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Unitarian Universalist? Or another UU. O poo poo. This is like the worst snipe ever. Uh.... Content, content. Uh. How much follow-up is there going to be on The Spire? I love the main book and I'm curious how it's doing as a whole. But I'm not really interested in pre-fab adventures and I'm not sure what you'd even add to it. Like new playbooks are cool I guess, but not really needed? I'm curious how you'd add to it or if that's even a good idea. Similar things are true for say Blades in the Dark or really any well-written game ; it seems like if you do too good a job you write yourself out of being able to effectively build on it because, well, you did a good job and it's done. But I'm also just some rando so I might have made up this impression. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Mar 11, 2019 |
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Mar 11, 2019 19:52
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Xiahou Dun posted:O yeah probably. I mean I wouldn't care but I'm a weird sex-positive Eurotrash. Yeah I understand that sometimes early childhood sexual exploration play is done with siblings, and sometimes it's same-gender, so that also layers on the incest and homosexuality taboos on top of the child-sexuality taboo already involved. I feel pretty safe in saying the vast majority of people would feel extremely uncomfortable admitting they have memories of engaging in sexual exploration play as a child to anyone, and perhaps especially to a friend or family member where they might feel a big risk in doing so. I would not even feel comfortable asking most people I know. Like I have no idea how that would come up in a conversation.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:53
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dwarf74 posted:One of my favorite things about our UU church is that they run OWL classes every other year. It's basically age-appropriate sex ed for literally all ages, going down to K-1. My younger son just finished said K-1 class; it runs the gamut from "these are the real names of body parts, and how girls' and boys' bodies are different" to "consent is really important; ask before touching" to "respect your body and other peoples' bodies, too" to "families come in all kinds of varieties" to "this is where babies come from" with a brief thumbnail description of how those sperm and egg end up together in the uterus. I think we’ve had this conversation before but UU is THE BEST. A+ forever. My own personal spirituality is leaning more towards pagan/Wiccan stuff these days but that just goes great with UU and I’m never giving up the cool church.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:00
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Xiahou Dun posted:Content, content. Uh. How much follow-up is there going to be on The Spire? I love the main book and I'm curious how it's doing as a whole. But I'm not really interested in pre-fab adventures and I'm not sure what you'd even add to it. Like new playbooks are cool I guess, but not really needed? I'm curious how you'd add to it or if that's even a good idea. Similar things are true for say Blades in the Dark or really any well-written game ; it seems like if you do too good a job you write yourself out of being able to effectively build on it because, well, you did a good job and it's done. But I'm also just some rando so I might have made up this impression. Well they Kickstarted a whole big honkin supplement for it not that long ago which looks like a bunch of everything, classes, advances, scenarios, setting info, etc, so my thought on the matter is it looks like Grant and the Spire team feel like it's got legs.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:06
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I'm also curious to see where "Sparked by the Resistance" goes. Hopefully along the lines of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:13
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Xiahou Dun posted:Unitarian Universalist? Or another UU. Arivia posted:I think we’ve had this conversation before but UU is THE BEST. A+ forever. My own personal spirituality is leaning more towards pagan/Wiccan stuff these days but that just goes great with UU and I’m never giving up the cool church.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:25
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Man I wish my experience with UU had been a positive one. Maybe the, I don't know if congregation is the right word, here is not great. The folks rolled super hard on the idea of joining the church and it honestly felt like what I now know is called love bombing.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:09
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dwarf74 posted:You got it. The lefty un-church. O hey cool. My girlfriend was raised UU and she's somehow actually gotten me to kind of like it, despite my militant atheism. They're really nice people.
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Mar 11, 2019 22:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:O hey cool. There’s no incompatibility between being UU and being an atheist. The central tenets are to explore spirituality and life with others, but there is no proscribed answer. Critical thinking and individual choice is encouraged; if you don’t believe in a deity that’s just as valid as someone who does. The central ethics are just humanist. @Dreqqus: That sucks! Congregation is the right term. Because UU is so diverse different congregations can differ greatly in their approach. If you’re willing I’d try again with a different congregation, and you’ll have a different experience.
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Mar 11, 2019 23:02
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In summary, making or playing a respectful game about deeply personal traumatic experiences is difficult and not to be undertaken lightly.
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Mar 12, 2019 00:56
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Xiahou Dun posted:O hey cool. I was raised Methodist and loved a lot about the community. This is a way to get that for us and our kids without the God stuff. Also lots of volunteering, protests, marches, etc. But yeah hey elf games
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Mar 12, 2019 01:23
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Trustworthy posted:At every step of this conversation, I keep thinking about how RPGs themselves sprang up around some very specific themes of killing and being killed. These are serious issues IRL, closely connected to tragedy and serious emotional trauma, but we've been trivializing them for long enough that they've basically become invisible. The ubiquitous, casual killing that takes place in the majority of popular RPGs never seems to be included when folks are talking about sensitive/triggering topics in gaming, which is increasingly weird to me. This is part of why Undertale had such a burst of popularity even though its use of those themes had all the subtlety of a brick through a window.
