Best posts made by rebekahse

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And I still haven't seen anybody answer why the 'right' to pursue that RP unfettered is more important that somebody else's fun.

Probably because nobody has said it is?

People have expressed their personal distaste for games set in historical time periods that remove negative social attitudes to cater to modern sensibilities. That's...it.

I'm a Jewish woman. I wound not approve of a game set in 1930s Germany that removed the abhorrent antisemitism present in German society at the time, even if the focus was on playing time-traveling super hero vampires. I think it's far too important to the setting.

That's my opinion. You don't have to agree with me. You're allowed to have your own. It can be different from mine.

@arkandel said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

But let's say you're setting a game in the fifties (or the Victorian age) and you're trying to be at least somewhat historically accurate. It's quite feasible even then to accept or even to require PCs to be more liberal in their outlooks; certainly there were plenty of individuals back then who didn't look at a free black man or a self assured woman as a bad thing, but societies as a whole did. Doing away with those parts ("in our version of London all races are equal") can still be done of course, it's simply not the same thing.

I think my problem with this would be that it borders on the cliche at this point, because it seems like that's what every game set in a (quasi-)historical period is doing these days. Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but speaking only for myself, it doesn't work for me.

As someone who sticks around these games for the day-to-day narrative/social RP aspects rather than the endless cycle of PRPs, I get frustrated when a game's setting goes out of its way to remove every negative societal trait that I would potentially have to deal with. Maybe sometimes I want to play Joan Holloway or Betty Draper, you know?

Games set in crappy/oppressive worlds have flourished before, but it seems like there was some seismic shift over the last few years where everyone got worried they'd be labeled some sort of '-ist' and now everything's sanitized and pretty boring. People don't seem to leap to OOC accusations of the player behind a character being a murderer when that character kills a bunch of people, and I'm confused why we seem to have decided that's self-evident but a character being a sexist or a racist is legitimate cause for OOC concern.

@surreality

Coo. That actually kind of sounds like what I'm looking for, because at this point I still have no idea what one actually does on WoD games. You'd think I would, hanging out here, but the impression I've gotten is that it's mostly, "I'm a vampire, and also I work at the bait shop."

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

If the point of engaging in IC discrimination is to demonstrate that a PC is a bastard, there are innumerable ways to do the same without engaging in IC discrimination.

What if the 'point' of engaging in IC discrimination is to demonstrate that the PC is a sexist or a racist?

For me, the key question is: why would a player engage in IC discrimination? And as I have yet to hear a solid reason as to why a player must engage in IC discrimination, and cannot find any situation where a player should engage in it.

This is actually a really good example of what I meant when I said it felt like there had been some kind of shift in the hobby over the past few years. Nobody would be asking this question, as @surreality already pointed out, about murdering another PC. You can end my character that I've worked on for five years in the blink of an eye, and that's not wrongfun, but playing a construction contractor who won't hire me because I'm a woman is somehow far worse and somehow has far more impact on my enjoyment of RP? I genuinely do not get this point of view.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I did however, expand that point to suggest that you're using historical realism as an excuse to allow abuse, it's not actually ethical to do so unless you insure that every character is hit by awful stuff out of player control and preferably randomly.

I'm not a historian, but I think one's chances of surviving the Old West without contracting tuberculosis were slightly higher than the chances of an openly gay black man being elected sheriff of an Arizona boom town.

Aside from that, I actually like the idea of a random-bad-things generator, if only because it would separate the people playing characters with a healthy IC/OOC disconnect from the people playing thinly-veiled author-insertion fantasy personas.

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@rebekahse

I didn't say it should be a huge chance. But it should be there. If the historically accurate misery is going to rain, it should rain on everybody, right?

Sure, I have no problem with that.

Though I'll admit being intensely interested in your view of "bad things happening to my character = fun tax." Do you feel as though that's kind of revealing as to where you're coming from in this discussion?

@faraday said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Back when I ran Sweetwater Crossing (a western), the policy allowed PCs to have modern sensibilities (making them outliers for their day and age) but permitted IC discrimination as long as it was kept IC.

Playing a female ranchhand, I was fully prepared to deal with era-appropriate discrimination. I saw that as an important thing that shaped the character and something I didn't mind exploring - even as a woman iRL. It was actually a little jarring when she would go around talking about her struggles in a town full of PCs who had no problem with her whatsoever. Off-camera discrimination just didn't resonate with people.

On the flip side, a situation arose where some PCs wanted to form a lynch mob to get an African American PC who was romantically involved with a white woman PC. Holy cow was that a horrible situation. Yeah, it's historical, but it was really uncomfortable (as, probably, it should be) trying to moderate that kind of thing. Not only did it pit the characters against each other, there was no small amount of anger and "You're a horrible person!" at people for playing within the game's setting.

