- FMguru
- Sep 10, 2003
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peed on;
sexually
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It was a giant post on his son's facebook page. I think it was posted last fall. It may still be up (or archived somewhere) but you'd have to go back through months of facebook posts to find it.
It was a lot - physical abuse, emotional abuse, alcoholism, and other drugs.
quote:Ernest G. Gygax, Jr. on Facebook permalink
April 26, 2019 5:23 pm
APRIL 26, 2019 THREE YEARS OF ABSOLUTE SOBRIETY!
Moderation in all things – sound advice but for those with addictive personalities – a very hard road to follow.
I am the firstborn son of a creative genius and as much as learned at his side, I was a shy mother’s boy. When she took me to kindergarten she pushed me into the door with all these strange children and told me to stay inside. I tried to push my way out as mother held the door shut and cried…
Later as time went on they thought that perhaps I had a mental condition or that our religion – Jehovah’s Witnesses – were the reason that I refused to learn or even try and be friends with the other students. I could have been held back in 1st Grade. In 2nd Grade the Principle took me aside to play a game just he and I and then I worked hard to surpass him, as he would compare items of the tests back and forth. Woe is me for it was an IQ test and I scored in the upper 4%. My days of avoidance and being in my World were compromised. My mother used a lilac switch and I went from the lowest reading group to the highest in 2 weeks. In 5th grade I was still faking Book Reports and bored with everything in School but I had to perform or face corporal punishment. Then Dad started reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan novels (Ace). So I picked up book 1 while he was in book 3. Before he had finished book 3 I had read all 12 and suddenly I was turning in extra credit book reports.
By 10 years of age to hang out with my Dad I would get a glass of beer as we watched a Bear football game (real grounding as the team was subpar, if I could stay still long enough more glasses of beer would be the reward but when I would see the neighbor kids out playing, well I had to head out. Also we went for a long bicycle ride with another of his friends and as a reward we went to Jane’s Bar. He sat me next to him and ordered 3 Beers and handed me on himself. Finally I was a Bigger Guy!
By 16 I was skipping out of at least half a day of school most every day. My reward system was to get together with Ken Reek and he would provide the weak Beer and perhaps even some Lime Vodka and or Southern Comfort – I would generally provide the White Hen Pantry sandwiches. At 17 I had a fake ID (18 was the legal age at the time) from Tim Jone’s brother and I had to fake a Georgia accent. Since I went out drinking with Tom Wham, Rob Kuntz and other far older gentlemen I was casually waved in. Pitchers of Beer, Pinball and some Pool games became favorite activities.
At 19 and early 20 I found that alcohol gave me the ability to open conversations with the fair gender, but my lack of knowledge and sheer fear of refusal kept me unwillingly celibate until Zelda informed me she was leaving Rob’s “rear end” and would I like to go out and play some pool with her… I said you still live with Rob. She replied not much longer and then I said sure only after you have really left him!
Well that on the second date turned into a whole new focus of energy for one Ernie – WOW this was fantastic and I had to do this at least three times a day. Well I could as long as I kept her in drink, tobacco and most importantly “Reef.” So now I had combined the concept of sex as part of addictive behavior. I went swimming in her so called affection for about 2 years, with not too shocking a few transgressions on her part, such as sneaking Coke and Pills whenever she could as well as while high from “Ludes” since Rob had gotten his Greyhawk Royalty quarterly check, well she talked me into letting her drive my car (after a night a drinking and Disco, while she was popping Ludes) and she crashed the Monza into a telephone pole sideways and then with her foot still on the gas and absolutely out of her mind, we were riding over a No Parking sign until I put the car in Park while the gas was still fully engaged. She got out of the car lost a high heeled shoe and stumbled across the snowy school field to go to Rob’s and join the huge regular event that occurred with every new Royalty check. Well I took the blame for the accident which was waved off, although I now had no car and she came stumbling back some 5 hours later to go to sleep. Man I was PW. Later when I was playing with her sister’s latest child, my God Child, Gladice told me that I was too good for her sister and that right now when I was supposed to at work she was with a local vagrant, drinking my booze supply and smoking our stash (as well as some things that are supposed to be between two people). I let her stay one more month in the rental as I gave gave my 30 day notice and found a friend to crash with. Oh I had one fixed Siamese cat when I went into this relationship, in 2 years she had increased that to a total of 22 felines! When she moved out the cats were still waiting for me as well as a messy house.
