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Not bothering to read the whole thread, just gonna throw my 2 copper in...
Pathfinder, like many fantasy RPGs, is a fantasy.
Your average adventuring party is a group of vigilante murder hobos.
Even some of the best things a party can do (such as, say, helping with a crime scene investigation) simply would not fly in the real world.
Use of lethal force is commonplace, and death of sentients is the norm.
As such, when things in a fantasy setting are supposed to be evil, they often go full mustache twirling.
After all, when the GOOD guys have a high body count, how do you make the bad guys...well, how do you make them bad?
So this is where the depraved stuff comes in.
Torture, rape, slavery, abuse, excessive violence, child abuse, and other evils that I can't even put into words.
These are bad things; we know them to be wrong, we refuse to accept them as even possibly being righteous; these are what make the individuals truly EVIL.
Let's just look at the core deities of Evil persuasion for a moment.
Take away slavery from Asmodeus, torture from Zon-Kuthon, mass destruction from Rovagug, beastiality from Lamashtu, slavery in the form of undeath from Urgathoa, and Father Skinsaw from Nogorber, and... well, you have a pantheon of Neutral deities.
Is child abuse a step too far?
Perhaps.
But it is a real world issue, a real world evil, and one that should be recognized.
Placing it under the purview of a Demon Lord does that.
Paizo is no more complicit in child abuse than "Twelve Years a Slave" is slavery.
My apologies. I only buy the physical books, so I am unaware of how they handle erratas.Do they retroactively change the PDFs when they have an error?
Typically, they'll revise a PDF if they reprint or of the PDF is defective - not if there's a batch of errata and there's no reprint. If my memory serves correct...
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Also, to be clear, the LINE here is sexual violence against children. I'm not tremendously concerned about rekindling unpleasant memories of the time their kid was burned on an altar to Moloch, but I am very concerned about making someone relive unpleasant memories of rape, especially with children.
There are LOTs of things I'd like to be able to "do over" as far as the last decade of Pathfinder is concerned, from the way some of our women characters are depicted (frankly even as recently as this book) to other sort of edgelord-style stuff, particularly early in the development of the brand.
Some of that stuff we "fix" organically, as we go. Sometimes it requires more aggressive action. Sexual violence against children fits into that latter category. Pretty much everything else, at least for me, fits into the former.
Oh sure, you laugh, but Moloch sacrifices are a very troubling event! <just kidding!>
But yes, there are a lot of things that could use a do over, if one were inclined, in all our lives and work. I had to go look up edgelord to know what that was, but sure, I can see what you mean.
The part where I questioned "the line" for you guys is because I expect (this being the internet and all) someone to take the ball and run with it. They got you to remove things about sexual violence against children -- although would it have been ok if Folca was just torturing them or killing them? That confused me in this argument -- and now they'll move to the other events in these books.
So I wonder, and worry that we're going to see a toning down of the material or a long line of revisions because in this day just about anything seems to upset someone, and if they make enough noise they tend to get their way. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but often not so good.
I'm rambling at this point, but hopefully you and others get the point I am going for.
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Now this thread is making me wonder if I am a horrible person for being able to read the book of the damned right before bed and still go to sleep.
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Now this thread is making me wonder if I am a horrible person for being able to read the book of the damned right before bed and still go to sleep.
Not having trigger points doesn't make someone bad. This is more about making the product more secure for those that do.
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Paizo is no more complicit in child abuse than "Twelve Years a Slave" is slavery.
They got you to remove things about sexual violence against children -- although would it have been ok if Folca was just torturing them or killing them? That confused me in this argument -- and now they'll move to the other events in these books.
Now this thread is making me wonder if I am a horrible person for being able to read the book of the damned right before bed and still go to sleep.Not having trigger points doesn't make someone bad. This is more about making the product more secure for those that do.
Thing is, trigger points are wildly varied and everyone has their limits.
Me, I can nonchalantly talk about my past brushes with suicide, yet the song "You Shook Me All Night Long" takes me to a *VERY* dark place.In the end, it's Aesop's fable of the man, the boy, and the donkey.
Try to please everyone, and you will please noone at all.
I suppose the best course would be for Paizo to decide where they as a company want to draw the line and stick to it, regardless of criticism from any given side.
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I guess I kind've see it.
I was thinking about and when I binge Criminal Minds (as you do) it's all fine and good. I am incredibly desensitized to murder due to media, and I know that serial killers aren't really a thing. (They exist, but only 50 of them, if that).
