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rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Plague of Hats posted:

While "maybe we'll pay you, I guess" is unconscionable, I don't think RPGs as an industry can sustain actual fair pay. Not before ameliorating the larger problem of stagnant wages and rising costs for the whole economy.

The old line is if you can't pay your employees properly, you shouldn't have them. This kind of talk makes me think the TG industry isn't something that really should exist.

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rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
I think GW's problems are pretty self-inflicted, and not in the "they treat vets badly" sort of way. The primary issue is their seeming inability to take people's money in exchange for product. Even excluding the specialist games and bits (the latter which I'm not sure made them much money) just the "core" GW stuff (40K & WFB boxed sets) are getting harder for shops to get. Basic plastic kits like Kroot (a common part of Tau armies) and Wave Serpents (a common Eldar troop transport), and all finecast after the initial wave are now not part of the standard stocking plan. What this means is that a) the margin for an FLGS is lower on this stuff, and b) when it does arrive it's in an ugly nondescript box with a small label in the corner, making it an eyesore on the shelf. Hell, the Kroot just now come in a plastic bag. And it doesn't even force people into GW's shops, because that stuff isn't there and supposedly you can't special order from a GW shop anymore (can't test this since there's no local GW to me) It's like they're actively trying to not sell parts of their lines, which makes zero sense to me-- if these things had to be designed it would be one thing, but they had these boxes up until a few months to a year ago, and these products didn't change after their books where released (i.e. same models same counts since they were created) The box art doesn't match the new stuff GW is putting out, but neither does the blank white box, so there's no difference there.

If you're selling something that's as visual as a miniature, doesn't putting a picture on the box make sense, especially since the design work has already been done and the money spent on it? Actively trying to not sell certain boxes is something that makes zero sense to me, and can't be good for their bottom line. The squatting (cancellation) of a couple of WFB lines (Bretts, Khemri, Beastmen) is rumored and sucks, but at least that means you're cutting out lines that don't sell, vice not selling half the line you already have in production.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

signalnoise posted:

Yeah I am a firm believer that exclusion is a terrible way to cause cultural change. It's better to be someone's friend and just nudge them in the right direction repeatedly, but in a manner that isn't off-putting. To really get some change you have to engage the people you disagree with.

Anyway I am curious to see what people think of this mini is the context of this conversation:



Is this ok?

Boob armour is stupid in general, but I think this is okay as a figure and not in any way exploitative. The entire female Dreadball team seems that way to me-- boobplate is dumb, but I get that it's about the only way to make your female figures look different.

I rather like those Victoria Lamb not-IG female troopers. They really show off the with somewhat realistic armour, the only difference between male and female characters should be the heads. Realistically proportioned, not in any way sexy, but very solid and nice looking figures. GW and lots of other miniatures companies could learn a lot from this.

EDIT: On your main issue, I agree that engaging with the people saying stuff usually is incredibly effective. I've been calling out people on the whole gay/fag/homo thing at the new shop I've been going to, and it's been effective in getting it not said in my presence at least. People are a lot more willing to be cool with the scenario when they're dealing with a real person who treats them with respect and not some paper-thin stereotype.

rkajdi fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Apr 20, 2014

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Bieeardo posted:

Unless there are separate stats for Victor and Victoria, or equally goofy, sweeping rules based on a mini's gender, there really isn't any point to sculpting a pair of 28mm scale L'eggs containers onto a mini's chest.

Agree completely. Awhile ago (before I took a careful look at the new book and saw it was poo poo) I had an idea about doing a Sisters of Battle army using conversions. No boobplates, just space marine armour cut down to fit a small frame (they aren't genetically engineered supermen like marines) and female heads with a green stuffed bowl cut. I thought it would look nice and more realistically female, but the number of dumb comment some people gave about that pretty much showed it would be an uphill fight to use them most places.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

JerryLee posted:

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.

The problem with other races in 40K is somewhat like the problem of women, at least from a practical perspective. For most of the space marines out there, a black or woman marine should look 100% the same since the figures have sealed opaque helmets. For IG/AM armies, Chaos Cultists, and Dark Eldar, I would totally go with mixed races and sexes. everything else is in sealed armour or so completely alien that it doesn't matter-- i.e. Tau, Orks, Tyranids, ect.

