Quote from: Engine;222990It sounds like the problem you have is "stupid* females," which is a subset of "females" which you - and your friends, who are dating them! - would do well to avoid at the gaming table. They are part of a larger set called "stupid people," and I recommend you give the whole group of them a pass, whatever attributes - like gender - they might possess in addition to being stupid.

They weren't stupid, they just didn't care.  They weren't there to game, they were there to hang out with their boyfriend.  People don't forget rules and dice because they're dumb -- if they were really that dumb, they couldn't function in the modern world -- they do it because they can't be bothered to pay active attention and learn what they are doing.  Because they aren't emotionally invested in the game, they end up just being a drag on the fun.

Stupid is more like the women I've gamed with who had a lot of gaming experience.  Every woman I've ever met, with one exception, who had enough gaming experience to be reasonably called "a gamer" was a strange hybrid of walking, talking carnival freak show and natural disaster.

Basically imagine the worst stereotypes of gamers: overweight, pale, obsessive, socially retarded, general failures at life, and then add all the worst stereotypes of feminists: bitter, irrational, hypersensitive, controlling, misandrist, misogynistic.  Combine them in one person.  That is pretty much all of the women I've met through gaming.  A few of them weren't fat, they were anorexic.

I kind of agree with Gary Gygax and with AoS:  Gaming is, for the most part, something guys are into.  Now if you've got a game like Engines, which is very pretentious and elitist...wait, sorry, no, I mean story and character focused with a heavy emphasis on in-character role-playing (Engine & SP: aren't y'all amateur actors or something like that?), and less emphasis on "kill things and take their stuff while quoting one-liners from action movies", then that's going to appeal to women more.  It's going to naturally be more of tea & biscuits affair than beer & pretzels.

But most groups aren't playing that sort of game.  Most groups are playing D&D or worse. RIFTS is very popular.  Does anyone think that there are groups out there playing RIFTs that are playing on a level deeper than "Fuck yeah! My half-dragon transdimenisonal cyber-ninja warwizard did 8 million mega-damage!  A few more of those and he'll be dead!"?

Quote from: wulfgar;222887Again.  This is simply not true.

N'Longa is a black African who practices tribal magic.  N'Longa is one of Howard's heroes.

I honestly don't think so; N'Longa was a buddy of Solomon Kane, who was always at centre stage in his stories; N'Longa could help with his magic, but the proud white man was needed to get shit done in Africa.

Also, there were implications that there was something faintly corrupt about N'Longa's magic, and through his contact with N'Longa Kane was losing his civilised self and "going native".

Also, when N'Longa first shows up he's all "ooja booja me talky funny". Granted, eventually he used his telepathic abilities to talk to Kane mind-to-mind, eliminating the need to use pidgin English, but still.

In short, N'Longa's not a hero, he's at best a somewhat ambiguous supporting character. Also, his depiction is entirely based on cartoonish stereotypes of black Africans; even when he's writing them as being fairly benign, Howard simply can't treat them as nuanced human beings and constantly resorts to ham-fisted stereotypes.

QuoteThere are many others.  As I said before, check out the Outremer stories or the Afghan tales.

Protip: there are more than two races in the world. It is possible to be racist against blacks and have no problem with arabs.

Quote from: walkerp;223004I said all his heroes were white males, which they are.  Somebody please find me a story where the principal hero is not a white male.

The Shadow Of the Vulture, first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, January 1934.  Principal hero?  Red Sonya of Rogatino, a woman.

And for the record: Yes, Robert E. Howard was an ignorant racist.  He grew up in the south, his family were former plantation owners, and he had all of the unexamined racism you would expect from a man who had almost no actual experience of African-Americans and was surrounded by people who were as matter-of-factly racist as you could imagine.  In fact, it's a testament to his open-mindedness that he's only as rascist as he is.  Compared to the culture he lived in, he was fairly liberal.

Oh well.  Maybe if he hadn't offed himself at 30 he would have undergone the same sort of change that affected Burroughs in his 30's when he began to have real commercial success and went to Hollywood.  His later Tarzan stories pretty thoroughly repudiate the racism of his earlier books -- a result of growing up in an whites-only township and learning of the world through books.  Who knows how Howard would have been affected by WW2 and the civil rights movement, had he survived to see them.

