Klaus van der Kroft's page

Depends on who's moving. If we play at my house, then the rest buys the snacks; if we're playing at someone else's house, we all buy the snacks. Unless we're cooking something specific, once dinner comes by we order pizza.

Then the total (snacks + pizza) spending is split between all those who assist, DMs and players alike, and we transfer the money online the next day to whomever carried out the purchases.

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

I got a papercut just the other day. I whined about that more than my leg for most of that day... lol

Papercuts are so damn itchy. *shrugs*

When I was 15 years old, our teacher was handing out our biology exams. The teacher called out my name and when I picked up my exam and turned around, I accidentally gave her a paper cut in the eye. Good thing the cut was mostly on the eyelid rather than the eyeball, but it looked mighty painful.

I felt really bad about it and baked her a cake next week as an apology. It looked and tasted pretty bad, apparently, but she was pretty cool about the accident, telling me that "Good thing you didn't cut the whole thing. Imagine trying to match the shoes with the colour of the eyepatch!".

For the past 10 minutes: Bacon Pancakes

Don't judge me.

I've always been pretty happy with the sort-of Magical Medieval/Rennaissance style of games like D&D and Pathfinder, and honestly I don't think I'll ever get tired of it. It's a comfortable setting and commonplace enough that you can spice it up with just about anything without throwing it out the window.

That said, I do like trying out new stuff now and then.

Which settings, themes, subjects, cultures or epochs do you think have been traditionally underused/ignored by RPGs in general? Which ones would you like to see more often?

Personally, I've always been a sucker for Bronze Age "Cradle of Civilization"-type cultures, like Babylonians, Assyrians, and Sumerians. Something about the awesome beards and towers that pierce the sky.

I also feel the earlier stages of the Age of Discovery have been generally forgotten. I mean, few periods have been more ripe for adventure than the Conquest of the New World, with mustachioed conquistadors searching for golden cities and fountains of youth.

Lastly, though it is generally present in one way or another in most fantasy settings, Middle Eastern settings, both pre- and post-Islamic, very rarely get a properly in-depth treatment, usually just a Hollywood Arabia thing that, while I still enjoy immensely, still leaves out so much awesomeness.

-The highest-altitude stadium in the world is that of La Paz, in Bolivia, at about 4,000 meters (some 13,000 feet). Non-local players often suffer from severe exhaustion when visiting, to the point that FIFA ended up ruling that football games beyond 3,000 feet would require players to stay 2 weeks aclimatizing prior to that. However, since all South American countries, with the exception of Brasil, decided to oppose the ban, FIFA had to lift it in 2008.

-It is estimated that the total amount of francium present in Earth's crust is somewhere between 20 and 30 grams. Francium was also the last element to be discovered in nature (as opposed to all the ones after that, which were synthetised in labs).

-Known as the Great Chilean Earthquake, the shake that brought down the city of Valdivia in 1960 was a 9.5 monstrosity that accounted for almost 25% of all the seismic energy released on Earth during the XXth Century, killing somewhere between 2,000-3,000 people. Nearly half the city sunk beneath the sea, including dozens of beer breweries (the city was a big focus of german and swiss immigration). So much beer sank that they kept finding traces of alcohol in the surrounding waters for decades, slowly released by hundreds of tanks and barrels, many of which are still lost under the muddy bay.

-Prior to the earthquake, Valdivia was also the most heavily fortified city in the southern hemisphere, the result of centuries of british piracy, dutch invasions and the strategic position of the city on the other end of the Strait of Magellan. The entire system, which extended far beyond the city and was the largest fortification in America, was known as The Key of the Southern Seas, and included 5 castles, 3 forts, 4 batteries, 4 citadels, about a dozen in-land fortified outposts, and several miles of walls. Sadly, only a tiny fraction of the structures survived the cataclysmic event of 1960.

I really don't know how to list games here, because I don't ever uninstall anything thanks to modern day large-size hard drives.

Do you?

List the games that you would not uninstall if your HD suddenly filled to the brim with unsavoury internet imagerie. Very unsavoury internet imagerie.

Well, think about it. Making a single new monster is a pretty involved process. Today, few companies put anything as public domain. If they did, there could be standardized patterns, modding communities, and awesome libraries to use. But the current style copyright is apparently worth more. If no games get made, well.

True. I would say, though, that we're seein some appreciation growth toward having games with strong modding communities lately. Perhaps it still is something that happens mostly on the indie side of the business, but big franchises like Civilization, Elder Scrolls, or pretty much everything made by Paradox really put a lot of care into making their games accesible for the community.