I never liked the idea of Salamanders as the "black" chapter, because I'm pretty skeptical that any planet would be racially homogenous after colonization. So every chapter should have a variety of skin tones, even though that usually means a token at best since you only have 3-4 models with bare skin per army. Same thing for Guard Regiments, nothing chaps my as quite like ghettoizing all the Mongolian-looking guys to one regiment, all the blacks to another, ect. An integrated military has been a thing for over 50 years now, we should expect something similar from our wargames.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Siivola posted:

If I recall correctly, there's a few female torsos per a box of Eldar Guardians (that is, the basic footsoldiers). Tau uniforms are too baggy and armored to tell, but I'm pretty sure there's an Ethereal model with clearly female body features.

Edit: Turns out I was kinda wrong on the Tau, both of the generic Ethereal models are kinda ambiguous. On the other hand, I was surprised how sensible both genders of the Dark Eldar Wyches are.

Yeah, I did forget about guardians. Mainly because I hate boobplates with a passion.

The only female Tau I think of is Shadowsun. And the only way you can tell is she has the option for an unarmoured head. Otherwise, she's basically old school Samus.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Kai Tave posted:

I do agree with Leperflesh that you should aim for a flat project payout of some sort rather than a per-word arrangement, as it seems that what you're after isn't just someone writing up an article but actually converting a game from one system to another, which in addition to being a degree of work in and of itself isn't the sort of thing you want padded out with extra wordcount if you can avoid it.

The other issue is that for PF stuff (a decent chunk of the industry right now) is incredibly complex. A lot of what you're paying for with a 3.5/PF product is stat blocks, and those take a lot of time to develop. Enough that it turned me off to DMing when it was the only game in town. Unless a computerized method has been developed for it, it takes a long time to come up with those statblocks. The same could be said for every rules heavy system.

I have an old acquaintance who's trying to do rules neutral adventures (no plug since I don't that's kosher here) that don't have stats in them. I think they'll do poorly since a lot of what people pay for is the mechanics of a system, but I also understand why he's not bothering with having things statted up for systems that are heavy and aren't particularly balanced (so really have no need for the heaviness)

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

potatocubed posted:

Tournament of Rapists bollocks

You can't drop a bomb like this without an explanation or a link.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Kurieg posted:

Okay

Chris Fields, who's rather infamous in the Fatal and Friends thread for his racist, misogynistic, and scatalogical d20 supplement "Black Tokyo" released a product on DTRPG under the name "Tournament of Rapists" with the following blurb.


He's probably released worse, but he made a few mistakes this time. A) He put up a low res preview copy but didn't enable a "First few pages PDF preview" so no one could actually tell what the book was about. B) He accidentally set the price at $599 USD rather than $5.99 USD and probably the most damning. C) he released it without properly tagging it as adult content, and since his publisher at the time was in good standing with OBS, it got scooped up by one of OBS' bots and preview copies were sent to some members of the gaming press.

It blew up from there, with both fields and his publisher defending it as a "Monster Manual" and what you're actually supposed to do is kill all these people for being horrible monsters, but there was no way for anyone to know this without actually buying the book. Relevant to this discussion, however, is people were threatening to leave DTRPG on both sides, either if the book was taken down or if it wasn't, people were claiming freedom of speech, etc, etc, etc. But what it really brought to light is that there's really only one marketplace for gaming PDFs online and OBS has a monopoly on it. Also that Wieck shouldn't be allowed near twitter again.


Christ, that's pretty bad. So what was the final outcome of the whole thing? Because it goes from really positive to really negative depending on if the sole online publisher is okay with creeper stuff on their portal or not. Realistically a gatekeeper to keep the scum end of the hobby from being able to effectively get their product to market is nothing but a positive thing. The internet/digital publishing is why we've had as many FATAL-lites as we have, so if we can put that genie back in the bottle it would be incredible.

As far as the 5E OGL goes, can't say I see it as a good thing at all. I get that WotC desperately needs adventures written for 5E, but the one thing that the current game has going for it is how closed/dead it is. You don't have a constant sourcebook treadmill when you only have 0-2 books come out a year. If you allow OGL glut 2.0, you're going to see a pile of poorly designed stuff and fantasy heartbreakers completely drowning out the official releases. But since the only stuff WotC seems to put out are adventures and core books, that might be what they are going for.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Kurieg posted:

OBS theoretically set up a pipeline by which people can report problematic books that will get reviewed and maybe taken down. I don't think it's actually been tested yet.

