Eh, never mind, let's move on with our discussion and leave others to pull their hair out.

Quote from: One Horse Town;469646That link leads me to a message that i'm unauthorised to view it.

Yeah sorry about that I wasn't expecting the mods to be so quick to lock it down.

Then again as it linked to that blog legally their nuts were in the grinder...

Quote from: daniel_ream;469629So, uh - hi.  I'm another - well, not RPG.net refugee because I hardly post there and have never so much as caught a mod's jaundiced eye, but the Kynn Bartlett threads were what drive me out of the board entirely.

Welcome to therpgsite!

Those threads didn't drive me out of rpg.net yet, I still see more positive things than negative (otherwise I would've stopped posting there a long time ago), but they sure left a bad taste in my mouth.

Quote from: Ian Warner;469639You thought the initial barrage was bad WELCOME TO THE FUCKING CRAZY TRAIN!

That link leads to a restricted thread. What does it say? EDIT: Nevermind, I guess I know it now.

Quote from: Stuart;469642This is the only forum where there's been anything close to reasonable discussion of this topic.

I just read this blog post after Fred Hicks shared it on Google+.

Fucking Crazy Train indeed...

WOW!! Just, wow!!

Hm.  Actual real-world rape is a very serious subject, as are accusations of rape.  Unless someone knows more about the situation, I don't think we should be passing on gossip.  (I'd say the same regardless of who the accusation was about.)  

So...  back to the hair-tearing...

Quote from: KrakaJak;469534Also, I don't think the hobby is sexist. Considering sex rarely ever factors in to character creation for most RPGs are completely un-sexist because gender is a non-issue for a majority of games.

It's a tricky question for most games how this works, but let me shoot you a hypothetical.  

Suppose I design a game completely assuming male players and characters.  All of the design and playtesting is by men, and the playtest characters are all male.  However, in the final writeup I throw in a note, "Player characters can be either male or female."  Would this be definitely un-sexist in your view?  

While it's better than giving female PCs a whole bunch of penalties, I think this isn't really inclusive - which can be mildly sexist.

Back in the day you just needed to be an insurance salesman to write rpgs, I blame batpenisguy.

Swear down, someone will write a game about this !

Quote from: daniel_ream;469629My god, I'm...I'm home.

Rational discussion of sexism in RPGs?  For real?  And hey, there's John H. Kim upthread!  Man, I haven't seen you since rgf.misc in 1997.  How are you doing, John?

So, uh - hi.  I'm another - well, not RPG.net refugee because I hardly post there and have never so much as caught a mod's jaundiced eye, but the Kynn Bartlett threads were what drive me out of the board entirely.

And then someone mentioned therpgsite.com.  And this thread.  And look, practically the first followup post is someone pointing out that perhaps the reason there aren't so many women in this hobby is that they'd just kind of rather be doing something else, and that's okay.  What I've been debating posting on rpg.net for a week and was afraid to for fear of being accused of "othering" someone (what does that even mean?)

So thanks, RPGPundit.  Thanks for creating this forum and sticking with it and growing it to the size and visibility it has, so that grownups can have casual discussions of their hobby without the hormonal adolescents stamping through the parlour raging about how no one understands their pain.  I know you didn't do it for me, specifically, but thanks anyway.

Oh yeah, and on-topic-ness: something that I think tends to get lost in all the cheesecake art debate is the fact that men and women just aren't the same in terms of what they find attractive on an instinctive, biological level.  Men see women as sex objects; women see men as success objects.    A half-naked Conan is not the same thing as a half-naked Red Sonja because the women aren't going to react to the image on the basis of its state of dishabille; they're going to react to it on the basis of how powerful and successful it implies Conan is.

Same thing with women complaining about female subjects making direct eye contact with the viewer vs. the males never doing so.  Direct sustained eye contact between human males implies either lust or a challenge ("I want to fight you or **** you").  To the average male or female viewer, both of those are going to be slightly uncomfortable.    Women, on the other hand, communicate face-to-face and with sustained eye contact all the time.  It has a different connotation between women, and between a women and a men.  An artist who wants to create an "attractive" portrait and isn't particularly  thinking about this effect is going to default to men looking away from the viewer, and women looking towards.

