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Alien Rope Burn posted:and in case you're wondering, the writeups are about 800-1200 words, usually around 1100 (and that's with me counting out the equipment that might be tacked on at the end of the description). So, basically thirty to fifty bucks paid per monster. Before self-employment taxes and social security and any other taxes and expenses. You get, as they say, what you pay for.
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Nov 6, 2017 22:02
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sexpig by night posted:I have bad news about how commonplace antisemitism is too It's super common. But also if you criticize Israel some people reflexively call that antisemitism. For a few people, simply expressing sympathy for Palestinians constitutes antisemitism. So... yeah, there needs to be at least a little bit of explanation to go with the accusation. e: f;b
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Nov 7, 2017 06:41
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Yeah basically if your friend is being outed as a sexual predator of some variety, and you decide you're going to stay friends with him anyway, that's your prerogative. The mistake is in posting about it publicly, and that mistake is compounded when it reflects on your professional contacts/company/employer/employees/customers. And the double-mistake is using weasel-language to diminish the seriousness of the accusations while publicly announcing you'll be retaining that friendship.
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Nov 9, 2017 20:18
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Comrade Gorbash posted:But it's just as bad, maybe even worse, when a company is skeptical of everything and automatically takes an antagonistic view of accusations. It's also just stupid. Stupid, to respond at all beyond "we're looking into this", until you as a company have reached a conclusion about what you think happened and how you are going to respond to it. Like, I don't run a company, I'm not qualified to do that, but it's loving obvious as hell to me that the wrong response 100% of the time is to let your employees post their immediate kneejerk reactions to anything of a serious nature. Whatever the intent of Green Ronin, good or bad, it speaks very poorly to the basic level of intelligence of the people involved so far that they didn't immediatley go "woah this is serious" and then shut the gently caress up (publicly) until it'd been discussed at length internally.
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Nov 9, 2017 23:00
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rape half-orcs are a direct result of doubling down on the "always chaotic evil" alignment descriptor used frequently in old-school D&D. See, if an orc is always evil, then how could an orc and a human have a loving parental relationship? It would mean the parents of half-orcs are always evil, see, because obviously nobody not evil could love a chaotic evil orc! Nevermind that old-school D&D was never consistent about poo poo like that, including orcs specifically being always chaotic evil, and also including the idea that the chaotic evil alignment completely precluded behavior that wasn't both chaotic and evil. Not that any of this is an excuse for explicitly injecting or preserving rape as a theme in a supposedly family-friendly game for teens and adults. Or hell, any game of any stripe that doesn't specifically say on the box "warning: contains rape themes" on it. But there's this terrible legacy of D&D-style alignments and labeling entire species/races with a specific alignment that a lot of grognardy old-school fans feel is intrinsic to the game, and a lot of the shittier conclusions drawn from that system seem to draw from it. e. The reaction against "backpedalling" isn't just because they see their brand as always perfect: it's also people who see any sign of backpedaling as giving ground to the "SJWs" who they have decided are the enemy trying to destroy their hobby. Nevermind if they'd actually agree on any specific point, it's the general principle as symptomatic of a culture war in which they see themselves as the aggrieved victims.
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Nov 23, 2017 04:04
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I have no such excuse because I'm 42 and although I started with red box basic D&D, I went to AD&D pretty quickly. And I still have my books. But yes also like half the "old school" D&D stuff is actually just 3rd edition stuff, but this goes hand in hand with how like 95% of people who played AD&D when they were teenagers were not in fact playing the AD&D game as-printed, because rules misunderstandings and house-rules were more or less universal. So I'll excuse myself by saying in the most memorable campaign I played in (lasted three or four whole sessions!), orcs were chaotic evil. 
