@Arkandel said:
People who grade books yet to be published - usually quite highly - on sites like Goodreads.
Yes, I'm looking forward to Doors of Stone too. But it has a 4.45/4 stars rating with 1500+ votes and not one of those people has read it. It just makes the entire rating system unreliable.
Some people do actually get ARCs and review based on them, but it definitely doesn't account for all of those.
Taking the Spafinder gift cards I got for Christmas and getting a massage todaaaaaaaaaaay
The thing is that bringing up "well people can always leave the game if they're being harassed" is just a fundamentally unhelpful thing to even bring up. Like, okay, people can leave. So? Yes, you can abandon a problem. There's just zero that's constructive about it in any conversation. All it does is distract from having actual conversation about harassment problems.
@Arkandel said:
@Roz said:
Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.
Even factoring in the first six words of the line you quoted? If so, please elaborate.
I just mean that if your point is that you're not banning any IC actions of that nature, it's because you're not banning anything, not because there's no difference between the two and no reason to consider them differently. That's all I mean. I'm being obnoxiously derailing.
Please, nit-pick all you can! I'd like to poke holes into my pitch, that's the whole point of it.
Haha, nah, I'm not even really poking holes in your overall pitch, just the one sentence. Hence me saying I'm derailing. (I probably wouldn't want to play on the game myself, because I just have different ideas of what I want to see on a game.)
On a personal note I simply don't like rating horrible acts. Rape is a heinous thing to do to another human being, it's a crime, it's wrong. But so is murder. So is torture. I don't believe it's in the purview of running a game to determine 'which is worse' - they are all nasty. That doesn't mean other people couldn't decide for whatever reason one is worse than others and ban it from their setting, though.
It's not really about rating horrible acts. The reason rape plots get banned some places is because of the very different ways in which people are affected by it and our society treats it. That is, you're way more likely to have victims of sexual assault -- likely multiple ones -- playing on your game, and more likely than not they either 1) didn't report it because our society sucks at handling these cases, or 2) did report it but experienced first-hand how shitty our society is at handling these cases. It's not really a matter of rating the horrible acts, but rating how comparatively horrible our society is at handling one of them in particular and how widespread the affect of it is. I won't say rape is worse than murder. I will say that our treatment of rape victims is way worse, and our treatment of rape as a narrative in art is also worse.
@Arkandel said:
@Roz said:
In the context of this thread it's not staff's job to say what's ethical and what's not. Is rape wrong and illegal? Yes! So is murder. If you don't intend to ban assassins from a game why draw the line at one but not the other?
Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.
Even factoring in the first six words of the line you quoted? If so, please elaborate.
I just mean that if your point is that you're not banning any IC actions of that nature, it's because you're not banning anything, not because there's no difference between the two and no reason to consider them differently. That's all I mean. I'm being obnoxiously derailing.
I too find it wildly frustrating if ICA =/= ICC on a game. But I strongly object to the idea that the only way to establish stakes on a game is to kill people's characters without warning. If the game inflicts no consequences on a character for doing stupid things, that's a big issue, yeah. But that doesn't actually mean that the only right way to tell the story is to have non-consensual character death. That said, if you're on a consent game and a player does something wildly stupid and there's no real other option, I think there's room for the GM to be like "okay you are totally going to die if you do that there's not really any other option" and if the player does it anyways that's pretty much consenting to character death even if they insist they shouldn't die.
@Arkandel said:
Ghost said:
Constructive Devil's Advocacy:
So does this mean that if I really want to play a serial rapist with an immunity to jail time who uses his powers to justify uncomfortable sexual situations, that I can drag all of my Shang friends with me?
Yes.
In the context of this thread it's not staff's job to say what's ethical and what's not. Is rape wrong and illegal? Yes! So is murder. If you don't intend to ban assassins from a game why draw the line at one but not the other?
Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.
I spent so much of middle school and high school absolutely in love with that man. Galaxy Quest came out when I was about twelve and my mom was like, oh you liked him?? TIME FOR SENSE & SENSIBILITY. Which is when I fell in love. My mom started renting a bunch of his movies just for us to watch together. He was a fantastic Snape, and he played a lot of assholes over the years, but in my heart he'll always be the quiet, honorable Colonel Brandon.
Probably the most satisfying campaigns I've had to run and participate in were on the old X-Men Movieverse: X-Factor game, where the core of the game was as secret mutant government agents. Since plot required missions required GMing, there was often times where we had back to back plots from staff and players. We had a big shadowy organization that was our rival to dismantle over the years. Since things were secret agent mission-based, we weren't as reliant on single players to carry things through; we could shift plot around a little easier. When I started on staff, I was unemployed and pretty sad about it. Never have I had more time energy to help run plot and more investment in a game, and now that it's years later I know I never will again. Unfortunately, that level of plotting is a total staff burn-out, which is what eventually happened. I'm still really sad we couldn't wrap things up better.
When we decided to close Mass Effect: Alpha & Omega, we specifically planned it out several months in advance to out with as satisfying a bang as possible. I really liked that we got to go out as epically as possible for that one.
Spotify's featuring a David Bowie playlist, if anyone wants to jam.
@Coin said:
@Arkandel said:
@Coin Of course I want the show to be good. But if it's good, yet it's not <X>, then call it something else.
I guess I'm just not a purist. I think a story can be told in different ways, or different stories can be told. Also, maybe I'm just super tired of having to worry about whether or not something lives up to its name. It's not a legacy, man; it's a comic book. I can't bring myself to care very much.
I don't know that that's really fair. There's a big difference between being a purist and feeling like an adaptation should follow the general core of its source material. Purists are generally the ones who are complaining that an adaptation doesn't follow every beat and plot point of the source material. You say that a story can be told in different ways, but I think the point is when it's a different story altogether.
I'm not much of a purist: I actually enjoy that sense of adaptation and how the story can be better told for screen. I think Game of Thrones has had some really fascinating adaptational changes, some of which I think improved upon the original. (They tend to put known characters together instead of introducing new sideline characters, such as having Shae serve as Sansa's maid instead of the practically-nobody in the books, or introducing that brilliant note of tension with having Arya serve as Tywin's cupbearer. It keeps the characters we care about interacting. On the flipside, there are some changes I disagree strongly with, but those are usually about scenes or plots that I'd object to in any medium, a la 'how many new rape scenes can we introduce to this show.')
On the flipflipside, I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the new Lucifer show because it looks so wildly removed to anything the comic was about. I'm not talking about plots as much as I'm talking about sort of core character beats and themes. I could be totally wrong and it's just bad marketing, but eh.
