Quote from: Snowman0147;861971What happen after that?

Well& not that exact thing but he made mention of the sjw inclination towards hypocrisy and nudge wink name dropped us in the process.

He got a three day vacation.

Didn't he used to be an admin or something.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;861972Didn't he used to be an admin or something.

Nah.

Quote from: Michael Gray;861937We've been playing for a while off of the "We swear this is not the final iteration, the real game will be totes different!" leak for...about 2 months now give or take. So, that seems to have been a fib. It's a perfectly competent game. Not groundbreaking by any stretch, but the combat runs smoother, the social combat/influence portion runs smoother (Or rather, runs at all! 2E was kind of a shit show in that regard). It's a bit faster, but most of the changes seem to be getting it to say, go down a highway doing 40MPH rather than bumping down an old dirt road that hasn't been maintained in 30 years doing 40MPH.

Combat hasn't taken too long, but we haven't had Exalt v. Exalt combat yet.

If anyone has questions about how things play out, I'll be happy to give answers if we've used it in play.

Thanks for the analysis. If you run across anything else, please share .

Quote from: Skywalker;861946Good to hear a balanced and informed opinion. What you say matches my impression of the ruleset. I would play it over 2e any day, but overall its an minor improvement on that existing base.

Though I think the rule set is needlessly dense it seems functional like I've said. It works just not how I'd want it too and its based on allot of assumptions and tropes I don't particularly agree with.

That happens. They weren't making the Nexus edition of Exalted.

The thing that chaps my ass is the way its been handled, the pervasive attitude directed at "haters", the passive aggressive bullshit, misleading commentary and other crap from the staff and writers.

Quote from: Brand55;861968There's an actual Street Fighter game for that. Though I haven't read it so I don't know if it lets you play Ryu or if it's any easier mechanically than Exalted since it was a White Wolf game, too.

I have it. Its not very good, IMO.

What I meant be play Ryu is play a guy/girl that's "just" good at fighting with empty handed. No weird special effects or emulating a tiger, etc. Some odd powers are fine and flavor ("Haudoken!").

To be fair, this wasn't exactly heavily supported in 2ed and 1st but there was more ability to build something like it using Brawl and a smattering of other charms and customs. Brawl didn't seem so pigeonholed into WWE smackdown style.

Dawn vs Tyrant Lizard

Quote from: Tyrrell;19506619After twelve turns or so neither side had won there was a lot of back and forth a lucky blow could still tilt the balance either way.  The dawn was in initiative crash when I ran out of time but he was slowly gaining back an initiative or two and a few motes each round. In a fight to the death I'd bet on him, he still has enough essence to pull out a big attack if he needs to though it will leave him spent.  

The tyrant lizard had taken eight body levels so she was at -1 die for everything. With a lucky attack she might be able to bash the dawn prone then follow that up with a stomp to grapple (he's in initiative crash so he can't heavenly guardian defense the unparryable attack, his evasion defense is negligible when he's prone) once grappled if she can control the grapple long enough she'll be able to savage him for some serious damage.   If the dawn gets himself out of crash she'll have to use her roar which will suck his initiative and willpower if he wants to keep from fleeing in terror, the dawn caste only has one willpower left so if she roars twice he'll head for the hills and shell be safe from that nasty glowing person and his sharp steel sword.

Quote from: Orphan81;861906So as a an exercise, I went through 2nd edition core and counted up the number of "problematic male gaze" images I could with the widest generous definition available.

Overall, it's about 10-11 pictures with an extreme definition of any female character who is showing some amount of skin.

A more reasonable definition, but still following these guidelines drops the numbers down to around 6-7 where the women are attractive and could be seen as presented as purposefully sexy..

When you finally get down to flat out nudity you get about 3-4 images total..
And one of those images, the infamous "green dude with two girls" is entirely about showcasing the decadence of the Dragon Blooded.

But anyway, considering there's something like over a hundred pieces of art through out the whole book, only 4-8 being "problematic" is not a big deal..

It certainly doesn't deserve to be thrown under the bus as some book of "Terrible Misogyny". Particularly when it's art and presentation overall is superior to 3rd editions.

Edit: Male Gaze Theory is an old 70's Feminist term whose original creator later discredited herself in the 80s and 90s...but which has been picked up again by extremists. The idea is that most art and media is presented with the "Male Gaze" in mind. That is, the only reason we have attractive women in media is to please the straight male gaze and nothing more.

This discounts the idea that Lesbians might also enjoy attractive women, or that women themselves enjoy seeing attractive women in their own escapism too, just as guys like seeing bad ass looking dudes in their own escapism.

This theory has been widely used to attack modern comic books, with the idea that the burly adonis men wearing skin tight superhero outfits don't count as sexual to the eyes of women because they're all "Power Fantasies" for men...While the scantily clad goddess superheroines are of course the worst thing ever..