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Mar 12, 2019 02:47
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MadScientistWorking posted:I mean its not vacuous nonsense. So much horrible lovely traumatic stuff is ingrained into D&D's murderhoboing that I've seen people legitimately get upset with stuff that leans into classic D&D tropes because they are fundamentally vile stuff. Yet even then it's not 100% ingrained. D&D, and PF, are both explicit that xp is for defeating a threat, not necessarily killing it. You don't need to genocide that goblin tribe, you can drive them out, or find a good reason for them to move along. Of course then you read the monster profiles, and run into stuff like sentient races that are invariably Evil and malicious...
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Mar 12, 2019 02:49
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Liquid Communism posted:Yet even then it's not 100% ingrained. D&D, and PF, are both explicit that xp is for defeating a threat, not necessarily killing it. You don't need to genocide that goblin tribe, you can drive them out, or find a good reason for them to move along. (elves are too busy inscribing all of history onto trees, generally)
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Mar 12, 2019 03:13
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Kai Tave posted:Well they Kickstarted a whole big honkin supplement for it not that long ago which looks like a bunch of everything, classes, advances, scenarios, setting info, etc, so my thought on the matter is it looks like Grant and the Spire team feel like it's got legs. During the Kickstarter I pointed out that they really needed more GM tools for managing stuff around the city, but they didn't have time to work anything up for this supplement. Maybe that'll bear fruit in the next one. And does anyone know where they hang out on social media or forums ?
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Mar 12, 2019 03:14
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CitizenKeen posted:I'm also curious to see where "Sparked by the Resistance" goes. Hopefully along the lines of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark. initially read as Spanked by the Resistance and was curious as to where this poe dameron fanfic was going.
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Mar 12, 2019 03:29
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mllaneza posted:During the Kickstarter I pointed out that they really needed more GM tools for managing stuff around the city, but they didn't have time to work anything up for this supplement. Maybe that'll bear fruit in the next one. Grant's on Twitter, seems fairly active. I absolutely agree that they need some kind of faction/city mechanics - feels like a real missed opportunity in a game all about, y'know, changing the city and dealing with factions.
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Mar 12, 2019 03:32
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[slowly drags the company mechanics from Reign out of where I've been keeping them in case of emergency]
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Mar 12, 2019 04:02
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BinaryDoubts posted:Grant's on Twitter, seems fairly active. I absolutely agree that they need some kind of faction/city mechanics - feels like a real missed opportunity in a game all about, y'know, changing the city and dealing with factions. Yeah, this has been my biggest critique of Spire. I think the game itself is good and very evocative, but it really lacks any sort of way to chart the Ministry's influence upon the city, for good or for ill, and it's especially notable because character advancements are directly tied to making changes to the city, but it's left entirely up in the air what qualifies as a minor or major change, that sort of thing. It seemed like they might have been aiming at something like this with Strata as a stretch goal but it didn't quite make it, nonetheless I do agree that you could get a lot of mileage out of a Spire supplement that, well: Hostile V posted:[slowly drags the company mechanics from Reign out of where I've been keeping them in case of emergency] does something akin to this.
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Mar 12, 2019 04:11
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Roadie posted:This is part of why Undertale had such a burst of popularity even though its use of those themes had all the subtlety of a brick through a window. One day I'll make my tactical turn based team RPG that's just about getting a group of socially awkward weirdos through various difficult social situations.
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Mar 12, 2019 05:31
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I'm thinking the scale of changes, at least for gaining advancements should be: street, district, city.
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Mar 12, 2019 05:38
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mllaneza posted:I'm thinking the scale of changes, at least for gaining advancements should be: street, district, city. Mmhm, that's the rough view I had as well, but I'd also love it if they went into depth with being able to zoom in and really make a particular district or neighborhood yours, a bit like cultivating your turf in Blades in the Dark. I want to be able to sink my advancements into the little scrap of the city I call my own, establish a hospital, supply the drowletariat with smuggled arms, that sort of thing.
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Mar 12, 2019 06:15
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Liquid Communism posted:Yet even then it's not 100% ingrained. D&D, and PF, are both explicit that xp is for defeating a threat, not necessarily killing it. You don't need to genocide that goblin tribe, you can drive them out, or find a good reason for them to move along.
