Quote from: RPGPundit;733841I guess you'd rather I had whitewashed it? Written a game about Epic fantasy India where there WASN'T a caste system?
Do you think that the Pseudo-activist SJWs wouldn't have then attacked me for "hiding the truth about dalit oppression" and saying "The pundit never once mentions dalits in his game!! How dare he! Discriminating against those people by trying to revise history and silence their voice"?

You could just have caste not impact people stats. That is a thing you could have done that would have made your handling of the issue less offensive.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;733849You could just have caste not impact people stats. That is a thing you could have done that would have made your handling of the issue less offensive.

Isn't that the same as white washing it?  Presenting an untouchable caste and then having a "life is fine for them!" approach in the game?

Quote from: Snowman0147;733720My apologize and while Archangel explained it best SJWs are called social justice warriors.  They do nothing other than complain, dog pile, and just generally make the other person feel like shit so they get a ego boost.  Worst of all they don't even give a single shred of care about the topics they love to preach about.  If it came time to actually physically, emotionally, or do something truly helpful to another human being they rather not do any thing at all.  It is just a new type of troll.

I don't dispute the existence of these people, but there's a contingent who lump anyone who complains or criticises a game's content as SJW'ing or political correctness or "white knighting" or whichever new word they learned this week.

I mean, do we really need to include rapey material in games? Do game books really need art of characters being fuck- or power-fantasies? Do we really need to have some societal groups be "fair game" for attacking or making fun of? And the answer is "no, we don't need any of those things", but now the progressive well is just as poisoned as the regressive well...

If a game has content I don't like I either excise it if its overall salvageable or don't buy that game. I believe some material should have warning for content just like most other forms of fiction and informed reviews and word of mouth help people steer around things that might offend and traumatize them. But I don't think anything should verboten out of hand. There's too much variation in opinion.

So its not that the "SJW's" talk about their opinions and preferences but the attempt to cram what they want down everyone's else's throat.

Quote from: NathanIW;733853Isn't that the same as white washing it?  Presenting an untouchable caste and then having a "life is fine for them!" approach in the game?

It's not like this is an easy sort of thing to handle, but not giving real world oppressed groups penalties to mental stats seems like a good start.

Quote from: NathanIW;733853Isn't that the same as white washing it?  Presenting an untouchable caste and then having a "life is fine for them!" approach in the game?

It depends?

There's an excluded middle, obviously, that includes approaches based on the fact that we're not playing games wedded to historical fidelity, usually (and because when we are, we tend to be playing exceptional people, and history is full of exceptional people who broke the mold individually.)  At the same time, people have to be cautious of erasure of groups which tend to get ignored.  

I mean, I like the fact that Rokugan does not dwell on how shitty life was for the average peasant or burukumen, because I'm playing in cinematic faux-Asia and I don't want to linger on a player-character's right to murder human beings by dint of an accident of birth.  I also don't describe the shit-field that villages use for people to use the bathroom in some places.  I don't view that as white-washing, it's just not germane to that kind of game.  (D&D gets a similar pass.  Medieval Europe wasn't known for its upward mobility in a lot of cases, but I have tons of poor villager's kids who rise to nobility.)  

At the same time, a game that does have notes about how shitty life was for a peasant isn't a loser.  It all depends on technique.  I'd prefer to see a lot of different approaches than one.

Quote from: Ladybird;733866I don't dispute the existence of these people, but there's a contingent who lump anyone who complains or criticises a game's content as SJW'ing or political correctness or "white knighting" or whichever new word they learned this week.

I mean, do we really need to include rapey material in games? Do game books really need art of characters being fuck- or power-fantasies? Do we really need to have some societal groups be "fair game" for attacking or making fun of? And the answer is "no, we don't need any of those things", but now the progressive well is just as poisoned as the regressive well...

Good point and my response is it really depends on the book.  It depends on what type of game that is being run and playing.  That is what boils down to it.

I mean if your going through a normal dungeon crawl where everyone is all relax and just want to have fun.  No you don't need them all.  It would actually hurt the game to have that dark content in it.

If your going into a dark gritty game that says fuck all to human rights.  Expect some dark and horrible things to happen.  If the game is like that and you give full permission to allow every thing don't complaining when bad things happen to you.  While I can understand ground rules being place the fact is if you pc every thing you going to do harm to the setting and ruin the enjoyment people have for such a setting.

What separates a person with a complaint and a social justice warrior is that a normal person can move on.  Don't like child death in a post apocalypse setting, then make a ground rule at your table.  I am sure you friends will understand and have fun.  That is not good enough for the social justice warrior though.  They want to change the setting and game to their belief system.  If they can't have that, then they want to ruin the career of the person that wrote the book.  I believe Pundit can testify to that, or have a example of that actually happening to some one else.  Point is a normal person with a complaint can be reasonable while a social justice warrior has reach the point that can't be reason with.

Quote from: Ladybird;733866I mean, do we really need to include rapey material in games? Do game books really need art of characters being fuck- or power-fantasies? Do we really need to have some societal groups be "fair game" for attacking or making fun of? And the answer is "no, we don't need any of those things", but now the progressive well is just as poisoned as the regressive well...

Of course not, but not including rape content and fetishism has nothing to do with being on board with progressivism, it has to do with not being a creepy loser.

