Posts made by Trundlebot

Fair enough on both.

1. It's worth pointing out that male and female athletic performance gaps basically boil down to hormones, not, fundamentally, skeletal or muscular structure. Basically, testosterone is a hell of a drug.

2. Very few of the people that have, for instance, won medals of honor were exceptionally beefy and strong. Tons of cases of of exceptionally brave and successful soldiering for instance are from tiny wiry dudes who are certainly not outside the range of normal female physical capability. When they're able to or force a way to fight plenty of women have historically excelled on the field of combat- and more so if we're including like generals for instance. Like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Joan of Arc, Boudica, the Trung Sisters, etc.. So basically, historically success at fighting and leadership in battle isn't determined by who can throw a ball the farthest as it turns out.

3. Also while in the real world, the most effective natural performance enhancing drug is testosterone, that really isn't relevant once you start adding mystical mumbo jumbo, alien super strength physiology, etc., etc..Like expecting the Hulk to be automatically stronger than She-Hulk per se isn't really based on anything but laziness of expectations. I won't say sexist ones, but, you know. Sexist ones.

So yeah, #BioFacts is a silly reason to act incredulous that girl superheroes might beat up boy superheroes or be better at the job.

eta: That may not even be exactly what anyone itt is doing but I encounter this argument enough that I'm going to rant against it anyway

Jenny@The Reach, although I haven't really RPed with her since the reboot was announced so shrug; working on Ethel@Fallcoast but it's obviously not open yet (although she's going to run a boarding house so I'd be happy to talk to anyone who wants to set up as a tenant.)

Also Mouse@New Prospect. Also a couple of other alts that are only semi-active there so far, Roxie and Karl. Both ports from City of Hope but I haven't really been playing there much either.

Want to figure out something on Game of Bones but just kind of ugh. Might make a maester.

I mean I think it would be a lot nicer if people just accepted that there are really, really, really, really good reasons both IC and OOC to just talk to each other and ignore those parts of the books.

But they don't. Instead they fight really hard to preserve that incredibly detrimental bit of flavor.

If they're willing to die on that hill I completely expect at some point to be playing my character and someone to tell me, "Hey, your Beast isn't allowed to be this social, take three chuffing damage."

I dunno, I can think of plenty of times I've been the asshole and I bet people that aren't me could think of more.

I mean there are some hardcore psychopaths in this hobby but a lot of people are just like, normal people that are sometimes assholes and sometimes not. Good game-writing should encourage the not.

Like, a good example with WoD stuff is the whole masque-between-super-spheres thing. Like it makes about infinite sense from both OOC and IC perspectives for the local werewolves and vamps and mages and shit to work together where their interests align, also creating a bunch of extra RP in the process.

But the people who pitch a fit about this and scream "superfriends!" and want to keep spheres separate aren't just being assholes, they're following the precedent laid down in the books. These groups aren't supposed to trust each other or get along, and hell, some of them want to kill each other. That flavor, while it kind of makes sense in a single sphere tabletop game, is dumb as hell in a multisphere game with dozens of players, but people cling to it anyway because it's embedded in the flavor of the world.

At the end of the day, "Don't worry about this flavor and theme-setting stuff, good players can just ignore it" isn't very reassuring. Why is it in there at all then?

I mean, you can say that people will be reasonable unless they're assholes, but I've gotten a lot of shit on a lot of games for deviating from what people expected certain splats to act like before. "Just avoid assholes, everything will be alright!" is pretty useless advice in this hobby honestly. Or it's pretty hard to implement in any meaningful and reliable way at least, especially when the game writers are encouraging said asshole behavior by writing, "X are supposed to be Y!" even if they add a small text disclaimer later.

Also way to not be familiar with the new chuffing damage rules, noob.

Okay no one point out I'm dumb, I already remembered that now kiths work entirely differently so I guess you can be a fairest or darkling animal-person or whatever.

So I guess that makes seeming just like... a vague outline of a character archetype? Leader, Rebel, Tough Guy etc.. Like TVTropes when it didn't suck or something.

Hm. But then seeming still affects how that kith manifests so... like I guess it's not the idea of a slot for "character archetype" that I mind, it's just that that seems different than what seeming was about and the connection between the two feels both stifling and kinda arbitrary.

@Sammi said:

Another way of putting it: this writeup makes those changelings who feel compassion and ethics more keenly than others into the Fairest.

The problem is that that's not all that it makes them. And there are seemings where this problem is more apparent still.