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Nov 23, 2017 20:12
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moths posted:I don't think AD&D (and earlier) had the same brain-searing tribalism because there wasn't much competition in the early days of fantasy gaming. Also, most of us were in contact with no more than a handful of other people who played D&D. If we had a tribe, it was no different from any other small group of friends who had a shared interest. The broad, "we're a society and we're different" stuff maybe applied more to adults who, even in the late 1970s, were already forming larger associations, attending conventions, etc. My first convention was the Golden Demon Awards in 1991, and my first contact with a broader "society" of D&D-playing nerds was when I first got access to Usenet in ~1993. If I go back and look at the letters columns in Dragon magazine, etc., I can find evidence of the brain-searing tribalism already at work, but I think it hadn't fully metastasized until there were hundreds of D&D players associating together online. From those conversations evolved a shared mythology of what D&D and D&D-playing and D&D-players were, with all the usual collective wall-building and inclusion/exclusion cultural constructions that tend to come from those kinds of communities.
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Nov 23, 2017 20:38
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I agree with you mostly, but you might be missing all the lard that piled up on 2nd edition towards the end, what with the character option books etc. If you had all that poo poo it could take days to make a character just because you had too much to pick from.
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Nov 25, 2017 19:30
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Another big issue with 4e KotS was that it used Kobolds. As an introductory adventure for people who maybe hadn't played D&D before this was an issue because kobolds' main gimmick was that they all have an at-will minor action that lets them shift one square. When your players are still trying to nail down the basic combat mechanics of a combat-focused tactical board game, it's hosed up to immediately meet an enemy who all thwart one of those basic mechanics - for example, that a shift costs a move action. Note that the example adventure in the back of the 4e DMG is "Kobold Hall." Yeah. When I ran that adventure as my first 4e adventure with two or three players unfamiliar with 4e D&D, this constantly threw them off. It made it very hard for them to figure out how to fight effectively, like setting up flanking for example. Here I am trying to tutor people about the basic mechanics of the game, and the enemies all have a special rule that changes that basic mechanic. The rest of that adventure is more kobolds, traps, a drake (so, a skirmisher with fly 8 (hover)), and... a young white dragon, which was a level 3 solo Brute with the hosed up math so it had 232 hit points. And a breath weapon that recharges on a five or six, so, using it roughly every three rounds of an interminably long combat. I pretty much think this encounter was intended to TPK a party of 1st level adventurers, and at best, it'd take hours of real-time gaming to grind through that encounter, especially when you consider the only things the players have dealt with up to that point are a bunch of kobolds and that one drake, so they've had zero practice fighting a big Brute type monster. KotS had very similar design, just much longer with more map to explore. So not only did it totally fail to introduce the game as being something more than a hack & slash dungeon grind, it also failed to provide a set of challenges that would be good for teaching and learning the game's fundamentals. I really don't know what the gently caress they were thinking.
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Nov 26, 2017 09:39
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superglue them to the bumper of your car e. hell, coat an old car with magic cards and call it an art car
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Nov 26, 2017 23:26
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, the thing about the power 9 is that they specifically cannot be reprinted in any form. Are you suggesting Wizards is legally prohibited from reprinting those old cards? Or is this just a "promise" with zero legal power behind it?
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Nov 27, 2017 03:20
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Sorry, I haven't been a party to those stupid arguments. I was asking a real question, mostly, although I strongly suspect I know the answer. It's not important though.
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Nov 27, 2017 03:41
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Kurieg posted:There is nothing legally preventing them from doing it I suspect but the amount of backlash they'd get from the community for doing so would not be worth it. OK. I was thinking there was a small chance maybe they lost the license to the artwork/design or some poo poo, like the Harmony Gold situation with Battletech and the Unseen mechs. But actually it's just "they can't do it without engendring major backlash, today, as things stand, which tells us nothing about what they'd be willing to do in, say, 10 years or 20 years or whatever."