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Mar 12, 2019 11:48
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RE: Serious games. I've got to admit I've never been angrier at this hobby, than with a serious game about coping with alcoholic parents as a child. I didn't play the game, or read the content, or even know anything about the author. For all I know it was completely tasteful and well done as a therapy game. The part I took offense with was when an friend of mine did play it at a gaming convention, and came hyping the game as this really great and amazing experience. I've known him long enough to know that he's from a great, loving and supportive family, so it was clearly a very strong experience for him because it was something very new to him. But in my personal case, I got to play that "game" for real for 15+ years, which is something I'm still coping with decades later. I know my friend didn't mean any harm with it, nor did the author of the game, but there's still something I found very insulting about making real human misery entertainment like that. I wasn't really mad at my friend or even the game itself. Just kinda generally angry at the whole abstract thing. I'm not sure why other media like film or books doesn't bother me as much, though. Just these kinds of interactive and personal roleplaying experiences. I think it might be the misery tourism factor mentioned earlier, where a player must want to participate in something like that, actively looking for those kicks. Or maybe it's the very public avenue of being at a convention where anybody can run a game like that, and anybody can just sign up and play with a bunch of strangers. Maybe I'd be less bothered if it was something presented at a closed setting with specific participants in mind. 
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Mar 12, 2019 13:42
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thatbastardken posted:initially read as Spanked by the Resistance and was curious as to where this poe dameron fanfic was going. It's just off enough to be a Chuck Tingle knock off. Wake me up for Pounded In The Butt By the Resistance.
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Mar 12, 2019 13:44
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Attestant posted:I'm not sure why other media like film or books doesn't bother me as much, though. Just these kinds of interactive and personal roleplaying experiences. I think it might be the misery tourism factor mentioned earlier, where a player must want to participate in something like that, actively looking for those kicks. Or maybe it's the very public avenue of being at a convention where anybody can run a game like that, and anybody can just sign up and play with a bunch of strangers. Maybe I'd be less bothered if it was something presented at a closed setting with specific participants in mind. Can't speak to your personal experience of course, but I find for me the degree of active versus passive consumption is a pretty big factor. Like, I love horror movies. Its pretty rare for me to get squeamish, even watching ones aiming for maximum shock value or gore. But I find playing a lot of survival horror games difficult, because controlling the character on the screen creates a level of immediacy that's not there when I'm just sitting and watching a film. It definitely varies by person though, as I know people who are generally lukewarm on horror as a genre, but really love horror games.
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Mar 12, 2019 14:28
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Note that is part of why I despise Dystopia Rising. Take horror, give it immediacy on a level that provokes fight or flight, and keep this up for 36 hours without space to decompress OOG? That is going to gently caress with people who thought they were down with it in unexpected ways and they will try to soldier on because they dont want to ruin others' fun.
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Mar 12, 2019 15:56
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Oh, and don't forget that they require everyone to take a turn monstering, so they get to go all Stanford Prison as they now have the power to inflict those feelings on others.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:07
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Liquid Communism posted:Note that is part of why I despise Dystopia Rising. Take horror, give it immediacy on a level that provokes fight or flight, and keep this up for 36 hours without space to decompress OOG? That is going to gently caress with people who thought they were down with it in unexpected ways and they will try to soldier on because they dont want to ruin others' fun. quote:The Manor may give its patrons unwanted haircuts, drench them in fake blood, submerge them in water, force them to eat and drink unknown substances, have them bound and gagged, or engage in other forms of emotional or psychological torture.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:07
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Desiden posted:Can't speak to your personal experience of course, but I find for me the degree of active versus passive consumption is a pretty big factor. Like, I love horror movies. Its pretty rare for me to get squeamish, even watching ones aiming for maximum shock value or gore. But I find playing a lot of survival horror games difficult, because controlling the character on the screen creates a level of immediacy that's not there when I'm just sitting and watching a film. It definitely varies by person though, as I know people who are generally lukewarm on horror as a genre, but really love horror games. I think a big factor here could be the gamification. For instance, role-playing can be a very useful tool for psychotherapists, depending on the client and the nature of their issues. I don't think that sort of thing would be at issue, even though it's definitely an active consumption sort of scenario. However, assigning points or rolling dice to determine responses and outcomes (like the previously linked Rosenstrasse kickstarter) could be more of an issue, in my mind. Assigning game mechanics and dice rolls in some ways trivializes the consequences that resulted from choices made by real people. I don't know if I like the idea of drawing a card that says, "woops, the Gestapo break down your door and carry you away to Auschwitz." *yikes*
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Mar 12, 2019 16:18
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Evil Mastermind posted:This whole discussion just makes me think of McKamey Manor, which is an annual haunted house that actually requires people to sign a loving waiver to go in. Uh. Man, I really wish the horse of 'if you're being made to feel physically or mentally upset the HORROR IS DOING ITS JOB' could go out and die.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:54
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Evil Mastermind posted:This whole discussion just makes me think of McKamey Manor, which is an annual haunted house that actually requires people to sign a loving waiver to go in. I saw the documentary this guy is in and he comes off as a massive rear end in a top hat.