I keep thinking this is the way of the future, at least for medium-to-small sized studios. After all, the level of quality that user-made content can reach these days is sometimes on-par with stuff the creators themselves made, with several times the amount, and it does extend the life of the game tenfold (SimCity 4 being a great example of this) while creating a very involved community that practically sells the game for you.

Though looking at it carefully, I can see why a company would prefer to avoid such situation, as it can mean less chances for further monetization in the way of DLCs, expansions, and sequels. And considering how enormous the budgets can get, perhaps such venues are necessary to make the investment reasonable.

Heroes of Might and Magic 3- for some reason, i just cant throw that one out

Good Heavens, yes! I forgot to add it to my list, perhaps because it's so stappled to my permanent selection that I took it for granted. HoMM3 was the pinnacle of the series, from gameplay to unit variety to the graphics.

Nothing better than steamrolling on everything with 5 stacks of hundreds upon hundreds of Archmages. I do love the Tower very, very much. I even used it as the backdrop for a D&D short adventure back in the day.

My only regret is that my friends never really got into it and I only managed to convince them to play it online once or twice.

I'm sure we've all got a handful of games that we just have to keep installed, regardless how old it is and how many times we've changed the 'puter, those games that make things like DOSBox and SCUMMV a necessity just between "drinking water" and "underwear".

Which ones are on your "DO NOT UNINSTALL" list?

Mine would be:

-The Settlers II: The Bluebyte classic about making tiny people build tiny houses to raise tiny pigs and then club enemies to death with porkchops.

-SimCity 4: The game that, in my view, perfected city-building.

-Masters of Magic: That marvelous crossbreed between Civilization and MTG. Casting Armaggedon just never gets old.

-Star Wars Rebellion: The much-maligned Star Wars strategy game from the late 90's, that for some reason I adore. I still play it on MP once in a while.

-Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: A slightly newer game, but one that I never manage to get bored of.

-Baldur's Gate II: I have finished it several times already and I just can't bring myself to not having installed. My favourite RPG of all times.

The question was "have Theme Park games run their course". My answer is "yes".

Making a AAA Theme Park MMO costs between $75 and $150 million. It requires 5-7 years to make one. Usually the team size is over 300 people in the middle part of the development (may swell considerably near the end as producers throw bodies at the content pipeline).

I'm not particularly savvy about videogame business practices, but I've often heard the comment thrown around that a big chunk of AAA budget goes straight into marketing.

Do you think this could actually be a big cause behind such enormous budget inflation (and thus maybe a valve with which to work in order to bring them down into profitability), or are AAA MMOs, as in the actual game and its assets, really that costly to make?

MMOs, like every other product, have a life-cycle, and it seems to be moving from the Maturity phase into the Decline phase.

In Market Theory, products have four stages in their life: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.

Introduction is usually monopolic/oligopolic, with lots of innovation, little profit, and slow-but-increasing growth.

Growth comes when the product has managed to settle in the market, and is marked by a sharp increase in profit and reach. Innovation slows down to accomodate the needs of the growing demand, the market grows in terms of consumers, and competitors start to join in.

Maturity happens when the product reaches its market zenit. Growth slows down as the market begins to saturate, profit begins to drop due to the increase in competition, and the entire line of permutation is made available.

From that point, two things can happen: Either innovation manages to push the product through into a new cycle, or the product enters its Decline phase, during which its market share progressively drops, innovation stops, competition begins to either die out or consolidate into fewer, more efficient producers, and the business focus switches into staying afloat rather than securing perpetual growth. This phase can be indefinitely long depending on the nature of the product, and social/cultural events may cause it to spin back into its cycle (hats are a good example).

If we check Themepark MMOs, they already seem to have gone through their Introduction phase (marked mostly by the successes of Everquest and WoW in the early 2000's), then proceeded into explosive Growth rates and finally reached Maturity somewhere in the mid-2000's, staying there ever since. All the signs are there: A huge number of competitors, many outlets, wide product lines with a large variety of permutations, little innovation, and a slowdown in market growth. I don't know about specific profitability, but market behaviour suggest that it must have shrinked closer to the equilibrium.

WoW itself as a product is most likely on the far end of its Maturity phase. The past three expansions have all happened after declines in the population, causing it to go up again, only to be followed by stronger declines afterwards. That falls in line with a standard diminishing returns on gradual innovations, which means the product is fighting off its Decline phase but going into it regardless.

The good thing is that such scenarios, in healthy economies, are often fertile ground for new products/explosive innovations to take hold strongly, as the market is looking for new alternatives to grasp on. So we're likely to see some pretty spiffy things comming out in the next few years (and also some scarecrows).

tl;dr: I think yes, but slowly.

