getting blasted because they didn't read multiple sources and dissertations to properly depict the staggeringly complex politics, racial tensions and socio-economic issues of the time so that the wrong people are depicted as villainous. Hell, if someone perceives it that way and suddenly the gamerunner is being portrayed as wildly racist on MSB.

So. I mean.

I get what you're saying, but I think the idea that someone is going to get blasted for not fully integrating the complexities of the socioeconomic structure of the Abbasid Caliphate into their 1001 Arabian Nights-themed fantasy setting is overblown.

Like, maybe someone somewhere might write that up as a shitty take, but I think most people are more than happy to accept a simplified version of the real world for fiction and playability. (Hell, I've spent years as the guy saying that if I need to read an ethnography to start chargen, I probably just won't. Having simple hooks/deals to start getting into play is a good thing!)

I think that, much more likely, complaints would come if the setting has less to do with Arabian history, or even Arabian fiction or folklore, than it does with racist European stereotypes about exotic slave girls and malicious, effete nobles strangling each other with silk rope.

I get that people might want to run something other than fictionalized modern-day New England or Middle Ages Europe pastiche, but if the setting doesn't interest you enough to learn more than the most theme park stereotype version of the historical inspiration, why would you want to run a game in that setting?

@derp said in Sensitivity in gaming:

I mean, I get that in a sort-of general principle way? But like -- I'm not sure that that's a great idea either. That would be like saying 'an American' gets to decide whether Squidbillies is a fantasy comedy based on specific tropes/stereotypes or a horrible slander against Appalachian persons.

I mean, there is something to be said about how lower-income white people are the last acceptable target of mockery, and one would hope that someone writing about Appalachian characters would have more knowledge or experience of their subject to draw on than having heard jokes about toothless cousin-fuckers.

I think the "who decides" question is just framing it under the idea that the goal is to never upset anyone ever with anything, but usually what the people talking about sensitivity readers are saying isn't that at all.

Not every American is going to be an expert on every American culture group or agree on every point about what is or isn't offensive. I do feel like an American living abroad could probably tell the difference between something that relates to Americans and something that's based off of racist media based off of shitty stereotypes about Americans. That's really all most talk of sensitivity readers is about; helping people sort out the difference between what they know about other cultures, and what's junk they got from white people imitating other white people making caricatures. Not "how can I avoid offending anyone ever," more "is this talking about Asian people like Ronny Chieng or am I doing Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's."

Ultimately, the people who get to decide what is 'too much' are the consumers of the media, based on their own tastes and preferences as social mores change. People can certainly be advocates for change, but I'm not sure that anyone gets to be "the arbiter of how much is too much" when it comes to things built on, ultimately, stereotypes, whether accurate or not.
Accuracy certainly isn't the point most of the time, and the offensive nature of something is so subjective as to be almost a not-helpful metric.

Well, yes. Any sort of creative work is always going to be a conversation between artist and audience, and a collaborative creation is going to involve a communication between the creators.

The answer to "how much is too much" is always all of the creators and all of the audience, and yes, they're going to disagree. People are allowed to like it. People are allowed to dislike it. People are allowed to be offended. (There's a good chance some people were meant to be offended.) People are allowed to make shitty, CHUDdy YouTube videos whining about pronouns and upload them to trick reasonable people into thinking they're making a salient point.

This general process is what finding an audience is. And just by that metric, one of the things a creator should consider is who they want to appeal to. Or, since a lot of the fundamental draws of a lot of work are near universal, how broadly they want to appeal. The latest Wulfenstein games, for instance, aren't going to hold much appeal to Nazis, because one of the selling points of the Wulfenstein games is the chance to sneak up behind a Nazi at the toilet and drown him in his own piss. (Also known as "having some wholesome fun for the whole family.") The work is fairly hostile to Nazis.