That's awesome, but I worry about abuse. As in, a bunch of gamer MRAs filing false reports on whoever is their current "SJW ruining our hobby" and getting stuff taken down or demonetized. Considering it's a small community and nerds are the worst, it seems like a plausible thing. The proper answer is actually reading and vetting what you are selling on your platform, but a lot of the e-commerce stuff I've seen is as low-effort as possible.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

NutritiousSnack posted:

If FATAL 2.0 or Black Toyko are put on there, it's going to get taken down. Book of Erotic Fantasy 5e, Old World of Darkness: Native American Stereotypes, MAID 2, and StoryGame: with some gross elements like MonsterHearts or Bliss Stage aren't. This is legitimately good in my book.

I dunno about that. I'd be fine with low level creeper stuff like BoEF and Cthulhutech or WoD: Book of NA/Roma Slurs simply not having a place to distribute anymore. But I'm one of those dirty types who actually wants the hobby to be a little more legitimate, and the only way to do that is to not be selling creeper fetish/racist poo poo in normal places.

Flavivirus posted:

I can see a lot of teething problems in the DMG's future. In particular, one which just occurred to me - there doesn't seem to be anything stopping you grabbing someone else's product and putting it straight back up at a lower price. Now I can see that being stamped down on, but what if you use a bunch of fan-generated subclasses in an big DMG supplement and provide a better deal to buy them that way? Surely there'll end up being some kind of race to 0, given that this makes everything uploaded there one step removed from being pay what you want?

Couldn't the same thing have been done with OGL 1? If you can rope off your own stuff like you could previously, it's not a big deal. All the halfway respectable places don't put anything back into the pot that's useful to anyone else, so only the rubes get screwed by this. It sucks, but it might help make sure that a real glut doesn't happen and the amateurs stay on the sidelines.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Mors Rattus posted:

Defensive much?

You can say that, but the number of gamer guys I see using "females" as the way to describe a woman in common conversation that also have highly regressive ideas about how to treat women is too high to ignore completely. Though I'd think it's just that there are a lot of gamers in the armed forces, and that's the common lingo for women there rather than anything else.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Gerund posted:

the act of banning women from Hearthstone tournaments wasn't immediately laughed out of the room.

As a filthy casual freeloader in Hearthstone, I had no idea this was even brought up seriously. Please tell me Blizzard laughed the idea out of the room after the idiot bro community failed to.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

The Black Stones posted:

"I was told that since the report was taken over the phone, and because they would not be investigating the crime"

Bull. loving. poo poo.

From the sounds of it quite a lot of stuff was stolen. At the very least they would send someone out to get a full on proper report and maybe while they wouldn't go out and send out cops and dust for prints and poo poo, they would probably put pawn shops on notice about a bunch of the stuff stolen so they can be on alert.

That story sounds 100% like someone figured out a way to scam people. Nobody should trust that.

Real Story time here on why to do this:

I had a gun case of figure stolen out of my car one time. Had a bunch of old school daemons from WFB 5E, which makes the figures a pain to ever get back and worth a decent amount, ~$1000 with ebay prices. I ended up making a police report for the stuff as a way to keep the option open for an insurance claim, which I ended up not making due to the dollar difference in stuff. However, I did get a call within about a month from the cops about some stuff that showed up that they though might be the same stuff. Turns out the guy taking the stuff open the case about a block later, realized it wasn't a gun, and tossed it on a neighbor's lawn. He had zero idea what the stuff was, but figured that effort was put into painting them, and turned them into the cops after nobody came by to claim them.

There is zero chance this guy put in a police report, or that he was told that by the cops. The police might not do a major investigation, but they aren't just tossing the paperwork in the trash.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Chill la Chill posted:

I enjoyed the whole post but especially this. I've habitually left RPG circles these last couple years cuz of this poo poo. It's entirely too boring and when I realize the GM's doing it, I pretty much just leave the group and do other stuff like weeb out or paint minis again. Paranoia and star wars were the only fun RPs I've done recently and a lot of that was our GM letting us try to recruit stormtroopers.