So I can see both sides of the argument ... not wanting to sugar-coat history vs. not wanting to throw the worst parts of history into peoples' faces. But for me personally? I prefer fantasy/sci-fi settings where the discrimination is because "You're from Tauron" and not "You've got dark skin."

I know this post is two weeks old and I apologize for dredging it back up, but it hit on basically the reason I avoid historical games: importing modern sensibilities into historical or quasi-historical settings always bugs me when I go to play in them, because it robs the setting of credibility.

And I feel guilty about that, because it's probably the height of white privilege to want to take a vacation into oppression, but I can't help feeling that while progressive utopias would be great to live in IRL, they're excruciatingly boring to play in.

@Thenomain said:

@rebekahse

We are more mega corporate than anytime before in history, it's just not something we feel we can, or need, to do anything about. A radio piece I heard from a pop culture analyst had superhero movies and now tv as popular because we feel that we have no control over impossible situations, mostly terrorism and rising control of our every day lives.

Sure, we absolutely are. But the lack of paranoia about it is what makes the difference, because Shadowrun's all about the paranoia. It's not a game that would get made in today's climate, I don't think.

I find the conclusion that you can't put in wireless or social networking into ShadowRun to be kind of strange, because Cyberpunk2020 is ready for it right now, and CP2020 has a heavy dose of world building too. (Five corporation books, four cybernetics books, etc.)

That wasn't really the conclusion, though.

So why do people flip their lid at idea of updating the game world?

I don't think most people do. I think the people that flip their lid flip it at 4th Edition's change to "WOD-style" dice mechanics, and thus don't want to play 4th. If you're not playing 4th or 5th, you're stuck with non-wireless 3rd/2nd/1st and all its clunky, 80s-era predictions of future tech. You could theoretically put wireless, social media, etc. into all of those, but you're basically having to write a lot of new rules for an old, established game system at that point, and I've never seen that work really well.

Aside from the dice mechanics thing, 4th and 5th don't feel as "cyberpunky". The writing of 1st/2nd/3rd editions just have an 80s feel to them that I can't describe but know when I see. I like that, personally, but it does feel dated and incongruous with where technology has actually advanced to. Being set seventy years in the future becomes a lot less plausible when people can't get on the internet stand-in without finding a physical jackpoint or setting up a satellite interface. But going with the recent editions of the game that aren't completely unaware of the technological advancements of the 90s/00s/10s loses out on the 80s cyberpunk vibe that I think attracted people to the game in the first place.

You can't have one with the other, basically.

If you're Oz, or if you know him, I'm looking to get in touch with him!

@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

ETA: Like, why does my PC have to suffer the same crap I do IRL for somebody else to be having fun?

Verisimilitude?

I dunno. I'm subject to sexism IRL, and it doesn't bother me when it makes an appearance in pretendy funtimes. Its absence were it would be realistic to have it strikes me as false, if anything.

@Thenomain said:

Absolutely not, because that's not where we are, but you can easily update CP2020 into the modern climate, so why not ShadowRun? We are paranoid, these days. We are paranoid as fuck. Apple unlock your phone because think of the children are we paranoid! We're just not paranoid about corporate control, as the US Chamber of Commerce has announced a lawsuit against Seattle trying to allow unionization of Uber drivers.

Right! It's a different kind of paranoia. I don't know why, but it doesn't feel very Shadowrun to me. Possibly just because I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s. Without the 80s-style paranoia, it just doesn't seem like Shadowrun.

Are you saying that CP2020 is not an old, established game system?

Noooooo, I'm just saying that I think updating 3rd Edition Shadowrun for wireless, social media, etc. would require way more work than it's worth, and wouldn't work all that well even if you did it.

That the latest rules sets are not thematically cyberpunk, that I can get behind, but let's also admit that the whole concept of cyberpunk is very 80s. Gibson's writings have moved on while playing to the strong social noir that made cyberpunk to begin with. I played a point and click adventure called "Void & Null" that captures the mood without having to be cyberpunk.

We can near future sci-if noir, if we wanted. Let's do it.

Cyberpunk's very 80s, absolutely. And it's totally possible to move on from it and still keep a lot of what makes Shadowrun Shadowrun, but despite that it doesn't feel very Shadowrunny. I don't know how to describe it beyond that, and it's probably just me - I do like 4th and 5th edition, from what I've seen of them, but they feel very, very different in tone and setting. Maybe it's all just nostalgia.

