Vivianne Laflamme's page

I recently saw a thread closed with the message "Locking. If you have feedback on specific products, please post in the appropriate forum. Additionally, abusive comments towards any paizo.com community member, staff or otherwise, is not OK here." (emphasis mine). There were definitely abusive comments in the thread; moderating it was a good thing! However, it reminded me of a short exchange I had with a Paizo staffer the other day. I feel that Mr. Reynolds's comments towards me were abusive and disrespectful. That thread was eventually locked, but for unrelated reasons.

The thing is, this isn't the first time I'm observed such behavior from staff members. I'm not going to link to a catalog of such posts. That would be inappropriate and witch huntish. But there seems to be a general trend. Abusive and disrespectful behavior seems to be tolerated when it comes from staffers. Is there some unwritten exception in the "don't be a jerk" rule that I'm unaware of? Otherwise, it seems like the rule is being unevenly enforced.

My impetus for posting this is this thread. I posted a link to a blog article analyzing how real world racial tropes have influenced depictions of orcs in fantasy roleplaying games. I was expecting at least some blowback from the "racism don't real" crowd. I wasn't expecting it to get bad enough that locking the thread became necessary.

Now, I don't think that locking the thread was the wrong thing to do. I was mildly upset when I first noticed, but by the time I got to the end of the thread, I understood why it had been locked. However, the direction the thread took and the subsequent locking has the effect of stifling conversation on the topic. In the past, I've seen threads on similar topics face the same kind of reaction (though offhandedly I can't remember any that got bad enough they had to be locked).

Hence the question in the title. Is there a place for these sorts of conversations on Paizo's messageboards? I feel these are interesting and important conversations, at least as interesting and important as how this feat interacts with that class ability. The LGBT gamer community thread partially fills this role, but only with regard to talking about queer gamers and queer issues.

Link

I thought this was an interesting article. It traces the history of orcs in fantasy games back through Tolkien. It talks about the tropes and real-world ideas which have influenced depiction of orcs and to what extent these influences continue today.

There's some interesting facts I was unaware of. For example, my mental image of orcs gives them very green skin like nothing we see in the real world, possibly due to too much Warcraft :P I didn't know that in some older depictions, orcs were described with a wider variety of skin colors, including some found in the real world!