Now, TTRPGs were, for a fairly long time, designed for by and for an audience of white men. (The MU* scene has been a lot more gender-balanced, in my experience, which might be an interesting topic to get into.) That doesn't mean it was anything like impossible for women to enjoy RPGs, plenty of them always have, but plenty of others have been turned away by material that presents women entirely in terms of how they relate to men. When the female gender is represented, essentially, by adolescent wank fantasy, that is often taken as hostile to women. When RPG designers, especially in the nineties, made conscious efforts to be more inclusive in their writing, the balance of the hobby had some major shifts. Avoiding making a work hostile to people outside of your culture is only a good thing for finding an audience.

On top of that, I will go so far as to say that people have a responsibility to avoid spreading harmful ideas with their work. You Are Not Immune to Propaganda and all. Not that a creator should be pouring over every passage to ensure that it encourages the development of proper moral values, but people do, in fact, take ideas and attitudes from media they consume, especially on topics they have no personal experience with (see: how many people think you get one phone call from jail, something that was literally just made up). So while I don't think that, say, anyone is going to really make any life choices because of how WotC presented the Vistani in Curse of Strahd, I do think that presenting an obvious expy of the Romani as a bunch of magical criminal drunks serves to strengthen negative attitudes and stereotypes about a real group of people, and it was irresponsible of them to do it.

Yeah, gonna toss in $0.02 and nerd out a bit as a completely amateur history dabbler.

Because, really importantly, I think it's important to know that the neat and tidy patrilineal primogeniture thing tends to be significantly overstated in terms of "how things were." It's a very simplified sort of set-up for our fantasy fiction. (Which, in fairness, it really has to be simplified if you want to have a game or fictional worlbuilding that doesn't require an undergrad degree to untangle.)

Plenty of places had a king (or equivalent) who was selected in ways other than inheritance. Election or acclaim by the nobility was a popular way in a lot of cases. Rome had a couple stretches were any competent general who came out ahead in a campaign could get his soldiers to name him Imperator and kick off another round of civil wars. More than a few countries, at some point, found they'd run out of kings and just asked someone with a sufficiently royal bloodline to come and rule them please. (This went on until at least the 1860s.)

I mentioned Rome, and I also think it's worth bringing up about them that adoption wasn't just as valid as blood relation, it was (in some ways) even more so. A great man was, obviously, obligated to treat his son as his own, and a natural-born son was obviously entitled to the benefits of that, but a man who'd been chosen as an heir was someone who obviously earned it. That's how a will turned a patrician named Octavius into Gaius Julius Caesar, until he decided to rename himself Augustus.

Nobility, meanwhile, are just rich people. In a society where 90% of the population needs to make their job "food production" or everyone starves (which, between the first and second Agricultural Revolution, is every society everywhere) the distinction comes down to the people who produce food and the people who have people to produce food. Mostly the money/land is heritable to some degree, because people generally want to be able to keep their wealth to the people they know, but it doesn't really have to be, and certainly not by oldest son primogeniture sorts of ways.

Real life nobility tended to get messy. Really messy, with the titles and ownership always disputed and shifting. Less "I own this contiguous area of territory, handed down by my forefathers into my care, to be passed down intact" and more like the portfolio of a major corporation--"I have the three core territories, some holdings on the border that are contested, have my eyes on some acquisitions I'm looking to make, and a couple things I wound up with that are frankly too far away to be worth their while so I'm just hoping to trade them off for something I can use."

Not to get too snippy, but... to do... that...

When, exactly, did we collectively decide that "well, it's day one release" was an excuse for a game to be buggy?

Like, I realize we're past the days when cavemen needed to chisel the ones and zeroes immutably onto a kar-chrij to ship out, and the ability to go back and patch a finished game is on balance a good thing. Same with content expansions that don't need the physical media and shipping expenses you'd get with an expansion pack.

But I'm a bit peeved at the fact that this has been taken as license to, generally, treat release day as "super special open full-priced beta testing." Especially when combined with the industry's... focus? emphasis? unsettling fetish? of deluxe ultra preorder things.

