Comparing mmo's to tabletop as far as culture is way off, regarding your first example. There's tons of 12-14 year old boys playing mmo's, and they have no supervision, so say some extremely rude stuff to everyone.

Quote from: danbuter;470423Comparing mmo's to tabletop as far as culture is way off, regarding your first example. There's tons of 12-14 year old boys playing mmo's, and they have no supervision, so say some extremely rude stuff to everyone.

That was an adult that posted that to my page. She's married and two kids (or is it one?)

The coffeshop owner has also played MMOs and I know he played D&D with his friends about 10 to 15 years ago. (First met him sometime in 1994)


- Ed C.

Quote from: The Traveller;470250So sort of like asians versus westerners?




I'd believe it.

trouble is when they describe their PC they don't look like that they look like this

(extract from the RPG Fantasy Heartbreakers)

Gaming with Females of the Opposite Sex


GIRLS IN GAMES
    Believe it or not, girls can be roleplayers too! Whether this is because they have emotional problems or just are socially awkward, the important thing to remember is to treat them with R.E.S.P.E.C.T.! To aid in this, here are a handy list of guidelines for including a Female PC (henceforth Fpc) in your gaming group:

    Do! Compliment her. Girls love compliments. Tell her that her hair looks nice or she has pretty eyes or ask her if she's lost weight since the last time you roleplayed.
    Do! Involve her in decisions. Ask her what she would do before taking any actions. You probably won't follow her advice, but it will make her feel good to “contribute”.
    Do! Allow her to do strange things like Heal NPCs and have in-game conversations with encounters. They may seem like a waste of time to you, but she will enjoy the game more.

    Don't! Stare at her bosom or sniff her hair!
    Don't! Ask her out during the game. It is distracting and can make her and the other players uncomfortable. Wait until after the game or during a bathroom ]break.
    Don't! Take off your shirt and chase her around, calling her your 'pretty pony'!
    Don't! Expect her to have sex with you just because your PCs are dating. What happens in the game stays in the game!

    Most importantly, Don't rape an Fpc without her permission, even if you are a Viking! It's just not nice.

    There are a few special rules for playing Fpcs. First off, you must decide before play if they are Gingers or Maryanns. Gingers receive the following Social Talents: Beauty, Grace, Charm; and the skill Manipulation for free. Maryanns receive the Social Talents: Pretty, Grace, Sweet, and get the Cooking skill for free! (Her specialty is apple pies). All Fpcs also get the skill Seduction for free!

    Fpcs receive a -1C penalty to Strength and Endurance attributes and a +1C to Agility and Appearance. Additionally, there are a few races and careers available only to Fpcs, including: Amazon, Valkyrie, Succubus, Nymph, Idoru and Witch!

    Pregnancy: If Fpcs have sex in-game, they can get pregnant! There is a 10% chance of this the first time, and this chance increases by 10% each additional time for a maximum of 50% (or 60% on a full moon). However, if the Fpc has the skill PMS (see below), she cannot get pregnant during her period. Note that artificial creature such as Synthoids and Robots normally cannot impregnate females of the opposite sex unless they have the 'Demon Seed' adapter.

    PMS is a special Talent that only Fpcs can get. It represents a monthly period whose length is determined by the Talent Rating: 1= 1d4 days a month, 2= 1d6 days, and 3 = 2d6 days a month. During this 'period', the character's Rage default rating is raised to 7 (Berserker), and her Badass rating is raised by one level (e.g., A Very Badass character would temporarily become Extremely Badass), but Warning! Your character will be tremendously attractive to bears!






(Disclaimer: the previous is intended purely as parody and is not intended  to represent the actual views of myself or any other moderately sane human being.)

