Quote from: DocJones on January 22, 2024, 08:31:39 PM

Quote from: Habitual Gamer on January 18, 2024, 03:34:25 PM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 18, 2024, 09:46:04 AM
I have never seen a single player, either male or female, play a female PC who was overweight or unattractive.

I'll admit it: the one time I played a female character was in 50 Fathoms, where I played some female squid thing.  "Oh, so she had boobs and a vagina right?"  Nope and nope; not that it ever came up, but I figured she would reproduce like a squid does (squirts eggs out on the floor, male squirts on the eggs, no lactation so no breasts, and all of it about as arousing as watching a spastic make a PB&J sandwich*).  Which isn't anything like mammals do, but still much less horrific than octopus reproduction.

(*"Hey!  Spastic squid reproduction on bread is -my- fetish!"  No it isn't, hypothetical internet person, no it isn't.)

Somehow mermaids became less sexy after I read this comic...

Same thing happened to me, but with that one Futurama episode.

Quote from: Cipher on January 22, 2024, 08:14:44 PM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 22, 2024, 07:37:55 PM

Quote from: jhkim on January 22, 2024, 06:17:38 PMThirsty Sword Lesbians made $298K in its Kickstarter, which is slightly more than the $291 for "Old-School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy".

What have the post-Kickstarter sales been like? It would not surprise me to find out that most of the people who wanted to actually buy and play TSL got their copy during said Kickstarter.

The only number that I could find is that as of 2021 Q3 it had sold 13,000 copies, as reported by Evil Hat Production.

Also of note is that even though the Kickstarter made $298K, the number of backers was 8,152.

In their own Kickstarter they list that after all was said and done, they bagged $88K as profit for their efforts.

Which clearly shows there is money to be made, but doesn't really say anything about the staying power of the game and how many people are actually playing it.

Thanks, Cipher. I tried checking its sales in Amazon, but they have bizarrely classified it as "Costume Weapons & Armor". It's #661 in that category, but it's not directly comparable to other RPGs.

https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Hat-Productions-17197-Lesbians/dp/1613171978/

It's one supplement, "Advanced Lovers & Lesbians", is rated #825 in "Martial Arts Swords". (?!?)

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Lovers-Lesbians-Supplement-Hardback/dp/1613172001/

Quote from: jhkim on January 22, 2024, 08:49:53 PM

Quote from: Cipher on January 22, 2024, 08:14:44 PM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 22, 2024, 07:37:55 PM

Quote from: jhkim on January 22, 2024, 06:17:38 PMThirsty Sword Lesbians made $298K in its Kickstarter, which is slightly more than the $291 for "Old-School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy".

What have the post-Kickstarter sales been like? It would not surprise me to find out that most of the people who wanted to actually buy and play TSL got their copy during said Kickstarter.

The only number that I could find is that as of 2021 Q3 it had sold 13,000 copies, as reported by Evil Hat Production.

Also of note is that even though the Kickstarter made $298K, the number of backers was 8,152.

In their own Kickstarter they list that after all was said and done, they bagged $88K as profit for their efforts.

Which clearly shows there is money to be made, but doesn't really say anything about the staying power of the game and how many people are actually playing it.

Thanks, Cipher. I tried checking its sales in Amazon, but they have bizarrely classified it as "Costume Weapons & Armor". It's #661 in that category, but it's not directly comparable to other RPGs.

https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Hat-Productions-17197-Lesbians/dp/1613171978/

It's one supplement, "Advanced Lovers & Lesbians", is rated #825 in "Martial Arts Swords". (?!?)

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Lovers-Lesbians-Supplement-Hardback/dp/1613172001/

I see. Any thoughts on why they would classify it in such a manner?

I don't know enough, hence why I ask, but does Amazon has a ttrpg classification? If not, then it would explain these choices.

Quote from: jhkim on January 22, 2024, 03:08:17 PM
That's fine. I just meant that we don't know what she would look like if we could see her face sans beard and hammer-swinging-arm in front of it. Female dwarves having beards was established by Gygax (Dragon magazine #38, 1980) - which is in keeping with Tolkien. That's when Module A1 came out, so it was following canon rather than an artistic choice. I think it was WotC in 3rd edition who reversed that, though I'm not sure.