@Ganymede said in Tyche Banned:

image snipped

I, um.

I get that you picked the image because it's talking about the slippery slope, but... I can't help feeling like a speech about "genocide starts by joking about it to normalize it" isn't entirely in line with using it as a reason to let an alt-righty poster alt-right up the forum.

FUCKING STOP TRYING TO CALL OUT HUNG OVER.

We all know why you feel shitty and we don't care. You're a grown man and you know when you work. Either calm the fuck down with work night drinking or suck it the fuck up.

@Trix

"Hey @insomniac7809, you know what you should do?"
"What's that, @insomniac7809?"
"You should point out to Weird Fiction aficionados arguing that H. P. Lovecraft's racism was an unimportant background detail that should be considered entirely separately from his body of work that, not only was he comically racist even by the standards of 1920s New England, his views are absolutely clear in his work, and likely vital to interpreting them."
"What a great idea, @insomniac7809! They'll obviously be willing to take direct textual evidence presented in good faith, rather than talking about Orwell and NPC cucks in reference to people pointing out the blatantly goddamn obvious."

I feel like it's one of those context things.

If you and your RP partner are doing the "IC only" thing, take it as it comes. If you and your partner are chatting about game stuff OOCly and you don't happen to being this up... little bit sketch, y'know?

As a cat person by inclination, I have long ago come to terms with the fact that love is pain.

@mietze My irritation comes down to the fact that, in my experience, the demographic that bemoans the Lost Age when kids could run around unattended are the same people who are convinced that any kid out of line of sight for five minutes will be abducted by one of the pedophiles that hides behind every hedge and under every rock. (It's safer for kids than it's ever been, Karen, you just watch too much cable news.)

@Pacha said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

there are plenty that specifically mention heterosexual relationships

FWIW, a good bit of that is specifically in terms of heterosexual spouses, which theme-wise doesn't restrict a player's decision about their sexuality.

That is, a married character could well be gay but in a political marriage for the sake of the family.

)

So, yeah, there is a conversation to be had here about how to handle this sort of thing in games, above and beyond how bad the video that sparked it was. (Which was, I want to be clear here: bad. Not gonna go back and read whatever I said in the wee hours last night, so gonna put that out. Bad arguments in bad faith to make a bad video.)

But beyond talking about how bad the bad video is, there is some meat to get into here. Especially in how it relates to MU*s.

In-person games have a lot of ways to handle content; I've got some fondness for "lines and veils" and "the X-card." "Lines and veils" gives people the chance to set up "lines," which are things they don't want to deal with at all in game (say, "no spiders" or "no sexual violence") and "veils" which are things that can happen in the fiction but they don't want to be 'on-screen' (so, for instance, someone could put "torture" behind a veil, and while there could be torture happening in the plot it wouldn't be a scene focus or get any graphic description. (The scorecard @Carma has there looks to be based on the same lines.) The X-card is something anyone can play to veto an element that was just brought up, we retcon it and move on. ("'From the pit, you see the leg of an enormous spider start to-' 'X-card.' '-an enormous snake start to emerge!'" "'I start to cut off the rude shopkeep's-' 'X-card, no you don't.'")

The thing is, these are a lot more workable in smaller sit-down games with friends. With MUs, where it is a good bit more ad-hoc and with a broader group (and, yeah, where you frankly can't have the same assumptions of good faith that you have in a smaller in-person game), it does get to be a thornier issue. Twice as much so when it comes to any game with horror elements, where violating social norms is kind of key to the whole experience. Anything trying to appeal to as wide of an audience as a given MU* can't really work with the same degree of "everyone gets veto power" as a smaller game with friends.