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Nov 27, 2017 03:47
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:i mean, considering they've poked at the edges of it a few times and had to tighten up their stance, it does tell us something but okay guy who literally admits to not knowing poo poo about this situation Hi friend, there's no need to be hostile. I pointed out a semantic difference between "can't" and "won't" out of interest in clarity, not to score points or something: and I was right about that, which means little in context, because I understand the intent was to state a strong opinion that the company won't reprint those cards. Which in the context of the conversation is a fine thing to say, and nothing more. It's all good, OK? I'm sorry there's clearly been really terrible conversations around this topic that have set folks on edge about it. I didn't know that.
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Nov 27, 2017 04:03
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One of the key value-adds that Patreon offers is literally "isn't Paypal," though. And Paypal is still far worse: unlike Patreon, they don't give a crap about negative feedback and do not roll back their terrible policies based on it.
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Dec 14, 2017 00:16
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That by itself is totally understandable. I've spent over ten years shitposting here on SA, and if I was permabanned I'd be very upset about it. Even for those of us with healthy in-real-life friendships, our online communities are a significant component of our social interactions now. Being summarily tossed out of a community you feel a part of is extremely distressing. Mind you I'm not arguing anyone in particular didn't deserve it. But being super salty about it for years is probably a totally normal and reasonable psychological reaction.
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Jan 4, 2018 06:23
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100% of the development costs of those old family games has been recouped decades ago, so the manufacturers are only paying for manufacturing cost, some tiny amount of marketing (if any), and a profit margin on them. And the manufacturing costs are also likely very very low, given the huge volume and the very simple components that most of those old family games have. They can afford to make 50 cents per box of RISK sold and still have that be a worthwhile product to keep making. As an aside, I think most game designers would love for their game to become so wildly popular that a counterfeiter would bother to make a knockoff copy. I mean obviously it sucks to be getting ripped off, but we are living in a crazy time of a ridiculous glut of boardgames available, and the ones getting ripped off in China are only going to be the top 0.1% most popular. Those are also, most likely, the games which have sold so many copies that the manufacturers have likely already recouped their development costs. I'm not saying I don't feel sorry for them, because getting ripped off sucks... but my suspicion is that nobody is being run out of business due to counterfeiting of their products, for exactly this factor. At least for now. This is a problem exclusive to the highly successful.
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Jan 11, 2018 17:24
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That sounds like it *could* happen, maybe, but I don't know that we have any examples. I think most of the time counterfeiters are going to focus on games where they know they have an opportunity to sell at least hundreds if not thousands of copies, and that means games that have already sold at least tens of thousands of copies, yes? They're going to say "OK today we are gonna rip off a game, what game should we rip off" and look for the ones that have the right price point, very wide distribution, ongoing reliable robust sales, and no really difficult to copy components. You're never gonna bother with some new indie game when a major big seller is an option. Hence Pandemic Legacy or Catan, and not some game that has only grossed $100k on 2500 sales. I presume. I'm putting myself in the shoes of a counterfeiter and thinking about what makes sense.
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Jan 11, 2018 19:56
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Comrade Gorbash posted:One Shot's solution looks workable and sensible, and I hope it pushes the industry as a whole to adopt similar standards. That's frankly an amazing response. It does rely on the capabilities of a couple of consultants to conduct some kind of fair arbitration, which may not be a universally useful approach, but poo poo, they're fully recognizing their own inability to be impartial and they're spending money to work around that. Also that cab driver is a goddamn hero.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:19
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Cessna posted:Sure! Every forum has their own culture, and everyone won't like every forum. I guess given you're a mod there you must actually like that forum, so it's probably unrealistic to ask you to just blanketly agree with a criticism like "the moderation at RPGnet is awful." That said, this statement basically is a dismissal of the criticism entirely, by claiming that RPGnet's awful moderation is just a matter of preference. "This is just how we do things" is a surefire way to ensure nothing changes and improvements are impossible to even consider. And around here, it's always gonna get called out as such.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:48
