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JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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People mostly seem to be talking about kickstarters here so far, and it's very interesting, but I wonder if there's also some room for informed posts about how game companies that "make it" can avoid turning into capitalist juggernauts wherein the "providing products to gamers" portion of the premise disappears up the company's rear end. Basically what happens when you go too far to the other end from the people in their garages who are doing it for love of the hobby, Games Workshop being the example that's on many folks' mind right now.

(I am not the person to make these informed posts, I just am curious if there's anything to be said on that score.)

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JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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It seems perfectly consistent to me. If you believe that something like Misery Tourism is vile and has no right to exist, then it seems to me like you ought to reject someone who is essentially aiding and abetting its existence, even if it's just the layout guy.

vvv Human beings reject other human beings by association all the time even if that association is not remotely relevant to the situation at hand, I'm not sure what you find so unusual or hard to understand about this.

JerryLee fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Aug 9, 2013

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Rulebook Heavily, have you talked to Victoria Lamb? I imagine it's likely she wouldn't want to do work on commission given that she has her own successful miniature line, but perhaps she has some ideas or contacts that could be helpful.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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I can understand why the publisher would sigh, hold their nose and go to press/molding/whatever even after an artist or sculptor takes a poo poo all over the job description, but how does the artist still have a job afterwards?

To be clear, I'm talking about 500-pound gorillas like WOTC dealing with their artists here.

JerryLee fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Aug 16, 2013

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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neonchameleon posted:

Good, fast, cheap. Pick two - and cheap is a given for small companies. If the artist is reliable and cheap that's enough.

Yeah I was thinking of my post in the context of relative giants like WOTC, but I should have been more clear since a significant part of the conversation was still about small timers. I edited it, sorry.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Mimir posted:

This is why you should only ever be inspired by public domain works.

Stay tuned for my upcoming Dickensian tactical miniature game, A Tale of Two Factions, and an exciting new fantasy RPG, The Quest of Iranon. That second one is based off the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, best known as we all know for his pre-1923 fantasies about "The Dreamlands" and also some Edgar Allan Poe stuff.

I legit like Lovecraft's Dreamlands stuff more than his fishpeople/tentacles stuff sometimes, so this wouldn't suit me wrong at all. :allears:

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Serious question, is there any reasonably sized game company that's just awesome to work for, even for the guys down in the trenches?

When you see reports from something like Wizards that make it seem like an awesome zany company to work for, it's usually still just a dozen or so folks near the top of the company who have made it to the point where Mark Rosewater gushes about them in his column and I have to assume that a majority of the folks in the org chart never see anything like that.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Rulebook Heavily posted:

I got a bunch of anonymous hate and abuse for selling a 64-page full art supplement with a color cover, internal hyperlinking table of contents and index, a share-alike creative commons license with no watermarking in the pdf and an upcoming PoD version for 7.50$. Most wanted it cheaper. A few said I was a terrible person for not simply giving it away to everyone for free and asking for any money at all. You can see it has an award for being a bestseller on its site, and it still hasn't made its cost back in sales. A post made by Fred Hicks even inspired me to speak out about it. (And all credit due to Hicks for taking a stance.)

If everyone could be convinced that the hobby shouldn't be on a constant hunger-and-shoestring budget, I'd be the first to fully embrace working in it. But open gaming licenses and PWYW models have created new expectations, and those expectations are that people will do work for them for free or else.

Do you think this has the same etiology as FFG not paying their employees a living wage for reasonable hours though? I mean, they (or Wizards, or GW, or) are the ones selling the $30-50 and up rulebooks, and there isn't the sort of expectation that there is with tiny indie stuff that it be given away for free or PWYWed--plenty of people will bitch endlessly about the rising price of Magic or 40K (:q:) but they generally don't literally feel entitled to have it given to them for free, or if they do, they're the far lunatic fringe.

I'm not trying to say that your situation and ones like it aren't legit unto themselves, I'm just trying to figure out if it's actually related to a discussion about toxic employment practices at the large(r) companies, which seems to me as though it's more closely connected to capitalist corporate culture than it is to gamers expecting things for free.

e: to put it another way, if I want to support someone writing a PDF or casting minis in their garage, it's as simple as buying from them, but supporting the fine folks who actually make larger games is a much iffier proposition because when I buy some $40 space marines or a $50 rulebook I have no way of knowing whether they actually get more than pennies on the dollar, if that.