Things got far better as my skills with the Dungeon Hobby Shop and then the Mail Order, the new RPGA and the Gen Con convention group all came under my care with 20 full and 2 part time employees. I now had lost weight and was playing Raquet Ball and working out a bit and then taking “Executive Lunches” with plenty of drinks and following that with chasing the ladies at work and elsewhere with lots of drink, some smoke and even a bit of Colombian Marching Powder. Boy did I swim in the waters full speed ahead ramming speed and would often be up until 4 AM and then be back in Americana Resort and Spa at 7 AM before heading back to work. Repeat as often as possible…
Then my father and mother were becoming Divorced and they tried often to make things work but Dad had watched his own mother die in front of him and mother would fall back on a 6 pack hidden at night as she cried. Dad started to rock n roll and mother started to drink heavily and I was following in the family DNA myself. Dad opened up Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment and he invited me to join him as Kevin Blume was discussing shutting down the Hobby Shop and closing the Mail Order so that some of our customers would stop complaining that we were stealing the business ( I did just shy of a Million with the 4 departments of the Consumer Services Division of TSR back in late 82 – early 83. Well living on a 10 acre estate in Beverly Hills and driving a Red Trans Am Firebird as well as an ability to bounce from Irish and English Pubs and even a few Dance clubs well I reveled in the sport. I also had a connection of the celebs for my cocaine occasional parties and he was also a pornographer! We worked intelligently when we worked and partied hard when we could, swimming everyday and having lady friends over for the evening hot tub parties. Luke joined the scene and things had to go a bit underground but fun was still had and drink was a major part of all the fun. TSR really started to sink under the rule of Kevin Blume and my father had to shut down DDEC, hurriedly write Unearthered Arcana and take over the reins. Part of that was bringing in Lorraine Williams the sister of our west coast pal Flint Dille.
Back home to a new job working with Jon Pickens with S&T magazine which was 4 issues behind (they had a game in the center of each issue) in six months I assisted Jon in bringing it up to but 2 issues behind. Dad was fighting for TSR in court and after he lost the preliminary battle (he still had a right to appeal), well he started New Infinities and hired Kim Mohan away from TSR Periodicals. Lorraine told my friend and boss Mike Cook you fire Ernie and Heidi today or you are out of a job as well!
Well I had a check for over 5 grand in front of me, a paper to sign waving all issues with TSR firing me without just cause and so I took my weeping sister on a tavern crawl over two counties. At night we had had other TSR employees set us up with a party at Club 21. One friend gave me my first hit of “Acid” (even though this would have guaranteed him a good lay…), my own poppa got me a package from a local dealer and the bar was covered with drinks and shots as many as we wished. While tripping I noticed that Coke was pure bunk and that it was over priced and so I perceived a way to spend my parting capital and start a business.
As the new venture grew up used my Management Schooling and people skills as well as getting the best product closer to the source and became quite a celebrity with bar maids, school teachers, bartenders, ex-policeman, a Martial Arts Instructor and bands as they played at Alpine Valley as well as lots of my drinking pals. Woman sought me out and for a few months I had 3 regular ladies a day (one married), and sought out more adventure at night at the taverns and after bar parties. Then one of my co-dealers showed me how to freebase and for 7 months that was grand fun and business still went on. Then dependance and addiction began to show it’s ugly head but my steady and I could afford it. Finally a member of the law warned me of a Grand Jury and it was pack up my bags and drive around the country, this was a 18 months away from Lake Geneva with really no income, a bad habit and an expensive girlfriend. We settled in Tampa Bay for a year to finish off that adventure. I finally saw that smoking an once a week and living expenses without an income were a dead end and I had overdosed on 3 occasions and been hospitalized twice in that year. Dad listened to me and took a flight to Tampa to aid me in taking this Monkey off the back. Well part of his answer was for us to go out and get drunk on legal margaritas and then somehow he took sides with Kelly against me somehow… From inside the van I spidered all 9 windows and when he further said now that is an intelligent way to handle this I fought him to the ground until he stopped fighting back (our father had used physical force to dominate us and sometimes his wife so I was following right in his stupid footsteps – just as I had in so many good ones with gaming). I went inside and slammed down perhaps half a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol. I woke up in a pool of bloody vomit, with a note informing me that Dad in a wheelchair, had paid for two plane tickets home and one of those was for my coke addict blond. I sold the Trans Am for next to nothing (it had problems and the purchaser gipped me on half the money – as well as if her sister could be believed he was a lover on the side…). I got the windfows repaired, packed it up to the gills and drove back to Lake Geneva.