Yeah, the last time I ran D&D, I specifically tried to not have black and white villains in the campaign. It worked rather well (the only things that came off as not morally complex were "natural" adversaries like bears or stirges) and drat if it didn't work well. I had to stat up everything initially as a possible adversary, but once you saw the way the group ended up seeing conflicts, you could start to see which way things were going to fall. And of course it allows for the flipping of tables when they find out their allies might do something that makes them a little uncomfortable. Making people actually think about the stuff instead of just smiting the obvious bad guy every time makes for some very interesting play on both sides of the screen, since there's not much better than having your expectations about the players you have be turned 180 degrees.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Leperflesh posted:

There's room for that kind of game, rkajdi (and it's the kind of game I want to play, incidentally), but there's also a place for players who just want a very familiar fantasy setting with cartoon ethics where you can go to town on some orcs without having to feel guilty or examine your motives.

But there's obviously been a glut of the latter type for 30 years now, so I do agree that it'd be nice to have more exploration of the former. Unfortunately, it seems like a number of attempts at a more "mature" grey areas type game, can't quite help themselves not be horrible shitbags and throw in rape, torture, misogyny, etc. into the mix, because "mature themes" has to mean that to some people.

Yeah, the constant conflation of any level of moral complexity with having piles of disgusting non-consentual sex stuff has been a problem for all of nerd culture. I have serious reservations about both the stories you listed strictly because they use rape as a way to further the plot. While I'm sure there are people in the nerd community that could use sexual assault as a positive thing to bring up to provoke real discussion, I've never actually seen it used that way in a game ever. My goal has also been to explicitly stay away from sex unless it's drug in by a player specifically and even then try to keep it as minimized in the game as possible. I've never seen it handled very well at the table, and I just avoid it as a rule since I don't think I could handle it all the effectively.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

adhuin posted:

But it does matter. It takes much more dedication and courage to be *insert cause*, if society will beat you / lock you up / kill you for it than just going with the flow.

On reverse, it doesn't take much courage for me to announce that I'm supportive of Unions, Gay and minority rights. Hundred years ago I would be in big trouble for those beliefs. Or more likely I would have just kept my mouth shut/adopted more mainstream attitude to survive.

Historically, this is correct. But part of the problem of hero worship is the tendency to gloss over these flaws, and even attempt to revive these positions by using the whole "X was a Good Person (TM) and believed in [regressive trash], so it can't be that bad" line. Gaming's not any worse with this than general culture, but it also isn't any better. The cult of Gygax is a great example of this-- Gygax helped make a popular game, but in retrospect he had a lot of very bad ideas about gaming, and people in general. And because of our pretty crappy personality cult culture (plus the loser gamers getting angry that decent people are starting to enter the hobby) his ideas get drug out in TYOOL 2016, instead of just looking it at as a relic of his backwards time and not worthy of a second look.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

quote:

I found D&D to be almost illiterate, poorly organized and not worth my trouble to sort out.

A very true thing. I remember as a kid trying to learn AD&D 1E from the DMG (this was in the late 80s) and thinking how poorly written it was as an instruction book. My copy of Metzner Basic D&D was a simpler game, but also way better laid out. I can't believe that TSR was putting out such a bad book at the same time as more modern books in the AD&D line. The DMG was a set of essays with Gary ranting about anyone playing the game at all differently to his primary model, and had piles of rules that just poo poo on players in unneeded ways that have still stuck around in people's psyche for some reason. Acting like Earn Your Fun is the only (let alone primary) way to game is intensely bad for burning through new players.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Leperflesh posted:

I imagine the thread is sick of talking about Conan. I'm happy to drop the topic, if so.

Nah, it's pretty illuminating. It also makes it easy to see why so much of the hobby is the filth pit that it is-- a decent amount of the thematic underpinnings of the hobby are a mess (Lovecraft and Howard, and I've heard some pretty poo poo things about Tolkien as well) so of course the game built on top of them has similar issues.

The good thing is there's been plenty of decent fantasy stuff made to draw from and have a better but somewhat different kind of fantasy gaming from. Of course, as soon as anything on the shelves get rearranged (see moves away from using absolute alignment morality, or just making the Drow less racially awful in D&D, to say nothing of D&Disms that are just bad design choices) the old grogs start throwing a poo poo fit. Hell, I might as well be an old grog, but I see how awful the rump end of the hobby can be and I actively want to see something fresh and big tent in hobby before it ends up dying with my generation of nerd shut-ins.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
Well, it's not like 3.x/PF has balanced encounters even out of the box. One of the best things 4E did was actually spend a bit of effort into making sure that all the math that was done for the game actually had a point. D20 as a whole is entirely too interested in stating everything out like it's a PC, and thus has no respect for the DM's time.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Evil Mastermind posted:

The problem isn't that there are people who do think that getting your poo poo broken is having fun. The problem is that people who think that seem to always assume that's the only way to have fun.