Getting back to Exalted I'm not unsympathetic to the problem the current release "schedule" for Exalted 3rd presents. The idea of waiting years for their favorite Exalts to become playable -again- is daunting. Though the reasoning is pragmatic: "Solar against the World" as "played out" as some might feel it is is a common play style. I've heard it said to be the most common and they open up mortal play along with giving the most reason to include broad setting information in their book as they don't have a specific area (the Realm, Yu-shan, the Underworld, etc) of their own but come from all over (arguably Dragonblooded share this trait).

If they did include the full play rules for all the splats in the core book it would be tremendous and/or have little setting information and the follow up setting specific books might be less desirable unless the buyer was really interested in new fluff. As the majority of the complaints about 2ed are, IME, about the mechanics that's not a given. So aggravating as it is the choice to go through the whole release cycle does make some sense.

Personally, I'm not interested in the new fluff or much else aside from hopefully functional mechanics. Most of fluff spoilers have left me cold or I've actively disliked them, particularly the choice to add new splats to a setting (and a system) that seem to be creaking under the weight of what's there all ready.

As for "dialing it back to 6" mechanically, that's probably a good idea over all. As they don't seem to be changing in the system that much and Storyteller works best as more modest power levels. Personally I'm not hugely thrilled by the idea. One of the draws for Exalted for me was the "Fantasy Superhero" aspects. I wasn't aware of any intention of dialing things back as far as "edgy" content like sexuality, horror and violence. But it does follow given the crowd they seem to be trying to appease.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;733877It's not like this is an easy sort of thing to handle, but not giving real world oppressed groups penalties to mental stats seems like a good start.

To clarify, they have a -1 to Charisma; this is a reflection of their low social status.   Given that every single human in the game has modifier to stats, and all have penalties as well as bonuses, its clearly making no judgment at all about any kind of natural 'hierarchy'.  In other words, if I'd given dalits a -2 to everything and higher castes +2 to everything, you might have a fucking point.  But as usual, you don't.

gamerGoyf, saying the Arrows of Indra rules gave lower caste characters a penalty to mental stats is a total misrepresentation of what the mechanics are doing.

As for the actual content the SJW objected to in the Exalted 3 material:

Spoiler

I happen to think that an evil immortal being who uses sex as a weapon, who's also into spirit summoning and whatnot, summoning a spirit that takes the form of an old flame of a target victim in order to life drain them through sex to be totally appropriate for games about things like that.  And just because the spirit is forceful or relentless in its advances, doesn't mean it's "rapey."  And even if it was, it's a magic demon sex spirit sent to drain your life force away.  If there ever was a subject where being "rapey" was appropriate, this would be it.

Quote from: Ladybird;733866I mean, do we really need to include rapey material in games? Do game books really need art of characters being fuck- or power-fantasies? Do we really need to have some societal groups be "fair game" for attacking or making fun of? And the answer is "no, we don't need any of those things", but now the progressive well is just as poisoned as the regressive well...

I really can't figure out what rapey material really brings to a game. It brings nothing and worse yet adds negatives to the game. It makes people feel uncomfortable and hostile to the game. Its just a net loss. I totally understand the idea that maybe people shouldn't be comfortable at all times but games are games. They are supposed to be fun. Its hard to have fun when your freaked out over rapey material or some obvious intrusive fetish that someone put into the game.

Now as for how it applies to Exalted 3 well the issues is that the designers didn't think through the previews well. Then they didn't write the previews well. The two acts collided and created a horrible mess. That ultimately blew up in their faces. I have a hard time feeling bad for them for it because its their own fault.

They should have been a fuck load more careful. They knew the game had a unpleasant history of rapey material and strange fetishism. They knew the game had a reputation for it. They explicitly stated that they weren't going to do that. Then they wrote something strangely ambiguous and complained when no one gave them the benefit of the doubt, well surprise!

This is of course my opinion.

Thankfully that is your opinion.  Point is there is some value in those unpleasant things and while I will never engage them in fantasy much less in real life you can't simply say it has no place.  Especially Exalted which is known to be a very beautiful place as much as it is ugly.  While there are things I rather just plain avoid at all cost I will point out taking them out of the game would actually harm the setting over all.  Just because you see some thing in a fantasy setting that completely fiction and makes you angry doesn't give you the right to tell developers to remove it.  That type energy is better off in real life.

Though I will give you the point in that the developers in for the third edition did promise a lot of things.  I just think they promise too much and should just focus on streamlining the system to make it easier for new players.  The setting itself shouldn't be touch at all because it is a very unique setting.

Sexual material is the sort of thing where you should have the option to use it, OR not use it.  The fact that it gets used badly is why it has such a bad reputation, and I'm not totally sure it will ever get away from that.  As for discrimination against castes, I think it would only be problematic if it were somehow central to the setting, and the main reason it isn't in L5R/Rokugan is that the non-samurai are basically ignored.  The other option is to be upfront and include it as Pundit did with Arrows of Indra, and even then he said that caste strictures would usually mandate that different groups not mix in any case.

JG

Yeah James said it best.  You should always leave that option out for sex.  I still stand on the issue that if you see something in the setting you don't like that doesn't mean you should force the developers to remove it either.  Just don't bother with it and never use it.