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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:I guess what super gets me is that making it about the safety tools /directly/ buys into the abuser in question's narrative that it was about the safety tools, plus an added layer of "You can read about it in my book, here's a screenshot of my book that this is in (implicitly: buy my book)" that's there whether it was intended or not. I went in expecting words of support for the survivors of condemnation of Koebel or just fuckin anything, but instead it was more talk of safety tools. It seems to me that since Kobel claimed that a lack of safety tools in place lead him to do this, she's claiming that having them would not necessarily have stopped him from carrying out that sort of abusive behavior. She is in fact not letting him make it about the safety tools, and saying that he is too predatory a person for them to have made a difference. Which, yeah, such measures assume people are acting in good faith.
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Apr 3, 2020 12:40
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On top of all that, Adam did have a discussion with the player about where she wanted to take her character beforehand, but instead of actually collaborating on potential plot hooks or pathways or specific ways to advance her character goals, he pushed all that aside to play out a deeply uncomfortable scene that flew in the face of what she wanted. So, effectively, the tools were lying right on the table there, and Adam swept them off to do his own uncomfortable cliffhanger scene where he described giving a robot PC their first "orgasm".
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Apr 3, 2020 13:08
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El Fideo posted:It seems to me that since Kobel claimed that a lack of safety tools in place lead him to do this, she's claiming that having them would not necessarily have stopped him from carrying out that sort of abusive behavior. She is in fact not letting him make it about the safety tools, and saying that he is too predatory a person for them to have made a difference. Which, yeah, such measures assume people are acting in good faith. Yeah. Adam Koebel talking about safety tools is changing the subject. It's sort of a discussion on "how could this have been avoided?" (and deliberately switching to passive voice) instead of "I messed up." As someone on twitter said (quoted here: https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2020/04/rpg-far-verona-canceled-dungeon-world-creator-faces-backlash.html) it's pretty hosed up to tell the victim "why didn't you safeword" when there was neither a safeword set up or even a vague expectation that one might be necessary. (Again, I'm not familiar with the stream itself, but that's the impression I get from all this.) I've run horror games at conventions and I've started using X-cards and the like. I like that the new edition of Fiasco has a "Let's Not" card built in. But I also leave certain things - first among them, sexual assault - completely out of my con games. Safety tools aren't a license to put just anything into the game and ask your players to police you. Reading the room is the foundation for any safety tool, and as Nuns with Guns noted, he ignored the player's goals to pursue his lovely actions. Sionak fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Apr 3, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 13:38
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yea it's literally just the Eric Andre 'who shot Hannibal' meme, he did a lovely thing and his 'apology' was going 'wow how could this have happened'. Safety tools are good, but they assume everyone using them has the same good faith and all, there's nothing about safety tools that would have literally forced Kobel to stop because he clearly was an rear end in a top hat who was enjoying making people uncomfortable to begin with. Safety tools are great but the conversation shouldn't be about them, it should be about 'hey Adam why'd you fuckin get off on doing such a terrible thing to someone who you supposedly considered a friend, you weird predatory gently caress?'
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Apr 3, 2020 15:05
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 15:25
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The player in question (whose character was assaulted) has released a video explaining why this caused her to leave Koebel's game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y21hx6FEPE She's trying to stay cool but you can see how pissed off and hurt she is. And I gotta say it's a good thing she turned off comments because can you even imagine how bad that poo poo would be?
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Apr 3, 2020 16:21
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Drone posted:Man, that video apology on the RollPlay channel was extremely not an apology, holy poo poo. From what I can gather, that's because the video on JP's channel wasn't an apology video. It was an announcement of the Far Verona show being canceled.
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Apr 3, 2020 16:24
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The problem I have with the Twitter apology is that, whilst it is a much better acknowledgement of what went wrong than the video (whose primary purpose, yes, was to explain why Far Verona was cancelled, but which absolutely should have included a direct apology rather than going "oops, forgot the safeguarding tools!") is that it feels like a response to the backlash to the video, as it were. Like he's gone over the tweets and tried to parse what people were objecting to, and then crafted an apology responding to that. In other words, it's not an apology intended to convey his actual feelings of contrition, it's an attempt to stop people shouting at him by saying what he thinks they want to hear. If he actually makes good on stepping away from refereeing and doing some work on himself to work out why the gently caress he thought that was appropriate in the moment, great, fantastic, but between the incident itself, the complete failure to do an adequate apology in the video, and the text apology which looks like a think tank wrote it, I'm going to believe he's changed when his behaviour indicates such, not take him at his word.
