Posts made by Tinuviel

Apparently, tis the season for endings, and mine is drawing near. I feel much like Cicero did when Augustus came to power, watching the names of friends and colleagues be posted to the forum door in the latest round of proscriptions. Bearing witness to a once-great thing becoming torrid and abused.

So, I feel it only sensible to leave before I'm sent naked to join my colleagues in exile. Lord knows that my mouth will get me into trouble one of these days, and I'd like to retain a little dignity as I vacate this once great home of free thought and expression. I find I barely recognise it now. It may simply be that I am old and tired, and what I thought this place should be is something best left to the ashcan of history. Or perhaps it never actually existed as I imagine, and my mind is tainted with the rose-coloured glass of reminiscing and mourning the past.

I have been a member of this and related communities for many years. We've laughed, cried, mourned, and celebrated together. From whence we started many of us have started families, gained academic or professional acclaim, or simply just gotten older. Though I pride myself on my ability to emotionally distance myself and to regard this place as simply A Thing and not anything important, I find myself sad at the state of affairs with which we have been presented.

I could articulate why I feel as I do, and indeed so many of us do, but that has been done dozens of times by those now gone and my analysis would not add anything of merit; I shall simply say that I disagree with many policies, some new and some old, and that disagreement has reached a point making my remaining here untenable.

I have found friends here, for which I thank you. I have found foes, for which I curse you. And I have found myself, for which you all owe me an apology and a refund.

Much love and respect, to those that deserve it,
Tinuviel

If what @Roz says is true, then both participants should be punished.

You're swiftly degrading any remaining confidence we have in you.

@greenflashlight Are you running any extensions that might interfere with things, like a wonky adblocker or whatnot?

@derp said in Active Games?:

but a lot of us old players are just so set in our ways that we don't really think about how it might change for newer generations versus what we're used to seeing in that situation.

That's because OUR WAY IS BEST WAY. Youth today have it so easy with their logs and their wiki pages and their sex games. Back in our day we had to work out if a game was active by DIALING IN and waiting for the text to load line by line...

@ganymede said in Races in fantasy settings:

@tinuviel said in Races in fantasy settings:

Racism is easy to write, because it's everywhere.

But that means oppression is more prevalent and common, and should correspondingly be easier to write.

I understand why writers fall back on the trope; I just find it boring and overdone.

Sure, but it's easier for a white man to opine philosophically about how racism is bad, than for them to write about how patriarchal oppression of women is bad. For instance. It's easier to pretend that you had no hand and gained no benefit from racism, or that racism is fixed now.

@aria said in RL things I love:

JAMES MCAVOY WISHED ME A HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

IN PERSON.

TO MY ACTUAL FACE.

Is that a reaction or a demonstration?

@ganymede said in Races in fantasy settings:

@mietze said in Races in fantasy settings:

However, if the setting writers wrote things that seemed specifically steeped in racial slurs/stereotypes of RL I'd probably not feel comfortable playing in that.

I earnestly don't believe it to be difficult to write oppression and adversity into a setting without resorting to what we would recognize as racism.

Usually, they're not trying to avoid racism. They're either trying to tell an allegorical story that doesn't quite work (see Detroit: Become Human) or they're using racism as a quick "these are the bad guys" signifier (see any fantasy/sci fi world that has "Space/Fantasy Nazis"). Racism is easy to write, because it's everywhere.

@faraday Aye, tis why fantasy worlds are often terrible at telling allegorical stories about race issues. Human ethnicities have no inherent differences beyond the superficial, whereas Orcs and Trolls or Klingons and Romulans have inherent physical differences.

Keep in mind that I am so, so, so deeply and profoundly white that if you dropped me in snow there would immediately be a Wholefoods (insert your own local up-market, pompous, charge 1000% more for the same stuff as a regular place-style supermarket as applicable).

Racism is lazy writing. It's easy "Elves hate goblins because they're goblins."

Individual characters can be racist, though usually that's more of a 'problem to resolve' rather than something static. Entire species of people (races, species, whatever) hating another different kind of people just for being that people? Lazy.

And that's not even getting into the moralistic aspects of the problem. I just hate it because it's trite and lazy.

This is definitely going to sound a bit 'blow my own horn'-like but on the rare occasions I read old logs, or am otherwise exposed to things I've said/done in RP, I occasionally get giddy reading some of the kinda great things I wrote. Especially when others have reinforced that "this is good" with votes or whatever.

@ganymede said in Meshing Groups:

@thesuntsar

It’s real hard to teach social skills, especially in an environment that caters to the non-social.

More pertinently, it's hard to teach people anything when they don't want to learn. They're comfortable in their group, they aren't inclined or desirous to change that.

Oh, another thought: Why are these people in particular here? Come up with a reason for why these specific individuals are involved in the story you're telling. Give each something that only they can do, so that everyone is useful/helpful but won't really succeed without the other people.

Smaller groups. If you want to encourage people to RP together, get two or three maximum together for something small and low-stakes. Five to seven is a large enough scene that some folks will be wary and/or uncomfortable, so will stick to who they know. Two or three and they've no option but to RP with someone new.

That said, don't force it. Sometimes people just don't want to RP with people with whom they're unfamiliar, especially not in any organised scene/plot. Especially if they've got limited play time.

@seraphim73 said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

Athletics [snip] would all be Background Skills

Not with the amount of bending over backwards to fuck me they seem to be doing.

@misterboring said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

There's a big difference between making a character who is competent at their specialization and min-maxing in my book. Min-maxing is the difference between being competent and world class.

As has been said before in this thread, the biggest problem with talking about 'min-maxing' is that everyone has different ideas of what min-maxing is. The "badness line" invariably being just below whatever it is they're doing.

@coin said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

And this is why my one character has Composure 8 and Influence 8.

Wait.

Did I do it wrong.

Can't die in combat if you just maintain a stiff upper lip and simply tell the bullets to, politely, fuck off.

@insomniac7809 Yeah, unfortunately difficult on games that try to do all the things. I'm like... the anti-min/maxer. I have the attention span of a gnat drowning in a vodka & redbull. I want to do the social and the political and the thinky thinky and sometimes the fighty and I want to do it all but ooh there's this merit that sounds really neat even if it never comes up in play and then there's like eighty specialties I could buy for my skills...

It's a thing.

@insomniac7809 Even worse is when you make that erudite natural philosopher that's so-so at the blade, and it turns out every "investigation" or "diplomatic" scene winds up with combat because the ST doesn't know how to do anything other than say roll initiative.

@ganymede Yep. As a middling student of psychology, pretty much everything I'm learning is "it depends."

So to answer this, and basically all other "Is X bad?" questions, the answer is "it depends."