adult content

[Zappo]

I was talking about the Forward to the book. You can't convince me its really necessary in the Forward, the Prefix or the Afterward.

Ooops. Sorry, I didn't know what a Forward is in a book context.

Yeah, I can't think right now of a good reason to use swearwords in an RPG book's forward. Maybe if the book is strongly adult-themed...? The author would have to be pretty good to make such a book maturely, but it isn't impossible.

 

[alsih2o]

early evening bump

 

[Bonedagger]

Mature content wouldn't really have any effect on whether I would buy a gaming product or not.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Nice too see you Mouse, how you doing these days?

Mostly better. Still having problems with the tendonitis in one finger, but it's doing a lot better than it was.

Other'n that, just fine. Thanks.

 

[Bonedagger]

But then again. Compared to the USA Denmark is a bit different on the sex/violence thing. Here movies mostly get warning labels if they contain violence. Nudity and sex is considdered more natural.

 

[Henrix]

I'm with Bonedagger.

From an european point of view you americans are totally fixated with swearing and nudity.

Here, it isn't considered much. Neither attractive nor totally abhorrent.

Nudity is everywhere, and is natural. It's how we are all born, after all.
And swearing is like that, too.

Me, I find graphical depictions of violence much more disturbing than porn.

If I want to look at people without clothes, there are better places to look than in a game supplement.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

If you aren't up to the level where you can integrate "mature" subject matter into your game, and indeed desire to do so, then you should just stick to playing Keep On The Borderlands or similar "bash the monster" video game nonsense... You haven't graduated past the early stages of gaming. Wake me up when you join the rest of us.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Another vote for mouseferatu's option.

 

[Blood Jester]

Sorry but...

It's bugging me.

FOREWORD

Thanks.

 

[Heap Thaumaturgist]

As a writer myself I've often found the opposite is true of published fiction. (Opposite of Mouse's comments, that is.)

Very few people in a novel "speak" like normal people on the street. There are phrases and variations you can use in text that sound horrible when spoken aloud. Very often when you get "bad" dialogue in a movie, it wouldn't cause a batted lash in a novel.

By that same token cursing often, while realistic, is somehow jarring in text. Perhaps this is because text is static. When a word is spoken, it is gone, air, released and that word is no more. A word on a page exists in large part forever, and stays within your line of sight for a long time. It sticks, it stops, it says: "Here I am, that's right, I said ****. ****. Right here."

Character-wise I seem to get the point when an author says: "______ let out a string of epithets that made even Flexor The Mighty red faced and uncomfortable." As opposed to: "You ****, I'll **** you and your ****ing sister right in the **** ****." It loses something. A character can seem very adult, if coarse and ill spirited if he "releases curses so foul the air became thick" but if the cursing actually begins he no longer seems coarse, just ... juvenile.

I'm looking at my bookshelf right now and I can't easily call to mind a genre novel in which the author or a character regularly uses curse words.

There is also the fact that curse words are a very grounding, human, HERE sort of thing. They disrupt the verisimilitude of a world ... do goblins use the same words? The same way? With the same foul innuendos?

Not burning your britches personally, I'm just disagreeing with the idea that it "feels" realistic to use Old High Crass in fiction, especially genre fiction. Moreso than any other form of fiction, genre fiction is the place you come across those words most infrequently.

--HT