I only have the starter box and revised PHB pdfs for 2e handy. The Revised PHB interestingly does not reference beards in the text description for dwarves at all. The Introduction to AD&D starter box says that "Dwarves are short, stocky creatures with long braided beards and burly builds". So it's probably safe to say that for D&D at least, 3rd edition canonized female dwarves not having beards. I don't have the pdfs for the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but the second edition also just says "dwarfs have beards", not specifying by male or female. The Gotrek and Felix story "The Dark Beneath the World" (originally published 1990) includes a female dwarf, and I don't think it mentions a beard, though I'm not sure (even though I just read it recently).

If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was World of Warcraft that canonized female dwarfs not having beards for most people, since that tends to be the case with most things modern fantasy. The fact that it is now nearly universal in fantasy media is probably a decent point of evidence that most players want their female characters to be more attractive. The way WoW treated some of its other races certainly is:

The female orcs and trolls don't even look like the same species as the males 

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2024, 11:48:36 PM

Quote from: jhkim on January 22, 2024, 03:08:17 PM
That's fine. I just meant that we don't know what she would look like if we could see her face sans beard and hammer-swinging-arm in front of it. Female dwarves having beards was established by Gygax (Dragon magazine #38, 1980) - which is in keeping with Tolkien. That's when Module A1 came out, so it was following canon rather than an artistic choice. I think it was WotC in 3rd edition who reversed that, though I'm not sure.

I only have the starter box and revised PHB pdfs for 2e handy. The Revised PHB interestingly does not reference beards in the text description for dwarves at all. The Introduction to AD&D starter box says that "Dwarves are short, stocky creatures with long braided beards and burly builds". So it's probably safe to say that for D&D at least, 3rd edition canonized female dwarves not having beards. I don't have the pdfs for the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but the second edition also just says "dwarfs have beards", not specifying by male or female. The Gotrek and Felix story "The Dark Beneath the World" (originally published 1990) includes a female dwarf, and I don't think it mentions a beard, though I'm not sure (even though I just read it recently).

If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was World of Warcraft that canonized female dwarfs not having beards for most people, since that tends to be the case with most things modern fantasy. The fact that it is now nearly universal in fantasy media is probably a decent point of evidence that most players want their female characters to be more attractive. The way WoW treated some of its other races certainly is:

The female orcs and trolls don't even look like the same species as the males 

Specially, the female Troll. You can't even see her tusks and no hunch stance either.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2024, 11:48:36 PM
The way WoW treated some of its other races certainly is:

I remember when The Burning Crusade came out and a bunch of people started playing Horde because they finally had a pretty race in the Blood Elves.

For me, this is the type of art/aesthetics I like for a fantasy game/story:



















Men are ripped and look like men. Women are fit and look like women.

Someone can argue about women showing leg but you can see men showing leg and even torso as well. It's just a style to show some skin I don't find this pornographic or in bad taste.

The art is excellent, has a lot of use of color, perspective, and detail. It's evocative and like I said, men look like men and women look like women. Yes, a little more idealistic, but adventurers would almost always tend to be on the fit side of the scale with low body fat and well defined muscles, for both men and women, since they have to walk a lot, fight and eat on the road while rationing their food instead of sitting all day and gorging McDonalds.

I can see the argument that is a little too stylized but I like my fantasy heroes to be idealistic. Something you can aspire to be. Men are ripped but not huge. They don't have the roided to the gills bodybuilder type of body. Same with the women, they are fit and have a good figure, but not unrealistic or plastic amounts of T and A.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2024, 11:48:36 PM

Quote from: jhkim on January 22, 2024, 03:08:17 PM
That's fine. I just meant that we don't know what she would look like if we could see her face sans beard and hammer-swinging-arm in front of it. Female dwarves having beards was established by Gygax (Dragon magazine #38, 1980) - which is in keeping with Tolkien. That's when Module A1 came out, so it was following canon rather than an artistic choice. I think it was WotC in 3rd edition who reversed that, though I'm not sure.