Well she got back together for a short while as we shared a room in her parents trailer. Then one day she found a younger man who had more resources to share and I had to move in with my soon to be ex-employee in the powder business. It took another year to really slow down on the stupid addiction but I finally quit cocaine – I thought for good. I still had alcohol to fall back on and an occasional two ships passing in the night. I had spent most all my resources, I was dependent on living with friends, soon Tom Wham and Rose Estes and low and behold I started to crave booze as my best friend.
Drunken stupidity got me to accept money from a lady I would never have talked to let alone touch for almost a year. Then I found a girl whom I mistook for an old flame until I saw that she had two kids in a picture and below that wholesome scene was a ¾ full bottle of Vodka in her underwear drawer. Mind you I hadn’t figured out whom she really was although she had professed her name was Ann not Cathy…. Well that became an off and on relationship for almost 10 years with her taking rides to various treatment facilities followed by new drinking bouts, lots of other men mostly ex prison fellows showing up at bad times professing love for her. Once when I went to bed on the 3rd day of a drinking binge, well she set my cloths on fire and I woke up to flames and ultimately when I told the Police I was going to sleep in my own smoke filled house, a scuffle and I got my own Ambulance ride behind hers to the dry out tank/nut house in the next county. I was releasable in 24 hours (rare) but she need the full 72 and so I stayed to be near her. I think a pattern is coming into existence substances equal wild ladies of passion who crash and burn often leading me to stupid excesses and a Wisdom score of perhaps 6.
Well then I found a bartender/waitress and we had several fun years. She and I would take turns becoming total fools but the other would help support the other most of the time. Then her teeth were all rotting out from speed addiction in her youth and I had a job with Abbott Labs and wonderful insurance. So we were fun and watched three grandsons come into the World together and I asked her to Marry me and then I could provide her medical needs. We also had a plan were we would get a house together purchase one that is and I would pay 2/3rds as I had a far better income. Well once she was my wife, she decided to go off with one of her co-workers to South Beloit and try a Crack house that she recommended. That meant absolutely no income from Deb as well as $50 dollars a day being taken as a cash check every day at the local Sentry Food store. Well after 36 days I say my shrinking bank account, I had removed the locks from the bathroom and bedroom doors so that she couldn’t just have personal time from me, while telling me that I was nuts and wasn’t smelling an old acquaintance burning cocaine although the quality sure wasn’t the same as my memory. Well that meant trying to get both marriage counseling and perhaps even addiction services for BOTH of us. She told the Doctor that I as a husband owed her whatever addictions she choose to do until she was ready to quit, the councilor told me to go ahead and get a Divorce!
She moved into a week to week boarding house and of course fell behind on her payments and so I would purchase for fair money items from her past that were in my apartment, but I would not give her cash. Instead I paid her landlord not only the back but future rent into the future. Finally she quit that foolishness but still smoked cigs and drank. Then her liver began to fail. As she started to hallucinate and get stints in the Hospital she finally began to lose the bad habits – far too late. We had a friendly relationship with little long term trust but as she began to have major health issues I ended up on two occasions getting her Emergency service and then I went with her to various Hospitals and even getting on the Liver Transplant List. Well even as I acted as the cheerleader in this with her sons and grandsons – well she passed heavy and out of her mind in May of 2011. I don’t want to die, please save me… still makes me cry as I was powerless to undo all the harm she had done to herself over 51 years of life.