Like, that article is deriding people who don't want to have their cool hard-to-replace gear taken away because of one bad roll, because it's working under the assumption that the challenge of (for example) your stuff being destroyed is an integral part of what makes D&D fun for everyone.

Same thing with level drain. It originally was the biggest gently caress you possible to most characters, and is a massive issue to use at the table. 3E was better than before, in that you actually get a save and have more normalized penalties. 4E was even better by making level drain instead be healing surge damage, which could easily be very deadly but didn't end with permanently screwed characters. Of course grogs hated this, because somehow fun is the exact opposite of "realism" or whatever the current watchword is in the Pathfinder crowd now.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

palecur posted:

Among the reasons I loved 4E is because it's the only RPG book line in years that seemed to have even heard of the concept of technical writing as a discipline.

Agreed 100%. I was initially turned off by 4E because it read much worse than any edition of the game. I still stand by that. The thing is, it plays way better than a least 3.x, and in lots of ways 2E. I have to think it's because the writing was done tightly and that's almost completely on the editors/tech writers.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Ettin64/status/880283341634781185

My usual reminder that the author of the Adventurer Conqueror King System is a piece of poo poo

What is the Escapist anymore, just Zero Punctuation and hangers on? I've often wondered why Yahtzee doesn't just go off and do a Patreon, since he's got a pretty big following.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm disinclined to believe that respectable high-minded video game punditry is a thing that exists.

I'm rather partial to Jim Sterling. I'm not 100% sure what high-minded means to you, but he's actually one of the few games journalists who is actually doing journalism and not just reprinting press releases. He's pretty vulgar, but he's also a good consumer advocate against the scummier practices in the industry, as well as standing up to some of the fairly abusive indie devs out there. He used to be with Escapist but was part of the mass exodus mentioned. It doesn't hurt that while he was a jerk in the past, he's fairly friendly to the whole social justice idea in gaming now.

You are right that it's still very much enthusiast press in general, which leads to lots of fawning instead of decent journalism. I'd like it to get to that point (i.e. be more like film criticism) but GG set it back at least five years if not more.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
And the shits keep on coming:

https://twitter.com/delafina777/status/920489843821486080

I am shocked SHOCKED that some ancient grog turned out to be a creeper.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:

I try very hard to be a good person, and would be proud to call myself a social justice warrior if I felt I did enough for the cause of social justice to earn that title. So I feel like poo poo even saying this, but I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of McFarland being permanently banned from RPGnet or fired from Onyx Path for this. Of course any claim of harassment or abuse should be taken seriously but I don't like the idea of permanently shunning someone from their community, taking away their livelihood, and labeling them a monster based on a single claim that we have no way to investigate. But we also need to consider the victim, and they should be made to feel as safe and comfortable as possible in the community, which we can't do if their abuser is present and tolerated.

Considering the crime being accused here is sexual assault against a minor (also note that sex crimes tend to be very serial) and gaming is full of young people, the proper answer here is to sever ties and force the dude out of the industry. Ideally, the full answer involves him being placed in prison for several years and a listing on the sex offender registry with all the implications that entails. It ensures he has minimal contact with any potential future victims, and if you're at all interested in retribution a few years in prison helps reduce someone's lifespan quite a bit.

It's rather mindblowing that there's even a discussion on this. If Metzner is a bad guy for skeeving on a woman and trying to wreck her career when she's not interested (FYI , it is an awful thing), a man who takes advantage of his minor student and actually has sex with her is orders of magnitude worse and requires a worse response. The crime being 15 years old only really means one thing to me, and that's the sad fact there are a bunch more victims out there who haven't come forward yet. Again, sex crimes are serial crimes, and sex crimes against minors even more so. The fact that the guy has a job working with special needs children is mortifying, since that's the exact position you want to ensure rapists stay out of. I legit have half a mind to report it to his employer myself, if only to help protect any current victims and shine enough of a spotlight so that previous victims can get some help or some level of justice.

EDIT: 15 years ago, not 25.

rkajdi fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 24, 2017

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Arivia posted:

I saw that red text title and knew the post was going to be spicy and boy howdy it was.

