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I'd like to know more about trans inclusion, while we are on the topic. I'll give an example to illustrate my question: In The Adventure Zone, there was a female character, and at the end of the whole thing they looked back and talked about how seriously they had taken her depiction because she was trans. Except that it had literally never come up in the story even once that I can remember. They said when introducing the character that she had been assigned male at birth and then never referred to it again. Maybe this is the best one can do, but to me it felt a bit off. It felt... exploitative, maybe? The idea that you can just say "oh and btw she was trans" and then pat yourself on the back for how sensitive and inclusive you are when I, a regular listener, had no idea she was supposed to be trans. But at the same time, if you make every trans character have a story that is about being trans, that is a kind of essentialism and might show an inability to look past that one aspect of their identity to see their full humanity. So what is the best way to do it? I'd particularly like to hear from the trans people here.
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Oct 20, 2017 13:37
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A trans friend has told me (while discussing media more generally than gaming podcasts) that if it would seem weird to include a scene to reassert that a particular character is cis/het, then it should seem equally weird to include a scene to reassert that they're queer or trans. I remember the sentence "it's not like you'd get to the end of a movie where the hero kisses his love interest and wonder why before that scene the movie never once pointed out that both of them were straight" coming up.
Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 13:57
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Cis people need to stop telling transition narratives. Pretty much full stop. I’m glad to see more trans people in narratives written by cis people but I am so so done with them doing transition stories. THAT is the exploitative, objectifying, dehumanizing stuff. So yeah, give me more trans characters who are good characters that happen to be trans. I haven’t listened to TAZ but it sounds like from what you’re saying the McElroys did just that. Great.
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Oct 20, 2017 13:58
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Arivia posted:Cis people need to stop telling transition narratives. Pretty much full stop. I’m glad to see more trans people in narratives written by cis people but I am so so done with them doing transition stories. THAT is the exploitative, objectifying, dehumanizing stuff. There's also a lot of "a spell for every occasion" problem-solving, but I have heard it gets better on that count. Regardless it's seriously the funniest, most entertaining rpg podcast I've listened to, with a good cast and great production values. Seriously the only actual play podcast that's kept my interest past a handful of episodes.
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Oct 20, 2017 14:13
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Arivia posted:Cis people need to stop telling transition narratives. Pretty much full stop. I’m glad to see more trans people in narratives written by cis people but I am so so done with them doing transition stories. THAT is the exploitative, objectifying, dehumanizing stuff. Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. And I'm quite pleased with the answer that "yeah duh, it really is that simple." It's nice when things are that simple.
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Oct 20, 2017 14:18
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https://twitter.com/OneShotRPG/status/921014628951449606 I don't know, maybe this is just me screaming into the void about people that don't matter (least of all myself), but I have an issue with D'Amato saying all that, in comparison to this: https://twitter.com/OneShotRPG/status/920403693404639232 I mean, maybe he's just talking about the mechanics, and maybe there's supposed to be some kind of line drawn between what Mentzer did and the history of a pair of consultants on a printed book (to say nothing of the recent Chult problem, but I can't shake the feeling that one has to go hand-in-hand with the other. EDIT: I want to be even clearer. I'm not saying he's insincere - I'm sure his heart is in the right place. I just think it's ... incomplete? gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 20, 2017 14:20
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Jimbozig posted:Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. And I'm quite pleased with the answer that "yeah duh, it really is that simple." It's nice when things are that simple. And again I haven’t listened to it but if the discussion at the end you note is actually about them trying to get it right representation-wise, that’s not patting themselves on the back. That’s talking about getting it right and the effort that involves, which is good. That stuff can be tough, and I’ve heard about TAZ having representation issues in the past and working to solve them.
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Oct 20, 2017 14:30
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Arivia posted:And again I haven’t listened to it but if the discussion at the end you note is actually about them trying to get it right representation-wise, that’s not patting themselves on the back. That’s talking about getting it right and the effort that involves, which is good. That stuff can be tough, and I’ve heard about TAZ having representation issues in the past and working to solve them. Yeah, they were really good about making things more inclusive as the game went on. They really did an excellent job of that. But what effort? In this case it didn't take any effort outside of literally half a sentence. A single clause, "...who was assigned male at birth," and then never mentioning it again. I guess maybe you mean the effort of listening to feedback and consulting with others to check that they are doing it right, even if the actual doing is dead simple. That makes sense to me. Is that what you mean?