Like, let's take Beasts. The idea is that Beasts now I guess flip out at being caged and confined and love flaunting social norms. Okay. But lots of animal-based concepts might not be about that at all. Lots of communal creatures- wolves, rabbits, ants, whatever- might love the idea of finding people they can trust and pledge with, except that mechanically they're not allowed to do that. Maybe I want to play, for instance, a spider ling as a genteel, refined housekeeper inviting people into her parlor, a woman who's nothing but civilized and refined, except that mechanically is a punished concept basically. Or an actual karma chameleon who blends in everywhere he goes and tries to be exactly what people want him to be but nope not that either apparently.

Like this is actually a pretty big leap backwards, it's basically the Pooka problem all over again. After the always-the-most-popular Sidhe, Pooka were usually the most popular splat on oWoD Changeling games, due to all the variety of animals you could build. Except... whatever animal type you made, you were pretty strong corralled by the mechanics and flavor to make a silly shit-stirring trickster type. "Animal type changeling" wasn't a theme you were free to play around with however you wanted; if you were a trickster type you were supposed to be Pooka, and if you were Pooka you were certainly supposed to be a trickster type, no matter what the actual associations with your animal type were or what themes you wanted to explore.

@Sammi said:

@Thenomain said:

And this is where I roll my eyes and sigh. With the decision now out of my hands once I choose a Seeming, it limits exactly the kinds of things I like to RP.

Your Seeming is supposed to be a representation of your character's personality. If you make morally grey choices, you're a Darkling. If you hide your weakness, you're an Ogre. If you lead by example, you might be Fairest.

Why is that a good thing though? Why is that an improvement?

The enormous freedom of creativity in character creation was one of the big draws to me for 1st Ed Lost. It was the main thing that compensated for the constant drumming on trauma-drama theme stuff, actually.

And it looks a lot like they're reducing creative freedom and intensifying the trauma drama, which is the exact opposite of the way I was hoping the new edition would go.

Was Darien on SI? Sounds familiar.

The last episode wasn't dumb because rape is so much worse or more shocking than other things- including other rapes- on the show.

The last episode was dumb because Sansa's character arc being nothing but getting horrifically abused in each of the seven kingdoms is dumb, it undid any empowerment she gained from her story last season, and focusing on Theon instead of Sansa indicates that it's his redemption arc they want us to care about and they're just using Sansa being raped as a tool in a male character's development all of which is super ugh.

I'm still going to watch the next episode but it's dumb writing.

Off the coast of the Zephyr Isles congregate thousands of green-winged terns, their dark feathers blackening the water. The fishermen and sailors consider them bad luck and shoot them if they get a chance, although it's bad luck to eat their flesh, which tastes foul enough at any rate. The locals say the birds cluster around near whenever somebody's about to die, waiting to steal their soul. Sometimes they fly about silent as the grave, and that means that their prey's escaped. Sometimes they make a deafening din of jubilation, and fly off back to the island where they nest. No one speaks that island's name, nor approaches it neither, for its ringed about by sheer crags and surrounded by fierce whirlpools that will drag a ship into the rocks.

I've heard tell of a small, wooded island that moves around, so no one may find it twice; I've heard many names for it but most call it the Wanderer. At the center of the island is a pool of water so still and clear you'd think you could reach out and scrape the bottom with your fingers, but the best divers of the Bay of Emeralds have tried in vain to reach its depths. Still, they say the water is good to drink- but don't harm a single living thing on that island, beast or bird or tree. One mad old drunk in a bar in Balig told my uncle of how he alone refused out of fear to eat from a wild pig they'd caught. He woke up the next morning alone. Their clothes and gear were all still there, but his shipmates had vanished. Swore he saw a lot more pigs running about, though.

Old rhyme might be appropriate here:

"There are men in the village of Erith
That nobody seeth or heareth
And there looms on the marge
Of the river, a barge
That nobody roweth or steereth"

Only if we're ignoring issues of scale and other variables. Maybe the other roleplay doesn't cause as much distress and drama and/or has other features that justify allowing it.

Like, maybe IC politics cause more ooc distress and drama but they're also often embedded in theme and also creates lots of opportunities for fun.

Experiences may vary but I have absolutely never heard of a rape storyline creating fun and interesting RP for anyone.

Singling out rape RP as if it's special makes sense if it is special, which it is.

I am sympathetic to the idea that theoretically storylines involving rape could be interesting and worth exploring.

The actual practice I've seen and apparently most other people have seen is an endless succession of clusterfucks and drama bombs that make prohibiting all rape storylines out of hand the eminently sensible decision.

One can speculate why it's so constantly a source of friction that actively harms games while contributing nothing of value, while other storylines with equally horrific and horrible things happening to PCs and NPCs aren't, but it's just pretty much an empirical observation. Rape storylines are awful and harm games.

It's basically the same reason most games don't allow underage PCs, right? In theory those can be played well. But this is mostly not what happens.