Evil Lincoln wrote:

I trained with an ancient japanese sword-master, it was pretty cool. I made my own katana, with steel folded 200 times. It takes a lot of work, most people don't realize.

Then I trained for years and years with it and I'm totally really good at it now.

Was it forged in the fires of Mt. Fuji so that it could cut through a tank?

I heard he made it by hammering down a tank into a blade inside the fires of Mt. Fuji. While the tank was shooting back at him.

I'm actually prohibited from putting my hands inside my pockets. Weapon concealment is not permitted.

Boobplate doesn't really bother me. Then again, I often DM highly cinematic adventures where people have swordfights on flying carpets and saying "This is a crazy plan, but it might just work" yields possitive results 90% of the time.

Dune game. We were playing envoys from an imperial house sent to a faraway moon, Lesotho II, which was as poor as misery goes. We were told the area was dangerous and that we might be attacked, so we all wore our shields. When we get out of the ship, there was a large crowd checking us out, when the sunlight causes our shields to shine.

Kid "Dad, why do they sparkle like that?"
Dad "Where they come from, they have... food"
Kid "Ooh, I want food too!"

We didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

AD&D 2e. One of the PCs was an alchemist who kept making a powder-like substance that granted him a bonus on Knowledge-related rolls, which he then snorted with a tiny tube. All the time.

Player 1 "You are always sniffing on that blue stuff?"
Player 2 "I occasionally enjoy it"
Player 3 "No, you always do"
Player 2 "It's good for your BRAINS, man, FOR YOUR BRAINS"

Even though I'm still disappointed about what they did to SimCity 5 (then again, it was Maxis' responsibility), I am not particularly bothered by this decision.

I mean, yes, I did love those classic LucasArts games like Monkey Island and Fate of Atlantis, but they never had a particularly good track reccord when it came to Star Wars games. Also, from the news it seems it won't neccessarily be EA directly making those games, but its subsidiaries like BioWare, which even considering the blunder of The Old Republic (the MMO, not the "Knights" ones) has a comparatively similar history of Star Wars games as LucasArts.

Just remember that LucasArts was responsible for cringe-worthy stuff like Yoda Stories and Lightsaber Duels, among many others (Star Wars Rebellion was generally hated, though I must admit I did have fun with it on multiplayer).

It's not like they are asking a street painter to take on the legacy of Piccasso. They are just handing the cow to a different milker.

Tiny Coffee Golem wrote:

Lord Snow wrote:

Tiny Coffee Golem wrote:

My answer: Yes. Immediately. Where do I sign up?

Well, you are only saying this because you are not smart enough to understand that it's a bad idea. Wait and see :)

I'm well aware it could go horribly wrong, but as mentioned I'd wait until at least the tenth generation. At least that way it's proven tech.

Well, the only problem with that plan is that before you get to take it...

The First Generation users have developed psychosis and tried to blow up the world.

The Second Generation users have developed psychopathy and become unstoppable serial killers. Fortunately, they killed the First Generation users first.

The Third Generation users have developed sociopathy and taken over the world.

The Fourth Generation users have developed paranoia and ruined all of the Third Generation users' plans. But they destroyed civilization in the process.

The Fifth Generation users have developed delusions. They rebuilt civilization, but made everything look like coconuts and giraffes.

The Sixth Generation users have developed narcissism. They took all the attractive people on earth, and manipulated them into co-dependent relationships.

The Seventh Generation users have developed borderline personality disorder. They discovered the perfect ways to make their Sixth Generation partners miserable -- and everybody else, too.

The Eighth Generation users have developed monomania. They figured out the perfect optimal strategies for all games. You can never play anything without an Eighth Generation user telling you you're doing it wrong.

The Ninth Generation users have developed wisdom. They realized that the world would be a better place if nobody else could ever take the drug. They erased it from human knowledge.

Pretty cool short sci-fi story to start the day with!

There's no "this is awesome" flag because I don't know exactly what we'd do with it. If we had more staff I guess we could review posts flagged as awesome and then feature them somehow on a curated front page like a magazine or newspaper or something. (Or I guess we could make it completely automated but that seems a poor choice of machinery to hand over to a community of gamers.)

Come on. What's the worst that could happen?

<A big ball of energy suddenly materializes in the background>

Is that... is that a T-1000?

So, this is a topic about how this topic is in the wrong forum?

This is too meta for me. I'm starting to see green code lines on the walls already.

Brb, taking a blue pill.

Awesome!