With her death I swore off fruit from lower on the tree of life (John Popson quote) and became celibate for 6 years after her death (add to that the last year of her life in which we could not do anything due to her failing health. I finally had tired of sharing lives with other troubled addicts. Now I would just drink all by myself and now that my knees were effectively gone, I could just vegetate and drink myself into oblivion!
2016 my 2nd major stay in the Hospital for the foolishness of my chosen course in life, this time my Kidneys, before a Heart Attack. Then my incredible Service Hound KC began to look me in the eyes (as she is doing now for the hours I am spending writing this). She refused to go out and play without me – I could not start the day without having dry heaves and other DT’s which would stop as soon as I had my first real drink of 100 proof Bourbon. So I made a vow to not find a new owner for KC but to change my life and give up the bottle. That of course didn’t happen until I finished the last bottle the night of April 25th 2016.
Twenty eight days of physical, mental and emotional pain and duress were ahead of me with each day the thought that I could just have one drink and then start again. I knew better than that for once while working at the Game Guild I had accepted an offer to party with a couple and show them how to free base and anything goes. Well that led to me wasting time and money as well as feeling like a slug and hypocrite to the young gamers as I hid in a lie and preached to them caution. I made it and by day 29 I just had a minor craving without the physical desire and the though that death would be preferable to a life with booze.
My health, my weight and my demeanor all began to improve and then one day while walking in the lovely grounds of the closed Golf Course Hillmoor I met an Angel with her lovely dog Bella. KC was actually friendly to her and pulled me to her! We had talked before but no matter how hormonal our response was she had lived with a complete and dysfunctional alcoholic in her youth and had a far better opinion of her worth and abilities that to go back into that bullshit. Well I stayed the course and now had a new respect for woman and myself and what a true relationship means.
Later at a meeting to protect Hillmoor from the Developer after my speech I took a deep breath and went out on a limb. “In closing I wish to say that if it wasn’t for Hillmoor I never would have met the woman of my dreams!” Truer words were never spoken and I have found a complete partner for the rest of my life and with Love and Responsibility will set and achieve higher goals and a life based on shared joy and family and a life without addiction. Donna Jovani is my strength and the one my heart beats for and a reward from a higher power for finally making the right decisions and increasing my Wisdom to perhaps even 17. Life without such Love would be hollow and insignificant. Now if my current health issues allow I will make her a 50/50 partner for the rest of our shared existence and even should things go South and my life take a turn for the worst I will have finally found complete and total heartfelt love and devotion.
Ernest G Gygax Jr – One of many people with addictive personalities.
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Apr 29, 2020 17:03
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May 26, 2024 03:53
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- GimpInBlack
- Sep 27, 2012
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That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.
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Or, in the case of the shaped fae, that they just showed up too late to get on the paperwork and nobody's bothered to fix it 
It's a shame Exalted's a squamous writhing nightmare of a game system because it does have some good ideas.
I am most of the way through my own conversion of the system to Cortex Prime for that very reason. And while I haven't seen anything specific, I have heard very promising things about the upcoming "rules lite" version, Exalted Essence from folks who have gotten a look at early draft.
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Apr 29, 2020 17:30
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- Desiden
- Mar 13, 2016
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Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS
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I am most of the way through my own conversion of the system to Cortex Prime for that very reason. And while I haven't seen anything specific, I have heard very promising things about the upcoming "rules lite" version, Exalted Essence from folks who have gotten a look at early draft.
There's a podcast floating around with some info on it, and yeah, it sounds promising. It's supposed to be roughly at a complexity level like OPP's storypath system, which they've used for scion and trinity continuum so far. Which, while it has some rough patches here and there, certainly seems about where I'd find the "sweet spot" in complexity for a high powered game. I had been toying with trying to adept storypath for exalted prior to essence, though now I'll probably wait and see how it turns out.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:46
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- spectralent
- Oct 1, 2014
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Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
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I found Trinity to just have too many bits to it, honestly. Quite possible it'll grok easier for me in another format, but.