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Oct 20, 2017 14:47
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Arivia posted:Cis people need to stop telling transition narratives. Pretty much full stop. I’m glad to see more trans people in narratives written by cis people but I am so so done with them doing transition stories. THAT is the exploitative, objectifying, dehumanizing stuff. I remember how in an old Werewolf sourcebook, a character's Roleplaying Notes ended with "You are gay. Your lover is [other NPC]." Is that all that should be said? I don't want to write a narrative about how an adventurer is hexcrawling because they got thrown out of their home for being trans and end up stereotyping, being exploitative or skeevy, etc.
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Oct 20, 2017 14:55
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Halloween Jack posted:Is there a right way to do this without being merely pandering? A problem that currently exists is that treating it as an everyday thing has mostly the same optics of people pandering to be able to say "we're progressive, see?". You just have to go with what feels right and if someone takes it in an unintended manner, have a conversation with them.
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Oct 20, 2017 15:22
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SilverMike posted:You just have to go with what feels right and if someone takes it in an unintended manner, have a conversation with them.
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Oct 20, 2017 15:35
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dwarf74 posted:It is really a lot of fun. Once you get past the first episode where the DM says some groggy dumb poo poo about the differences between 4e (which one of the brothers played) and 5e (which the game nominally uses). You know, bog-standard "everyone is a spellcaster" bs. It never comes up again. I absolutely adore TAZ, I finished it yesterday, but gently caress me listening to Griffin talk about how the fighter in 5E is amazing because he's the best at fighting when it's plainly obvious that in the podcast we're listening to right now the wizard is the one who has the most impact in fights is just really hard.
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Oct 20, 2017 15:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:I mean, maybe he's just talking about the mechanics, and maybe there's supposed to be some kind of line drawn between what Mentzer did and the history of a pair of consultants on a printed book (to say nothing of the recent Chult problem, but I can't shake the feeling that one has to go hand-in-hand with the other. To be fair to him, that conversation (such as it was) was specifically about mechanics. It sprang from the whole Dan Harmon article where the author claims that he claims that roleplaying development had been "stagnant" and everyone who knew anything about RPGs got a bit narked.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:06
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potatocubed posted:To be fair to him, that conversation (such as it was) was specifically about mechanics. It sprang from the whole Dan Harmon article where the author claims that he claims that roleplaying development had been "stagnant" and everyone who knew anything about RPGs got a bit narked. Yeah, I get that completely, and I wrote all that because I acknowledge that he's not really talking about the same thing at the time. (and, regarding that Kotaku article, Dan Harmon was dead wrong, of course) I guess that in general I'm more than a little disappointed that D&D 5e is so popular, given its parentage.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:10
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Kurieg posted:They did the same thing with the oracle iconic, she's trans and it doesn't come up anywhere. Paizo's attempts at representation are aggressively 'mark all the boxes', particularly with that character. As others have brought up, instead of designing characters that are good that happen to be LGBTQA, they run through the laundry list of labels and apply them haphazardly. Trans? Check. Person with disabilities? Check. And so on and so forth. For some reason, they don't seem to get that 'token' is a label you can apply to characteristics other than 'black' and it's just as bad. gradenko_2000 posted:(and, regarding that Kotaku article, Dan Harmon was dead wrong, of course) Could you link that article, preferably in a non-Kotaku format (I've hated going to their site since they made summer interns fall on swords to generate traffic)? I need a bit of schadenfreude today to see a guys nerds slobber over be wrong.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:25
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(My mistake, it was Polygon, not Kotaku) Video games had to evolve for tabletop gaming appeal to be understood, says Dan Harmon quote:Dan Harmon is best known for creating series like Rick and Morty and Community, but one of his biggest passions is Dungeons & Dragons; so much so that he created an entire series dedicated to playing it with his friends.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:30
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Saguaro PI posted:I absolutely adore TAZ, I finished it yesterday, but gently caress me listening to Griffin talk about how the fighter in 5E is amazing because he's the best at fighting when it's plainly obvious that in the podcast we're listening to right now the wizard is the one who has the most impact in fights is just really hard. I'm only halfway through the backlog and Travis has already made it a running theme in his goofs about how bad the 5e's designers hosed up, that for a literal year and a half of his life his options and abilities in fights are severely gimped because he made the mistake of picking the class called Fighter. He's literally experiencing Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit syndrome in real time. With one character actually summoning angels*.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:(My mistake, it was Polygon, not Kotaku)
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Oct 20, 2017 16:32
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RE: FFG and progressiveness, it isn't exactly a hugely progressive step so much as a huge step up from where AEG had been but they stopped using a literal racial slur in L5R to refer to the lowest caste.