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Apr 3, 2020 17:24
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 17:28
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Absurd Alhazred posted:He's literally still GMing on streams, so I don't think he's taking any steps at all. He's sure not making the apology prominent on his twitter feed, either. Him jumping right back into GMing is the thing that goes from ‘this apology is downplaying what went wrong but maybe he’ll actually work to fix things’ to ‘nope, he should be banished to the shadow realm’ for me. Like... if there were any contrition at all he’d at least take a little while off, make explicit what he’s doing to prevent this happening ever again, etc. Apologize profusely to the player he specifically abused like this, as well as the other players. Instead it seems like there’s been his twitter apology but that’s it, and he’s still GMing streams, and all the players quit, and well it all adds up to him just trying to sweep this under the rug. Which is gross.
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Apr 3, 2020 17:38
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It's not even an apology, just an admission of maybe having hosed up.
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Apr 3, 2020 17:39
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 17:41
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My bad - on rereading he says he won't be starting any new campaigns until he's done the work to sort out his head on this, and he'll implement new safeguarding on his existing campaigns. Which feels weird in its own right. There are only two things which can be true here: - Good safeguarding is a sufficient and proportionate safeguard for his existing campaigns. In which case it should be fine for new campaigns too. - Adam has realised his internalised attitudes are dangerous enough that he really should not start running new campaigns until he has sorted them out, even with safeguarding techniques. In which case, those same techniques won't be sufficient for his existing campaigns and he should stop running those too. I bet that by the time his existing campaigns are done and he needs to start a new one to keep the e-fame flowing, he'll discover that actually, the work he'd done on himself whilst his existing campaigns were running was sufficient, no need for a break at all. What convenient timing!
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Apr 3, 2020 17:42
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Meanwhile, Modiphius decided to release a Conan book about the "exotic East" on April Fools, and it came out so offensive that a lot of people on Twitter were wondering if the book was a joke in bad taste. Unfortunately it apparently isn't.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:38
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I feel like they forced this on themselves by declaring their Conan would be a totally faithful and accurate adaption of Howard. You can’t do that and also cover the areas he made of 100% pure strain racism.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:51
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Absurd Alhazred posted:He's literally still GMing on streams, so I don't think he's taking any steps at all. He's sure not making the apology prominent on his twitter feed, either. It's understandable that he's still GMing on streams, because those streams are contractual obligations, and they're how he makes almost 100% of his income. Adam's one of the vanishingly few RPG streamers who was successful enough at it to quit his day job, so it's no surprise that he needs to keep doing the thing he's being paid for even in the midst of a PR crisis. Watching that scene, it strikes me that I have been at tables that could have worked their way through it to an end people were comfortable with, whether that's through safety tools or a hard break in the game to talk it over. It is profoundly uncomfortable content, but not unapproachable. But, those games weren't being streamed live to an audience of thousands, with a cast of people who are being paid to be on that stream, and whose strongest professional instinct is "Never Interrupt the Stream." Safety tools weren't developed for that environment, and I strongly suspect the ones we currently have don't work there. Hard breaks in a streamed game because someone is uncomfortable go against the nature of the cast and the format. This is weird new territory for the industry, a place where our tabletop instincts and the demands of professional independent broadcasting are incompatible, and it's becoming increasingly clear how far we have to go before we can reconcile them.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:54
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Mors Rattus posted:I feel like they forced this on themselves by declaring their Conan would be a totally faithful and accurate adaption of Howard. You can’t do that and also cover the areas he made of 100% pure strain racism. I haven't gotten the new one but the past books where they dealt with those kinds of regions were perfectly well handled and clearly done from a place of 'we're going to cover all we can about the universe but we also want these places to be sources of inspiration and storytelling not just cheap stereotypes and antagonist fodder.
