Jmacq1's page

I guess my problem with the comparison of loincloths vs. bikinis is that I suspect few women would want the loin-cloth Conan as eye candy. In my experience with Mrs Gersen and her sisters and girlfriends and so on, women do NOT find powerful-looking, masculine men in art to be appealing. What they want is a guy with no body hair, floppy head hair, long eyelashes, pouty lips, a weak chin, grossly-overdeveloped pecs (like boobs!) and abs, and no discernable musculature anywhere else (little dainty wrists and forearms, etc.). And he has to be striking that absurd pose that shows off his "line" between the hip and abdomen (which I think makes him look like a sissy, and my wife thinks makes him look "hot").

And it's the same way with the ridiculous outfits and poses the "women" in a lot of fantasy art are shown in. I'm not a hardcore feminist or anything, but even I find the overwhelming prevailence chainmail bikinis and Seoni-poses to be puerile and annoying -- so I can only imagine how obnoxious they must seem to actual females.

The comments trying to compare the shirtless male barbarian to the bikini-wearing female warrior are much the same as the people that try to argue that sexism isn't rampant in comic books because even though 99.9 percent of female superheroines have pornstar bodies and tend to either wear bathing suits or skin-tight latex to fight evil in, it's OK because most of the dudes are all square-jawed, insanely handsome, more physically perfect men than anyone in the real world could ever hope to be. Both arguments are missing the point: The skintight male superhero costumes and the shirtless barbarian aren't there in the material to appeal to females. They're usually in the material to appeal to male readership in the form of being power fantasies.

So basically, even the 3/4s naked Barbarian exists to appeal to men (in most cases). There are characters that do seem to be designed more to appeal to female demographics (and such characters are becoming more common), but by and large most RPGs (and comics) are still heavily, heavily geared towards white heterosexual males (again, it's not as bad as it used to be, but that's in the sense that it's 96% geared towards that demographic where it used to be 99.9% geared towards that demographic).

Then of course the argument becomes a matter of business: If white heterosexual males are the overwhelming majority of who is buying your stuff, isn't it just good business to cater to them? This is basically the excuse Comic publishers have consistently used when cancelling critically acclaimed books starring minority characters that don't sell to their expectations. Irrespective of "right" or "wrong" there may be some validity to that argument.

So considering making He-Man an Ogrekin Orc for the mechanical benefits is A-OK, but considering making him a Synthesist Summoner is "too far away from the overall character."

Gotta love the hypocrisy.

If you already know what you wanted He-Man to be (A Barbarian) then you didn't need this thread in the first place. Stat out your Barbarian and move along, and next time don't get pissy when you ask for suggestions and people give you suggestions that don't march in lock-step with your preconceived notions.

Interesting factoid.

The only reason that Texas ever existed as an independent Republic, was because for years, the United States wouldn't take it.

I'm sure that had nothing at all to do with a significant political bloc in Texas that didn't want the United States to take it, either...(They also wanted to stretch The Republic of Texas all the way to the Pacific Coast, incidentally).

I don't think the plan works when New Texas would more than bankrupt itself in the futile battle to eliminate the corruption and violence in Mexico in order to make it stable enough to function in the manner he describes.

Particularly without the benefit of the United States military backing it (which even then wouldn't likely be enough to do the job).

Given the significant anti-government sentiment evidenced by some Texans, they're not going to play nicely if "New Texas" tries to draft them for purposes of pacifying Mexico, either.

That's not even getting into the internal fighting from those that didn't want to secede from the US, and the war with the US itself who isn't going to want Texas' resources to leave the union.

I find myself curious if anyone's ever done a credible study of any "casual link" between violent behavior and full-contact sports like Boxing and Football, etc...?

Because I can just imagine the kinds of responses a "Ban Football!" editorial would garner in Duluth....

With Hero Lab it makes creating characters so much easier.

And yes, I have made way more characters then I could ever play, ever.

Hero Lab for a "character creation-obsessed" person is like giving a heroin addict an IV that's connected to an oil tanker....

The snarky in me would add

"If you've ever crafted for profit or advocated for such."

Beat me to it, though I was going to say:

"You've ever used the item creation rules as written for anything."

Okay, this is a long thread and I'm not going to read the responses.

The OP wants to talk about societal ramifications. I've touched on this in an unrelated thread.

Charm person is absolutely toxic to the rule of law. Because it has a nonzero chance of causing the victim to commit acts contrary to their own morality as long as they aren't suicidal it is unjust to punish someone who committed a crime under the influence of charm person equally to someone who committed the same crime without magical influence.

There is no way to prove whether or not someone was charmed after the fact. The mere existence of the charm spell makes justice impossible.

Charm can be used to induce people to accept contracts they would not normally accept, and cannot be proven or disproven after the fact, poisoning the validity of contracts in general.

The rule of law and charm person cannot coexist. Arcane casters (except summoners and magi, but how do you tell the difference between a magus and a wizard/martial multiclass without looking at their character sheet?) must die or be exiled unless knowledge of the spell can be extinguished.

Without the ability to use an opposed charisma check to get results better than diplomacy it can be tolerated enough to not drive out arcanists, but should still be criminal for the same reason consent under the influence of mind altering substances is not valid consent.