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Oct 20, 2017 18:14
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So, Paizo has their lesbian (and of course it's lesbians, two men kissing still rustles grog jimmies) couple iconic or whatever, but does Golarion material address how gay/trans people exist in their various not-Earthly cultures? It's a fantasy world that's a lot more egalitarian than real feudal monarchies I imagine though I am also not expecting full universal marriage equality or whatever. One thing I liked in Exalted 1E waaaaay back in the day was that they bothered to mention this at all, they didn't make a huge point of it but it was something that was considered when describing marital and sexual customs. When people talk about inclusion, that's actually more of what I'm looking for. All TSR's worlds ignored gay people officially for years and may still be doing so no matter what Greenwood intimates at convention panels.
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Oct 20, 2017 18:27
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occamsnailfile posted:It's a fantasy world that's a lot more egalitarian than real feudal monarchies I imagine though I am also not expecting full universal marriage equality or whatever. Why not? It's what you should expect and demand. There's no reason for a fantasy setting to not be like that. E: Like, I can think of some reasons for a setting to not be that, but it absolutely should be the option that needs to be justified and explained, rather than the norm.
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Oct 20, 2017 18:29
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In a world with wizard morality I assume that whatever non wizards do is only curtailed in so far as it may impact wizards. Want to marry a dude who used to be a different due who was once a tree? Go for it. Want to sell me a spell component ruby worth only 49 pieces of gold instead of 50? Death.
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Oct 20, 2017 18:37
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https://twitter.com/MTBlack2567/status/921186189389869056
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Oct 20, 2017 18:42
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Jimbozig posted:Yeah, they were really good about making things more inclusive as the game went on. They really did an excellent job of that. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. It's certainly a fraught thing to include right now, so good on them for doing it. Halloween Jack posted:Is there a right way to do this without being merely pandering? I don't think pandering is the right term, because you're not just doing it to make your audience happy without any virtue otherwise. Inclusion is worthwhile. I think you're right to say that you could probably do a bit more - but as AlphaDog pointed out, you don't really need to put in trans poo poo for the purposes of just talking about trans lives. A trans werewolf character probably doesn't need details on how they get hormones or whatever, but of course their ties to other characters are relevant. Include things that matter to your game as you would with any gaming product, don't make it your level 30 genderqueer elf mage. Note that when I said cis people should stop writing transition narratives that refers specifically to the narrative of transitioning and focusing on that - I and most other trans people are just so done with Transparent and the Danish Girl and all that junk. Your hexcrawling trans person is fine I think, because you're using those details to inform their place in the game at large. And it's a problem that a lot of trans people face, but just including it isn't anything bad. It would be exploitative and skeevy if you said they're hexcrawling because they're a sex worker who wants to get more clients (since that's a stereotype about trans people.)
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Oct 20, 2017 18:51
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There are also some open questions: if you're making a game and want the art to be inclusive...well, a trans woman and a cis woman have no visible cues that are going to show in the art. Even less than sexuality, since you can easily have a peaceful scene have a pair of gay or lesbian characters holding hands. You can write iconic characters and specifically note that they're trans, I suppose, but not every game is going to have iconic characters.
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Oct 20, 2017 18:57
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Barudak posted:In a world with wizard morality I assume that whatever non wizards do is only curtailed in so far as it may impact wizards. Want to marry a dude who used to be a different due who was once a tree? Go for it. Want to sell me a spell component ruby worth only 49 pieces of gold instead of 50? Death. Nah, with a unassailable ruling class, they can impose whatever morality they feel like, no matter how stupid, obnoxious, or reprehensible. What's the point of power if you can't use it to lord over other people?