JerryLee fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Apr 20, 2014

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Kai Tave posted:

It's funny because GW doesn't actively cater to breast-obsessed nerds the way these Kickstarter projects do and while they as a company have gotten some hard knocks lately it's hard to deny that GW hasn't been remarkably successful with a game that doesn't plaster lovingly-sculpted anime tits all over their products.

I'm not trying to say that GW is super-awesome about getting women invested in the tabletop gaming hobby because GW's approach largely seems to be ignoring that women actually exist (unless they're space elfs maybe), but nonetheless I think the idea that your wargame needs to have loads of tits to sell well and that's just the way of the world is kind of specious.

Anecdotally, I've talked to at least one WMH-playing woman who straight up said that she played that game because the 40K community was groggy, misogynistic and toxic whereas the WMH one was laid back and not creepy. There isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 relationship between titty art and a regressive culture surrounding a game (not that you said in so many words that there was).

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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moths posted:

The elephants in the room are Kingdom Death and its $2,000,000+ Kickstarter, Relic Knight's $900,000 kickstarter, and Toughest Girls in the Galaxy with almost $700,000. Dungeon World and Eclipse Phase combined pulled in just about $200,000 (10x less than Kingdom Death).

Did you account for the fact that the first three are minis products and the latter two aren't? Doesn't that skew the cost upwards? I mean, it's still a problem insofar as there's $2,000,000 worth of interest in Kingdom Death, but if you're trying to get a headcount it's not the best metric.


quote:

The issue ultimately has more to do with how female characters are depicted rather than how naked they are. Kingdom Death and Warmachine both have inappropriately-dressed-for-combat women figures. In WMH they're powerful badass commanders of mighty armies, and in KD they're literally furniture. Going forward, that distinction will make more of a difference than any kind of cleavage / buttcheek ratio.

This is the sort of thinking I do about this subject, but you put it better than I have. This isn't to say that all else being equal, all the men being sensibly dressed and all the women having boob windows isn't a problem, but one always has to look at the entire outcome rather than focusing on any one thing as a progressive shibboleth.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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A good compromise might be to have a cuirass that's sculpted with some noticeable additional room in the chest, but without each "cup" or the cleavage being lovingly, individually sculpted.

I saw an article once where the point was made that having sculpted cleavage on a breastplate would actually channel the force of blows inwards to a point and break your sternum, and I think that's a decent guiding principle to keep in mind.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Kai Tave posted:

The thing is the impracticality of boobplate as actual armor has been pointed out and re-pointed out, and not once have I ever seen someone go "oh man, I didn't know that, now I have to go back and redo all my art so it makes more sense, thanks."

I'm not saying "it's hopeless so shut up," I'm just saying that in the case of boobplate I don't think the people sculpting and/or drawing it think it's feasible or practical, they're doing it because they think it looks cool or sexy. Arguments about practicality are just going to make them shrug or reach for "it's fantasy/sci-fi so whatever" as an excuse and go right on with it.

Well, the specific implied question was 'how do we signal the physical sex of the model without boobplate or midriff' and my answer was to make extra room in the chest but without deathtrap cups/cleavage.

As you say, it's a somewhat academic question if we assume that no one wants to move away from exploitative armor in the first place.

As another answer to the question, if you look at something like Victoria's new "Arcadian" squads (which are amazing and I'm going to search my couch cushions over the next few months until I have $50 for a female squad) you can see that there are differences in the proportions of the males vs. the females. It's not that obvious unless you have two models from the same line right next to each other, but maybe that's all right?

JerryLee fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Apr 21, 2014

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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moths posted:

It's obviously not 1:1 between RPGs and minis products, but there's enough overlap that it's essentially the same community. That is to say we could split hairs until it's as micro-compartmentalized as the metal community, but outside of a game store nobody differentiates between a TCG, RPG, or miniatures game.