Backed it.

Thanks for the heads-up. I had missed it entirely.

taig wrote:

Klaus van der Kroft wrote:

"2,611 posts since your last visit"

Yeah, not reading that.

I'll just asume you guys have been heatedly debating about whether you put ice before pouring the drink or after.

I'm pro-before...

+1. Significantly less messy splashing that way.

But if it is a fizzy drink, you'll lose bubbles!

Ice goes before if it's non fizzy, after if it is.

I'm pretty happy the way things are. I'd probably just do some functional fixes, like improving my hearing on the left side (which has been diminished ever since I got an ear infection while travelling through Mexico about 10 years ago).

As for more dramatic modifications, I'm pretty sure they'll happen sooner than we expect. I wouldn't be surprised to see people with blue skin, tails, and beer-cooling compartments inside their thighs. Some people like standing out, others like the shock-factor, and others try to build their identities around their looks, which means we're likely to see some rather extreme modifications show up as new technology allows it.

Thus, I've often wondered how, if it ever happens, our first contact with aliens will be like:

Alien 1 "Dude, I thought you said these guys were mammals"
Alien 2 "Don't look at me. When we sent the probe 50 years ago, they didn't have secondary heads, glowing skin, spider legs in their backs..."
Alien 3 "... or prehensile genitals..."
Alien 2 "Yeah, that's messed up. Though I have to admit the benefits when it comes to procreating while jumping from high orbit"
Alien 1 "What?"
Alien 3 "Humans, dude, humans. They are like evolution on drugs"

"2,611 posts since your last visit"

Yeah, not reading that.

I'll just asume you guys have been heatedly debating about whether you put ice before pouring the drink or after.

Steve Geddes wrote:

I went to school to get smarter, so yeah. What's the downside?

You went to school to get more educated. At least by my definition of the term, that does not necessarily mean smarter. I have known some very, very dumb people in school for a very, very long time, yet getting information thrown at them didn't seem to help.

I have absolutely no idea how to properly define what intelligence is, but I've always thought that one of the benefits of education is that it stimulates various kinds of thought/behavioural processes that might, in some way, result in enhanced intelligence.

I mean, whatever intelligence is, it has to do with the brain, and the brain is all about neural connections: The more it has, the better it works. And we know these connections are, at least partially, shaped by what we do and what we learn.

Therefore, I would venture to say that education -not necessarily school education, perhaps, but at least education with some sort of multidisciplinary structure- should have some sort of impact on a person's intelligence.

If anything, it is the gateway drug to other intelligence-affecting activities.

"Anus" comes from the Irish word for "ring," or "anne," pronounced "aine."

Which is about ten times funnier than whatever it was you were saying.

No offense.

Actually, the root is Latin, not Irish. After all, "Anus" is also the root for the Castillian "Anillo", the Italian "Anello", and the French "Anneau", all of them meaning "Ring".

As a theoretical thought excercise, if there was an intelligence booster thing without collaterals, sure, no reason not to take it. I plan to write a lot of stuff before I die, and I'm sure that would help making it easier.

In practice, however, I'd be wary of meddling with my brain unless the thing has been tested to oblivion. The potential for behavioural/emotional/mnemonic alteration outweights the potential for additional number-crunching.

As the saying goes, never bet something you can't afford losing.

Got this game a couple of days ago. I was never much of a fan of the first one, but I decided to try out the second installment (either that or Steam is effectively transmiting radiowaves to force me to buy stuff).

CiM2 is a transport game, in the line of the fabulous Transport Tycoon and the not so fabulous Locomotion. Rather than a lengthy review, I'll just give the good and bad points I've noticed:

The Good:

-Graphics: Pretty realistic and detailed. Nice reflections on the water, trees move with the wind, people walk around town doing their business, streets alight during the nights. All in all, a nice-looking experience.

-Dynamic Cities: This is one of the coolest things ever. While you cannot actually build appartments and shops, people will slowly grow their buildings around the transport networks you lay. You just connected that nuclear plant to a nearby town and there are not enough workers? Some houses will start plopping along your road. A hotel you just linked has no nearby entertainment? Maybe some shops and a cinema will get built in the area. This creates very unique experiences every time you play, and makes the game seem very realistic.

-Route Construction: CiM2 gives you a huge level of freedom when building roads and rails, allowing the construction of some really convoluted networks. Best of all, the game uses an intelligent adaptation system that changes the surroundings to fit your work, making ledges, bridges, tunels, and whathaveyou without any kind of fuss, and making it look right in the process. Just building roads is a load of fun in this game.