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Apr 29, 2020 18:54
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- Leperflesh
- May 17, 2007
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You're right to be wary here, but I feel like the context and application are important.
I'm on record, even in the post you're quoting, that "humans but slightly different" is a bullshit thing. Putting aside the creative bankruptcy, that kind of thinking gets you on the express train to racist caricature city. It's an entirely legitimate call to say that whatever you're doing shouldn't tread in that territory. But if you're making the conscious choice to include non-human sentient beings in your game, your fiction, whatever else, they should be something other than human.
With the exception of forums poster Nessus, everyone involved in this discussion is human. We only have observations and behavioral studies to tell us about other cognitive models of sapience. It's the sci-fi alien problem - how do you create a thing from whole cloth for which you necessarily have no reference? Well, you cheat and you use information you do have. If I want to play an uplifted octopus in Eclipse Phase, I'm going to research cephalopods and bootstrap that information into my character. If I'm playing a living song in a high-concept freeform game, I'm going to study music theory and audiology in equal parts, just so I can get a grip on what I'm trying to characterize.
And while it's dangerous territory, I think even your example could be done well, with the right touch. Chimps are like us, but the are still very much not us. There's fertile narrative ground in how that contrast with humanity would play out.
So long as it wasn't done by Gary "This Robert E Howard guy has some great ideas on racial politics" Gygax.
I don't dispute there's a hell of a lot of baggage involved here. The hobbies this forum focuses on have D&D, Catan and WH40K as their flagships, so it's not like anyone who posts here should be unfamiliar with the concept of consuming problematic material. But I don't think there's anything inherently unethical about bootstraping a fantastical creation off of real-world things. Like with everything else in life, we just have to be vigilant about asking ourselves "Am I being a shithead right now?"
Also, I just like monsters and space aliens. v v
I think the point is just that: to the degree chimpanzees are different from humans, so gnolls might be different from hyenas: so, even if you want to start with research about hyenas, you are free to invent differences as (or more) radical than those, without abandoning the "hyena people" premise.
For example: chimps and humans both organized into extended-family groups, but then humans invented civilization and began living in even larger groups, using adaptive mechanisms such as language and government to handle the problem of living together with people you don't engage in mutual grooming with on a near-daily basis in order to reinforce social bonds. Similarly, hyenas live in packs, but if you have sapient intelligent hyenas with language and tools, you should not say to yourself "well obviously they must live in packs" just to maintain fidelity to your concept or your research about hyenas. Although you could. But it's not "unrealistic" for your hyena-people to, for example, live in cities, or to have become solitary, or to become highly skilled seafarers, or to develop a deeply-cooperative society where interpersonal conflicts never become violent.
Actually I think doing that makes them more interesting, too. Yeah make your octopus-people or mantis-people or whatever and use visual and cultural cues drawn from their real-world characteristics to encode that origin, but also surprise me with one or two significant shifts from their animal origins, because that's also very realistic and compelling.
Reference: C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series centers on a space ship run by basically Lion-people; and, similar to how actual lions live, Cherryh wrote hers as a society in which the females do most all the work and generally deal with problems and kind of instinctively dote on the one alpha male that might be in their midst if that should happen, while the males mostly live in luxury except for rare occasions when they're in the presence of a rival male with whom they will probably have a savage fight. BUT ALSO the Chanur are spacers who can deal with advanced technology and have intelligent conversations and they have adaptive social mechanisms to cope with crises arising from their old instincts; multiple plot points revolve around cases where the characters deal successfully with aliens who have radically different viewpoints and lifestyles, in part because they're tool-using socially-adaptive people with language etc., they're not just rigidly "Lions but with hands" and they're also not just "humans but with lion faces and maybe sometimes they roar and go hunting a lot." They're far more interesting as characters in the novels because of the creativity and adaptations and differences that Cherryh imagined, in addition to the cool lion-like characteristics.
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Apr 29, 2020 19:14
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- CitizenKeen
- Nov 13, 2003
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easygoing pedant
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I am most of the way through my own conversion of the system to Cortex Prime for that very reason. And while I haven't seen anything specific, I have heard very promising things about the upcoming "rules lite" version, Exalted Essence from folks who have gotten a look at early draft.