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Apr 3, 2020 18:57
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Kestral posted:It's understandable that he's still GMing on streams, because those streams are contractual obligations, and they're how he makes almost 100% of his income. Adam's one of the vanishingly few RPG streamers who was successful enough at it to quit his day job, so it's no surprise that he needs to keep doing the thing he's being paid for even in the midst of a PR crisis. Not to say that Tools would have fixed it and the lack of them was the only problem, as he clearly hosed up and at the very best most generous interpretation completely lost his tether to the game and the players, in service of whatever story he thought was a good idea. But I've seen the X card work on streams. they just stop talking about that situation. and carry on. Hell I've seen it invoked on streams Adam himself was running, and he/the players involved just stopped the scene and moved on. The GM/Player just stops. And then they segue to something else/move to another character. The Discussion around the X and what triggered it happens after the stream. Not to say that people don't have a resistance to rocking the boat or interrupting the stream. It's why the X is literally just something you toss into chat/ping on the VTT to let whoever is talking know that they need to shut up and move on. But once again, he clearly overstepped dramatically, regardless of the tools or lack of tools.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:07
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 19:15
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sexpig by night posted:I haven't gotten the new one but the past books where they dealt with those kinds of regions were perfectly well handled and clearly done from a place of 'we're going to cover all we can about the universe but we also want these places to be sources of inspiration and storytelling not just cheap stereotypes and antagonist fodder. Beyond the name which... needs some work, though I understand a lot of naming conventions from old school Conan are difficult. Is there any indication the actual content of the book won't be as you described?
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Apr 3, 2020 19:24
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Your problem is that you're looking at this as a PR disaster instead of at the substantive problem, that this guy has emotionally abused one of his coworkers in public, and does not fundamentally think that this is a problem; instead the "tools" should have stopped him or more likely he shouldn't have gotten caught. Who keeps employing/contracting such a person? It's this buddy. He gave a PR "I'm sorry you were offended" apology and passed some of the blame onto his victim for not properly protecting herself with tools that weren't in place. That's garbage regardless of his contractual obligations.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:31
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Your problem is that you're looking at this as a PR disaster instead of at the substantive problem, that this guy has emotionally abused one of his coworkers in public, and does not fundamentally think that this is a problem; instead the "tools" should have stopped him or more likely he shouldn't have gotten caught. Who keeps employing/contracting such a person? Adam Koebel posted:I understand that what I narrated in that scene was wrong and I’m surprised by my own inability to recognize it in the moment. It comes across as a cagey apology, sure, and he spends a lot more effort talking about the safety systems than about his actions, but I think it's disingenuous to say he doesn't think it's a problem. Because at the very least, he's stated that what he did was wrong.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:40
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Kurieg posted:It's this buddy. He gave a PR "I'm sorry you were offended" apology and passed some of the blame onto his victim for not properly protecting herself with tools that weren't in place. You can think he hasn't done enough, or think he's doing it just for PR. Which hell he might be, I don't know that dude. He very much did not put the blame on her at all, and specifically said he was the one who hosed up, on both counts, not having protection systems in place, and for narrating the scene at all. He might be using some language that he hopes will soften his fall or whatever but he isn't bus tossing anyone here.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:48
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 19:51
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Arthil posted:Beyond the name which... needs some work, though I understand a lot of naming conventions from old school Conan are difficult. Is there any indication the actual content of the book won't be as you described? not really, like I said I haven't read it so I can't say for sure (not-Asia was one of Howard's bigger blindspots, even as he got less lovely and started making heroic not-Africans and such he kinda kept the whole 'whoooooooo mystic and mysterious asia' thing going so I'd say it likely has the most pitfalls to avoid). But yea, April Fools, advertising your big 'mysterious east' book, it led to a lot of people going 'uh is this a lovely joke or what'.
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Apr 3, 2020 19:53
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New apology: https://twitter.com/skinnyghost/status/1246140090436313088
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Apr 3, 2020 20:45
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That's a step up and yes, being supervised by a counsellor is a positive step if true, but it's going to take a lot to get people to forget how he giggled away on the stream like the GM in the "Dare you enter my magical realm?" comic, only worse because at least the Whizzard asks if you want to enter the piss forest.
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Apr 3, 2020 20:58
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I have negative faith in him and his apology.
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Apr 3, 2020 21:27
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Mors Rattus posted:I have negative faith in him and his apology.
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Apr 3, 2020 22:49
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It's a much more considered apology, so that's good. Really, it's more a matter of whether he actually puts in the work he's talking about or not. If it's like the Green Ronin timeline and just a way to buy time and hope people forget/lose interest, I think it'll be fairly obvious. At this point, I'd say there's enough vocal people in the hobby that will not let this be forgotten if he does just try to go dark for 6 months and hope it blows over.