-Map Editor: The game comes with a very handy map editor, with several automation tools that make creating new scenarios a breeze. For example, you can lay down some roads and activate the building generator, which will create communities around them; the bigger the street/network, the larger the urbanization.

-Easy Line Creation: Creating transport networks is extremely user-friendly in CiM2. You create a depot, plop some stations around and then create a line, selecting which stops you want. The game automatically finds the best routes (showing it with spiffy flowing lines on the game), calculates the time it takes to reach each station, and even gives you the average and optimal amount of vehicles of each type you'd need to service it. You don't have to manually assign each vehicle, either, as depots intelligently assign available vehicles to the various routes they service. Everything also nicely adapts to the changes you make on the timetables: If you, say, increase the frecuency of buses going though Station A by 15 minutes, the depot will adapt the vehicles to the new requeriments (though it will likely ask you to purchase aditional buses, or you run the risk of them arriving behind schedule and making passengers angry).

-Map Size: Maps in CiM2 are pretty huge. Never as big as those in TTD, but still very large, enough to house giantic metropolises or several smaller cities, with large tracks of countryside and tiny villages in-between.

The Bad:

-Number of Vehicles: The game has very little vehicle variety. Even though you can work with buses, trolleys, trams, trains, and waterbuses, you only get 3 models for each category, and that's it. The shop already has several additional vehicles as DLCs (at 0.99 each), so it is clear the route the devs wanted to take the game.

-Emptyness: I'm still not quite so sure how exactly the game fills up, but it seems that cities are static until you connect them. This means that cities will seem empty and lifeless for a long while, with hardly a car of person walking around. Things get better once you start connecting things, but I found this odd and rather disconcerting.

-No Random Maps: Even though the game has a great editor, I miss having a random map generator. There is already a hefty number of player-made maps (even one uploaded by yours truly), but it's not the same as the good old automagically generated scenarios of TTD.

-Types of Goods: Unlike games like TTD and Locomotion, in CiM2 all you move around are passengers. It is still very fun and challenging, but you won't be playing around with production chains and selling goods to distant cities.

-Music: There is almost no music to speak of, just some themes when the sun goes up or down. You'll be cracking open some MP3s or Grooveshark soon enough.

Well, those goalpost certainly aren't going to move themselves now are they?

Goalpost with wheels

Check & mate

Why do people constantly make threads complaining about board debate tendencies?

Are you surreptitiously complaining about people making threads complaining about how people discuss threads?

PS: Does this mean I am also surreptitiously complaining about you surreptitiously complaining about people making threads complaining about how people discuss threads?

In think a big part of it has to do with how extensive debates can get in a medium like a forum. Sometimes a discussion can become so huge, with so much information, with so many different sides, and throughout such long periods of time, that it easy to lose grasp of the original point. Memories get mixed up, people realise they worded something wrong, others forgot what exactly they said 300 posts ago, etc.

Then there is also the excruciating level of nitpicking that is also natural to forum debates, which often changes the intended meaning of a particular message. Maybe a user thought he was saying A, but after fifteen other users dissected his message to oblivion, his message is now interpreted as saying B, C, and some D.

With these conditions, I think a lot of people simply do not realise they are moving the goalpost, and thus would have less to do with excessive narcisism than with an information overload and the pliability of the debate. This could happen the other way too, with some users interpreting the goalpost as moving while in truth they are changing their own interpretation of what was originally said due to the same aforementioned overload/pliability.

I'm sure we've all been caught at least once in a seemingly endless forum discussion and started to second-guess what we thought was said nine-hundred and twenty-two pages back.

I don't mean to say this rules out people just being flat-out lollygagging poppycockers, but I think there is more to it than just a plague of Narcissuses.

the game.

You bastard.

I have stated more than once and I will repeat again. I do not think you are consciously determining anything about homosexuals in your game. I am not accusing you of bigotry or anything like that.

I would argue that you have determined the position of homosexuals in your game world, without consciously doing so. They don't exist. For all practical purposes there aren't any. The world defaults that way, just by not putting any in it.

And my argument is that you are making a mistaken assumption, as you are equating the default thought process with all the potential thought process involved. If, by standard reflex, I make random NPCs heterosexual due to the way my particular thought process as an individual is wired when relating to D&D stories, that does not mean I am pre-determining that homosexuals are non-existant in my game worlds. I can still put homosexuals in the story, but since the particular subject of an NPCs sexual orientation is not something I consider relevant to my stories, I don't worry about that particular detail. But this says nothing about whether homosexuality exists within the internal paradigm of the story or not.