May I ask what you're doing differently than Blood and Fire? B&F is a good Marvel Heroic Exalted hack.
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Apr 29, 2020 19:53
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- Dawgstar
- Jul 15, 2017
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I was very pleasantly surprised by Trinity which feels like it helps you come up with Aspects that inform your skill choices instead of just throwing you to the lions, more than other games. Scion is a bit less hand-holding, but I don't have the problems with it I do, say, Fate.
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Apr 29, 2020 20:08
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- GimpInBlack
- Sep 27, 2012
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That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.
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May I ask what you're doing differently than Blood and Fire? B&F is a good Marvel Heroic Exalted hack.
Well, I haven't seen Blood and Fire before just now, so I can't really compare directly, but my take uses MHR style power sets--one per Exalt type and one per Aspect (I dropped "Caste" as a term because it's kinda problematic and I got tired of having to write "Caste or Aspect" all the time). The concept of "Excellencies" I rolled into Specialties, but they also have Charms (which are SFX). I also pared the options way back--three Excellencies per Aspect, five Charms per Excellency.
One thing I'm playing with in my current revision is using Virtues, but giving each Exalt type it's own set. So Solars, for instance, have Glory, Justice, Passion, Truth, and Hubris, while Dragon-Blooded have Duty, Honor, Pride, Loyalty, and Ambition. (I don't really like the Great Curse as a magically-imposed external force, so I ditched it in favor of each type having a "core flaw," which is more a reflection of the kind of people who Exalt than anything intrinsic to the process of Exaltation).
As you might guess, it's a loose adaptation, and I'm freely changing stuff I don't like or think I could do better. I've rewritten the fluff on most of the Exalt types, given Solars a new thematic focus for their powers beyond "just the best at everything..." lots of stuff like that.
Oh, and Lilun is right the gently caress out.
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Apr 29, 2020 20:19
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- CitizenKeen
- Nov 13, 2003
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easygoing pedant
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Somebody should revive the Cortex thread, since the old one is in Archives.
<monkey looking away meme.jpg />
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Apr 29, 2020 21:13
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- Xiahou Dun
- Jul 16, 2009
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We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.
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You're right to be wary here, but I feel like the context and application are important.
I'm on record, even in the post you're quoting, that "humans but slightly different" is a bullshit thing. Putting aside the creative bankruptcy, that kind of thinking gets you on the express train to racist caricature city. It's an entirely legitimate call to say that whatever you're doing shouldn't tread in that territory. But if you're making the conscious choice to include non-human sentient beings in your game, your fiction, whatever else, they should be something other than human.
With the exception of forums poster Nessus, everyone involved in this discussion is human. We only have observations and behavioral studies to tell us about other cognitive models of sapience. It's the sci-fi alien problem - how do you create a thing from whole cloth for which you necessarily have no reference? Well, you cheat and you use information you do have. If I want to play an uplifted octopus in Eclipse Phase, I'm going to research cephalopods and bootstrap that information into my character. If I'm playing a living song in a high-concept freeform game, I'm going to study music theory and audiology in equal parts, just so I can get a grip on what I'm trying to characterize.
And while it's dangerous territory, I think even your example could be done well, with the right touch. Chimps are like us, but the are still very much not us. There's fertile narrative ground in how that contrast with humanity would play out.
So long as it wasn't done by Gary "This Robert E Howard guy has some great ideas on racial politics" Gygax.
I don't dispute there's a hell of a lot of baggage involved here. The hobbies this forum focuses on have D&D, Catan and WH40K as their flagships, so it's not like anyone who posts here should be unfamiliar with the concept of consuming problematic material. But I don't think there's anything inherently unethical about bootstraping a fantastical creation off of real-world things. Like with everything else in life, we just have to be vigilant about asking ourselves "Am I being a shithead right now?"
Also, I just like monsters and space aliens. vv
*nods nods*
Wait what the gently caress did Catan do besides be kind of dull and out-dated?
