Posts made by Kestrel

@arkandel said in Character 'types':

• Is there a kind of personality you choose for your PCs? Do you mostly play military folks? Clever people? Seducers? Jokesters? Do you quip with most of your characters? Are they typically polite or rough around the edges?

Intelligence agents. Spies. Information brokers. Hackers. Quack doctors. People with an agenda they're playing close to the chest. People who aren't what they initially appear to be, who may be subject to misleading rumours and first impressions. Liars, rogues and investigative types. People with trust issues that go both ways: they don't trust people easily, and nobody trusts them.

Almost never anyone who seems like they could conceivably be someone important, fancy or respectable. The characters will be underestimated, never overestimated.

For me, a character is successful if it surprises people enough to make them ask questions.

• Do most of your characters fall within a certain range between 'good' and 'morally gray'?

Usually grey. I play morally-driven and amoral characters in equal measure, but on both sides they're always somewhat grey. Which in my view is just a matter of realism: no one's purely bad or purely good. They all have at least one thing they would sacrifice anything for, whether it's their lover, their friends, their government, their cause or their own skin. Even amoral characters have a sympathetic reason for why they are that way. (Maybe they lost a child, a loved one, or learned some hard lessons during their upbringing.) So I generally favour anti-villains and anti-heroes.

And for two more - this time controversial - bonus points!

• Do you judge others either for the types of PCs they usually play? As in, do you ever roll your eyes and go "pft, that @Arkandel rolled a snarky hipster in his early twenties again. Is that all he knows how to play?"

Yes.

I judge people who across the board always play pretty, perfect, wealthy people, with supermodel played-bys and so on.

I just find this style of wish-fulfilment RP kind of shallow, and rarely very engaging for anyone other than the person it's meant to serve, who is playing the character in question.

• And finally... do you judge others for the type of character they are playing and if so do you associate the player's views with the character? For example if someone played a Slaver on Shang, or a racist on a nWoD game.

Almost never.

However if there's a visible pattern there are times that I'll squint, for example if I've known this player for a good few years and I notice that all of their characters are white nationalists played by white blonde models, and their description always focuses on just how flawless their alabaster skin is; or if they're known for really getting their jollies from rape RP on a regular basis; or if they're a grown-ass 40 year-old playing (or fucking with) a series of sexualised teen/child characters.

One incident I'll handwave, especially if I wasn't privy to all the details. (Maybe they faded? Maybe they were making a pointed, thoughtful attempt at social criticism?) But when it's a pattern, especially an exclusive pattern (e.g., ALL of their characters are flawless-alabaster-porcelain-skinned white nationalists) then ... yeah. I'll squint. Especially if they make their political opinions OOCly known at a later/prior date.

I otherwise wouldn't care or judge someone for playing a slaver, a racist, a chauvinist or any other evil character, unless it seemed to align with their OOC behaviour. That's just their character. It's a story. Stories can have villains.

@bobotron said in Good TV:

Second best season premiere so far, after the Mountain Men introduction.

Aww, look how cute Octavia looks in this gif. I bet that in her spare time she likes chasing butterflies or something.

@juke said in What Is Missing For You?:

@kestrel said in What Is Missing For You?:

Cyberpunk.

Sci-fi.

Spy-fi. (Easily combined with Noir.)

If anyone can recommend a good Noir setting, by the by, you can have a kidney of your choice.

Stay tuned.

Mmm, steampunk.

I would play in either one of these settings, however my vote goes for #1.

The main reason for me is that I know next to nothing about St. Petersburg, and would worry about botching Russian culture/geography/politics etc. were I to play in a Russian setting.

@skew said in Which setting do you like better?:

The other grouping of technology will be the modern methods of science. Based on this poll, people seem to prefer a lower scientific level, so I might aim for 1800 instead of 1900. Steam engines exist, but in their basic form. Some ideas of modern medicine (sterilization) might exist. But I intend for this group to look a lot more like what people think of when they say steampunk. Whirring gears, brass, etc.