Well, the point isn't that they're spheres of interest utterly alien to each other, the point is that people might spend vastly different amounts of money in one stroke for miniatures (especially high-end miniatures like Kingdom Death) than for roleplaying systems and supplements, so a miniatures kickstarter making 10 times as much as an RPG doesn't necessarily indicate that it enjoys 10 times the audience. It seemed like that might be a misconception that was at work.

If your point is that idiot game company presidents are going to look at the $2M figure independently of context and think that that raw amount of money is because of tits rather than because of the price points of exquisitely sculpted resin statues, then fair enough.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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adhuin posted:

Those are just white marines in a black-face!

Reminder that they actually had Salamanders (or, more accurately, most/all of their recruiting population) being ethnically black, then walked that back and now they're magic geneseed jet black instead. e: maybe it always had something to do with the expression of the geneseed but the point was it actually came out as African racial features, not blackface.

For as bad as it is when dumb stuff just gets made up and survives as a legacy even after we should know better, it's depressing when game companies actively walk stuff back.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Keep on finding that dark cloud to go around the silver lining, goons.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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If a goon encountered a succubus IRL, they'd immediately start indignantly lecturing her about how they didn't want to be a part of a fuckmonster game, and what sort of creep did she think they were, until she got bored and went away.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Ratpick posted:

Why does there even need to be an evil sexmonster in D&D? If you don't count any of the skeevy stuff from third party sourcebooks, the succubus/incubus is the only instance in D&D where intimacy ever comes up mechanically and even then it's "Welp, you lose a level." The only thing that leads to is players being constantly paranoid about being intimate with NPCs, because there's always the off chance that it's a life-destroying demon. Also, because succubi are more prominently presented in the game than incubi, it easily leads into the old "all women are potentially seductive she-devils" cliche, which is just tired and sexist.

D&D is just not generally suited to gameplay that explores sex and/or sexuality on a meaningful manner, and the fact that the game features a sexmonster that sucks the life out of you further discourages any intimacy in the game.

Also, why would a monster that is all about enticing people to the dark side with the power of their sexuality actually drain the life out of their victims in intimate moment? Wouldn't they want to keep their victims alive so as to be able to tempt them further?

When a notsex demon kills a player and sends their soul to hell, why do we just have them roll up a new character instead of roleplaying the eternity of torment they're suffering?

The answer is that we can have recognizable tropes without needing to :regd08: them all to their logical conclusions in game time.

I agree with you that incubi and succubi should be treated equally except for physical gender, and even be the same entry in the way that, for example, you wouldn't expect male and female bandits to be differentiated; and that maybe there are further refinements that could be made within any given system! I think that until the representation of sexdemons in the MM or in published adventures gets excessive (aren't we mostly just talking about one adventure path here, still?) that most games are relatively safe from excessive sexdemonry, unless you play with a whizzard in which case that's a problem you should probably address in any case.

JerryLee fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jul 26, 2014

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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It seems like the non-whizzard way to use a succubus (or at least the salient features that make her a succubus) would be as a sociopolitical plot element, in the sense that there's a foocubus who's corrupted the ruler of the kingdom or whatever, but doesn't try to actually kill the players by snu-snu. "Priming the players to avoid all sex" is irrelevant if the PC's sex lives aren't a topic of discussion anyway. Alternatively, it could become a more general sort of influence/mind control demon.

I don't own the Pathfinder MM and don't have my old 3.0 ones handy, so I have no real recollection of how far short the typical succubus falls of this more reasonable proposal. Based on the conversations in this thread my guess is pretty far, but on the other hand I sometimes have trouble picking actual realistic assessments apart from some goons' eagerness to prove that they are not only not-whizzards, but the shining incorruptible exemplars of anti-whizzardry.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Kai Tave posted:

Yeah, the thing about this approach is, well, this could be done with any sort of demon, or evil wizard or whatever for that matter. I'm not saying it's a bad approach, but the defining trait that makes a succubus a succubus is boning. That's sort of their whole deal (insofar as myth/legend goes, not necessarily in terms of pure elfgame mechanics, though succubi in RPGs almost always have some kind of charm and mind-whammy stuff and having sex with them is a bad idea).