Setting a "rating" for the game is a good first step, although it does come with the issue that ratings are kinda bullshit. (Fun fact: Taxi Driver was given an NC-17 over the climactic violence scene, so Scorsese kept sending "recut" versions of the film to try to get it down to an R. Thing was, he didn't cut a goddamn thing, he just desensitized the NCAA by showing them the same ultraviolence over and over until they decided it was an R rating.)

Putting out some hard rules across the games is generally a good idea, I think. As well as respecting players who ask that topics or details be "veiled," more or less as outlined above; even if it's a bit much to ask that "violence against children" not be a thing in any aspect of the setting, it's perfectly reasonable for a player to ask that it not be given detailed description or focus. It doesn't need to just be "players," either; I know one of the GMs on a L&L game has said they won't have a scene where a horse explicitly dies. You can't have a world where the cavalry charge is the height of military technology but no horses are ever killed by violence, but it's perfectly acceptable to say that they don't want to GM a scene like that or give/be subjected to descriptions of it.

Give players a chance to bow out for content just the same as we have to accept that sometimes real life obligations take precedence over being available for pretendy funtime events that our characters should be present for. Be willing to gloss over detail rather than lurid prose about things that make people upset.

You can't reasonably have a game of a hundred, or even like twenty, people where everyone gets complete veto power over anything else that happens in-game (and while content in one TT group is basically only the business of that group, characters in a MU* interact outside the scope of a given PRP).

As far as people using bad faith to try to escape consequences to their character... I feel like the only thing to do here is work out with the player/s involved what the consequences are, at least in broad strokes, and move on. Maybe do one or more abstracted rolls to determine outcome without getting into detail. Real people and their feelings are more important than make-believe consistency, but a MU* is by definition something that has to have a certain degree of fictional 'reality' holding together, or everyone's play experience suffers.

Much more than a TT group, a MU* has to have some points where the fictional reality of the setting takes precedence over personal comfort, and the answer has to be "take it or leave it."

I think that, for all the fine lines we might want to put around what is or isn't "white knighting," it's gone the same way as "virtue signaling" and "SJW" in that it's now just a way for the Tyches of the world to attack anyone left of Mussolini as fake.

@lordbelh said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Say you put your fantasy setting in a arab inspired setting. How much research is expected? And how much from the game maker, and how much from the players? Who gets to decide what is appropriate, or too cliche, or downright offensive? Would you put a setting there at all, rather than a generic western culture approximation?
I think that's the sort of convo @Arkandel was looking for? Or I might be wrong about that, too. I'm not known for my high batting average.

So, okay, looking at a question like this...

The question of "who gets to decide" is a thorny one, I'll grant that. Not everyone is going to come to the same answer, obviously.

A first step kind of has to be "someone Arabic," which is why the people being mocked in the bad video are talking about sensitivity readers. Not that every Arab is going to have the same answer. But, I mean, it's 2020; you can probably find someone on the internet who's actually a part of the culture you're depicting to tell you if you're doing a fucky.

Barring that... I mean, "how much research" is kind of a tricky subject, but I feel like "fucking, y'know, some" is still a step beyond what a lot of people do. No one's expecting a dissertation, any more than western fantasy settings actually resemble historical Europe, but like, for an Arabian-inspired setting, just figuring out that "Persian" and "Arab" aren't the same thing and a harem isn't what you think it is would be a step beyond. Read up a bit on the history--not like getting a graduate degree, but at least a bit. Maybe even read some histories or just fiction actually by members of the culture you're taking inspiration from, instead of just white men writing up their orientalist fantasies with one hand.

@mietze Yeah, and kind of riffing on that... for all the talk about oversensitivity, I mean, it's weird how often the people who are being silenced get to complain about it on late night talk shows or national news, y'know?

People keep asking, like, "how can I know nobody will be offended" and yeah, that's not a thing. Look around the internet for discussion on any media property, you're sure to find a few truly baffling takes. But that doesn't mean there's no legitimate criticism to be had, or that people shouldn't try to be thoughtful and responsible with their work, y'know?