Definitely nothing to do with the tech for me. I actually like the tech described in #2 better, but the angel tech (and the fact that it's not set in Russia) in #1 more.

In fact, if you could merge both settings, I say go for 'high'-tech (relatively, for a steampunk setting), low-fantasy. And definitely play up those religious themes, love me some religious fiction.

@rinel said in Real life versus online behaviors:

@kestrel I don't know how much I agree with that. What we choose to do with how we feel--the public restraint we choose to exercise--is part of who we are.

Fair point.

And it's not just a lack of consequences that influences our actions online; empathy is much harder to come by when you can't see or hear a person. And that's not an intentional issue--just think how many fights start on this forum because people misunderstood something written they'd never have misunderstood in a face-to-face environment.

It doesn't excuse consciously acting like a jerk, but I think it explains why people sometimes do. It's not that they don't care that people are upset; it's that they don't see it.

I think that empathy can be measured in the radius of a sphere.

Everyone cares about themselves. Almost everyone also cares about their inner circle: family, friends, significant others.

A little further out people care about people like them: their gender, their race, their political party, their country. Much further out people might/sometimes care about the wellbeing of their entire species, e.g. people from other countries, other backgrounds, other beliefs, social outcasts such as prison inmates, and so on.

Even further out people might care about sentient beings who are very different from them, starting with the family dog and expanding outwards towards endangered species on the other side of the planet.

Caring or not caring about people on the internet, who are theoretically on the other side of the world, and whom you can't see, would rank a little higher on the empathy scale, but I don't think that's any less a measure of the person in question. It might just be that they never even think about what the person on the other side of the screen is going through, but again, that's a lack of empathy.

It's similar to how some people are deeply moved by the horrors they see on the news, and become inspired to action, while some people shrug and move on with their day — or will even continue actively contributing to these horrors somehow — but would perhaps feel differently if they were transported into the communities and came face to face with the victims, whom they don't otherwise think about harming with their day-to-day choices.

I don't necessarily think that the latter category are 'bad people', but they're definitely less empathetic compared to the former. It isn't a binary measure.

I don't think there's any difference between people online and offline. I really don't. If you don't like me online, you probably wouldn't like me IRL, either.

Contrary to popular beliefs about how online you can be anyone, and you can't trust people on teh interwebs, what differs is not the inherent character, but presentation: people's true selves come out more readily online. I trust people online way more than I do offline; anonymity means there's nothing holding people back here if they want to be arseholes. You can be racist, sexist, homophobic — in my case, I'm an obnoxious vegan — and it isn't going to cost you your job or the respect of your new girlfriend, etc. You can stalk and harass people online with virtually no consequences, you can even send people death threats. IRL you have to be polite to save face.

While it may be true that online you can be anyone, I think that the person people most want to be, and tend to become online, is their truest self. They can lie about their gender, their physical appearance, their marital status, their history, but these things are surface-trappings. If IRL you're in the closet because you live in hicksville, OL you can be a flamboyant diva. If IRL you're a psychopath who has to keep their violent tendencies in check, OL you can cyberbully and play FPS games. People might seem different online and offline, but they're really not. You just might not have known them as well as you thought you did, when all you were seeing was their public restraint.

@peasoupling said in What Is Missing For You?:

The first things that come to mind are Westworld

ftfy

(I would play this.)

Original settings. I'm willing to play something rooted in fanfiction here and there, but that requires me to:

• Really, really like the setting.
• Actually know the setting, or I'll probably skip your game entirely.
• Think that setting would make for a good game; many of them don't. I love Firefly for example, but I don't think setting a game in the Firefly universe would accomplish anything that you couldn't do better with any other run-of-the-mill custom sci-fi setting. It's the characters that make that setting special, which is how I feel that way about most media that tends to get fanfictionalised into a game.

