Bendris Noulg said:
Ah, but it's not. For instance, the fact that people read this kinda press release or discuss the BoVD, and all they see is "blood & boobies" tells more about them then it does about the people actually using the material. Yet we are expected to believe that their perception of immaturity and inability (unwillingness?) to see the material in another light as the defacto truth regarding these books.
I'll take you up on this one.
But the extremism of the left ("anything, no matter how disgusting, perverted, or delinquent should be printed") is no more attractive than the extremism of the right ("blood and boobies are evil and nobody should print them").
I'll defend your right to print/read/use such material, should you so choose. That doesn't mean I think you SHOULD use it or that I condone using it... or that I'll support your efforts other than by protecting your rights.
What, exactly, does it tell you about people who only see "blood & boobies." That
they are more immature than those who see value in the product? The connotation you seem to give is that "these people are too close-minded to be worth listening to." All it REALLY tells you is "these are people who are ethically or morally predisposed to think that blood & boobies add sufficient negative value to trump any positive value that the rest of the work might have."
Similarly, I could say, "people that like or defend this material tell me a lot more about themselves than they do about the material." The connotation, of course, being that (to butcher a quote from above, "{they} are fetish bondage S/M {weirdos}."
Neither connotation particularly suits me, to be honest, and I wish we'd stop trying to polarize things. Not everything is so black and white.
After all, I know how the material is being used in my game, and it's far from gratuitous. But do any of the "blood & booby" detractors have any proof that the material is being used otherwise? Not a shred, in fact. Yet their perception that this material is in bad taste, can't be used maturely, and would only be desired by those who are immature seems to be a recurring theme that, despite unpteen threads to the contrary, seems to never go away, and is often portrayed as truth without any suportive facts beyond personal opinions.
Suppose someone's position is, "such material is by definition objectionable and therefore inclusion of such material in a campaign is by definition gratuitous."
It's all about definitions and "perception is reality."
You
know how the material is used in your game and you BELIEVE it is far from gratuitous.
But by the standard of the person mentioned above, they
know (from your own statement) that the material is used in your game and that person BELIEVES it is gratuitous - REGARDLESS of how it is used... by their thinking, it doesn't matter HOW you use it IF you use it at all.
You can't empirically prove that it's not gratuitous because you and they do not agree on where the line for "gratuitous" is. Don't discount the opinions of others just because they don't draw the same line as you.
After all, read over all the threads about "mature" material since BoVD was released. They are full of assumptions and accusations. Not once have I seen a thread that states "I was in a game where the DM used the BoVD and it was so gross I had to quit..." Instead, it's slammed on by people that have either (A) seen the material but not been in a game with the material being used or (B) have not seen the material and have based their opinions on the statements made by Group A.
I'm with you on Group B needing to be quieter - if you haven't seen the material in question, you can't form a well-informed opinion on it. But I can't give you Group A. In order to have an opinion on material, I must have gamed with it? That's a bit ridiculous, IMO. So I can't tell you that a Feat that gives you a +10 to all attack rolls isn't balanced until I actually play with it? Come on.
What about those of us who have seen the material and projected forward exactly what using the material would do to our games (knowing the personalities of our players)? What about those of us who have seen the material and said, "boy, if this had been around when I was 14, that amazon-elf-babe-porn adventure Bobby ran would have been EVEN more graphic?" What about those of us who look at the material and say, "you know, this is not what I want in my game" (the same as we might look at any other product and say, "that has no place in my game" - for instance, Firearms have no place in my campaigns)?
I would suggest to you that the reason you don't see a lot of, "I played with it and it's gross" posts is that a lot of people pre-filtered it... "it's gross, so I won't play with it."
Both of these are, fundamentally, the well spring from which ignorance flows.
No. The wellspring of ignorance is three-fold; satisfy any one of the three criteria below to be ignorant:
1.) Lack of experience to apply to a situation.
2.) Lack of capacity to apply experience to a situation.
3.) Unwillingness to apply experience to a situation.
Note that I did not say experience IN a situation, but rather spoke to applicability of experience TO a situation.
#1 can be cured with - you guessed it, experience.
#2 can only be cured by expanding the capacity of an individual and is not always possible. It also goes by the name "incompetence" (in the nice sense, not the mean sense).
#3 usually goes by the name of close-mindedness.
Hence, there are three requirements to be "not ignorant" - you must have experience that can be applied to a situation and you must be willing and able to apply it. I readily admit that I have no experience WITH the BoVD in a campaign. But I have experience with "Vile Material in Campaigns" and with the BoVD... and can apply those to two understand the likely effect "Vile material from the BoVD in a campaign." Thus, I am not lacking in experience, I am not unable to apply it, and I am not unwilling to apply it. I am therefore not ignorant (at least in my mind). YMMV.
Suffice to say I can give you all the Pro-BoVD arguments as well as I can give you all the Anti-BoVD arguments. I happen to believe that the premises of the Anti-BoVD arguments are more compelling... hence I am Anti-BoVD. I hardly see how that qualified me as ignorant or close-minded... I simply proceed forth from different premises than you do - and THAT is life, not either of us being wrong.
--The Sigil