Yeah, I don't disagree with you there--my point is more 'only bad DMs [or ill-written adventure paths, as the case may be] think that player-succubi boning must ensue simply because they are part of hell's portfolio'--none of which is to say that the core mechanics or fluff surrounding succubi are as good as they need to be.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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The problem with D&D, in my opinion, is that it isn't based on European values.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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In addition to everything else, the consumer can assume (or ought to be able to assume) that a giant RPG book is going to be a pretty solid investment in entertainment for at least the next few years.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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inklesspen posted:

I've been making the worst investments ever, then, if you count all the books I bought and never got to play.

Me too, quite frankly, but at that point it's on us. :v:

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Kai Tave posted:

That is some ridiculously tortured logic.

It... seems relatively straightforward to me? He's using two different things as an example of how the price in dollars can stay roughly the same or even go down despite inflation, because there are more things than inflation that affect the price (like the state of the art making it cheaper to create and distribute things). You can argue that it doesn't apply to elfgame books (ideally providing specific reasons) but that doesn't make the logic tortured.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Kai Tave posted:

"A top of the line computer game in 1980 cost $40 and therefore if a computer game released in 2015 using 1980s standards for quality costs just $40 then inflation must not be that big a deal" isn't a train of logic that makes that grogpost's argument any less dumb.

Well, it might not have been what they said, but it's not like you can't also get games released to 2015 standards for $40.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Leperflesh posted:

I am of the opinion that 4E was a huge leap forward for D&D, but it was also remarkably divisive. Frankly I think the criticism there should't be "4E went too far in a weird direction" which alienated groggy D&D players, but rather, "4E didn't go far enough in a new direction" to make it wholly new and good. All of the parts of 4E that I dislike are parts that attempted to retain "traditional" 3e mechanics and tropes. OK, skill challenges also didn't work, and there were some problems with monster math that needed tweaking, but these things weren't that hard to fix. I'm talking more along the lines of, why do we still have ability scores? Why do we even have to have character classes, now that powers are cross-class balanced and everything is either a power or a feat? That kind of thing.

Somehow I've never seen this sort of analysis advanced before, and now that I have it's making a significant amount of sense. I never really liked what 4E made of D&D, but alternate systems like Dungeon World or whatever have much more appeal to me than 4E ended up having, and putting it in terms of 4E not being able to decide whether it was fish or fowl is something that could really help to explain that for me.

I'd go a bit further and say that the setting, especially the cosmology, suffered from the exact same sort of problem. They came in with a CHANGE EVERYTHING attitude like you'd see being satirized by the character of a middle manager in a Dilbert cartoon, but they weren't actually willing to creatively cash the check that they'd written. So now the outer planes are planets or something but they still have to have all the same races and factions of outsiders shoehorned in because apparently players won't know what to do if they can't summon a barbazuBearded Devil anymore. The gods have to be all/mostly the same, etc. etc. Compare it to something like 13th Age which not only created a new cosmology, world premise, etc. but did it a way that drives the sort of game they want to create.

So yeah, the idea that 4E was some sort of half-baked abomination (which is not to say you can't prefer it to 3E, but it would require that you hate 3E more than I did) makes increasingly more sense as I think about it.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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I don't think that fracturing the market is inherently a bad thing except insofar as there is a practical limit to the publishers' investments in making games with decent production values, and to the pool of players upon which you can draw to find a game with people who share your interests (especially if you're not into PbP or roll20 type gaming)... which unfortunately is to say it is sort of a bad thing in practice, except forcing people to all play the same system together and let half of them be more or less miserable isn't a solution either so what can you do?

The other reason why fracturing can be considered a bad thing is because it gives certain types of people on both sides of the aisle something to swing their figurative dicks (or strapons, I guess) around about, but those sorts of people are going to do that no matter what. If it wasn't editions they'd just be grogging even harder than they already do about gender minorities or whatever.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Misandu posted:

I think you just haven't been exposed to enough hard core OSR/3.X fanatics.

Speaking for myself, I've seen some of the most :stonk: examples in the grogs.txt thread... and I've also seen a lot of really offputting rhetoric from the other side.