In particular I'd like more sci-fi games. I think there are already more than enough WoD / supernatural horror games out there, enough superhero games and enough L&L games. These areas aren't lacking, although I second @thesuntsar that I would be more likely to consider a supernatural horror game that eschewed the usual teen/college drama cliches and maybe wasn't set in a small town in America. Go big. Go Noir. Like London, New York, or some other familiar, dusky urban playground. As a bonus, the first two have a literal underground/subway which can make for a pretty neat setting.

If you opt for London, it doesn't have to be Victorian London. I would personally prefer it wasn't, because I feel like people tend to confuse all things English with all things old and stuffy. U guise, there is more to British culture than monocles and tweed. (I'll make an exception for Steampunk settings.)

Cyberpunk.

Sci-fi.

Spy-fi. (Easily combined with Noir.)

If anyone can recommend a good Noir setting, by the by, you can have a kidney of your choice.

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So I think you'll get more success just by trying to attract the scattered folks throughout the hobby who are already craving more of a story environment than by trying to bribe people into playing a completely different style of game than the one they want to play. As @Lithium said - find like-minded people and cater to them. Even if, as with TGG, that's just a small group.

I think this is a given, but the thing is that the kind of playerbase you advertise for isn't necessarily the kind of playerbase you'll get. The 100 for example is a brutal survival setting filled with culture-clashes, war, genocide, criminal protagonists, and the oft-repeated phrase 'there are no good guys', but the MUSH version of it mostly had people who really wanted to establish peace and play moral protagonists. It was, through no fault of its creators, a very mushy version of the setting it was based on, which is why at some point I walked out. (Side note, is anyone else ultra excited for Season 5 airing tonight?)

Any game can state its ethos from the outset, and you can proudly trumpet ICC = ICA until you're blue in the face, but ultimately it's the game designer's responsibility to cultivate the player culture they want. If the design doesn't support the ethos it's trying to achieve, no amount of asking people nicely is going to change that. @arkandel is quite right in that if you're telling people that it doesn't matter if you win or lose, but you're only rewarding winning, you aren't going to get the results you want.

So absolutely, I will look for like-minded people, but I'll also look for ways to encourage and reward that like-mindedness, to ensure that it sticks, and doesn't change when people invite their friends from other games or people join the game with preconceived notions from other game-cultures they've been involved in. Besides, there's a minimum and a maximum people can do in any situation: the best and worst fits can still be coaxed towards the higher end of their natural range if the environment provides positive reinforcement. That's all I'm looking for.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

What do you get for being successful on such a game? Oh, everything. You have access to exclusive scenes, for starters; there are plenty of "high council meetings" in MU* to the point it's almost a separate trope for them, where the Duchess and the Count meet their peers to share secrets and make decisions. You are among those who get the spotlight in public scenes, who are invited to social events and are bestowed the cool ranks.

You don't get those - as a rule - for failing. It's not a matter of attributes and dice pools (or at least not exclusively) but rather the fact that it reflects how real life works; politicians, business people and generals don't advance in their perspective careers because they are challenged but because they beat those challenges.

I don't see why it has to be this way. If you fail and your character ends up in jail, they could still have a very cool scene where they're brought before the high council and interrogated about their crimes, who they know, etc. They could be bribed to betray their friends, thus being turned into a double agent who has regular meetings with important NPCs trying to blackmail them or extract information.

Story, even spotlight, isn't contingent on winning or losing. In fact I think that when people think of a character like Wash from Firefly/Serenity, his two most memorable scenes are: A) goofing around with toy dinosaurs; B) dying horribly. His legions of fans prove that a suave, successful sexpot isn't necessary to portray a great and deeply beloved story, which is the ultimate aim in designing this kind of system.

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

• The majority of MUers regard MUs as games, not stories. Yeah, there are some stories involved, but in many ways the stories are secondary to the game aspect - XP, advancement, minigames, status, and even TS in a way.
• An awful lot of MUers (perhaps even the majority here too) view their character not as a fictional character in an ensemble story, but as their personal proxy. When their character wins, they win. When their character loses, they lose. This is why we see so much unhealthy IC/OOC.