I only have the starter box and revised PHB pdfs for 2e handy. The Revised PHB interestingly does not reference beards in the text description for dwarves at all. The Introduction to AD&D starter box says that "Dwarves are short, stocky creatures with long braided beards and burly builds". So it's probably safe to say that for D&D at least, 3rd edition canonized female dwarves not having beards. I don't have the pdfs for the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but the second edition also just says "dwarfs have beards", not specifying by male or female. The Gotrek and Felix story "The Dark Beneath the World" (originally published 1990) includes a female dwarf, and I don't think it mentions a beard, though I'm not sure (even though I just read it recently).

If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was World of Warcraft that canonized female dwarfs not having beards for most people, since that tends to be the case with most things modern fantasy. The fact that it is now nearly universal in fantasy media is probably a decent point of evidence that most players want their female characters to be more attractive. The way WoW treated some of its other races certainly is:

The female orcs and trolls don't even look like the same species as the males 

Probably not what moat people think, but in Norse myth female dwarves dont have beards either. Gleipnir was made from impossible things like the "roots of mountains and breath of fish" one of the ingredients was a woman's beard which implies that its just as impossible as the other stuff. Though norse Dwarf =/= Fantasy Dwarves really but its an interesting anecdote.

Quote from: Cipher on January 23, 2024, 12:46:25 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2024, 11:48:36 PM
If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was World of Warcraft that canonized female dwarfs not having beards for most people, since that tends to be the case with most things modern fantasy. The fact that it is now nearly universal in fantasy media is probably a decent point of evidence that most players want their female characters to be more attractive. The way WoW treated some of its other races certainly is:

The female orcs and trolls don't even look like the same species as the males 

Specially, the female Troll. You can't even see her tusks and no hunch stance either.

Yeah, this is my problem with the "ugly women are bad" side of things. I want female orcs and trolls to look like the same species. More broadly, it messes with my sense of verisimilitude if characters look like posing models.

Quote from: Cipher on January 29, 2024, 12:56:24 AM
For me, this is the type of art/aesthetics I like for a fantasy game/story:
...


Men are ripped and look like men. Women are fit and look like women.

Someone can argue about women showing leg but you can see men showing leg and even torso as well. It's just a style to show some skin I don't find this pornographic or in bad taste.

Taking the last image there. It's not that I find it pornographic or in poor taste, but I prefer the original PHB cover because to me, this one doesn't make sense. The barbarian doesn't look like he just forced the door open with his shoulder. He looks like he is standing and posing - and the door shattered inward from the awesomeness of his body-building stance. It has the feel of posed models.

The original PHB cover gives more of a sense of action in a real world to me. The figures look fit (as oggsmash says), but they don't look like posing models.

Likewise, this one:

Quote from: Cipher on January 29, 2024, 12:56:24 AM

Here it's even more clear that the figures are standing and posing looking at the camera (or portrait-drawer, maybe). It feels posed, and the aesthetic is more than just their pose. There's a clean and bright look to their clothes and gear, and there's the glamour-shot lighting.

In the 1E era, the covers were more about characters more believably in the middle of action - styled for action more than glamour. There's the PHB and the Erol Otus Basic Set cover, and the Module A1 cover I posted earlier. If you prefer a more photorealistic style, there are still covers like the 1E Wilderness Survival Guide cover:



There is some posing in the stance here, but it's much more subtle. And the characters definitely look like they're in action. As oggsmash noted about the 1E PHB characters, they look like they're reasonably fit - but they just don't look like bodybuilders posing for an audience. Likewise, these characters aren't ugly - but they're not posed for glamour.

Quote from: jhkim on January 29, 2024, 02:30:31 AM

Quote from: Cipher on January 23, 2024, 12:46:25 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2024, 11:48:36 PM
If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was World of Warcraft that canonized female dwarfs not having beards for most people, since that tends to be the case with most things modern fantasy. The fact that it is now nearly universal in fantasy media is probably a decent point of evidence that most players want their female characters to be more attractive. The way WoW treated some of its other races certainly is:

The female orcs and trolls don't even look like the same species as the males 

Specially, the female Troll. You can't even see her tusks and no hunch stance either.

Yeah, this is my problem with the "ugly women are bad" side of things. I want female orcs and trolls to look like the same species. More broadly, it messes with my sense of verisimilitude if characters look like posing models.