I can look at individual examples of OSR or 3E grognards and go "whoa that's pretty drat toxic" but from my point of view, and probably this is because I mostly stay on SA, the 4E/whatever newer systems fans don't do a great job on average of rising above the edition warring rather than turning around and making GBS threads back on anyone who enjoys the older systems. One good thing I can say about the edition warriors for the newer editions is that they seemingly tend to be less correlated with other, more harmful sorts of toxicity, and that's not irrelevant, but "hmm, at least they're less misogynist" is pretty faint praise in my book.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Everblight posted:

Life is unhappy! :kratos: That's why it's filled with marriages, graduations, births and retirements!

All of which can be unhappy in the right context! :iamafag:

But seriously, I happen to be rereading The Power of Myth just at the moment, and Campbell talks about the role of sacrifice in lending power to a narrative, but at the exact same time he's talking about how that sacrifice ultimately leads to the achievement of bliss/transcendence. It's not supposed to all be grimdark life-is-horrible poo poo, people!

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Effectronica posted:

Every single time someone even vaguely academic turns their gaze upon role-playing games, the thing that they identify as the defining characteristic is that an RPG allows players to attempt anything, in principle. This is not something any video game can even attempt to approach, and anything that could would arguably no longer be a video game anymore. Saying that TTRPGs occupy the same headspace as videogames doesn't just include board games (and with them wargames and card games), but probably conflates most of our leisure activities. But nobody argues that TTRPGs have to compete with TV.

I think that some video games (specifically, the ones that enable and encourage heavy modding) aspire to the same attempt-anything ideal. The difference is that in a CRPG, it's easier said than done, whereas in TTRPGs, it's often literally as easily done as said. :v:

Something like Skyrim with all its mods is on the road there as far as videogame-world customization. There just needs to be a leap forward in the accessibility so that I'm not waiting 1-4 years after the release of a game for it to become what I really wanted it to be. I think someday that leap will be here and it'll be really cool. I mean yeah, we all wring our hands about how people just use Second Life to indulge their weird fetishes, but we wring our hands about the same sorts of things in TTRPGs so I think it's a wash.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Effectronica posted:

No matter how many mods I pile on top of Fallout: New Vegas, I will always be able to come up with something the game doesn't allow me to do, until the map becomes the territory and the simulation becomes the real. TTRPGs don't have this problem because they're improvisational.

My point is that making CRPGs "improvisational" in this sense is essentially just a technical/engine limitation and that those can be overcome as technologies and design philosophies advance. We may not ever be able to improvise in a CRPG with exactly the same ease as we can do so in a TTRPG but I fully expect them to converge until CRPGs can scratch that itch for most practical purposes.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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moths posted:

Part of me wonders if someone at GW actually did a half-assed market research and learned that many figures never see play. So from that perspective, money spent developing a game is almost entirely worthless. The only rules that matter (from a business angle) are the force organization charts, because they tell customers how many figures they can buy. (Which, coincidentally, all say "any number of models" now...)
\
:tinfoil:

They are certainly correct that I spend much more time modeling with their products (obtained secondhand or from communism) than I do playing them.

Unfortunately, it's because the game in which I would play them is so toxic and lovely!

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Personal anecdote & reflection time:

I am someone who splashed around in the shallow end of the hobby with 2E D&D, really went all-in on 3.x and enjoyed it a ton for what it was, tried 4E but never really found myself hooked by it even though I could recognize its mechanical upsides. I never hated 4E fans or anything but if you'd made me take a side in the edition wars, I would have had to go with 3.x/Pathfinder.

Recently I've picked up Dungeon World and begin looking into it and I'm already really enamored with it. Now, if you went by stereotypes, you wouldn't expect someone to follow the pattern "loved 3E, meh on 4E, loves the looks of DW," to say the least. Which invites me to ask myself the question: Why?

I've decided--and this was something I already knew for most purposes, but having another data point in DW has really helped cement it--that what I loved about 3.x, at least by the time I'd bought way too many splats, was that it held out the promise of being able to do nearly anything, especially if you took third-party stuff into account too. Would it blow up horribly in execution if you weren't careful? Sure. I never really encountered that, which in retrospect was part luck and part the way we ran our games. But anyway, the promise of doing whatever you wanted was there. And that's what DW has offered to me again, except this time I don't need to hunt down which combination of books will give me the full rules for playing a half-gnoll half-ogre alienist, I can just write myself a playbook. I can even use the fluff from my old books. Pretty cool.