This meme explains it all quite perfectly..
http://41.media.tumblr.com/bcb7694c58b274a5a2f926091dc6c8a7/tumblr_n34az5n03J1seq1n3o1_1280.jpg

It's a lot like the Bechdel Test and most of the rest of ideas from the usual suspects: a good, interesting and useful idea that then gets run into the ground and turned into counter-productive idiocy.

Basically there are different kinds of attractiveness. Image if you ask an average guy what he wants to look like and then what he wants a woman who he's going to have sex with to look like and then ask an average woman what she wants to look like and then what she wants a man who she's going to have with to look like. What you'll get is two attractive men and two attractive women who look quite different.

That's why male action stars look different from male rom-com stars and why female models in Elle look different than female models in Maxim. In a lot of unisex media there's a strong tendency for the men to fall into the "what average men want to look like" silo while the women fall into the "what average men want to have sex with" silo while you get a lot fewer looks that fall into the "what average women want to look like" and "what average women want to have sex with" silos.

That's sexist and annoying and there should be less of that.

HOWEVER, all of that has a number of flaws:
-It completely erases people who aren't straight.
-It only works for average people. Lots of people don't want to look like or fuck what the average people want to look like or fuck. People who don't fit in those neat little boxes get constantly told to shut up for not supporting the above set of ideas.
-It's really appealing to solipsistic douchebags who quickly assume that if they don't want to look like a certain bit of art of their own gender then nobody does and if they don't want to fuck have sex with someone who looks like a certain bit of art of the other gender than nobody does. Anyone who disagrees with said solipsistic douchebags is obviously either deluded or sexist.
-It ignores a lot of other breakdowns in what people find attractive aside from gender. For example age. The target female market for romance novels is a lot older than the target female market for boy bands. Which is why people on the covers of romance novels look nothing like Justin Bieber.
-People somehow get all of this mixed up with realism and complain that bits of female art don't look realistic which is really a completely pointless line of argument. Stylized art isn't supposed to be realistic.
-You get people so used to females getting the short end of the stick that their focus changes from having male/female balance to simply being pissed that certain kinds of images of females even exist. Being annoyed that there's a hundred sexualized images of females and 0 of men is fine, being annoyed at a bit of female thigh and cheering on guys in speedos is stupid.

The best solution to all of this is lots more diversity. Throw in all kinds of looks and all kinds of clothes and all kinds of poses. In general with any discussion about art the people who say "this kind of art sucks, there should be less of it" are wrong and the people who say "this other kind of art is awesome and there should be a lot more of it" are right. Personally I think that in a game like Exalted dudes fighting in speedos or less makes a lot of sense, shit should be goofy and over the top for both genders.

Quote from: Daztur;861987That's sexist and annoying and there should be less of that.

QuoteIn general with any discussion about art the people who say "this kind of art sucks, there should be less of it" are wrong and the people who say "this other kind of art is awesome and there should be a lot more of it" are right.

If you create something, and create it with a specific audience in mind... then I see nothing wrong with making the look of the thing appealing to that audience.
As funny and 'fair' as I might think it is I wouldn't want to be the editor at Maxim who decided to shovel in loads of pictures of half-dressed BBW women and men for the sake of 'diversity'.

Quote from: Daztur;861987It's a lot like the Bechdel Test and most of the rest of ideas from the usual suspects: a good, interesting and useful idea that then gets run into the ground and turned into counter-productive idiocy.

The Bechdel Test was never a good and useful idea. Even when Bechdel wrote it, the damn thing was a joke, the punchline of which was the last movie to pass it was... wait for it... Alien.

You know: the horror movie with an alien rape monster?  Where one of the two female characters is essentially a useless waste of flesh who doesn't even try to save her own life, much less anyone else's?

Quote from: Spike;862000The Bechdel Test was never a good and useful idea. Even when Bechdel wrote it, the damn thing was a joke, the punchline of which was the last movie to pass it was... wait for it... Alien.

You know: the horror movie with an alien rape monster?  Where one of the two female characters is essentially a useless waste of flesh who doesn't even try to save her own life, much less anyone else's?

More to the point, Bechdel herself has mocked the use of the damned thing.

QuoteOTOH, if they need to drum up money to deal with replacing some of the stuff with issues, they could sell 'beta' access...

QuoteI'm fairly sure they could literally just say "We need a bit of money for a few art requests, who wants to throw some into the pot?" and they would have backers willing to give them a little. I missed the original kickstarter, and I know that I would give them $50 for a PDF copy and the promise of better art.

Wasn't "asking for some money in the pot for art" what the Kickstarter was for?

Thing is I have no doubt the second poster is right about people lining up to contribute.

Quote from: Orphan81;861906Edit: Male Gaze Theory is an old 70's Feminist term whose original creator later discredited herself in the 80s and 90s...but which has been picked up again by extremists. The idea is that most art and media is presented with the "Male Gaze" in mind. That is, the only reason we have attractive women in media is to please the straight male gaze and nothing more.

This discounts the idea that Lesbians might also enjoy attractive women, or that women themselves enjoy seeing attractive women in their own escapism too, just as guys like seeing bad ass looking dudes in their own escapism.