Interesting side point on the sexism issue. I have been playing RPGs of a sort with my daugher since she was 3 or 4 moving from kind of 'choose your own adventure' style games where I just ad lib a plot and ask her to make decisions to some games we have been playing recently with an old Advanced HeroQuest box set I found in a cupboard.
Well I just came back from a trip to see my mates in Mallorca and Martin who I have been mates with since I was 10 and who was on the fringes of our RPG games at schools has been using D&D (4th editions essentials) as a teaching aid for some Language classes he runs. To cut a long story slightly shorter he has been trying to market Lingua Kung Fu which is a way of teaching kids Kung Fu and Mandarin at local Spanish schools he also teaches spanish kids English and Kung Fu. Well one of his teaching styles is to get kids to form simple sentences through RPGs so rather than have them learn 30 words he gets them to form sentences and the nature of those sentences means you use the simplest words so 'I want to open the door' or 'I look into the chest' etc .

Anyway while I was over there I ran a game for 2 of his kids, a german girl and my daughter. So the kids ages ranged from 6 - 9 3 girls and 1 boy.
The sexism part is that the kids totally loved it, girls and boys alike, so the basic activity is not inherrently sexist. Now I threw away D&D obviously and created a much simpler 2d6 target system based on 5 stats that they assigned 10 points to as bonuses and they could pick 3 'powers' and I let them be whatever they wanted to be (my daughter who saw a digimon cartoon for the first time 2 weeks ago insisted on being a digimon bird although being my daughter she prooved far cannier than her 6 years of age would suggest). I did that to show Martin that that the system he was using was actually getting in the way of the game he was trying to run and the time he was spending looking things up was much better spent just chucking stuff at the kids to challenge them and get them to role play.

Now in 2 hours of play we had 3 combats against goblins, goblins on wolfback and Lord Frost and his goblin soldiers. The kids all loved the whole thing and the girls were as bloodthirsty as the boys, I mean my daugher's power was to be able to change into different animals 4 times in the adventure and when she turned into a lion and ate the goblins that the sorceress had cast sleep on I realised they were going to be one of those parties

So moving from anecdote to extracted observation. The hobby per se is not sexist. The problem I think lies with the perception of the the hobby as nerdy and women not wanting to be flagged as nerds and with the fact that a lot of males that don't mind being targeted as nerds do so because they have few social skills and therefore act in a sexist way as a defense mechanism to the fact that they have no real way of relating to women and they see Sexism as the 'cool male' way to handle it.
The answer is either to get all the nerds out of the hobby (I believe Kyle has previously stated that unless you have a job, a partner or at least 5 friends you probably need to work on that before you get to play at his table ); to start roleplaying much earlier and deal with a wider range of situations (although as I said there was a lot of combat and a scary chase through a dark forest in a 2 hour session in my game); or to train GMs far better which realy involves not letting nerds be GMs

Quote from: TristramEvans;470467Don't! Take off your shirt and chase her around, calling her your 'pretty pony'!

Awww...

I'm really surprised how much chatter there is about this topic.
At the end of the day, a lot of the time, when we're playing, we want to be the hero character, and therefore, we're all pretty keen to defend our favourite thing to do. No one wants to think that the thing we dedicate so much time to might actually be sexist...

I'm a girl.
I've read a lot of these comments (though I have to admit, coming in late, 32 pages was more than I could get through in one sitting.) and I wasn't sure I'd seen any other women weighing in...
Just thought I better drop in my opinion.

I've been gaming for over ten years now, and most of the time I'm running. I think with access to being the GM, I get to decide a lot of how women are represented in the game. So I decide what kind of chicks they are. Some of them are horrible, some of them are brilliant... the same as my male NPCs.

Funnily enough, recently the only group game I play (once a month-ish) suggested that someone might bring their new girlfriend along.
I groaned as much as all the guys.
There is something really painful about having girls join in when they have never played before. I have seen an awful lot of terrible manipulative girl behaviour when they are forced to play. It's weird and I hate it. But is that sexist? Not really... It's not that all women suck when you try and make them roleplay. I have three atleast in the past that I have loved gaming with.

I don't know why more women aren't geeks.
I am geek and proud. I married a geek, all my friends are geeks, and yes- most of them are guys.

The way games I play are written is not, in my opinion, sexist. Although I have played an awful lot of WoD and I think that was geared a lot more towards a mixed audience. I think the racey artwork that features in lots of games is no worse for women then men. When I think about the Conan-esk dudes I've seen in a lot of games... well that can't be easy to live up to...