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Mar 12, 2019 17:27
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I think something I find distasteful is the idea that Serious topics can be gamed. It's the "walk a mile in their shoes" thing, except you're just simulating the walk. I'd never presume to have a better real understanding of what it's like to be a trans person or PoC because of a few recreational hours pretending to be one, in a safe environment. I don't think anyone here would. It's profane. But for some reason trauma, grief, and mental illness survivors aren't "off limits." It feels exploitative and dismissive to game their experience - like they somehow posess a less valid, less real identity. It hits pretty close to home, and maybe I'd be cool with it otherwise. But Serious Games seem like a well intentioned mistake to me.
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Mar 12, 2019 18:10
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I don't think the goal - at least for a product with realistic and good intentions - is a "better understanding" than a person who actually experienced those things. But teaching tools come in many forms, and I think a game can be a teaching tool, even about serious subjects. e. Dealing with the triggering aspect of reproducing traumas that some actual players have probably actually experienced is a very significant challenge, and I hope I'm not trivializing that difficulty. My point is only that the word "game" does not have to restrict the domain of moderated interactive experience to only light entertainment type experiences. e2 I also strongly agree with the idea that a casual stroll-up-and-play pick-up game at a con is not the right venue to present this kind of game. Yeesh. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Mar 12, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 18:32
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Sure but teaching tools are for teaching eg grief counsellors, not for a bunch of friends to have some beers and a “deep emotional experience” together. They’re not the same thing, and they’re not done for the same reasons
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Mar 12, 2019 18:35
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That's true and I think you're right that that's the intent. It just feels like the actual insight you'd get is comparable to eating a croissant once vs growing up eating French food. And if it's so small, why even do this? The potential for harm seems to very much outweigh any net good it'll do.
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Mar 12, 2019 18:39
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Serious Topics to which you are desensitized, or were never sensitive, can always be good (even if not fun) games, hilarious comedy, et cetera for you. Serious Topics to which you are sensitive either need to be handled delicately or not at all for a product to be good. Your sensitivities are likely to change over time. I don't agree that game-based learning trivializes a Serious Topic per se, and I don't agree that Serious Games are a mistake. I do not think that somebody is "too sensitive" if they find a game's treatment of something troubling, upsetting, or offensive. Talk with your group about the themes of the game before you play, including the themes of violence and extrajudicial killing (which are, let's face it, in most RPGs ever made). Have an X card mechanism when you do so. Stick to your agreement.
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Mar 12, 2019 18:42
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moths posted:That's true and I think you're right that that's the intent. Malignant in particular turns out to have been the creator's way of exploring their own grief to understand it and work through, though, which rather squarely pegs it in what would be the "own voices" category if those who have lost close family to cancer were some kind of minority (gently caress I wish it wasn't something that so many people have to deal with). It wouldn't be the route I would have taken but I could see how creating it as a game because that's the creator's medium of choice is valid and it shifts the context of the conversation pretty dramatically from "this is someone trying to craft entertainment from outside the experience" to "this is someone's way of exploring how they reacted and how others might react under the same stimuli." It's free, but the creator asks folks who download it to donate instead to cancer research, and if you provide a receipt showing a minimum donation of $10 to the charity in question they will give you a free pdf of Thou Art But A Warrior as thanks. I was way out of line when I initially responded to this entire scenario; I apologize for that. But I really don't feel like this is about what I initially took it to be, namely exploring real misery for cheap fun; this is something that the creator used and it sounds like Meinberg also used to explore their grief about their respective losses. And that? That I can't poo poo on. That's fukken valid.
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Mar 12, 2019 18:51
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If that's part of their healing process, absolutely. I don't think anyone involved in this is trying to do harm, nobody's playing these for laughs over a Papa John's order. But it seems to me that a Serious Game is at best a sample-sized packet of information, and at worst a substitute for more conventional help and treatment. Like I don't know how much good, actionable information is in these for people who would legit benefit. Not just for anyone directly affected, but also their support network. There's a lot of bad "common wisdom" and advice out there already, and the thought of introducing recreational amature therapy gives me some intense reservations.
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Mar 12, 2019 19:12
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moths posted:But it seems to me that a Serious Game is at best a sample-sized packet of information, and at worst a substitute for more conventional help and treatment. You are confusing the act of someone writing a game as an outlet for their grief (what the author of Malignant did) with what the game itself is meant to accomplish, which in the case of serious games is usually to educate people and get them to understand something. They do this because mechanics are good at communicating ideas and feelings, and because human beings find it easier to sympathise with people or understand their plight if they can relate to it in some way, rather than having those people be a random statistic in the margin of a history book. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Mar 12, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 19:31
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