Dominate is actually less bad. While it can still be used for contract fraud the extreme behavior changes it induces make it possible for witnesses to identify dominated people with enough reliability to salvage the notion of criminal justice. There will still be magic induced miscarriages of justice, but at least you can try to sort things out.

If you follow this logic, no magic should be permitted at all, anywhere, ever. Charm Person is hardly the only thing in the spell catalogs that would be a nightmare in regards to "rule of law."

Not to mention that this position you've taken seems to inherently presume the existence of such things as evidence-based hearings, trials, etc... when it's just as likely to be "Some nobleman/noble-appointed magistrate said I'm guilty so I'm guilty" or even simple "might makes right" or "possession is 9/10s of the law" (unless you "possessed" something belonging to the right/wrong noble).

Trying to apply "semi realistic" law to fantasy settings (particularly high-magic fantasy) is much like trying to do the same in a Superhero setting: It simply doesn't work well. "Realistically" the societies in question would have created laws that adjust and account for the problems that common understanding of the existence of magic and superhuman abilities cause (with varying degrees of success of course) but instead there often seems to be attempts to apply our own real-world frame of reference to settings in which such a thing is like fitting a square peg into a round hole, so to speak.

Most D&D style settings seem to present an overall general acceptance of magic with degrees of regional variation and regulation: A nation or two that are "magic-user ruled" or "magic friendly" and one or two where magic-users are persecuted or oppressively regulated, with a whole lot of in-between. How the tavern-dwellers in the original scenario presented would react would almost always depend heavily on what the local opinion of magic in general is.

And of course, how strictly "realistic" your game master wants to be.

So objectively speaking of the morality of the act in a real-world context as the OP apparently wants us to: The act is not bad in any way, shape, or form, because it's a fictional act being perpetrated on a fictional character. In other words no act actually occurred.

In terms of crowd reaction: If the crowd is so blase (or hardcore) that they watch assassins and adventurers fight it out in the middle of the local tavern and calmly and keenly observe all the actions going on after the melee has ended, I'd imagine they're hardened enough that a little magic isn't going to faze them, since they obviously don't fear death or bodily harm while a bunch of (presumably) strangers are swinging swords and spells and whatnot around nearby. Unless it's specifically a magic-hating/magic outlawing society, in which case someone in the melee probably already cast some magic so they're screwed either way.

If the commoners ARE afraid they're probably not exactly going to rush off to rat out the folks who just WON the fight, lest they become the next victim. If they choose to have a negative opinion of the spellcaster/spellcasters in general because of the Charm Person, that's their own fault, not the fault of the party. Otherwise folks would have to start shifting alignment everytime they botched a Diplomacy check.

Though if you live in a society where magic is commonplace enough that the average tavern-goer can recognize a charm person spell/more subtle magic being cast and immediately know what's going on, I'd question the notion that Magic is particularly "taboo" in that world.

Hard to portray because it's all in the timing and tone, but I'll try:

Scenario 1: One of our players ("J") always played the exact same character in every 3.5 campaign we played: A buxom, dark (brown) skinned, white-haired female elven archer (Ranger) of Chaotic Neutral alignment. Basically Storm of the X-Men with pointy ears and a bow. Personality wise she was basically a "get rich quick" schemer, constantly trying to con (or "charm") just about every merchant or person of authority in town to try to get the things (s)he wanted (usually money). Bear in mind that "J" is a 30ish human male player for imagery's sake.

So at one point in one of our campaigns "J" has wandered off with the Half-Orc Barbarian ("B") to try to find the "general store" owner of the particular town we were in. They knock on the door, and the shopkeepers 10-year old daughter opens the door.

"J" says in a "soothing" voice: "Hello little girl, is your father home?"

GM as little girl: "No..."

"J" says in the same soothing tone, but at a strangely "urgent" tempo and responding practically before the DM has finished answering: "Can I come in?"

It was a case of OOC blurring the line but his delivery was so perfectly creepy that the entire table ended up in tears.

Scenario 2: Same player, same character, different campaign, trying to pawn off loot from our last adventure on one of the local merchants:

"J": "But these daggers were forged with iron from the legendary Mines of Galidor!" (Completely making this up as he goes along)

*NPC refuses to buy them for a copper more than he originally offered*

"J": "Well, how about I just trade them for a quiver of masterwork arrows?"

NPC: "No, that'll cost you the daggers and 2000 gold pieces."

"J": "2000 gold pieces, that's outrageous!"

NPC *deadpan*: "They're made with wood gathered from the fabled Forest of F***youtopia."

*Cue laughter*

Scenario 3: We had invited a new fellow to our game who turned out to be...a little odd, even by gamer standards. At one point in our session, this new player goes off on a completely non-sequitur tangent in conversation that has nothing to do with the game or well, anything that was really being discussed previously (seriously it was about the ice in his cup cracking). As he concludes, one of our other players, who is ordinarily one of the nicest and most inoffensive guys you'll meet responds in a positively acidic tone:

"Yeah man, I like Chocolate Chip Cookies, too."