If a player goes and asks "Are there homosexuals in this country?", then my most likely answer will be "Yes". If they go asking in the local market about homosexuals, I will most likely end up putting homosexual NPCs. These are not typical questions from my players, so it is not something I have to consider on a regular basis, but the point is that it is not pre-determined.

I'm pretty sure Boromir had to go to the bathroom sometimes, despite Tolkien never making even the slightest mention of there being a toilet in Middle Earth.

I'm curious, following up on Alice's post: Do you do the same thing with women? Do NPCs default to men unless there's some plot reason or world role that a particular character needs to be a woman?

Actually, a big chunk of my NPCs tend to be women. Probably, if I did a statistical analysis on all my random NPCs, most innkeepers and kings would be male (just as most dwarfs would have orange beards in my stories. I blame Warhammer), but women NPCs come to my head as naturally as male NPCs do.

And given that this is fantasy, do you do the same with fantasy races? If you're putting together a town that's supposed to be mostly human, with a large minority of halflings and a smattering of the other races, do all the named, notable NPCs wind up being human unless there's some particular reason they need to be another race? Even if that winds up not reflecting the population at all?

That would depend, I think. Unless I'm playing Planescape (where humans are probably the thing you see the least), my stories tend to develop in either human-only settings or human-dominant worlds, so non-humans are usually the exception. There are some tropes I tend to fall back into pretty often, though, such as the clever orc smith, the pompous dwarf merchant, and the lofty elven priestess.

Notable NPCs, however, those I rarely make up on the spot, so there tends to be a conscious choice to make them one way or another.

RE: "defaults"

There's no inherent problem with you as an individual assuming a character is a Straight White Cis Male unless otherwise stated, but it is both unfortunate and a symptom of a number of issues that persist in our world (sexism, racism, heteronormativity).

I won't lie: I do it myself. An on-the-fly NPC is most certainly a Straight White Cis Male (and probably Middle-Class as well) despite me being an advocate for diversity in all forms. But I do try to make a conscious effort to diverge from that. Recently, I made the captain of the guard in my town Keleshite (Arabic) specifically because I realised that everyone in town so far was a Straight White Cis Male. None of my players even blinked. I'm also mentally making sure that 1/4 - 1/2 of his guards are female (the players are planning on hiring them to help clear out some bandits soon). I also realised that all of the bandits I'd shown so far were men - so I made one random encounter have a female lieutenant to fix that a little, and intend on making sure at least a couple of the rest are women as well. I'm certainly going to make sure at least 1-2 people in town that they meet will fall into the LGBT spectrum as well, if it ever comes up.

Little things like that aren't "token gays" or "token PoC" or whatever. It's me consciously taking a stand against those societal norms in order to make a better game. The Captain wasn't defined by his different ethnicity--it was simply part of his character description when the PCs met him. The female lieutenant wasn't defined by her gender--she simply happened to be a woman. None of these characters become "token". They simply become "the captain of the guard", "the bandit lieutenant", "the mercenary for hire", "the serving boy at the tavern" that exist with a little more verisimilitude than having Yet Another Straight White Cis Male.

That's a perfectly understandable and acceptable way of doing so. It is not something I would personally implement, as I've always felt uncomfortable toward the use of diversity quotas (as I believe they undermine equal opportunities, which I think is the way for tolerant diversity), but I have absolutely no problem with it.

Still, my point of contention is not about whether or not we can create inclusivity in the game; it is against the notion that not having homosexuals featured as part of the game means that the DM has predetermined the position homosexuals have within the game world. To which I insist by my position that such argument assumes conscious refrainment, while in truth it can very well (as I believe is my case) be simply a matter of not considering the topic relevant enough for the story to make a conscious effort and instead employing standard options.

White straight male is pretty much the stereotype of characters in roleplaying games. And somehow giving people British accents in movies makes it "historical" no matter what culture it's supposed to be.

How many non-whites were there in the Lord of the Rings movies? I honestly can't think of one...not one.

There were haradrim in the third movie. Those are basically the Middle Earth version of Middle Eastern people.

Spicy meatballs with white rice and tomato sauce. Made by my mom. One of my favourites.

Referring to straight white males as the "default" is a bit dehumanizing.

Note I'm using the default as a verb, not as a noun. As in "automatically selecting an option when no alternative or condition is specified".

That's the whole point. You don't have to be interested in writing stories about gay people to have gay people in your stories. Just like you don't have to be interested in writing stories about black people to have black people in your stories. They don't have to be the focus. Even if they are, the focus doesn't have to be on their sexuality.

They can just be Frank and Bob, that cool couple that run the bar. No more important to the story than if they were Frank and Sue.