Yet, they also have episodes about child abuse. THAT is really uncomfortable. Probably because it is more real, more commonly occurring, and something that people just don't want to touch. It's something a minority of Paizo customers would want.
Seeing Paizo's stance on it, I think they did the right thing. This shouldn't prevent them from having our creepy murderous cults we hold dear, or cultists maniacally laughing about a gory punchline.
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I'm going to make this brief:
Not removing Folca from the PDF isn't a great choice. Pathfinder is already widely pirated and extremely easily accessible in pirated formats (including brand new releases that have only gone out to subscribers). Removing Folca won't incentivize that any more than it already is. That makes "we don't want to make it a rare, pirated item" sort of a cop-out of responsibility.
Because what do you think will happen if Folca is removed from reprints? Either you care more about a non-issue that doesn't help fighting piracy, or you care about not profiting off of child abuse.
Yes, it takes a lot of resources to do layout again. Maybe if you hadn't put incentivized child abuse in the book in the first place, or if it had been caught in the several steps of development/editing/copyfitting you wouldn't have to make this choice.
The consequence of screwing up is fixing the mistake. Not just apologizing and continuing to draw in revenue off of a book that features incentivized abuse of children.
Claiming that paizo is profiting off of child abuse is just dishonest.
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It’s not that hard to please in this regard, child abuse is waaaaaaaaay on the other f&%@ing side of the line.
I agree, although it seems that the major objections seemed to be (1) giving it powers to remove/alter memories and inspire lust, and (2) including the Lust domain.
If those bits had been left out and it was just (as if it is better?) torturing and/or killing children I'm not sure it would have gotten quite the visceral reaction.
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On my initial discovery of Folca in BotD3 and reading about it in this hardcover I didn’t have that much of problem with it, because in my head I had completely compartmentalized it as a horrific villain, and people like having horrific villains for their characters to stab. Repeatedly. Moreso if they themselves were a victim of whatever Evil these fiends delt in.
But, my opinion of not being bothered this, my want of self righteous rage to have a target in game to go after, as someone who has not suffered physical abuse, is absolutely meaningless.
I let my rage and eagerness to have one more target on an already long list of horrors to take revenge on for those who have suffered win over protecting people who have been hurt. I let hate beat out my empathy. What’s more important, in real life and in a game. Going after monsters so they don’t hurt anyone else, or not having those monsters so there’s no victims to begin with?
I do not need rules for including a rapist in a game as a villain, I do not need rules to include a child abuser as a villain. My mind can do that all on its f&~~ed up own. Could Folca, if left to hushed whispers and minimalistic text, been handled correctly? Possibly.
It was not.
I’ve been dragging my feet about this, and I flat out f%~*ed up in that regard. Including nightmares, very, very real nightmares in a game is one thing, and it’s already on the line right there, spelling out those nightmares, let alone outright mechanizing and rewarding them, is so far over the line you can’t even see where it landed.
The disclaimer sidenote (which I completely missed and had to have it pointed out to me) needed to be more prominent, either a warning introduction like how Horror Adventures handled it or a whole emblazoned page.
Regarding the removal of Folca from existence, I’ll gladly download the corrected PDF once it’s out. We have plenty of monsters already, plenty of Evil, plenty of nightmares, plenty of horrors, in real life and in-game, and none of my games, none of my theorycrafting about hypothetical adventure hooks that I’ll probbaly never use, absolutely none of that is worth causing someone to suffer a goddamn breakdown because they’re relieving some of the worst moments of their life now because of a f*%%ing book about a game.
Pathfinder isn’t Animal Crossing, all happy and carefree, but it is a game to be enjoyed, it’s supposed to make people happy, bring them together, not break them down.
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Well, I am sorry that this is the decision that Paizo has chosen to make, but I respect Paizo's right to make it.
I guess I'll just have to move up The Book of the Damned in my queue of books to purchase so I can get the complete package before it's too late.
For likely the last time in this thread, Malefactor out.
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I want to thank Erik, and management for responding to this in an official capacity and making it clear what you’re going to do to rectify this issue and prevent it from happening in future. I also want to thank you for making clear to the community here at Paizo what the company will and won’t stand for.
I’m disappointed it took this much noise to get Paizo to make an official statement, but I hope Paizo doesn’t let anything reach this stage again in future.
I hope as a forum community, people can learn something from this. About empathy, putting people before products and not drowning legitimate criticism with noise.
Paizo is a company, like any other. They should be held accountable for real mistakes, that cause real hurt.