The guy who was talking about playing with his girls has got the right idea!
Maybe it's not the games that are sexist, or even the player, if you have a group of decent individuls, maybe it's just a problem with women's attitudes, which are taught in childhood.
Ok, I'm a teacher and a feminist, so don't start me on this...
I'm just throwing it out there.
Maybe it's the rest of the world saying that women shouldn't be interested in adventures and imaginary worlds etc etc...
Maybe they should just concentrate on girly things. Otherwise... you know... they'd be weird.

Most boys I've played with have been completely fine!

Quote from: Melan;469957I do not wish to contribute to this trainwreck of a thread; however, much like walkerp, the ban of Seanchai has absolutely no justification, and flies in the face of your stated principles. He was a contentious git like most of us here, but did not "disrupt threads" any more than other users.

Your memory is faulty. Walkerp spent a couple of days earning his banning by supporting pedophilia and asking, quite literally, to be banned.

I don't know what happened to Seanchai, but in Walkerp's case there was all the justification anyone needs.

Quote from: Spike;477040I don't know what happened to Seanchai, but in Walkerp's case there was all the justification anyone needs.

There were misunderstandings which then led to conflict. Then it was just a matter of provokation, and then basically giving in to the provokation. The difference is that Seanchai was systematically fishing for confrontations, whereas, in the case of WalkerP, there was one particular instance that ended up with his banning.

I think you can make a case that Seanchai was a constant nuisance in conversation that basically can fit the definition of "disturbance of the site" the Pundit laid out as a banning reason at some point. The same could be said of WalkerP, though I do believe this was because of a much more specific issue at the time. Because of this specificity in the time frame, I actually think there's less of a case to be made regarding WalkerP than there was regarding Seanchai.

It doesn't really matter what drove Walkerp to suddenly decided he needed a banning, the simple fact is that he deliberately posted a topic that is explicitely, and with good reason, forbidden and kept it going despite repeated warnings to stop... and to put the cherry on the cake, when it finally came to a head he out and out claimed that he was looking to be banned.

Really at that point he could have been Bhudda rolled up with Han Solo with a dash of Terry Prachett and he still would need to be banned.  


But lets not have anyone claiming that he was some sort of martyr in the name of free speech in a bit of revisionist historical whitewashing.


Full Disclaimer: Personally, I didn't like the fucker, and after his outing himself as an omnicidal, species hating tool, I was happy enough to see him go.  But even if he'd sucked my furry yellow cock every day (and twice on Sundays) I'd still have pointed out he earned that ban. EDIT::: Also, I hated his fucking avatar. Just sayin'

I'm not pretending that WalkerP is innocent of any wrongdoing. He isn't white as snow in this. He himself knows it.

Quote from: Benoist;477051I'm not pretending that WalkerP is innocent of any wrongdoing. He isn't white as snow in this. He himself knows it.

True, but I was responding to a (now week old...) Post by Melan, who was using him as an example of improper banning.

Quote from: DanDan;477034The way games I play are written is not, in my opinion, sexist. Although I have played an awful lot of WoD and I think that was geared a lot more towards a mixed audience. I think the racey artwork that features in lots of games is no worse for women then men. When I think about the Conan-esk dudes I've seen in a lot of games... well that can't be easy to live up to...

This is an interesting statement. Because speaking for myself personally, the answer is "of course not", because playing a super-capable badass that you aren't in real life is sort of the point of such characters.

Now is this equitable though? I know some woman resent that so many RPGs depict so many female scantily and are made uncomfortable by them. But not all women are the same. (Sort of like men that way...)

I've heard some blasting of Paizo over Seoni, the iconic sorceress. But the pathfinder iconics also feature the well-clothed Kyra and Seelah. Some women on RPG blogs/forums have blasted the mere existence of Seoni, the existence of the rest of the female iconics notwithstanding. But I know that for many women I play with, Seoni is exactly the image of a character they would want to play.

Kudos for having a thread that for the most part doesn't descend into whiny little privilege kafkatraps (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122).

Quote from: Typhon;477110Kudos for having a thread that for the most part doesn't descend into whiny little privilege kafkatraps (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122).

Interesting article.
If I needed some lulz I'd post it in full on Tangency.