Did I miss something?
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Apr 30, 2020 05:27
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- wizzardstaff
- Apr 6, 2018
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Zorch! Splat! Pow!
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*nods nods*
Wait what the gently caress did Catan do besides be kind of dull and out-dated?
Did I miss something?
It has a mild case of being inherently colonialist.
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Apr 30, 2020 05:32
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- BaronVanAwesome
- Sep 11, 2001
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I will never learn the secrets of "Increased fake female boar sp..."
Never say never, buddy.
Now you know.
Now we all know.
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It has a mild case of being inherently colonialist.
Can settling an uninhabited island be problematic?
Other than building roads made of sheep
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Apr 30, 2020 07:13
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- Filboid Studge
- Oct 1, 2010
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And while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.
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I think the point is just that: to the degree chimpanzees are different from humans, so gnolls might be different from hyenas: so, even if you want to start with research about hyenas, you are free to invent differences as (or more) radical than those, without abandoning the "hyena people" premise.
For example: chimps and humans both organized into extended-family groups, but then humans invented civilization and began living in even larger groups, using adaptive mechanisms such as language and government to handle the problem of living together with people you don't engage in mutual grooming with on a near-daily basis in order to reinforce social bonds. Similarly, hyenas live in packs, but if you have sapient intelligent hyenas with language and tools, you should not say to yourself "well obviously they must live in packs" just to maintain fidelity to your concept or your research about hyenas. Although you could. But it's not "unrealistic" for your hyena-people to, for example, live in cities, or to have become solitary, or to become highly skilled seafarers, or to develop a deeply-cooperative society where interpersonal conflicts never become violent.
Actually I think doing that makes them more interesting, too. Yeah make your octopus-people or mantis-people or whatever and use visual and cultural cues drawn from their real-world characteristics to encode that origin, but also surprise me with one or two significant shifts from their animal origins, because that's also very realistic and compelling.
Reference: C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series centers on a space ship run by basically Lion-people; and, similar to how actual lions live, Cherryh wrote hers as a society in which the females do most all the work and generally deal with problems and kind of instinctively dote on the one alpha male that might be in their midst if that should happen, while the males mostly live in luxury except for rare occasions when they're in the presence of a rival male with whom they will probably have a savage fight. BUT ALSO the Chanur are spacers who can deal with advanced technology and have intelligent conversations and they have adaptive social mechanisms to cope with crises arising from their old instincts; multiple plot points revolve around cases where the characters deal successfully with aliens who have radically different viewpoints and lifestyles, in part because they're tool-using socially-adaptive people with language etc., they're not just rigidly "Lions but with hands" and they're also not just "humans but with lion faces and maybe sometimes they roar and go hunting a lot." They're far more interesting as characters in the novels because of the creativity and adaptations and differences that Cherryh imagined, in addition to the cool lion-like characteristics.
Good books, but don’t tally up with modern observation of lion behaviour, which is a partial example of what you’re talking about I guess.
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Apr 30, 2020 07:14
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- Punkinhead
- Apr 2, 2015
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Hmm, has anyone ever made a Catan-like set on Mars or something?
For some reason I have never been interested in Catan, until this very post.
I would love a version where I have to be cut-throat and underhanded because the resources I'm fighting over are hydrogen deposits and we're all building space elevators.
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Apr 30, 2020 07:43
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- TheArchimage
- Dec 17, 2008
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It'll just be I've got space wood for space sheep and you know it.
There was a space version at one point, wasn't there?
Close! It was Star Trek branded, so instead of wood and sheep you had dilithium and crap. I think there were also special abilities you could use depending on what crew member you played as? My in-laws picked it up but I never played it myself.
ETA: See also Starfarers of Catan below, which I was not previously aware of.
TheArchimage fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Apr 30, 2020
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Apr 30, 2020 08:12
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- GimpInBlack
- Sep 27, 2012
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That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.
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The general idea of colonizing virgin terrain and converting it to an economically productive area has some issues in light of all our various ecological problems. But I also suspect that's why it's "mild."