Only characters should feel unsafe, players should always feel safe and welcome.
Take away slavery from Asmodeus, torture from Zon-Kuthon, mass destruction from Rovagug, beastiality from Lamashtu, slavery in the form of undeath from Urgathoa, and Father Skinsaw from Nogorber, and... well, you have a pantheon of Neutral deities.
Actually you would end up with far more interesting set of evil rather than the cliched set you have here.
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I want to thank Erik, and management for responding to this in an official capacity and making it clear what you’re going to do to rectify this issue and prevent it from happening in future. I also want to thank you for making clear to the community here at Paizo what the company will and won’t stand for.
I’m disappointed it took this much noise to get Paizo to make an official statement, but I hope Paizo doesn’t let anything reach this stage again in future.
I hope as a forum community, people can learn something from this. About empathy, putting people before products and not drowning legitimate criticism with noise.
Paizo is a company, like any other. They should be held accountable for real mistakes, that cause real hurt.
Only characters should feel unsafe, players should always feel safe and welcome.
I'd like to say that disagreeing about if something is a problem is not "noise" and that those people -- hey, I am one! -- should also be allowed a say rather than sitting quietly.
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I’m disappointed it took this much noise to get Paizo to make an official statement, but I hope Paizo doesn’t let anything reach this stage again in future.
This is an entirely unfair characterization of how things went down. Erik himself said he's been busy with PAX Unplugged as of late. With that plus the absolute fiasco going down over Ultimate Wilderness its pretty to safe to say Paizo has been extremely busy as of late.
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I've seen a large number of the posts, CPEvilref. A good many seem to be the same people in a large number of places saying the same thing, which doesn't exactly convince me that it is as wide spread a problem as it is being made out to be.
Regardless, Paizo has answered the call and has said what they are going to do. Hopefully this will be the end of it and not the beginning.
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I'd like to say that disagreeing about if something is a problem is not "noise" and that those people -- hey, I am one! -- should also be allowed a say rather than sitting quietly.The 'noise' as you seem to have missed the point, was many people, both here and elsewhere, calling Paizo to account on publishing 'child abuse gives you magic powers' rules and the whole expansion of Folca. Which, thankfully, they've admitted was a mistake and commited to never doing again.
At the risk of saying what has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, no one seems to be taking issue with "torture gives you magic powers" or "killing gives you magic powers" which could be equally "triggering" to someone. I'm not sure exactly why this has been chosen as the thing that must be singled out.
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I've seen a large number of the posts, CPEvilref. A good many seem to be the same people in a large number of places saying the same thing, which doesn't exactly convince me that it is as wide spread a problem as it is being made out to be.
If you don't think Paizo publishing mechanical benefits for child abuse is a problem, then I really don't know what to say.
As you say, hopefully this will see a turning point for paizo on this and other issues, as indicated by Mr Mona's posts.
Bolded for emphasis. It isn't nice to say that I said something that I didn't.
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At the risk of saying what has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, no one seems to be making a big deal about "torture gives you magic powers" or "killing gives you magic powers" which could be equally "triggering" to someone. I'm not sure exactly why this has been chosen as the thing that must be singled out.I haven't been murdered
I have been abused
But whataboutism was called out as not being acceptable by the mods already in this thread, and, pertinently, your point was already answered in the official statement:
Many of you are probably thinking, "what's the problem? I can handle this in my game." Or maybe even "bad guys are supposed to be evil," and to you folks this statement probably seems like some kind of betrayal or act of cowardice. The fact of the matter is that this issue specifically crosses a line with a HUGE number of gamers, and we knew better than to cross it this time. After the recent furor, we know even better not to cross it in the future.You're cool to do whatever you want in your games, but the public is right to hold us to a higher standard. Just because you think you can be responsible with this type of content does not mean that every GM can. Much more importantly, the primary concern here is less the GM and more the player who randomly encounters these themes unwittingly, and finds him or herself reliving terrible memories of trauma during what is supposed to be a game people play for fun.
Every so often, in an effort to fill in every blank, or provide rules for every eventuality, we can cross into a line of making a rule for something that probably shouldn't be in the game in the first place.
Folca is an example of just such an element, and he (and his kind) will not be welcome in Pathfinder products in the future.
You haven't been murdered, but many here may know someone or have someone in their life that has been. This is true for cutting/self-mutilation, rape, and so on.
Again, this is my concern: you and some others saw this as a problem and pointed it out, which is fine. Someone sees that and decides that they don't think that hillbilly ogres are a good idea and wants that removed and an answer why it was included. Or slavery. Or cutting.