Yeah, I got it arguing with Marxoteens in D&D. I don't have a high tolerance for sex criminals, and an adult who sleeps with a minor is the definition of a sex criminal. This is serious poo poo and is entirely unrelated to whatever RPG work the guy has done, good or bad. And again, lots of the gaming community is younger people, and it's worrying that we have a dude with this serious an accusation against him having any kind of access to children.

Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:

You uh, sure seem to know a lot more specific details about this situation than I do.

I don't. All the information I have is between what was posted by the victim and a simple search to find the guy's RPGGeek page (literal first link) since I didn't know who he was ahead of time. Last sentence has him as a special pathologist for a school district. I'm specifically not doxxing him, but it's troubling as hell.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

The Wyzard posted:

I'm going to regret asking this, but:

Do you have any source or basis for the claim that the victim was a student of his?

I thought it was in the claim on RPGNet. If I misread that, I'm wrong on that. I would also argue it's the least important part of what I understood the crime to be.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Arivia posted:

“Marxoteens.” Okay sure buddy right.

Considering they're folks attacking the Democrats from the political left, I don't see any other term for them.

I also don't see what it has to do with one of the bog standard "Maybe it's false/Let's hear his side" kind of MRAish responses that always seems to come out when a woman brings forward an allegation of rape. That's the point Enola Gay-For-Pay brought that I'm responding to. Again, this is serious poo poo and is basically as tangentially involved with RPG stuff as the NeoGAF thing is with video games. Acting like McFarland should be dropped for making even as lovely a game Beast is instead of being a rapist is just impossible for me to comprehend.

It's worth discussing Matt McFarland for the same reason I brought up the Metzner stuff here originally. The nerd community in general has been a victim of the nerd social fallacy, and that's let a bunch of creepers like Metzner and worse into the community. I want to clean house on sexual harassers and sex criminals, and I don't honestly see a lot of reasonable counter-arguments to the position. I do see a lot of cowardice from people in power about doing the right thing and booting them, and it's actively helping to make the community a worse place.

rkajdi fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Oct 24, 2017

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Mors Rattus posted:

I believe the accuser entirely; however, I am not about to invent nonexistent accusers for potential additional crimes that may or may not have happened. There is one accuser. That's all we have, unless someone else comes forward. The accuser has said nothing about being his student; you can PM her if you want to find out more without inventing stuff she didn't say. She is also happy with how the situation's been handled, and I've satisfied myself with that. I do not want Onyx Path - or anyone - to hire McFarland for future work, and I do not intend to buy anything he works on. I wouldn't be mad if RPGnet banned him, but I'm not gonna be mad that they didn't, either, if the guy's victim isn't.

Again, it's not about inventing them, it's about pathology. Sex crimes are pathological, meaning you get the same individual committing lots of incidences of similar crimes. You see it incredibly often when a high profile sex criminal gets busted- see people like Jerry Sandusky. This is straight out of basic sociology. I mean math-wise considering the victimhood rates (20-25% depending on study), and the rates of perpetrators (under 5% by similar studies) the crime has to be serial for the two to make sense together.

I also honestly might not have brought it up except for seeing his profile showing he works as a speech pathologist for a public school system. Considering the accusation, that's a red flag if I've ever seen one.

Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:

The thing that bothers me about this situation is that I always want to absolutely believe and support victims of sexual assault and harassment and to always err on the side of caution, but I am also uncomfortable with the idea that a single claim of wrongdoing can and should, without investigation, cost someone their job and reputation.

In McFarland's specific case, however, I think his accuser is absolutely telling the truth and that his silence is utterly damning, and if she even vaguely contemplates pressing charges he should be accountable to the full extent of the law.

I'd be more accepting of this attitude if it actually resulted in anything getting done. We just had a woman come forward about something less serious about a man in the RPG community with actual chat logs, and nothing's really getting done about it. He's still working and acting like he's a decent person, and she's getting slammed by the usual types and not believed. For an older crime that just passed off as he said/she said I don't expect any level of justice to be done here. And again it's hyper worrying since there's fairly good odds given his self-described profession McFarland works or worked with kids.

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rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Kai Tave posted:

Yeah, I wasn't sure precisely when the prices started to rise so it could have come later on. I remember when I was living in Portland I'd see secondhand PHBs going for $50-60 at some stores.

Wait, 3E stuff us actually worth money? Maybe I need to liquidate my collection, because gently caress playing that game again.

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