The idea that everyone in the story, or the game, is straight unless there is some specific story reason for them to be gay, is exactly what I'm talking about.

I disagree. As I've mentioned, homosexuals are not part of my "default to" set of elements. Therefore, if I were to put homosexuals in the game, I would have to consciously and purposefully add them.

That means I'd be including the equivalent of a "token gay" in the game for some odd and misplaced sense of forced diversity, something which seems rather counterproductive to me. I've always though true tolerance and diversity is when it doesn't matter whether you include someone of a particular group or not, because the descriptor is no longer relevant as a method of social classification.

For the reccord, black people very rarely appear in my games, and when they do it is often conscious, never as something automatic. Does this mean that I've purposely predefined the place of black people in my game world? No. I think this is the result of my social background, as I live in a country where black people represent less than 0.1% of the population and thus the concept of black-skinned people is not what my brain automatically defaults to when I ask it to quickly make up 20 NPCs.

Same with homosexuals.

But that's the point. No one is saying you have to focus on the sexual part.
At least I'm assuming the romances and marriages are not actually platonic, you just don't focus on the sexual part. That the marriages (and certainly the parental relations) imply sexual activity and the romances imply at least sexual interest, even if it's not acted on.

Homosexuals form those kinds of relationships too. It's not all about the sex. :)

All I'm saying is that not dealing with sex is not the same as not dealing with sexuality. Merely by having romances and couples, even as NPCs, you're dealing with sexuality. Having all of those be heterosexual means you're saying something about the place of homosexuality in the game world, whether you intend to or not.

I understand where you're comming from, but I'm not entirely sure I agree. Primarily, because I don't think there is necessarily proactivity and concious decision to use a particular sexual orientation in my games.

If sexual orientation happened to be a subject relevant to the story, I would give further thought to it. But that's not a compelling matter in my games, so I don't build stories around it. Thus, I don't really give particular processing time to deciding one way or another, which means I will default to the standard when describing the gender of some NPC's parents.

It's the same with column design in my games: Unless for some reason I have to give special thought to the matter, I'll most likely default to doric-style columns, but that doesn't mean I've determined the place of corinthian or ionic columns in the game world.

I don't believe that says anything about the place of homosexuals or corinthian architecture in my game worlds. If anything, it speaks about my particular thought structure and social background: I'm heterosexual, and while I have a couple of homosexual friends and a homosexual cousin, the matter is not really a significant element in my life and is also not something I'm interested in writing stories about, just like I'm not interested in writing stories about the 1960's or racecars. And since it is not relevant to my stories, I don't make a choice or take a stand about the issue, instead defaulting to the standard when for some reason it is necessary to determine the sexual orientation of characters.

I think it's time for me to hide this thread; it's just going 'round and 'round.

I activated a trap card, didn't I?

Klaus van der Kroft wrote:

Save for the occasional joke, sexual subjects and sexuality in general are not relevant themes in my games.

Again, no romance? No married couples? No heterosexual relations of any kind? Parents?

Whenever romance, marriage, parental relationships and whathaveyou are at the focus of the story, the take is generally more platonic than sexual, as in more interested in the external effects of the relationship than the internal. They still sometimes take some notoriety, but they are not relevant to the story (as in, the story would develop essentially the same way with or without them).

To use a greek classification, themes of love in the manner of philia ("fraternal love"), agape ("preocupied love"), and storge ("familial love") get the focus, while the eros ("intimate love") is not really relevant.

No particular reason for that, though. That's just the way we play and feel comfortable playing.

Has anyone ever heard of this new urban legend going around about children who appear to be between the ages of 10 and 16 who knock on doors and ask to be let inside? The victims report that the children's eyes are completely black (even the sclera, or whites of the eyes) and the more they refuse the more insistent the children become. Witnesses report feeling overwhelming fear and evil emanating from them. I've not read any accounts about what happens if they are allowed in.

So, having said all that, I'm about to run a game whereby I will introduce the Slender Man as the antagonist. The children are to be his heralds, sent to collect a debt owed to the Slender Man from an unfortunate individual who has hired the PCs to guard him.

Aside from the aura of fear, what other powers might they possess? I've seen the movie "Let The Right One In", but I'm not sure I want them to be vampires. Are there even a gaming statistic write up for them somewhere already? I want to scare this batch of newby players with a horror themed game, and I think these creatures would be ideal.

So, what do you think?

Sounds like a great idea! Simple terror is best terror.