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Apr 3, 2020 22:55
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He still hasn't actually said "I'm sorry for what I did," just "I recognise I should not have done that and will be speaking to my therapist."
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Apr 3, 2020 23:14
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Lemon-Lime posted:He still hasn't actually said "I'm sorry for what I did," just "I recognise I should not have done that and will be speaking to my therapist." Koebel posted:I'm so sorry that I hurt the cast, and to anyone else in the audience who felt hurt, this apology is for you, too. Is the concern that he's not saying "I'm sorry that I did [thing, explicitly delineated]"? In my mind, there's a transitive power of
Do others feel that that is not the case?
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Apr 3, 2020 23:19
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There is absolutely nothing difficult about saying "I am sorry that I did X thing", so not saying that makes you look like you don't want to, or at least that you don't want to acknowledge the actual thing you did. E: pretend for a second that I got drunk and smashed your tv. How do you feel about "I'm sorry I upset you" as opposed to "I'm sorry I got drunk and smashed your tv"? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Apr 3, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 23:31
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I don't think there is one special, specific method of wording an apology which is universally agreed-upon as being The Official Syntactically Correct Way To Apologise - and if there was, I would not trust any apology which used that wording, because an apology should not be an exercise in filling out a boilerplate form letter. A sufficiently determined mind can find any reason to nitpick at the particular way an apology is framed. The wording is nowhere near as important as the specific ideas conveyed, and the ideas he conveys are - to take direct quotes - concepts like "I'm so sorry that I hurt the cast" (note the "I" language, specifically framing it as a thing which Adam has done and an act he takes ownership of, which is better than the "I'm sorry that the cast was hurt" wording he might have used), and "I understand that what my players through in that scene was wrong", so he's not shying away from acknowledging the specific source of the hurt being his actions. EDIT TO ADD: to use the smashed TV example, it reads to me like Adam is saying "I'm sorry I that I smashed the TV" (smashing the TV being the result of the behaviour) and "I understand that getting so drunk that I was no longer in control of my actions was wrong" (getting drunk to the point of losing self-control being the behaviour which led to the TV being smashed). But there's something which is even more important than the ideas presented in an apology, and that's that the apology should sound like a sincere thing that the person in question actually believes, and this robotic, overly-polished PR text which Adam probably worked up using examples offered by his therapist absolutely doesn't sound sincere! It sounds like the platitudes uttered by someone who isn't sad that a bad thing happened because of their actions, they're sad that consequences happened that affect them, and it will take time and clear indications of changed behaviour on his part to change that impression. So it really, truly doesn't matter to me whether or not Adam uses a particular turn of phrase in his apology. Even if he used it now, the fact that he's done it after people have called on him to do it would just make it look like part of the sanitising exercise. Actions speak louder than words and Adam's actions in the livestream are loud enough to drown out anything he says about them in future. Warthur fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Apr 3, 2020 |
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Apr 3, 2020 23:46
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I'm still stuck on the "wondering what on God's green Earth led you to believe that this would be a thing your players would respond positively to" phase of this whole thing, and neither apology has really addressed that.
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Apr 3, 2020 23:59
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Also this is him apologizing over a week after the fact, only because there was an uproar on Twitter (he clearly didn't care about the peoples reactions, even when one person straight up quit on him), and after two prior apologies that didn't get the reaction he wanted thus prompting him to come out with this more rehearsed one. The time to give him the benefit of the doubt was if he apologized directly after the incident. Instead he was gleefully laughing about how he electroraped a robot and actively prevented the party from protecting the PC who didn't know better. He's only sorry that his actions have consequences.
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Apr 4, 2020 00:00
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E: Wow wrong thread!
moths fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 00:03
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You uh You sure this is the right thread buddy
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Apr 4, 2020 00:04
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Uhh...
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Apr 4, 2020 00:06
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I’m genuinely curious, what are the apologies that this thread had accepted/not gotten angry at? It seems like every potential apology this thread has seen is deemed insufficient and insulting, and I’m wondering if there has been an apology that actually has been seen as a god faith effort. As for Adam Koebel, I don’t actually care about how or how much he apologizes, actions speak louder than words. I’d just avoid his stuff (this isn’t exactly hard for me, though) until he did enough stuff that made it clear it wasn’t going to happen again
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Apr 4, 2020 00:38
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