Quote from: Casey777;256221I suggest you go read the blog for Carcosa where the author gives examples from Deities & Demigods, Book of Ebon Bindings etc. including rules that were direct inspirations on his work. Or go over some of the novels & stories cited by the author and listed in my previous post. Or the examples from First Fantasy Campaign (Blackmoor) and OD&D upthread. Or take a look at Margaret Brundage's Weird Tales covers. All that's 20+ years old.

There are stacks and stacks of porn books from the 60s and 70s I could also cite as 'inspiration' for an olde school styled supplement about bad moustaches and anal sex.  That doesn't change the fact that
none of that is present in the original rules
and you are a disingenuous fuck for implying that it is.

Quote from: StormBringer;256225I'll take a stab at it, but I don't wholly support the argument:
...
Or so the argument runs in my mind.  Others may not agree on all the points, but certainly, this would be the heart of the matter to me.  Word of mouth is always touted as far more powerful than any advertising scheme.

Yeah, I can see what you're saying. I kinda like Maid as a gateway drug to harder, more heinous stuff!

However, I think the issue here isn't a rules-set damaging the hobby (or at least to one person's experience of it) -- it's a bunch of jerks doing the damage. And they could (and likely would) do that damage with any set of rules.

Also, hopefully, someone familiar enough w/ RPG's to attend a convention would be aware that they'd detoured into a subculture cul-de-sac, and would (hopefully) be able to find their way back to the main drive (Enworld ).

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: StormBringer;256225I'll take a stab at it, but I don't wholly support the argument:

GenCon '07, big table, lots of people playing a translated anime game.  Someone sits in, and gets to play some goofy servant who runs around making sure the mischievous sentient cats don't interrupt an important business meeting, or have to cover up for the malfunctioning robot butler.  Good fun is had by all, and I doubt the promoters point out there is a trait called 'Likes them Young'.

Fast forward four months, player is familiar with said game, and perhaps a few others.  A group is advertising in the area for another couple of players for a campaign.  Maid is tops on the list, but maybe some Poison'd.  Well, our example player hasn't heard of Poison'd, but if it's anything like Maid it should be pretty fun, right?

Naturally, this group doesn't turn out to be as light-hearted as the demo at GenCon.  Now this player has a skewed view of the hobby because of this group.  It would hardly take more than one session of D&D with a similar group murdering children and raping their way across the countryside to turn them off to RPGs, and encourage them to badmouth RPGs to anyone they come in contact with.

Or so the argument runs in my mind.  Others may not agree on all the points, but certainly, this would be the heart of the matter to me.  Word of mouth is always touted as far more powerful than any advertising scheme.

This is just pure speculation, right?  It didn't actually happen and it certainly won't.  I mean you can barely find a game of Savage Worlds in most towns amidst the sea of 4e games.

Quote from: walkerp;256231This is just pure speculation, right?  It didn't actually happen and it certainly won't.  I mean you can barely find a game of Savage Worlds in most towns amidst the sea of 4e games.

It's as speculative as the stories of a group of players stating their characters gang rape the only female player's character.

In other words, you are looking for names, addresses, times, and sworn affidavits.  They don't exist.  That doesn't mean there aren't some sick fucks out there with these games enabling their sick fuckery and helping them foist it on an unsuspecting new gamer.

Quote from: StormBringer;256236In other words, you are looking for names, addresses, times, and sworn affidavits.  They don't exist.  That doesn't mean there aren't some sick fucks out there with these games enabling their sick fuckery and helping them foist it on an unsuspecting new gamer.

Sure but it doesn't mean that there are either.

Quote from: StormBringer;256227There are stacks and stacks of porn books from the 60s and 70s I could also cite as 'inspiration' for an olde school styled supplement about bad moustaches and anal sex.  That doesn't change the fact that
none of that is present in the original rules
and you are a disingenuous fuck for implying that it is.

uhhh, 3 of the 4 things in the graphic I posted are from the original 1974 rules... one was from the third (1976?) supplement.

Deities and Demigods is a D&D supplement. Book of Ebon Bindings is for a 1970s D&D variant. Surely I don't need to explain the relevance of Blackmoor... and surely the importance of Weird Tales as a direct and primary inspiration for D&D doesn't need to be explained?