As for powers, the whole concept of "home" has very strong relations with various mythologies: A place that means something to someone has a certain relationship with that person, and home is the most powerful relationship a place can have with an individual. Therefore, allowing someone/something into your home has strong metaphysical significance, akin to voluntarily giving your name.

Demons, witches, faeries, and various other mythological monsters want your name because it gives them power over you. Keeping your name to yourself protects you, because it shields your identity from them.

Home works in a similar fashion: Home is where you act like yourself, where you are at ease. Home is also where you feel safe and protected, and where only those you trust should enter. Giving someone access to your home, then, implies letting them through one of your innermost layers of protection (your name/identity and ultimately your soul being the only things left after that).

These creatures, then, want to come in, but they want you to let them in. They want you to let down your defenses (using exasperation as a tool, apparently) and allow them access. After that, it's all nefarious plots and probes in the wrong places, I guess.

Save for the occasional joke, sexual subjects and sexuality in general are not relevant themes in my games.

Thos deaths are more about two monotheistic religeons clashing violently than it is about rabid Atheists executing Christians, though. That kind of strengthens the point many on this thread are making - while being religeos does not make one a terrible person, the three monotheistic religeons existing today have some nasty sides to them. For example, the deaths of a hundred thousand people each year on account of thinking Jesus should be taken more seriously than Muhammad.

I wasn't saying or implying that they were being killed by Atheists. Most of the killings have political motivations rather than religious, however. Religion is sometimes used as the pretext, but it's usually about suppressing Christian groups due to their tendency to form into alternate political groups.

Atheism, just like any other ideology, can be used as a pretext to kill people. Religions account for more because, well, they have a far bigger representation, both now and throughout history. But give anyone a desire to kill someone else, and they'll use whatever ideal is at hand to do so.

The anticlerical killings during the Spanish Civil War always bring to my head the way these things happen when Atheism is the ideal being used, with thousands of priests and nuns being raped and murdered simply because they were religious figures. Just as nasty and ugly as when a religion is used to the same end.

"They disagree with us, so we must hate them and kill them" doesn't really have a colour of its own and is amazingly flexible to accommodate just about any concept we can think of.

Queso chicken from the nice Mexican place not far from work. Found out you can just call in and pick up an order, so might visit them a bit more often now.

<Movie fast-forwards through a montage of Orthos ordering queso chicken twice per day, every day, and we find him in his deathbed with a doctor looking at his lab results sternly>

Doctor: "This is the worst case of queso chicken intoxication I have ever seen"
Nurse: "But Doctor McHandsome, what can we do?"
Doctor: "You do nothing. I'll take care... of everything"

Then doctor and nurse kiss for the camera while Orthos dies unceremoniously in the background.

Finished the game last night. I really liked the ending. Left me thinking in the dark for almost half an hour. Awesome game.

1) Given the game's main story: ** spoiler omitted **...

Screw it. I want KFC today.

Free speech means that yes, you have to take what others say about you, but you are just as entitled to react to their comments. Limiting what can be said will only stifle communication - and communication is the best hope we have of surviving as a species.

With the limiting factor of not trampling on other rights in the process. Calling someone names is permissible; making up false accusations is not.

As with any right, though, the best way to protect it is to use it wisely.

_Cobalt_ wrote:

As stated in another thread, 163,000 Christians die annually for their faith

Could you provide some support for that figure? I just googled it and all that came up was what amounted to a fundraising document which, in addition to being deeply suspect from the get-go, did not deign to tell the reader how it arrived at that number.

During the 2011 Conference of Interreligious Dialog in Hungary, italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, speaking as representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation of Europe, indicated that their studies showed that 105,000 Christians were killed each year, or 1 every 5 minutes. This number represented stricly martyrs, that's it, people killed specifically for being Christians.

It is not a particularly surprising number, in any case. Christians suffer a lot of persecution and killing in the Middle East and Africa.

Space 1889 game. The party was going through a hunting safari in Venus, when one of the characters (Lord Nigel Blackhorn of Humplebottom-on-Averyshire, Proffessional Nothingdoer) suddenly snapped:

"By golly, I haven't done anything lordly in almost two days. <Pointing at two servants> You and you, fight to death for my amusement. Chop chop"

He also insisted on calling everyone "Richard".

During a Pathfinder campaign, the resident barbarian had lost one of his hands. Later on, the party got a necromancer to attach a new one they stole from a graveyard. From time to time, the hand would slap him, give the finger to random people and stuff like that. When asked if it wasn't problematic, he responded with his characteristic russian accent:

"Hand holds sword. Sword kills people. Vorgok pleased with arrangement. Rest of time, hand can have day off"