So for me, this is very much a key aspect that needs to die. The question is just how to kill it. I think the latter can be tackled by swapping out narcissism for group narcissism, i.e. fostering a player culture of in-group loyalty, where individuals feel most rewarded for their contributions to and the successes of the collective. In this case 'the collective' is the overarching storyline, but it's fundamentally no different from getting people to cheer on a sports team, rally for a political party or join a fundraiser. Players need to feel like the way to become their most heroic, badass, righteous selves is not through their character's individual successes, but by supporting other players, supporting the group, and even lining their character up as a sacrificial pawn in the great story-churning machine.

The former is a little harder. I agree that taking away gamist incentivisation is a good start, but I worry that @seraphim73's idea of having only 'karma' as a stat would also risk people running too wild with their character builds. I like @arkandel's idea of rewarding failure but I feel like this too is a band-aid, as it would still, ultimately, be about a system of rewards and progression. However a band-aid might be the best that can be hoped for.

Since you've posted on this thread, @faraday, I'll add that one thing I really liked about FS3 was the combat system. Perhaps it's just because I had never played a MUSH before the 100 came along, but I had never seen anything like that before. What I saw there is that once players already know whether they're going to win or lose, and are given freedom to write as they will about the manner in which this has happened, they're generally their best selves in terms of writing some pretty epic failure emotes, narrow successes, etc. If you already know you've managed a critical success then there's no reason not to RP struggling, bobbing and weaving, taking your time and just barely making the shot after almost getting killed, etc. Whereas if you don't, people will RP being ultimate badasses until the result comes in, in hopes of brute-forcing their way to a win.

@kay said in Heroic Sacrifice:

That said, having your character die or otherwise effectively taken out of play, that is a more difficult issue. That's not failure but that you don't get to develop that character's story further. The only two ways I see to make that easier for players is to either somehow make it a fitting end for the character or have a game like Paranoia or Kult where you KNOW your character is going to be short lived and the goal is to have as much fun as possible before the inevitable end. But that also means players will be much less invested in those same PCs and typically makes for more beer and pretzels type RP than anything with depth. Ymmv.

This is a good example of something I see as a game culture issue. Ideally (in a perfect, utopian MU) people shouldn't be focused on 'my story' — this is hero-think; protagonist-think. It should be first and foremost about the story, and sometimes for the benefit of the story, an important character has to die, or suffer. They still get a really cool story, much like Wash did in Serenity, Snape and Dumbledore did in Harry Potter, Boromir did in the Lord of the Rings, and so on. But yes, sometimes the personal story has to end for the purpose of overarching stakes/impact, and then ideally you'd get to create a new, even cooler character than the first one.

I don't think this makes for beer and pretzels RP; the opposite. The higher the stakes, the more meaningful character choices become; the more the story has a sense of urgency and momentum. Your character is important, and worth investing in, precisely because they could be snatched away at any moment, and every second you have with them counts.

However, for it to be a sacrifice, you would have to volunteer your character for the funeral pyre, so in reality the character wouldn't be snatched away until you've reached a point where you're happy enough with their story so far and are willing to let them go.

@kay said in Heroic Sacrifice:

The theme and setting of the game will make that harder or easier: a superhero game, the death of a superhero would of course be a huge deal that people talk about ICly years and decades afterwards. In a fantasy game, a well known hero/noble whatsit would also be remembered. But outside of those positions and themes it gets harder. Why would anyone except his friends remember Joe McBluejeans in modern Chicago, say? Still, given the right story, that would be one way to make it a feel good thing.

I don't really know a great deal about modern Chicago (UK here) but I feel like this kind of system would work best in a brutal or gritty setting where death is expected, and moral bankruptcy is accepted. E.g. survival horror or noir. But the idea would definitely be to make sacrifice rewarding, be it because you got an epic death scene or because everyone will always remember IC how your character bravely laid their life down challenging the enemy, so that their friends could get away.