Now shut up or take it to off-topic.

Quote from: walkerp;222741Calling it bad writing is just bullshit.  You have one entire section (say, a class) that uses the masculine and then the next that uses the feminine.  It's consistent within that section and avoids awkward punctuation (like the slash in he/she).  If you find the use of she or hers in a descriptive rules sentence bad writing, you've got other issues you need to think through.

If you're using "he or she" in your text, it's fine, although unnecessary by writing standards. If you are alternating between the two separately in the text (and I'm not talking about consistency in the same section), you are mixing gender, which not only becomes confusing, but is akin to mixing tense, something that should never be done.

Personally, I don't care one way or the other - most RPGs are full of poor grammar and writing structure anyway. My issue is that it should not slow down comprehension of the text.

This thread got way too big too fast I had to skip about half the pages, so if this was already said, I apoglize.

Quote from: Jackalope;223056Basically imagine the worst stereotypes of gamers: overweight, pale, obsessive, socially retarded, general failures at life, and then add all the worst stereotypes of feminists: bitter, irrational, hypersensitive, controlling, misandrist, misogynistic.  Combine them in one person.

Good grief Jack! Can such an abomination actually exist? :eek:
Are you sure you aren't painting them a few shades of darker than they really where?

You're giving me ideas for new Great Old Ones if I ever run CoC again. Or maybe a new mutant race for my Mutant Future campaign. I wonder how many XP would bagging one of those grant?

Quote from: Jackalope;223056Stupid is more like the women I've gamed with who had a lot of gaming experience.  Every woman I've ever met, with one exception, who had enough gaming experience to be reasonably called "a gamer" was a strange hybrid of walking, talking carnival freak show and natural disaster.

Basically imagine the worst stereotypes of gamers: overweight, pale, obsessive, socially retarded, general failures at life, and then add all the worst stereotypes of feminists: bitter, irrational, hypersensitive, controlling, misandrist, misogynistic.  Combine them in one person.  That is pretty much all of the women I've met through gaming.  A few of them weren't fat, they were anorexic.

This has not been my experience and I have met, played with and introduced a lot of women to gaming. I will say, this is a subset of those just as their male counterparts are a subset of male gamers. I don't game with either subset. I have better things to do. I met my wife, an intelligent even keeled professional through gaming and she is still a gamer.

Note: I am in no way trying to invalidate or argue your experience. I can't. I can share my experiences though.

Quote from: Jackalope;223056I kind of agree with Gary Gygax and with AoS:  Gaming is, for the most part, something guys are into.  Now if you've got a game like Engines, which is very pretentious and elitist...wait, sorry, no, I mean story and character focused with a heavy emphasis on in-character role-playing (Engine & SP: aren't y'all amateur actors or something like that?), and less emphasis on "kill things and take their stuff while quoting one-liners from action movies", then that's going to appeal to women more.  It's going to naturally be more of tea & biscuits affair than beer & pretzels.

But most groups aren't playing that sort of game.  Most groups are playing D&D or worse. RIFTS is very popular.  Does anyone think that there are groups out there playing RIFTs that are playing on a level deeper than "Fuck yeah! My half-dragon transdimenisonal cyber-ninja warwizard did 8 million mega-damage!  A few more of those and he'll be dead!"?

Hmm, I haven't played a game like that since I was 12 or so. Not because I believe the way I play is some kind of objectively better way to play, but subjectively I prefer it. So, if you do ply in the style you mention it may be that reason why you do not get women gamers or women gamers you prefer at your table.

Now, just because I do not like "gonzo" play style, I tend to attract a different sort of woman to my table. They tend to want to play squirrels...er, I mean in my style. What style that is I could not say but it does tend towards 1 part action, 1 part story, 1 part inter-character relations. I would also say, a lot of building things. So, how you play, to me, is what attracts certain types of women to your table.

Now, if you just have the girlfriend there cause she wants to keep an eye on her man or because she wants to spend time with him...come on dude, that is a recipe for a bad time whether it is gaming, a baseball game or whatever.

Bill

Quote from: Jackalope;223059The Shadow Of the Vulture, first published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, January 1934.  Principal hero?  Red Sonya of Rogatino, a woman.