I'm not saying this is the way it must be, just that this is the way our brains are hardwired to work by default.

You're welcome.

Also, where was therpgsite and this thread mentioned? I assume it was in the typical "look at those horrible people! no moderation = anarchy!!1!" type of thing where what they claimed was going on here had nothing to do with what is actually going on here?

RPGPundit

Quote from: Claudius;469659Those threads didn't drive me out of rpg.net yet, I still see more positive things than negative (otherwise I would've stopped posting there a long time ago), but they sure left a bad taste in my mouth.
[...]
WOW!! Just, wow!!

Having dealt up close and personal with the kinds of people in the feminist/social justice movement that use the whole philosophy as a shield and sword to abuse other people with, I will say that absolutely nothing that has been revealed about this whole sordid mess surprised me.

John, I think one of the problems with this whole discussion is that "the hobby", "the industry", "this specific game here", "my gaming group" and "these people I met at a convention once" are all being used interchangeably at times.  Your hypothetical example certainly sounds slightly sexist, but I think a better question is whether that hypothetical is at all representative of published RPGs in general.  Are there many RPGs that completely assume male players and characters?

Quote from: daniel_ream;469665John, I think one of the problems with this whole discussion is that "the hobby", "the industry", "this specific game here", "my gaming group" and "these people I met at a convention once" are all being used interchangeably at times.  Your hypothetical example certainly sounds slightly sexist, but I think a better question is whether that hypothetical is at all representative of published RPGs in general.  Are there many RPGs that completely assume male players and characters?

(Welcome back to an rgf.misc veteran, by the way!  I just had a blast from the past when talking about Fudge being designed on rec.games.design.)  

No, I don't think my hypothetical example is representative of the whole.  I do think it is a significant minority - say perhaps in the 10% to 20% range.  To turn this to real RPGs, I can mention, say, The Lord of the Rings RPG from Decipher.  All 6 out of 6 of the archetype characters and all of the players and characters in the examples are male.  The GM in examples is female, but that seems like a token inclusion that could easily have been a last minute search and replace.  

What's more significant to me is that in discussion of the game and reviews, no one commented on this.  It was not considered strange or even notable.

Quote from: daniel_ream;469665Are there many RPGs that completely assume male players and characters?

Duty and Honour/Beat to Quaters but as it's a game about the Napoleonic British Army/Navy I can't see how you can actually play a woman with any capability. I mean a camp follower role would be even more sexist than ignoring them in their eyes  

Quote from: daniel_ream;469629So, uh - hi.  I'm another - well, not RPG.net refugee because I hardly post there and have never so much as caught a mod's jaundiced eye, but the Kynn Bartlett threads were what drive me out of the board entirely.

Me, too. I got so sick of "RPG" discussions that were thinly veiled attacks of some sort. You think that mods would just state, "Hey, stop it! No 'Are white men the root of all evil in RPGs?' threads allowed!", as an example. That game about jilted women seeking revenge stirred a poo-storm and that was it for me. I saw people suspended/banned for simply having opinions that didn't follow what is the general RPG.net bent. Some were straight-up jerks comments, but it seemed that ones with a certain political bent get more leeway than others. Oh, well.

I just want to game and talk about games and learn about games and not worry about if person X feels treated poorly because of gender, race, sexual preference, hair color, shoe size, income, allergies, etc. We're GAMERS! We play in the most awesome pretend worlds around and that's what I want to focus on.

Quote from: daniel_ream;469665Are there many RPGs that completely assume male players and characters?

I can only think of one and that's Deathwatch*. Even then, who cares? Make female marines, or don't play it. To steal your words, I for one am tired of people using the sword and shield of political correctness to wage war against people who don't agree with them.

*Please, no sidequests into why DW is bad for not having women SM.

O_o

Quote from: Claudius;469659Those threads didn't drive me out of rpg.net yet, I still see more positive things than negative (otherwise I would've stopped posting there a long time ago), but they sure left a bad taste in my mouth.

Yeah, although rare, you sometimes get concentrated awesome in threads over there. I don't mean rare because the rest of the threads are crap, but rare because that much focused incredible is rare anywhere.