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Cessna posted:I'm getting called out here for tone policing - but over on rpg.net, I'm getting PMs from Users for not tone policing enough. I try to balance things as best I can and learn from my mistakes, and that's all I realistically can do. There is always a middle position between two positions, and always a more extreme position beyond each of them. This does not in any way imply that the middle position is good or correct. Consider: one guy thinks all black people should be murdered, while another guy thinks all black people should simply be deported to africa. Moderator decides to maintain balance by arguing for a middle position, and someone complains that this just isn't harsh enough! That's an absurd example (but not really, all of those opinions genuinely exist) but that's to prove the point: just because you have people to either side of your position arguing that you should change it has no bearing whatsoever on whether your position is correct. Tone policing is awful in part because it's always arbitrary. RPGnet attempts to codify it with increasingly absurdly long rules statements that nevertheless fail completely because ultimately tone is just about "does this sound harsh to my ear" and that's different from one person to another.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:02
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Cessna posted:There's a saying in the military, "our SOP is written in blood." That is, every one of those silly, arbitrary rules is there because someone did something and things went badly. That's why we have so many silly things built up - because, yes, someone DID post "hey, Tangency, I'm bleeding profusely, should I get help" so we had to say "please don't ask for medical advice" in the rules. Well, you're a rules-enforcer, so you can't really shrug and say "I don't agree with these rules" while continuing to voluntarily enforce them. It's not even like your livelihood depends on this job, right? You don't disagree with these rules and how they're enforced so strongly that you'd choose to resign as a moderator rather than enforce them, basically. As for the first paragraph I quoted: a bunch of lawyers should in particular understand that good laws are not written in reaction to specific cases. By extension, good forums rules are not written in reaction to individual incidents on the forums. Ask your fellow lawyer buddies what they think of the body of American statutory law, taken as a whole. It should be illustrative of this principle.
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Feb 1, 2018 00:55
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The phrase "personal attacks" is a vague, and rules can't successfully be based on vague ideas. The issue here isn't how to finely slice what is an acceptable form of criticism and what isn't: that's always going to be tough. Rather, this is what I call a category error*: We don't like thing A Thing A belongs to Category X Everything in Category X is the same as Thing A Therefore we'll ban Category X The bold part is the fallacy. And the mistake RPGNet is making is perhaps founded on this error. To spell it out, in case it's not totally clear: the word "attack" has negative connotations, and especially when directed at another person who has feelings and rights, vs. some other entity like a company or an inanimate object to which we do not ascribe feelings or rights. However, the word "criticism" carries less negative connotations. And there are other words that are even less burdened: "critique," "analysis," "review," "debate," "deliberation," "dispute." ...."Argument." But these words are all just adjectives that are potentially applicable to the same activity. While not perfectly synonymous by dictionary definition, you'll find them all cross-referenced in any thesaurus. Especially once we accept a definition of "attack" as being not necessarily a violent physical action. So what we have here is the selection of a word with the worst possible connotative meaning, to apply to a category of actions that is inclusive of many different types of speech; and then moderation of that category as if anything that fits into the category is as unethical as its worst constituent. That's absurd, and the result is as absurd as the policy. When people get together to discuss things, differences of opinion aren't just inevitable, they're kind of the point. Healthy debate necessarily entails disagreement. But the phrase "personal attack" can be read so broadly that it includes literally any form of contradiction: if someone says X, and I think X is wrong and declare that, I have escalated the situation and initiated a conversation... a discussion... a debate... an argument... an attack. The worst of this is that there actually is a useful-for-moderation definition of "personal attack:" quote:Making of an abusive remark on or relating to one's person instead of providing evidence when examining another person's claims or comments. The key part here is "instead of providing evidence." If RPGnet wants sensible policy, I think it should avoid this imperfect, vague phrase entirely... but it could instead use this definition and probably apply it effectively. "Such-and-such game developer is poo poo." An abusive remark with no evidence. "Such-and-such game developer is poo poo, because he made X product, and that product was garbage." Abusive, but allowed, because evidence was provided. Perhaps against a separate rule about using abusive language, but not against the personal-attack rule. "Such-and-such game developer made X product, and that product was garbage." Unequivocally allowed, because evidence is provided, and no abusive language is used. Notably, the product itself is unprotected from abusive language, because it's an inanimate concept with no personal feelings. It should be noted that I am also explicitly arguing that it's a bad idea - and also impossible - to attempt to create rules that protect everyone's feelings completely from any possibility of being hurt. As I noted, all conversations that include any form of conflict - any disagreement of any nature - can hurt someone's feelings. It does not feel good to have one's preconcieved notions or convictions be challenged. As social animals, we get an emotional reward when others reinforce our beliefs, and we get an emotional penalty when others challenge our beliefs. This is probably an evolutionary adaptation to the psychology of