Please.  Red Sonya was practically Conan in drag.

!i!

QuoteAlso, when N'Longa first shows up he's all "ooja booja me talky funny". Granted, eventually he used his telepathic abilities to talk to Kane mind-to-mind, eliminating the need to use pidgin English, but still

Well, as an African it makes perfect sense to me that N'Longa's English wouldn't be perfectly fluent.  Rather than a racist mark against him one could take it as a mark of his intelligence- Kane can't speak N'Longa's language at all.

QuoteI honestly don't think so; N'Longa was a buddy of Solomon Kane, who was always at centre stage in his stories; N'Longa could help with his magic, but the proud white man was needed to get shit done in Africa.

Yes, Kane was at the center of the stories, but a story can have more than one hero.  My take on it was that Kane needed N'Longa a lot more than N'Longa needed Kane.

QuoteAlso, there were implications that there was something faintly corrupt about N'Longa's magic, and through his contact with N'Longa Kane was losing his civilised self and "going native".

All true, but I don't see how any of that is racist.  Magic in general is corrupt in Howard's worlds, and "going native" is not something REH viewed entirely as a bad thing.  There's something dark and sinister about most of Howard's white characters as well, Solomon Kane included.

QuoteIn short, N'Longa's not a hero, he's at best a somewhat ambiguous supporting character. Also, his depiction is entirely based on cartoonish stereotypes of black Africans; even when he's writing them as being fairly benign, Howard simply can't treat them as nuanced human beings and constantly resorts to ham-fisted stereotypes.

I think N'Longa is a pretty nuanced character.  Like you said, he's a big help to Kane, but yet there's something "off" about his magic.  What is it's source?  Can magic used to fight evil, be itself evil or do the ends justify the means?  Howard serves up lots of food for thought with the character.

QuoteProtip: there are more than two races in the world. It is possible to be racist against blacks and have no problem with arabs.

Yes, lots of races out there.  My comment about outremer stories and Afghan stories was differected at Walker's claim that all the bad guys were blacks and arabs.  Howard certainly could have been cool with Arabs and anti-black, but I don't think he was.  I think his writings show that any person- black, white, brown, Pict, Celt, Dane, Arab, Frank....can all be heroes or villians.  Most of his characters, regardless of race are corrupt degenerates, yet heroes can arise from any race as well.

Quote from: Ian Absentia;223065Please.  Red Sonya was practically Conan in drag.!i!

So it does not count as a non-male character then?

Quote from: Jackalope;223056Now if you've got a game like Engines, which is very pretentious and elitist...wait, sorry, no, I mean story and character focused with a heavy emphasis on in-character role-playing (Engine & SP: aren't y'all amateur actors or something like that?), and less emphasis on "kill things and take their stuff while quoting one-liners from action movies", then that's going to appeal to women more.

Now if I could just break you of the idea that story- and character-focused gaming with a heavy emphasis on in-character role-playing has to be pretentious and elitist. Look, I get that it often is, but it doesn't have to be. What makes it pretentious is when it thinks it's more than it is; what makes it elitist is when it's put forth as superior. If those things aren't done, it's just people in a room roleplaying in a different way than you.

Quote from: Edsan;223068So it does not count as a non-male character then?

Depends on the reader, I suppose.  Is it the gender-specific prose, the characterisation, or the reader's interpretation that makes the character female?

That said, I always liked Red Sonya myself, possibly because I found it more pleasing to imagine her chainmail bikini than Conan's sweaty loincloth.

!i!

Quote from: wulfgar;223066Well, as an African it makes perfect sense to me that N'Longa's English wouldn't be perfectly fluent.  Rather than a racist mark against him one could take it as a mark of his intelligence- Kane can't speak N'Longa's language at all.

Except it's a mark of his intelligence which makes him talk like a retard.

Honestly, I think N'Longa is a bit of a red herring in this argument anyway. We have one black good guy in Howard's writing. (I don't count him as a hero, simply because he wasn't the protagonist of the story, and that's the sense I've been using "hero" in this discussion. In every case, Kane is the protagonist.) He is a good guy who is a tribal witch doctor based on Howard's understanding of tribal African society, which appears to be non-existent. And just because he is depicted as being a good guy doesn't mean he is considered to be Kane's equal; the vast majority of black characters, who don't have any sort of magic, are definitely Kane's inferiors - they're either savages that Kane must destroy or simpletons who need Kane to protect them.