This theory has been widely used to attack modern comic books, with the idea that the burly adonis men wearing skin tight superhero outfits don't count as sexual to the eyes of women because they're all "Power Fantasies" for men...While the scantily clad goddess superheroines are of course the worst thing ever..

This meme explains it all quite perfectly..
http://41.media.tumblr.com/bcb7694c58b274a5a2f926091dc6c8a7/tumblr_n34az5n03J1seq1n3o1_1280.jpg

The Male Gaze the Bechdel test, etc seem like polygraphs and IQ tests in being things that people cling to because they give nice  simple answers to complicated and nuanced subjects

Quote from: Anglachel;861891So, Exalted 3e is a groundbreaking rpg, huh? LOL

The official delusions have started after ~1 day of the backer pdf dropping. Funny detail - the first to use this exact words was...no wonder...Holden himself. And then it got taken up by some (no wonder there either) heavily biased other folks (for example Zeea). And now it started to be uncool to be "negative" about the game aka the fanbois start dog-piling you if you post anything else than praise of the game :rolleyes:

And the biased moderation is still getting worse. So criticizing the art and how the whole team has done the pdf is now automatically (as it seems) a personal attack (because the people who worked on that stuff are members of rpg.net) but if you talk crap about other companies or other dev. teams that are not part of OPP or the mod team, then it's no problem...even the mods themselves "personal attack" old devs of 2e.

The owners of rpg.net really should put a stop to this. Or are they themselves part of that crowd? I mean this is really not funny anymore.

Basically anyone that posts negatives or Hell, praise that's not glowing enough  either gets dog piled, one of the mod staff pulls a passive aggressive "Oooh, can't we talk about this is another thread?" (not in red text but its still going to have a chilling effect when someone with  premise of authority start dropping hints) or just get straight up mod hammered and thread banned and possibly given some that's more severe than for similar offenses.

Quote from: SuperG;19510005And actually, I'd say all the other abilities still have to do the "mundane" things. Solar Athletics can allow you to fly, but a Solar Athlete still walks to get around. Solar Brawl allows you to punch out gods and dinosaurs, but you still need to practice katas and train, just like everyone else. Solar Lore tells you secrets of a forgotten, mythic age and prophesy destruction - but it also still leaves you as the guy who can tell the party the name of that town over there. Solar Medicine can work wonders - but you're still going to be treating real world diseases (and probably quite a lot), not Mummy Rot. Solar War allows you to train your troops to be as swift as the coursing river and have the force of a great typhoon... but Followers still "only" gives you "mundane" humans.

Being as awesome as Conan (and any friends he might has) is no longer the low bar you vaulted across the second you Exalted - it's the main competence level the game focuses on.
.

I can accept this as the direction they decided to go in. It happens. But its the acting like this is how its always been, the original "intent" (whatever the at was) and that anyone that wanted or expected different was either an idiot or a some kind of poor gamer is one of the things that's pissed me off about this entire thing.

Quote from: Spike;862000The Bechdel Test was never a good and useful idea. Even when Bechdel wrote it, the damn thing was a joke, the punchline of which was the last movie to pass it was... wait for it... Alien.

You know: the horror movie with an alien rape monster?  Where one of the two female characters is essentially a useless waste of flesh who doesn't even try to save her own life, much less anyone else's?

In the defense of the Bechdel Test it's pretty useful for analyzing, say, the output of all Hollywood movies this year. It gives you some interesting information that way, especially looking at stuff year on year. But using it to look at individual movies is idiotic, that's running a statistical analysis with a sample size of one which is worse than useless.

Quote from: Nexus;862047The Male Gaze the Bechdel test, etc seem like polygraphs and IQ tests in being things that people cling to because they give nice  simple answers to complicated and nuanced subjects

It isn't just the Drama Club who do this sort of thing. It's an incredibly common human behavior that goes like this:
1. Notice a set of bad behaviors.
2. Make a label for that set of bad behaviors.
3. Sensible people agree that that's a good label for some bad behavior.
4. People then start lumping anything they personally don't like under that label if it's even remotely topical.
5. People who aren't idiots get annoyed at 4.
6. People who are idiots pretend that anyone who doesn't agree with their pet peeves being evil and harmful is defending the original set of terrible bad behaviors way back in 1.
7. Sensible people get really tired of the idiots and start getting suspicious of anyone using the label thought up way back in 2, even though its original narrow definition was fine.

You get this with the stuff we've been talking about in this thread but also with everything from terrorism (which now means "violence I don't like"), Mary Sues (which now means "competent female characters I don't like"), grimdark (which now means "setting that has unhappy stuff in it that I don't like") and socialism (which now means "economic policies that Republicans don't like") and harassment (which now means "people disagreeing with me").

A good general rule is whenever someone dismisses something by sticking a label on it without any analysis then they're not worth listening to.

I've seem Mary Sue applied to male characters too. Sometimes Marty Stu but that never seemed to catch on. But yeah, it has been watered down allot from its original meaning of over done authorial insert character