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So the question becomes, as a game creator, how do you tackle this? How do you encourage your playerbase to step back a little from their need to play heroes? From their need to avoid obstacles, reject risks/stakes, and inhibit progression or complexity in a story?

Start with rewarding failure. Not many games do this; in fact nearly none do.

I quite like the idea that failure would reward you (literally experience, or something similar), but success would cost you. Winning would have to be earned, ideally through a consecutive series of sacrifices made not just by you, but by other players throughout the story.

So for example that guy whose character was tragically killed in an important battle, their sacrifice paved the way to your success. In this way it becomes not just personal, but social, and cultivates a player culture where taking hits means you're helping the group, the story, and get kudos for doing so.

As a literary person, my goal when playing MUs is to read and write the best possible story. I want the kind of story that, when complete, could be enjoyably read about in a book, without anyone sighing with boredom or rolling their eyes. Such a story requires conflict, progression, stakes, and diverse, fallible, realistic characters. I won't say that such stories don't exist in MUs, but they're rare, fleeting, and require a lot of finesse to achieve.

One of the most easily identifiable barriers to good storytelling in MUs is something we can call, without any clinical implications, 'the Hero Complex' — or more simply, player egos. Players don't often view their characters as unimportant cogs in the storytelling machine, but as the hero; the victor. They want their characters to be smart, sexy, morally unambiguous, badass, powerful, competent and special, but when these traits are universal, they don't make for a good story; they make for a cast of competing divas on a stage too small to hold more than one.

They don't want conflict, because conflict with their character feels like a personal attack. They don't want stakes, because stakes implies a risk that they might lose. The don't want complexity or diversity, because they want their characters to be unambiguously pure, upstanding, and worthy of admiration. In the minds of many MU players, ideally all other characters should like and approve of their own, should desire their own, should never fight their own, and no obstacles that seem insurmountable should ever be in their path. Their characters should never lose anything or come to any lasting harm. But can you imagine what a boring story that would be? It can serve the goal of personal escapism, but very little else. As patronising as it sounds, I think many MU players don't actually know how to have fun, and actively avoid it without ever realising that their own inhibitions are responsible for their lack of fulfilment in the games they play and the stories they write. This would be totally fine if it were self-contained, but it rarely is: divas tend to lash out at anyone who threatens their escapist bubble of in-character peace and perfection, are riled up by environmental conflict, and make it their mission to stop any rising intrigue in its tracks by trying to 'solve' narrative obstacles prematurely or creating unprecedented backlash against any moral ambiguity.

So the question becomes, as a game creator, how do you tackle this? How do you encourage your playerbase to step back a little from their need to play heroes? From their need to avoid obstacles, reject risks/stakes, and inhibit progression or complexity in a story?

An idea I'm fine-tuning at the moment but would appreciate more feedback/discussion around is something called 'Heroic Sacrifice'. This idea wouldn't solve the Hero Complex, but it would exist to incentivise behaviour in the opposite direction. By capitalising on player needs to feel that their character/play-style is heroic, noble, important and special, the idea would be to reward players for 'sacrificing' some aspect of their character throughout their play. It could be the character's life; it could be an ability, such as sight or their leg. It could be a moral sacrifice, for example taking a life in order to gain wealth, or in the opposite direction, sacrificing the entirety of their character's wealth in order to save another character's life. The idea would be that throughout the story, opportunities arise for the characters (or sometimes the players OOCly) to make various sacrifices, for example a diabolical NPC might want to mutilate your character's face, rendering them ugly, but if you accept this consequence you'll earn some points to invest elsewhere — or in your next character.