Carcosa will be arriving in my mailbox any day now, so I haven't read it, but I have had some correspondence with the author (since I've got a similar project in the works). He's taking some prime source inspirations from D&D and highlighting their horror aspects.

Quote from: RPGPunditI just want the right people offended and criticizing it.

And who si going to decide who's right and who's wrong... apparently mighty tzar Pundy the great... You are so full of shit it must be leaking from your ears.

Quote from: StormBringer;256227none of that is present in the original rules
and you are a disingenuous fuck for implying that it is.

It is interesting how Carcosa's associations by you got worse & worse despite you not really looking up any of the information on it. :teehee: Similar to how some (not necessarily you) have done with Maid. :hmm: I have stated that I respect the author; I'll likely get Carcosa, though like Maid (and many other RPGs) I do think it could produce fucked up play.

Carcosa has at least as much relation to D&D / EPT & its sources (like ones listed in the back of the ODAD&D DMG) as Maid RPG has to its sources  though one is a homage, the other a parody, and both are recent releases.

However since you're wearing wideass blinders that weigh a Tmf & obviously aren't bothering to read a thing I've linked to or look at the covers and art from OD&D and Tekumel books, good night and may God bless. :hatsoff:

Quote from: Venosha;256224We are role playing these games, and what better way to get your rocks off without really being noticed,

You mean like these guys?

Quote from: droog;256205Logic-chopping, Elliot.

No. No, no, no. Unless you're trying to make some sort of sly point about screwed-up logic yourself.

There might be a rich discussion to be had about the inherent influence of various media. I doubt you're aiming at that, but I don't think one can seriously dismiss the effect, on content, of painting, writing, the printing press, photography, the motion picture, radio, television, or the Internet.

D&D puts the power of shared imagination in the hands of people, some of whom (many of them adolescents) do messed-up things with it. I'm sure Poison'd shares this quality--I mean that it gives people an opportunity to act out fantasies in an imagined world. This is an inherently risky activity whatever RPG you're playing.

It could even be influenced by the setting. Certainly D&D has trappings which evoke atavistic psychologies, and the settings are typically anarchic. I suspect that this contributes to a higher incidence of "screwed up" games than, say, a modern or SF game, though I don't have numbers to cite. It could be that the rate of "screwed up" games of Star Frontiers is just as high as D&D, but the relative numbers are such that the Star Frontiers screwups never make it onto the radar. Still, I find it very plausible that, especially in the immature or ignorant mind, the pseudo-medieval setting would be imagined as lacking social inhibitions and controls that would still be present in a modern or classic SF setting.

But Poison'd, by all appearances, embraces an equally bleak view of its setting, in fact plays it up to make pirate society one where no social standards can be taken for granted. It's a projected fantasy of a state of nature.

We could try to argue whether the imaginary setting offered by the game is more or less "inherently" atavistic, brutal, and anarchic than that offered by D&D--since neither of us has read Poison'd, I doubt this would get very far. And D&D is a very broad field, from the various editions of rules themselves, to the various official and semi-official settings materials. I think there were phases where there was a strong element of romanticized medievalism instead of projected atavism; the latter was stronger in the earlier history of the game than it perhaps was in the middle years. But I think what was going on in the core materials was rather like the whitewashed version of pirates that Vincent Baker commented on when was talking about his inspiration for Poison'd. That is, D&D in the 70's embraced the naughty, ne'er-do-well, picaresque, bawdy (etc.) elements of 20th-century adventure fiction from Howard, Leiber, Vance, Errol Flynn movies, etc., and from earlier sources such as the Odyssey, Le Morte D'Artur and so forth, but it swept the uglier or more problematic aspects under the rug, such as Howard's racism, the pedophilia* in the Lankhmar stories, or the absolute amorality of Vance's Cugel.

That's all by way of talking frankly about D&D. Again, I can only give impressions of the content of Poison'd, the rule book, based on snippets I've gleaned. My main point here is that in terms of its treatment of its imaginary setting, Poison'd does at least as much to foster atavism.