living in groups, where beliefs and convictions often had significant impacts on survival and prosperity, social status controlling access to resources, inter-group conflict moderation, etc. I dunno, I'm not a psychologist and I'm getting into the weeds here my point is that you can't hope to universally protect people's feelings from being hurt at all. So my recommendation is to understand very clearly exactly what behavior you actually want to prevent, while avoiding descriptive words or phrases that are wildly open to interpretation or which clearly can include many kinds of behavior that you are not actually trying to prevent. "Personal attacks" is an excellent example of a phrase you should avoid. Even the suggestion I laid out above is problematic and I think going too far, because while the developer is not explicitly impugned in the third example, there is a passive implication that the developer did wrong by making a garbage product, and the moderator is forced to either ignore or moderate suggested but not explicitly stated "abuse." You're still setting yourself up for very difficult moderation tasks, and toeing a line where there is a strong chilling effect on debate and discussion that you actually want to promote or permit, due to posters' inability to clearly identify that line and the strong desire to avoid punishment for crossing it. In the end you're better off just telling people not to be huge assholes to one another, and then being as transparent as possible about handing out punishment for rear end in a top hat behavior. If someone is clearly a huge rear end in a top hat, kick them out; and the response to anyone complaining about that is "he was being a huge rear end in a top hat and had lots of warnings to stop being a huge rear end in a top hat and he refused to stop being a huge rear end in a top hat." Of course this requires you to have excellent moderators, and that's probably a bigger challenge than writing really good rules. *Formally, I think this is a combination of the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of false equivalence, but I'm not sure. As a writer, I'm chiefly concerned with semantic errors, and "category error" or "category mistake" is, strictly speaking, a type of semantic or ontological error rather than a fallacy... but exactly how you define this error is unimportant, the key thing is to understand that there is a significant error. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 20:34
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Rand Brittain posted:That's a useful analysis, although I think it's worth pointing out that the atmosphere RPGnet generally tries to encourage would probably mean discouraging using comparisons like "garbage" except in extreme circumstances, so it may not be a great example. Yeah I don't like RPGnet's atmosphere, if that's not clear, and I also think it's totally fair to refer to any company as "garbage." People need to be able to express their emotions, and that means using words that are explicitly or implicitly emotional. "That product had some flaws" - very neutral. "That product was bad" - expresses my emotional reaction better "That product was total garbage" - more emphatic, the reader can see that I feel more strongly and can infer things about the product itself based on my reaction "That product was a loving pile of poo poo, and I hope everyone involved in publishing it dies in a fire" - still yet more emphatic, and any reasonable person would suspect I do not actually want the people involved to die, because hyperbole is a common and useful rhetorical device... but they can also be very warned that this isn't just me saying that product did not suit my personal tastes but maybe would be OK for someone with different personal tastes, this is me saying that product is harmful is a shameful embarassment to the industry and demonstrates extreme unprofessionalism or bad taste or bad faith by the publishers etc. etc., but using more colloquial language that doesn't make me sound like I've been sniffing my own farts a lot. RPGnet draws the line after the second or maybe even after the first example. I find that so suppressive and obnoxious that I don't bother posting there. I could understand drawing a line between the third and fourth, although I still think that's overly protective of apparently really fragile egos. SA's line is well beyond the fourth, and I think it's totally fine and adult people can actually handle it especially because they are capable of recognizing hyperbole and even that at some level, tossing about swears and such can be a fun and harmless form of interaction between basically decent people. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 20:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The idea that expressing yourself without swearing and wishing people to die is "sniffing your own farts" is not really an argument in SA's favor. No no I'm not saying there's only two possible ways to express yourself, only that - and this is intentionally self-deprecating - long bloviating posts picking apart details using high-falutin' language is a bit fart-sniffing and I think it's cool and good to support many different people's preferred modalities of self-expression. But yes you do have to draw a line somewhere, and there is a line here at SA too. You can see this for example in that helldump was eventually shut down and the constant calls for it to return by various old-guards have been consistently turned down for many years now... at some point, you're actively promoting people being huge assholes to one another just for fun, and that's pretty gross. Even if the targets picked by helldump were, very often, highly deserving of criticism, the result was toxic. But yeah there's an unlimited variety of ways to express yourself, and that's why drawing the line between what's OK and what's not OK is hard. Using vague terms in your rules doesn't help, and making significant categorical errors by robotically applying vague terms as if they weren't vague at all is an active impediment to successful moderation.