4E alienated me when it broke compatibility with all my accumulated 3.x resources and didn't give me any immediate way to replace them. Couldn't buy a book for <concept> because it wasn't out yet by the time I got disenchanted with the new system. Couldn't easily homebrew or port <concept> from the old system because, for all the ways it streamlined things, 4E still had more than enough crunch that it felt like a burden to brew stuff up if it wasn't very easy to base off of something they printed in the first round of core books.

If 4E had been DW-level simple to brew stuff for, or if they had managed to update the rules in a way that made it fully straightforward to port stuff from 3E (or even just not completely broken compatibility in the first place) it might have been a different story. It was neither, so they lost me. C'est la vie.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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I don't have that much of a problem with it in the end, because she clearly explains early on in the piece why she considers it to be terrorism in the technical sense. You may or may not still disagree with it, but the author's done their due diligence to articulate themselves. That's how usage changes occur and neologisms become legitimate: by people promoting their use to describe a phenomenon that (in their opinion) nothing else describes well enough.

I might not have used it in the title, though, because for better or for worse it's relatively common for people to have developed an allergy to sensationalist-sounding language in social media, and you don't want to turn off otherwise sympathetic readers just because you initially appear to not be using language correctly.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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We (as a society) should, of course, apply standards of proof and reasonable doubt to any accusation of criminal behavior. I hope no reasonable person is arguing against that. The problem here (and it's a problem, of course, in society as a whole, including gaming) seems to be that the victim's claims are not even being taken seriously or followed up on by the authorities whose responsibility it is to do so.

e: Talking, of course, about the actual criminal behavior and not the toxic but non-criminal aspects of nerd culture.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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I can understand that he wants to do everything legally and by the book, especially where serious criminal activity is alleged. He doesn't really do himself any favors by implying that you have to be a sexist pig at the office in order to be poorly handling concerns about misogyny, but if you took out that dumb language, the actual facts of his alleged response (please talk to our lawyer who will help you take the proper legal action) is pretty unobjectionable.

The legal authorities appear to be poo poo about it, if we go by her allegations, but that's not the fault of the guy at Wyrd.

If I'm missing something, please point it out.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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Good responses. I can completely agree that he came off as an unprofessional dick and probably should have let his lawyer make the statement, especially since he makes such a big deal out of having a lawyer to handle it.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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While it's true that people sometimes overdramatize or misremember things to their own benefit, I think that when determining how much it should worry you, you have to ask what the endgame is, what the cost or downside of taking them at their word would be. Right now, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like the only sorts of things being asked for is that nerd culture not harass people (much less send them death threats), not do things that make other users of a public space intensely uncomfortable, not marginalize women and minorities out of the hobby, etc.

If it ever comes to the point that we're leading a satanic-panic-style witch hunt against folks, sure, then you can point to unreliable memories as an actual relevant problem. For whatever it's worth, I do get an uncomfortable vibe when listening to some of the more... enthusiastic dogpilers in internet spaces, such that they come off to me as the sort of people who would be on the wrong side of such witch hunts. I do think it's something we need to be on guard against, just because humans aren't good about things like that. I also think that in general it's important to be as intellectually honest as possible, just out of principle. But please don't use the justifiable fear of witchhunts as an excuse to delegitimize or derail from perfectly reasonable requests like the ones in my previous paragraph.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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There's also 'is the person describing women in a rhetorically different way than men?' which is the big thing for me. If someone is consistently using 'males' and 'females,' then yeah, okay, that might sound a little bit weird, but it's probably just a personal quirk and not a shibboleth for sexism (not to say their utterances can't be sexist for other reasons). If they're saying 'men' and 'females,' in the same breath, then sure, sound the red alert.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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"I'm glad Wizards of the Coast is working to protect my investment in Magic cards," Tom said reservedly.

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JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

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"Let's post pictures of our pets! That's always a fun derail," Tom said cattily.

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