Given that, we move on to the truly empirical. And here the record weighs very strongly to suggest there's something about Poison'd, more than D&D, which doesn't just enable the acting out of screwed up fantasies, but invites it, and even encourages reporting those fantasies in public. Of course I'm referring to the actual play reports which have been posted. D&D has a huge corpus of accounts of play, and I think it would be very hard to argue that the screwed up accounts are anything but dwarfed by the "okay" stuff. Not to mention, most of messed-up game sessions are ascribed to adolescents or presented as negative examples of play. Whereas in the case of Poison'd, the screwed up reports are a significant proportion of the accounts, and they're often met with enthusiasm by other fans of the game.

In conclusion, if you really do want to argue about the association of D&D with tasteless play vs. Poison'd, and their relative appeal to twisted tastes, then the Poison'd side starts at a significant disadvantage, and that is the side where the burden of proof lies.

*Though that didn't really become apparent until "Rime Isle" (1977) and "The Mouser Goes Below" (1988).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;256254In conclusion, if you really do want to argue about the association of D&D with tasteless play vs. Poison'd, and their relative appeal to twisted tastes, then the Poison'd side starts at a significant disadvantage, and that is the side where the burden of proof lies.

It's just not a matter of proof. We're talking about perceptions. D&D: highly visible. Poison'd: not so much. You need to clean up your backyard, Elliot.

It occurred to me that this is kind of the flipside of Chris Chinn complaining about essentialism and stereotyping in RPGs while buying and playing Legend of the Five Rings.

Quote from: walkerp;256214If someone were to say, "I find the topics in Maid and/or Poison'd to be offensive and it's not something I really want to play" and then I were to criticize them, that would be a fair case of me doing the above.  But I have no problem with someone saying that.  That's their personal judgement.  

What I am objecting to, is taking that personal judgement to a level of prescription for the entire hobby. RPGPundit and Kyle Aaron are saying "these games are morally reprehensible and they should be expunged from our hobby and the people that play them should also be expunged from our hobby."  Note that they don't actually give any specifics on how they can be expunged.  But that is the implication.  What they want is some kind of safe, middle ground (as defined by them) of content which offends nobody and keeps the hobby safe from outside criticism.

I have already gone into why they want this (their own social insecurities, basically).

I just want to say this last sentence is absurd. However I mainly want to talk about what you wrote above.

I agree that it's inappropriate to speak for the entire hobby. (By the way, I think I've said as much earlier in the thread.)

However, I think in the process of this discussion if not before "the hobby" has become vastly overrated as a concept. If my opposition to censorship of books makes it impossible for me to publicly reject, insult, decry, and ridicule fans of The Turner Diaries, because I have no business speaking for the "book reading hobby", then I don't give a damn about the hobby. When the topic of virulently racist books, or rape video games, or RPGs that revel in vileness comes up, then if I feel like it I'll speak as a human being, not "a gamer" to say they're messed up. People who expose their fantasies in public do not, as a rule, have a right to hear only "awesome" feedback.

Quote from: droog;256257It's just not a matter of proof. We're talking about perceptions. D&D: highly visible. Poison'd: not so much. You need to clean up your backyard, Elliot.

It occurred to me that this is kind of the flipside of Chris Chinn complaining about essentialism and stereotyping in RPGs while buying and playing Legend of the Five Rings.

The connection seems quite feeble to me.

And ultimately I'm not seeing compelling in your first sentence either. RPGs are inherently risky. The biggest RPG is going to have the most incidents; more sick images are going to be transmitted by DVD and CD-R than minidisc.

I think you're on a bit of a side track. I don't think you can reasonably deny (and you haven't) that the texts and play that have come down to us have left racism, sexism and perversion in their wake. Intent or not, I know what I've seen.

I stack up against that my actual reading of several Vincent Baker games, my experience of playing them with reasonable, well-socialised human beings, my knowledge of VB gleaned by internet use, and my informed guess (bolstered by other people's accounts) as to what lies within the text. I think half the text has probably been reproduced here and there, if you cared to read it.

I really think you've got to understand the role controversy and mock outrage has played in this whole imbroglio. I mean, according to Spinachcat the famed neck-raping incident never even happened (well, it never actually happened in the first place, but you know what I mean).

Quote from: droog;256262I think half the text has probably been reproduced here and there, if you cared to read it.

Yeah, it has. The application of the central mechanics to things you'd find in most other games seems to be confusing people, whilst using that central mechanic to gain the outcomes seen in APs doesn't seem to need any clarification by people playing the game.