I know that current systems do exist throughout the MU world that allow you to select preexisting conditions that make your character's life harder (a limp, a stutter etc.) in exchange for getting more points to spend elsewhere, but in this instance I'm talking about choices made on a near constant basis throughout the story. For example, letting someone kill your character, having your character fall down a treacherous mountain while the rest of the group struggles to climb and becomes increasingly nervous that they might be next, having your character lose their leg in an epic battle, or having your character betray their own. You, the player, would be rewarded for making unpopular choices, thus helping to balance out in-game demographics, raise in-game stakes, and so on. Ideally such a system would also socially reward you: as a player, you'd be thanked for helping to drive the story.

For the question of rewards, I'd like other posters to chip in.

What would incentivise you to let your character be killed or seriously harmed in some way, such as being blinded or losing a limb?

What would incentivise you to have your character make an immoral choice?

Under what circumstances would you not be mad at someone whose character just royally screwed yours over?

Kitty is a girl with the right allocations. She is fast, thorough, and sharp as a tack. She has a mind like a diamond — she knows what's best. You can tell from one look at her, with her eyes that burn like cigarettes, that she is the kind of girl who gets up early and stays up late. You bet she has uninterrupted prosperity and good dividends. As she's touring the facilities and picking up the slack, she's putting up her hair and playing with her jewellery, which is when they catch the righteous sun and you notice that her fingernails shine like justice. She has a short skirt and a long, long jacket, with shoes that cut, and she uses a machete to cut through red tape. Her voice is dark like tinted glass, with a smooth liquidation. Her car has a cupholder armrest — it's the kind of car that will get her there. She traded her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron and her name is now Karen.

(the song)

Sup.

@Cupcake said in MU Things I Love:

You engage in romantic involvement rp.

You discreetly indulge in shippy enjoyment, eyeballing pictures, gifs, music that reminds you of the pairing, but stay quiet about it because you don't want your cool rp buddy to find out how weird you are and possibly find you stalkery or obsessive...

And then you find out they are just as loony as you are about the whole thing. YAY!

I RPed a relationship with someone who would link me Hozier songs out of the blue reflecting our characters' situations.

It was adorbs and made me feel so much better about having a few romance-specific songs in my character's playlist.

@Lithium said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I am in shape, it's a perfectly valid shape.

Also: Life is a terminal condition, nobody makes it out alive.

Also also: Congratulations on getting in a more socially acceptable shape.

Also also also: I need a pool, my knees can't take extended walking/running.

My New Year's Resolution for 2016 was to give up alcohol. As of 2017 I've accomplished this, and didn't have even a drop of alcohol throughout the last year, not even on my birthday or any other special occasion. It didn't feel like that much of an effort but I am super proud of myself all the same. Bit by bit I'm trying to get healthier, and having gone plant-based a few years prior (also as the result of a New Year's Resolution!), this felt like the next logical step.

Granted, my goal was also to drop 10kgs in 2016 and I didn't succeed in that resolution, but you know ... win some lose some. (I actually dropped 20kgs but regained it. GDI yo-yo dieting.)

My resolutions this year are twofold, and are a fair bit simpler:

• Be more selfish.
• Start a bullet journal.

The first resolution I realise isn't one most people would make, or even look favourably on other people for making, but I've come to realise that taking better care of myself is a major step I need to make as a grown-up. I'm one of those people who'll drop everything in an instant for a friend, but when it comes to my needs, I usually leave those to the wayside and I'm way too critical and harsh on myself, while other people never meet me halfway, nor do they extend the same care or permissiveness I offer them. So ... yep. 2017 is the year that I stop feeling bad for needing to put myself first, in lieu of expecting other people to meet the standards I set for myself.

Apart from that, I'm notoriously disorganised and need to get my shit together. So instead of making a list of resolutions for myself this year (which I usually do), I've decided to take it bit by bit, month by month, and set myself health/education goals as I go, to suit my fluctuating state, while focusing on the little things and the getting of the shit together (e.g., do laundry today). I like that the bullet journal system is very suitable for an on-the-fly kind of lifestyle, since you don't pre-plan your year or even month — you use as much space as you need for the day/week, index your newest lists and goals, and then write up your next month after as many pages as you've needed to use for the one prior.