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Feb 2, 2018 21:07
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Subjunctive posted:I think we prefer the term “natural language”. At my company there's this new push to use "natural language" in our documentation, and it's... well, it's in some cases a fine and good reaction to overly-formal writing, but in a lot of cases it's just stupid. Every industry has jargon, which outsiders can find impenetrable and difficult to navigate. But jargon terms often develop specifically as a reaction to ambiguity, and ambiguity in technical writing defeats its purpose. Rules are, of course, a type of technical writing.
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Feb 2, 2018 21:11
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I think your analysis of how to write good rules is very much on point, I just think that SA was significantly better when it limited how hard posters could fling poo poo at each other and had more of a top-down moderation approach instead of relying quite so hard on community self-policing, which is related to if not exactly identical to the question of where moderation draws the line. You're talking about culture, really, and moderation and rules definitely have large input into what a culture will be. However, culture is ultimately created (as an emergent gestalt and not really intentionally) by the participants, and it is futile for administrators to try to 100% dictate culture through rules writing or enforcement. SA's culture has changed over the years, for sure, and its usership has risen and then fallen, and those numbers may have some correlation... but there are a lot of other factors in play, so it's impossible to tease it all apart. Not to mention that any given user cannot possibly be a full participant in every subforum of SA, so every person's perception of what SA's culture even is is necessarily incomplete. My experience in mostly reading and posting in a half-dozen or so specific subforums is obviously very different from someone who mostly doesn't read any of them.
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Feb 2, 2018 21:14
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There is a difference between someone who is merely bad at time management, and someone who declares on a weekly and then monthly and then quarterly basis that he has made progress and is about to release a product on such-and-such a date, and does this for five years straight without releasing the product... all the while publicly and viciously excoriating anyone who criticizes his tardiness. At some point, a person who has a procrastination problem has to admit it to himself and publicly. At some point, attacking your critics for their demonstrably accurate criticism goes beyond being a forgivable foible. At some point, you're no longer a person who is just late on a project you've been paid for: you're just a thief. At some point - say, several years later - you have to admit that you're incapable of completing this project, apologetically refund the money you collected by any means possible, and take up a new line of work better suited to your temperament. Skarka is a lying, angry, vicious, unrepentant thief who happens to have a number of victims who prefer to take his side... perhaps out of a misguided belief that by doing so, they may some day receive the product they paid for, I dunno. Loudly pointing this out over and over serves a dual purpose: it warns newcomers who might not know better to beware a known bad actor, and it warns everyone who could become a similarly bad actor that they won't go unpunished for it. OK there's also a certain visceral satisfaction that comes from calling out bad behavior, I can admit that. It feels good to tell everyone what a lovely person Skarka is. I'm not 100% sure why.
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Feb 3, 2018 00:14
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