There is a specific reason why this happened. Warcraft being a video game franchise is important.

Code and memory storage could only handle so much, so "orc grunt" was always the same art model. There were some female hero units, but I don't think there were any female regular units until Warcraft 3. Even then, a particular unit always had the same sex. Archers were female and druids were male. When the MMORPG comes out, however, the game has to accommodate both male and female characters for every race. While the majority of the player base was male, women did want to play the game.

As a general rule, people don't stray far from themselves. There are people who play the opposite sex, and women in the early 2000s did this more often, the overwhelming majority of people play their own sex.

The majority of women don't want to play an ugly character. Simple as. I remember having this conversation with a friend that I played with at the time, and even the female orc was too "butch" for her. She wouldn't play it. This woman isn't unusual. I've seen my sister-in-law do the same thing. So while it's true that they don't look like the same species, women vetoed playing the female version of an orc or a troll. They wanted to be the orc or troll version of a real woman, instead. So that's what the developer made.

World of Warcraft was so big that it influenced a lot of later artwork.

the "nontraditional positivity" they make so much of really doesn't go as far as they think it does

They will tell you Lizzo is beautiful, but woe betide the man who says "you look just like Lizzo".

The female orcs and trolls don't even look like the same species as the males

I always preferred Castle Falkenstein's approach: there are no female dwarves, and no male elves.  They're one species with extreme sexual dimorphism.

Quote from: daniel_ream on January 29, 2024, 12:27:48 PM
I always preferred Castle Falkenstein's approach: there are no female dwarves, and no male elves.  They're one species with extreme sexual dimorphism.

That's actually a really neat way of making elves and dwarves more alien too.

Quote from: 1stLevelWizard on January 29, 2024, 12:51:17 PM

Quote from: daniel_ream on January 29, 2024, 12:27:48 PM
I always preferred Castle Falkenstein's approach: there are no female dwarves, and no male elves.  They're one species with extreme sexual dimorphism.

That's actually a really neat way of making elves and dwarves more alien too.

You can have a lot of fun with that idea.  Perhaps the dwarves carve their kin out of stone and then call upon their gods to animate them with the breath of life.  Literally, every dwarf is a blessing from their god.  While elves on the other hand might be like Mass Effect Assari in that they can bond/mate with anyone but any children will be another female elf.  Sorry, no half elves in that setting.

I can't remember if it's CF canon or fanon, but I recall reading a loresheet that said that the reason dwarves are so avaricious is that elves are very rare - no 50-50 births here - and picky, and it is every adult dwarf's life goal to accumulate enough wealth to impress an elf-maid enough to get her to settle down with him.  Strongly implied is that the vast majority of dwarfs never do.

Quote from: daniel_ream on January 29, 2024, 02:52:04 PM
I can't remember if it's CF canon or fanon, but I recall reading a loresheet that said that the reason dwarves are so avaricious is that elves are very rare - no 50-50 births here - and picky, and it is every adult dwarf's life goal to accumulate enough wealth to impress an elf-maid enough to get her to settle down with him.  Strongly implied is that the vast majority of dwarfs never do.

That's not the impression I got from the core books. Note that Castle Falkenstein doesn't have "elf" per se as a character type. Rather, there are a dozen or more different types of Faerie characters - which include male and female, but there are a few male-only types (like Leprechauns) and more female types (like Selkies, Naiads, and Russalkie). From page 21,

QuoteThis finally brings me (in a roundabout way) to the subject of Dwarfen females. Remember a raging controversy in fantasy lit as to whether female dwarfs had beards? The answer--what female dwarfs? When a Dwarf falls in love, he marries a willing female from one of the other Faerie races, like a Naiad, White Lady or Russalkie. THe offspring always take after their parents: all the males turn out short and heavy-set like their Dwarfish fathers, while all the females turn out like their willowy Faerie mothers. Dad raises the boys under the mountains in his dwarfhold, the slender, beautiful females go off to live with their mothers; and everybody gets together throughout the year in big family gatherings that drive distracted human male observers to wonder "What on earth could she (a beautiful Naiad or Selkie) see in him (a short, bristly-bearded Dwarf engineer)?" It figures.