@ganymede said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I would ask the question, actually, because on many of the games I play on, murdering another PC is unthematic. Take, for example, Werewolf 2E. Written into the Oath of the Moon is a prohibition against killing other werewolves. So, if the PCs are werewolves, murdering a werewolf is verboten.

Then we have very different frames of reference, because the WoD MUSHes (and I suppose most of the games in general) I'm familiar with are ones where player characters are allowed to kill other player characters.

If this is the case, congratulations for perpetuating that horrible truism about art imitating life.

Thanks? I honestly don't understand what you mean by that.

I'm saying that anyone trying to justify their choice to engage in IC discrimination probably took lessons from the Dan Brown School of Writing.

Or possibly Tarantino, or maybe Harper Lee, or Sholem Aleichem, or Clint Eastwood, or... But your point hopefully wasn't that compelling, interesting, and even great narratives can't possibly include protagonists whose flaws include bigotry of some form or another, and was instead just expressed clumsily, because I think a lot of people have enjoyed The Hateful Eight and Fiddler On The Roof and To Kill A Mockingbird and Gran Turino.

The basic problem with Shadowrun (probably the only tabletop RPG I actually like!) is that it's just so inherently 80s. Attempts to update it to account for the massive leaps forward in technology since it was first written make it lose a lot of its charm and "big megacorps gonna get us!" feel, but NOT updating it, or sticking to previous editions, just feels downright loony for a setting that's supposedly in the future. A future without wireless Internet or social media? Nuh uh.

I think I've seen a quote where someone said that Shadowrun feels hyper-futuristic and fifteen years out of date at the same time, and I think that sums it up nicely. But it's my first and only love so I can never really get too down about it.

@Jennkryst said in Anyone kind enough to help me with oWoD?:

@rebekahse Join the crazy evil ones. It is the best.

A useful kinfolk varies, based on what useful you want to do, as well as if you want to... er. Multi class. In oWoD, it is possible to be a Kinfolk who is also a Mage or Changeling. Or a Vampire, but that might get you killed faster than playing the crazy evil ones.

I was kiiiinda thinking about the crazy evil ones, since the background I was going for was like...deep South redneck trailer trash, and the crazy evil ones kinda seem to have a Rob Zombie movie vibe going for them that would work for that I think. But there don't seem to be all that many of them around.

I was thinking of taking a lot of street/crime Connections, and Streetwise and social skills, but I don't know how useful that would be.

You can find good RP on Second Life, but it's kind of a "the juice isn't worth the squeeze," thing, because there is a LOT of squeeze. There are a ton of roleplay sims, most of them pretty bad, and there isn't an easy way to even track them down.

The other issue is that you'll have to spend some money (or learn to make all sorts of stuff) if you want to be taken seriously by most other roleplayers. Mesh body replacements for the default avatar are pretty much the expected standard for women now, along with mesh clothes and mesh heads, and that alone costs about $40. Guys seem to be able to get away with not putting in as much effort with their appearance, because there are far fewer of them and thus they're swamped with RP regardless.

The other problem is that most of the RP sims that are based on actual RPGs (D&D, WoD, Shadowrun, etc.) seem to go bust pretty fast.

With all of that said, I still pop on pretty regularly to RP with the one decent group I've found.

@Ghost said in We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.:

The last game set in a Roman Empire era/setting had a shitload of rape, forced character pregnancies, and when you mention that game's name on this forum, people flee, close doors, lock windows, and speak in bad English things like "yooo musss go now. Yooo go back home. You stay away. Isss Vam-peeeer."

I put it at a 65-75% chance that if another Roman Empire setting game opens, plenty of people who enjoyed Firan will show up to roleplay some of the same, theme-enforced misogyny.

They also had copious amounts of female leaders, female generals, female rank-and-file soldiers...

Not to defend Firan (because it was horrible in many, many ways), but it was even more progressive and equitable than a game trying to hew close to Roman-era realism would have any justification for being.

Trying to create a realistic Imperial Rome game and removing the structural sexism of the era would be like creating a game set in '60s Mississippi but having a big statement on your login screen saying that racism doesn't exist and everything's integrated.

@Clarity said in What do you play most?:

@Arkandel said in What do you play most?:

To be entirely honest here I have been playing the most what most people have been playing the most.

WoD for me was a derived preference. I like well populated, active games, and those have historically been the ones to match the description.

I'm an off peak player so I kind of need to gravitate towards games that are well populated just out of necessity, as they tend to be the ones that are more likely to have people around in my time zone. So the code base used isn't usually one selected out of preference.

In saying that, I tend to prefer fantasy, historical, or modern fantasy previously. Though I'd love to play a good sci fi, or post apoc.

I feel your pain. As another off-peak player who just loathes WoD, there's basically nowhere to play.