It isn't a fallacy when, given the current tenor on the internet, it becomes more and more likely by the day that someone will take up that fight. Erik has said this is their line and I hope that it is, I really do.
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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Guys, let's lay off the meta commentary for a little bit, please?
The thread is supposed to close in six minutes, and it would be delightful if it did so in a spirit of understanding and agreement I hope we all get to experience over the Thanksgiving holiday.
We can go back to each other's throats on Monday, but a little peace is very much in order, I think.
Gobble gobble, and all that.
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Guys, let's lay off the meta commentary for a little bit, please?
The thread is supposed to close in six minutes, and it would be delightful if it did so in a spirit of understanding and agreement I hope we all get to experience over the Thanksgiving holiday.
We can go back to each other's throats on Monday, but a little peace is very much in order, I think.
Gobble gobble, and all that.
Sure. Have a nice holiday.
Customer Service Manager
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PS: Due to the potential volatility of this topic, we’ll be temporarily closing this topic at 5:00 Pacific time today to allow our moderators to take their four-day Thanksgiving holiday in relative peace. We’ll open things again when we return to the office next week.
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This thread was so 'volatile' earlier, but now it remains silent. I guess all it takes is a few days of silence to make people loose interest?
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I think it's mostly because after Mr. Mona's new statement and intent to very likely revise the book and PDF, the issue here is essentially resolved, and what was left of the discussion could be considered the aftermath: Was this good enough, what happens next, will there be similar cases to this, et cetera.
So yes, after the silence, aftermath-discussion essentially is dead now that everyone had the time to process it.
People didn't lose interest. This thread came forth with a goal in mind, and that goal has been achieved. There's no "sequel" after this, I highly doubt anyone reading this is inspired to start campaigns to remove more/other content.
Basically, it is done. The dust has settled.
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This thread was so 'volatile' earlier, but now it remains silent. I guess all it takes is a few days of silence to make people loose interest?
To say the truth, I'm posting only now because I believed this thread was definitely locked.
I think it's mostly because after Mr. Mona's new statement and intent to very likely revise the book and PDF, the issue here is essentially resolved...
And I'm very unhappy with this decision, I'm getting the physical book and/or the PDF tomorrow *EXACTLY* because of this act of self-censoring.
In my opinion, all I see is a loud minority crying wolf for nothing, and in need of a Bryce Treatment from the Paizo staff.Let me guess: in his last adventure, Durvin Gest had an encounter with the cult of Folca, and later he published his experiences in Volume 5 of the Pathfinder Chronicles. Do you think am I right?
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Guys, lets all please step away from this.
The matter is done.
Further discussion will amount to nothing more that a shouting match.
Lets calm down and step away.
There is no need to continue
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I highly doubt anyone reading this is inspired to start campaigns to remove more/other content
The question more likely is, if someone does get inspired, will it be done referring to/using this precedent only as a hollow excuse to censor something? I agree that Folca and its theme were disturbing and warranting changes. However, Folca didn't exist in perfect vacuum as sole evil deity of the setting, there are other themes there that are equally disturbing. And even as I can objectively agree with getting them cut too, I can't wonder if the same tactic may be used just to do the same with something in setting, that someone may just dislike.
But this is just my thoughts, hope they are wrong and all going to be good.P.S. Sorry for clumsy english (if it is), not a native speaker.
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This is Paizo's setting. If they want to cut stuff from it, they have every legal and moral right to do so.
I never considered Folca to be a big deal (he's portrayed as the most evil thing ever, and I'm used to awful shit existing in-setting from White Wolf games, Unknown Armies, Kult, and the like)...but I don't own Golarion. Paizo does. And that makes their opinion on the matter controlling.
They made the setting and they thus have every right to adjust it as they see fit. If a particular change does not meet with your approval, you have every right to ignore it or stop buying their products...but this seems a really weird hill to make your stand on in that regard.
With all due respect to Paizo's right to do whatever they want with their setting and as the issue and its resolution is pretty much settled...
I am just genuinely interested as to why, with all the twisted horror, the violent savagery, the deprivation, the hedonism, the monstrous deviancy, the torture, the slavery, perverse morality etc., etc... we have seen from the lineup of pathfinders evil and damned over the years, with parallels to real life existing world problems and suffering, which may or may not be as bad/evil as child abuse, why Folca was the place to draw the line? And, if I may ask, are they sure the line should have been drawn where it is?