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Oct 20, 2017 18:58
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occamsnailfile posted:So, Paizo has their lesbian (and of course it's lesbians, two men kissing still rustles grog jimmies) couple iconic or whatever, but does Golarion material address how gay/trans people exist in their various not-Earthly cultures? It's a fantasy world that's a lot more egalitarian than real feudal monarchies I imagine though I am also not expecting full universal marriage equality or whatever. One thing I liked in Exalted 1E waaaaay back in the day was that they bothered to mention this at all, they didn't make a huge point of it but it was something that was considered when describing marital and sexual customs. When people talk about inclusion, that's actually more of what I'm looking for. The same Paizo book that introduced the trans iconic also included a magic item for transitioning, and they published fiction discussing her place in dwarven society on their website at the time. For trans people in human societies, look at the background of Anevia Tirabade, the first trans character Paizo published in Adventure Path #73. It talks about what her life has been like and so on. It's actually really well done because it likely directly comes up in play to illustrate something about the setting of the adventure, not to just go "look she's trans!" (The PCs find the holy sword her lover sold so that she could transition in a demon hideout, which frequently leads to an uncomfortable conversation that shows how corrupted this nation of crusaders facing endless demons is.) Notably though, that same AP volume doesn't really talk about her being a lesbian and just passes on it. Still, Amber Scott tried - and she obviously cares, she was also responsible for including the trans character in Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear that got Gamergate all upset. edit: These are from like four years ago though, obviously Paizo has changed their tune since then.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:00
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Ratoslov posted:Nah, with a unassailable ruling class, they can impose whatever morality they feel like, no matter how stupid, obnoxious, or reprehensible. What's the point of power if you can't use it to lord over other people? Given usually wizards are farting around in their towers doing whatever they dont seem like the sort of hands on micromanager types where they really care what exactly his support staff get up to. They appoint a king and tell him to go at it and as long as the silver powder keeps flowing he doesnt care. This is, why I assume adventurers get hired and ruins are everywhere. Ruins are leftovers from wizards who died and adventurers are sub contracters to help supply the king with wizard materials.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:01
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Ratoslov posted:Nah, with a unassailable ruling class, they can impose whatever morality they feel like, no matter how stupid, obnoxious, or reprehensible. What's the point of power if you can't use it to lord over other people? Would they care to? They've got schemes and research and poo poo to do. Heck, there's a whole RPG based around "Going outside? Meeting the unwashed masses? I have people for that, thank you very much!" Who can say the ruling wizard/s isn't/aren't gay themselves and thus the only dialogue they have for someone preaching about their plane's Sodom and Gomorrah is "Power Word: Kill"? Who's to say that the wizard doesn't get up to sexual moores(so?) that makes pansexuality or having multiple partners "pale in comparison"? Every diabolist is in it for the harem of sub/incubi, don't try to convince me otherwise. Extreme rules based around the worth of rubies or diamonds or bat guano annual production rates makes more sense than having rules about lifestyles - imagine Saudi Arabia but it's bat's poo poo instead of oil.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:12
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LashLightning posted:Who can say the ruling wizard/s isn't/aren't gay themselves and thus the only dialogue they have for someone preaching about their plane's Sodom and Gomorrah is "Power Word: Kill"? The best you can assume is that godlike wizards would be like Rhialto and his gentleman's club in The Dying Earth, benignly presiding over a post-apocalyptic world. The worst is that whatever they do in their own private lives would be irrelevant to the draconian geohell they'd impose on everyone else to squeeze out every last drop of profit. Like in the real world.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:17
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I think you mean "Actual Dracula Peter Thiel"
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Oct 20, 2017 19:18
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So, uh, you're aware of the social issues in Saudi Arabia, right
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Oct 20, 2017 19:18
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Mors Rattus posted:So, uh, you're aware of the social issues in Saudi Arabia, right
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Oct 20, 2017 19:20
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Mors Rattus posted:So, uh, you're aware of the social issues in Saudi Arabia, right I did think about that - I was too enamored with a country's economy built on fecal material. Also, there's a ton of politics featured in that situation - apparently my dear ol' blighty had a hand in forging that situation back in the late 1800s/early 1900s - and I didn't think people would go to that length for their Elfgames.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:25
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occamsnailfile posted:All TSR's worlds ignored gay people officially for years and may still be doing so no matter what Greenwood intimates at convention panels. I’m pretty sure Ed Greenwood’s definition of a gay character is something along the lines of “buxom sex goddess having hot lesbian threesome with
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Oct 20, 2017 19:42
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Also, Peter Thiel is a vampire, not a wizard.
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Oct 20, 2017 19:43
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I'm just saying, when you point at a country whose mores and laws are built almost entirely on industry and profit with no care for social issues beyond that, Saudi Arabia's not it.
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Oct 20, 2017 20:02
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Comrade Koba posted:I’m pretty sure Ed Greenwood’s definition of a gay character is something along the lines of “buxom sex goddess having hot lesbian threesome with No, not at all. He’s been sneaking gay and trans characters past TSR and WotC for years now.
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Oct 20, 2017 20:07
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Mors Rattus posted:I'm just saying, when you point at a country whose mores and laws are built almost entirely on industry and profit with no care for social issues beyond that, Saudi Arabia's not it. Yeah, my bad. Sorry.
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Oct 20, 2017 21:00
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Arivia posted:No, not at all. He’s been sneaking gay and trans characters past TSR and WotC for years now. The impression I got from Greenwood's writing on the subject is of exasperation. Like 'in a world with literal gods, multiple sentient races, and magic that can change literally anything, you think people are hung up over sexuality?'
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