I may post pictures after I've prettied mine up for the week and stuff, if this thread is still going and I'm not feeling super self-conscious by then!

@surreality said in Sensitive cultural/political/religious aspects of game themes.:

Insisting that someone's RP must focus exclusively on their cultural disadvantages in any given time or place is, you're essentially saying: "If you want to play a woman, a person of color, someone gay, you accept that the only RP you're going to do involves those subjects being front and center at all times, and those are the only character choices that will or can matter."

No one's actually saying that, though — especially not the part you've emphasised in italics. To insist that characters or a setting be grounded in the cultural sensitivities of the time does nothing to limit the minutiae that real people experience regardless of where, when and how they were born. If someone's created a character so two-dimensional that they can't, say, experience the awkward butterflies of a first romantic kiss outside of the context of their circumstances, that's on them, not the realism of a setting.

Ultimately, I agree with @Thenomain. Create the game you want, that you like, that you would play, and expect people who share your ideals to play it. Trying to strike a multitude of compromises is, as @Kanye-Qwest said, the worst of both worlds.

I happen to think that rape, sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and the like make for great storytelling — this coming from someone frequently derided as a SJW — so I tend not to understand why anyone would want to exclude these themes from their story where they should realistically apply.

If you're building a medieval fantasy world like Middle Earth, then these themes aren't massively necessary. This is an elegant solution if you want to create a setting where these issues don't exist.

If you're specifically setting something in Victorian London or 1940s New Orleans or something, though, I think you should include the relevant themes of political/identity conflicts. Otherwise, what's the point of setting something in these eras to begin with? Just to have the glitzy glamour/vintage/retro style while sweeping the baggage under the rug? I think, if you were trying to be 'sensitive', that's more insulting than being explicit about issues of the era.

Where it leads to issues of marginalising certain players and their preferred archetype (e.g., saying no women who are more than x), it's the responsibility of the game-designer to create a reasonable loophole, or perhaps just choose a different setting. For example, instead of setting a Noir somewhere white and affluent, set it in New Orleans, where women of colour can play pivotal roles 'behind the scenes' as voodoo medicine-women or jazz musicians, despite the social climate of the country they live in. If you have a Victorian London sci-fi setting, invent some kind of secret society that operates out of the London Underground, and in which women can be badass and gay men make out or whatever. You get the picture.

(Coincidentally, I'm currently working on a Noir project set in New Orleans, so this is very much on my mind.)

Fucking hate Christmas.

It's a shitty holiday and everything about it is dumb. So is Hanukkah, which just had to fall obnoxiously right on the 24th to the 1st of January this year. (Jewish calendar is variable, and it usually ends up being significantly earlier in the year, sometimes even occurring in late November.)

I hate both of these things! I'm a shameless grinch, and this year I got stuck totally alone for it, not even with other grinches to grouch with in person, because a family member inexplicably died of cancer halfway across the globe (seriously selfish of them, amirite) and my closest mates, who didn't go to that funeral abroad, decided to go on a holiday tour of a whole bunch of countries in the southern part of Africa instead.

So I'm sitting at my laptop indoors, brooding, thinking of how much I hate this time of year, because everything outside is closed so I can't even go have fun somewhere and meet new people. But, thanks to this hobby, there are people who are online at the same time, elsewhere around the globe, who are just as miserable and alone as I am right now and want to have some fun.

Cue a string of amazing and awesome stories throughout the last two days, from adrenaline-pumping, conflict-ridden action-adventure excitement to, you know ... eyebrow waggle. And I had fun.

Now I know this sounds sad as fuck, but while I may not be able to have an enjoyable holiday season, at least my pretendy-fun-time character can. And it's times like this that when I occasionally step back from the hobby or cut it loose for a spell, I remember why it's a good hobby to have available now and then.