And then we move out of fantasy and take a look at his boxing stories, which consist almost entirely of heroic white boxers beating up vicious black gorillas.

But hey, here's the secret:

It's OK.

It's really OK.

It completely doesn't matter that Howard didn't like black people.

You know why? Because great writing overcomes the limitations of the author.

Philip K. Dick was a hack whose epic drug intake turned him into a paranoid schizophrenic. He also wrote great SF which makes compelling statements about the human condition, despite all this.

H.P. Lovecraft was a crank who wrote long letters to his friends about how other races are inferior. I can still enjoy The Shadow Out of Innsmouth because I can choose to regard the Deep Ones as Deep Ones, or symbols of primal savagery, as opposed to being metaphors for immigrants.

Almost every single author you could care to name writing up until the 20th Century took it for granted that women were subservient to men. But I'm not crazy enough to condemn all pre-feminist fiction to the Memory Hole.

Robert E. Howard wrote depictions of black people which I don't like, because I consider them simplistic, stereotypical, and lacking insight, sins which are especially bad since his knowledge of the history of pretty much every region of the world aside from sub-Saharan Africa seems reasonably thorough. But that's OK, because despite that he was able to give us Conan.

Great writing isn't diminished by the flaws of the author, because all authors are flawed. Great writing overcomes the flaws of the author.

This doesn't mean that we should be blind to the author's flaws (if anything, understanding them helps us understand the text), but it does mean that we shouldn't dismiss an author's work because of the author's flaws. Again, I don't like the Kane stories because they don't overcome Howard's suspicion of black people, in the same way that some of Lovecraft's lesser stories don't quite overcome his suspicion of other races. They are simply less good than the Conan stories; if they were as awesome as Conan, I wouldn't have noticed the racism so much. (Though arguably, a requirement of them being as cool as Conan would have involved Howard being less keen to spout off about how sinister Africa is).

Quote from: Warthur;223072And then we move out of fantasy and take a look at his boxing stories, which consist almost entirely of heroic white boxers beating up vicious black gorillas.

Huh?  Even if you meant that figuratively...huh?

!i!

Quote from: walkerp;222741I remember reading somewhere that it was a standard editorial practice at Wizards... It's the same in the 3.x books.

Calling it bad writing is just bullshit.  You have one entire section (say, a class) that uses the masculine and then the next that uses the feminine.  It's consistent within that section and avoids awkward punctuation (like the slash in he/she).

3x's handling of it was the way i prefer it. Usually, the gender description for a class matched the gender of the character illustration. I don't think there was much gender-specific wording in the 3.x DMG was there? Way I remember it, it was "you" (the DM) and "they" (the players). I don't have my 4e DMG on hand. Have these conventions changed?

Quote from: walkerp;222829In effect, they were and have been and that's the whole point.  Fantasy art and literature from the get-go is rife with the constant reinforcement of the supremacy of the white male over women and all other races.  Do you think that is just an accident?

Read any Robert E. Howard recently?  Tolkien?  Don't get me wrong, they are great writers and I love their work (especially Howard), but there writing reinforces social inequalities that were not good (like slavery, colonialism, women not being able to vote).  Things have changed in our society, in many ways for the better.  Should not our literature, art and gaming reflect that?

Social inequalities? The works of Tolkien are inspired by northern European folklore. The people in that folklore are white. They have the heroic tradition of warrior cultures. Those warrior cultures were male-dominated (as were pretty much all warrior cultures in every corner of the earth).

D&D was inspired by Tolkien, Howard, Lieber, and other writers who were themselves harkening back to earlier cultural traditions. To change those cultures and make them multi-ethnic socieites where the captain of the guard was as likely to be a woman as a man would be to invent something new - and something incongruous to those familiar with the myths and sagas they drew on.

If there were African authors who drew on their own folklore to write pulp novels, I wouldn't condemn them for using black protagonists. Artists shouldn't be under any responsibility to model their fantasy settings on modern, utopian notions of gender and culture diversity.