Quote from: Talking_Muffin;469671We're GAMERS! We play in the most awesome pretend worlds around and that's what I want to focus on.

And we come to the heart of the matter! These are the worlds of the imagination.  We're the walkers in dreams, the guardians of the temple, and I mean that in a very real sense. This isn't a vehicle to push your ist, whether communist, feminist, racist, humanist, whatever; keep your damn grubby real world off. This is the gateway to infinity, and all are welcome, but don't think you can bend it backwards to win hearts and minds for your cause, it doesn't work like that. I speak with passion because I genuinely believe there has never been anything quite like this, and trust me, I've looked.

Quote from: jhkim;469498I'm not in the scene, but it looks like there are plenty of metalheads who are concerned about racism - in particular the minority of neo-nazis/skinheads that show up in the metal scene.  For example, there is the  Metalheads Against Racism website or this article on "Racism in Metal".

As GRIM said, worrying about racism isn't the same thing as wanting the scene to be more multicultural. But obviously it reflects the discussion we're having here. All I can really say is that I've never come across that kind of discussion myself. Looking over the links, it seems to be mostly about obscure black metal acts, which is not really my thing (as the AC/DC example would show, I'm more of a rocker really - but since people these days seem to call Motley Crue "metal" with a straight face I've just come to using that term for the whole scene).

To be honest though I was just searching for the first example I could think of of an imbalance that no-one seems to care about. Someone up-thread suggested knitting, which is probably a better example.

Of course, a lot of rock and metal is horribly sexist. To which the standard response given by most of the bands over the years is basically "yeah, we know".

Quote from: GRIM;469453I have mixed feelings on the whole thing.

On the one hand I can't fucking STAND the author of H&H. They're a drama whore and one of the most bigoted, hateful and prejudiced people I've ever met. They have zero sense of humour and beat anyone who disagrees with them about anything with accusations of misogyny/transphobia/etc (Yeah, Kynn's trans, which adds a whole other level of irony/complication to this whole drama).

On the other hand, if people want games like this they should make them, so kudos and more power to Kynn for going ahead, even if I suspect this is going to end up another Wraethuthu.

Back to the first hand again, I think the stated aims of those project are very much at odds with its execution and presentation. It's not going to change anyone's mind, it's going to have narrow appeal and Kynn is such an offensive and offputting person it's just going to make people more hostile - as happened in the RPGnet thread.

Nobody much cares how I would have gone about the same agenda and anything I say will, constructive or not, will be taken as hatred and get me accused of all sorts again so I won't bother going into that. Let's just say I'd have gone about it differently.

As to that thread, I found the 'pro-feminist' (for want of a better term) posts to be far more strident, offensive and dismissive of the points of others. 'Privilege denying dude', 'mansplaining' etc are terms that ARE going to get people's hackles up, as is denying the hardship other people suffer in their life or playing one-upmanship over who has it worse.

Wow. Just wow. That was very well-said. I am serious. I find it sad that myself and others have posted pretty much the same thing on RPG.net, but it was met with exactly the same derision you described. I applaud you, sir.

Quote from: Grymbok;469686To be honest though I was just searching for the first example I could think of of an imbalance that no-one seems to care about. Someone up-thread suggested knitting, which is probably a better example.

Well, romance novels are written almost exclusively by women (or men writing under female pseudonyms, which happens more often than you'd think) and contain egregiously stereotypical depictions of both sexes; the men depicted are often little more than one-dimensional accessories for the female protagonist.

Most paranormal romance objectifies the male characters physically and sexually to a degree that makes the RPG corpus look utopian by comparison.

Romance fiction is orders of magnitude a bigger business than RPGs, and is bigger than most other genres of fiction.  Nobody seems to be terribly concerned about correcting the romance fiction industry's portrayal and/or acceptance of men, either as authors or as characters.

I have a standing offer with most popular paranormal romance authors that I will custom redesign and host their author web site for five years in exchange for a book where the nice, normal not-a-werewolf-or-vampire-or-centaur-or-jesus-do-you-have-to-strap-it-to-your-leg-when-you-go-out male character ends up defeating the monster and gets the female protagonist.  They don't even have to submit it for publication; just send me the manuscript.

No one's taken me up on the offer yet :-)