It's certainly no Puerto Rico, where you build Caribbean sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations worked by "colonists" who arrive every turn on "colonist ships."
The "colonists" are represented by little, brown, person-shaped pieces.
GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Apr 30, 2020
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Apr 30, 2020 08:12
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- Winklebottom
- Dec 19, 2007
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yeah, Terraforming Mars is great
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Apr 30, 2020 09:58
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- spectralent
- Oct 1, 2014
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Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
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Yeah the last major island suitable for human habitation was Rapa Nui (Easter Island) back in the 1100s. Everything after either you're taking it from someone, the previous inhabitants were pushed out by natural disaster, or it is a very small island not really suitable for large scale habitation.
The Falklands, surely?
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Apr 30, 2020 10:38
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- Angry Salami
- Jul 27, 2013
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Don't trust the skull.
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IIRC, Bermuda and the Seychelles had no permanent settlements before the early modern period either.
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Apr 30, 2020 10:59
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- GimpInBlack
- Sep 27, 2012
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That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.
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IIRC, Bermuda and the Seychelles had no permanent settlements before the early modern period either.
Bermuda had no permanent settlements at the time of its discovery by Europeans. Whether it was used as, e.g. a stopover point or resupply location by the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean before European contact is harder to say definitively. But, uh, given what happened in the region in the late 15th and early 16th century, I think Bermuda falls squarely in the "taking it from someone else" category. The Seychelles I'm not as familiar with, but a quick Wikipedia skim (I know, I know) says that Arab traders were trading sea coconuts found only on Seychelle long before European colonization, so yeah... even if there were no permanent settlements there the islands were still being exploited by people before the Europeans rolled up and said "nope, ours now," so....
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Apr 30, 2020 12:13
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- GimpInBlack
- Sep 27, 2012
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That's right, kids, take lots of drugs, leave the universe behind, and pilot Enlightenment Voltron out into the cosmos to meet Alien Jesus.
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lol an actual PhD got an article published on a seemingly legitimate professional psychology website about how the depiction of orcs isn't racist and it's another Satanic Panic (but also it's nobody Twitter randos from outside the hobby).
Dude also has some poo poo to say about "well the Africans also had slaves" when American slavery comes up.
I can't believe how big this seems to be getting.
Wanna take bets on how long it takes him to start blubbering about "Irish slavery" and how "they turned out fine?"
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Apr 30, 2020 14:45
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- Arivia
- Mar 17, 2011
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lol an actual PhD got an article published on a seemingly legitimate professional psychology website about how the depiction of orcs isn't racist and it's another Satanic Panic (but also it's nobody Twitter randos from outside the hobby).
Dude also has some poo poo to say about "well the Africans also had slaves" when American slavery comes up.
I can't believe how big this seems to be getting.
Psychology Today is kind of like Forbes: as long as you have a degree, you can just publish whatever. It doesn’t get edited or receive overview.
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Apr 30, 2020 14:52
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- MadScientistWorking
- Jun 23, 2010
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"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."
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lol an actual PhD got an article published on a seemingly legitimate professional psychology website about how the depiction of orcs isn't racist and it's another Satanic Panic (but also it's nobody Twitter randos from outside the hobby).
Dude also has some poo poo to say about "well the Africans also had slaves" when American slavery comes up.
I can't believe how big this seems to be getting.
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Apr 30, 2020 17:15
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- JohnnyCanuck
- May 28, 2004
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Strong And/Or Free
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Just as an FYI folks: because Zak is bringing suit against Mandy in Ontario, there is an Ontario-based anti-SLAPP law that's been in place since 2015. So thankfully, she has that going for her - it's not anywhere near as bad as it used to be.
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Apr 30, 2020 18:40
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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May 26, 2024 03:53
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- Notahippie
- Feb 4, 2003
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Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth
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It can't be that legitimate since the dude is comparing widespread ethics gaps in pyschology to that.
Psychology Today used to be a semi-legitimate interface between research psychology and the genera public, but by the 2000s was Buzzfeed light and most credible psychologists don't publish in it.
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Apr 30, 2020 18:48
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Apr 29, 2020 17:03
