IF you intend to be taken seriously by intelligent people.
I beg your pardon? Watch your manners, please, or this conversation will be very short.
IF you intend to be taken seriously by intelligent people.
I beg your pardon? Watch your manners, please, or this conversation will be very short.
I await your answer. You are the one that equated something with murder that could be as innocuous as opening a door for someone.
I'm not equating them at all;
YES, you did. Very clearly. You compared allowing murderers to run free without action against them to allowing people who commit "sexism" to run around without action against them. SO, please answer my question.
No, the meat of this discussion is you don't apparently want to hear that the whole hobby does not stand convicted and therefore need not pay contrite penitence for its sins.
Adventuring is the draw, IMO, of D&D. Avoiding violence whenever possible is firmly at the root of the adventure RPG. (I just played Temple of the Frog - 2 men, 2 women players)I've played in a few. As far as D&D type games, there is a scientific aspect often overlooked. Human males are more attracted to activities involving violence than are human females. It is genetic due to evolution of the species.
on the grounds that women have charged the moderators with sexism for not allowing politically charge discussions of sexism. Would any other class of gamer be so privileged had they complained the moderators were being discriminatory? For example, if I had complained that shutting down threads about the role of religion in gaming were motivated by anti-religious bias, would this allowed me free reign to discuss religion?
Indeed so. The interesting question is why the GM or the source material chooses to set those particular boundaries, and whether it is in fact the case that those limitations are followed.
If they're followed arbitrarily then the players are quite justified in asking whether "we have to do it this way" is in fact true.
For example, imagine that your GM, after telling everyone the game was going to be Gothic Horror, had slapstick comedy and jokey NPCs popping up regularly throughout the session. You might well have frowned at the guys playing luchadores, but then I think you'd probably also be asking why the GM wasn't bothering to stick to the Gothic Horror tone that was supposedly the theme of the campaign. Especially if the GM had banned luchadores and said no, you all have to make characters that fit the Gothic Horror milieu.
Johnny3D3D said:In general, I'm pro-luchadore.
Adventuring is the draw, IMO, of D&D. Avoiding violence whenever possible is firmly at the root of the adventure RPG.
I was talking about the relevance of the statistics in this case, not the similarity of the two things being measured.
Here is what you said. "Murderers are no doubt a very small percentage of the world population, but we don't allow it to happen. It's still addressed, dealt with by law and policy, and universally condemned -"
It says what it says. You WERE comparing it to murder. As if a possible act of "sexism" (WHOLLY undefined BTW) requires the urgency of handling as does an act of murder.
OK, @Kursk , I've tried to reason cordially with you a couple of times and to try to get you to drop the attitude. Since you clearly have no interest in doing so, please do not post in this thread again.
No attitude. I just was curious why you equated "sexual harrasment" with murder.
If that WERE the case, it would be reflected in play. It is not.
So, it doesn't appear in Hackmaster but did in an early version of a game I've never heard of but does not now since you specified it was an early printing. I'm not seeing what the problem is then as it seems that people are speaking up about it and games are being changed because of it. Sounds like victory to me!
I hold doors for people, not just women I find pretty.
I think it is good to discuss gender equality - sexism hurts men as well, perhaps just as much, as women. It sucks for everybody. At a convention last weekend, I estimate it was around 20% female gamers. So, if we want the hobby to expand, we should be looking at this.
I don't think chain mail bikinis and such are a problem. You have to look at the overall image - is she empowered, and equal to the bare-chested Conan? Boobs are great. Muscles are great. Its the overall tone I care about. The fantasy characters shouldn't be empowered because of showing skin.
The 5E playtest I was in had a father and daughter, and the daughter was an MVP as far as deducing things about the mystery at hand. The GM ignored her sometimes, though, and I made it a point to at least affirm what she said - hey, good idea, maybe we should do that...
What I didn't see was a lot of women GM's. I wonder if that is a key in getting more women players. Originally, TSR built the hobby by focusing on GM material - GM's who want to run their games are what drives the hobby IMO.
Come to think of it - wow. I've never played in a woman's game. All my GM's, since 1987, have been guys. That's not good.
So no, whether you are a woman or not (and I'm still not certain, because your profile says male), you don't get to speak for women. You aren't their appointed champion. You don't get to go around like a knight in shining armor defending them from the assaults of predatory males. Because there isn't one single way of looking at any of this, and not even among women, and you know - maybe they don't necessarily need your protection.
Isn't this an individual group issue though? I mean, even if sexual assault were to occur in my game, I would never be graphic about such a sensitive subject - not just because I'm worried that someone in the group has been sexual assaulted - but because dwelling on graphic anything can be prurient and voyeuristic and unhealthy. But I don't get to tell another group where to draw that line, because there is a point where I think dealing with mature issues is something important for a game to do and one of those very important issues is the very real problem of evil. And sometimes evil has to be portrayed, and how to do that correctly isn't a clear cut thing. And I'm not going to banish that from my game, because that itself would tend to make the fantasy exercise unhealthy. I disagree with claims that we aren't desensitized to murder. There are so many assumptions being made in this larger argument that I just think are flat out wrong.
Nothing justifies that. I'm not ever going to try to excuse that. But this isn't a simple subject. I had friend go to DragonCon, and a cosplay vampire (a girl) had made one of those real denture pieces that features very real and sharp fangs, come over to him sexually grope him and then sink her very real fangs into his neck: a complete stranger completely without provocation. And she drew blood; a he did hit her, because well, assault and battery. I mean, I don't know how readily you're going to accept this claim, but there is a lot of sexuality assumed around the cosplay culture and some women - certainly not all of them - are very much attracted to it by its sexuality and very much desire to be the center of attention because of it. Some of that attention goes way beyond what they want, I'm sure, and again there is no excuse for that. But when you get into these complicated whose flirting with who situations, sometimes the boundaries between what is sexual harassment and what is welcome flirtation get really blurred. Now, I don't think that even needs to be part of a discussion of rape, but if you are going to start blurring the lines between 'rape bad' and 'this guy with pimples at dragon con was hitting on me badly', there we are. You went there already.
Make up your mind. Is it about home games or not? Or is it about your desire to dictate to the gaming community what they should or should not publish based on your standards of what is moral or not?
Would you like to go through them one at a time? Let's start with the Scythians. The actual essay you link to says: "There is ambiguous evidence as to the role of women among the Scythians." There is very little hard evidence for Scythian women warriors beyond the usual role of aristocratic women leading men into battle in their spouses place, or of defending their homes, lives, and children in the last extremity - the real truth of 'women have always fought'. To the extent that the evidence paints a picture of female warriors, we are talking a small minority, in one culture, during one period, using the horsebow - the one weapon of the ancient world that might equalize the genders somewhat in the way that say a rifle does - and that culture ultimately went extinct, conquered and assimilated by a culture without a female warrior tradition. Not exactly evidence of equality of the sexes if you are basing equality of the sexes or any other person on what they are capable of (because if it was that, then mentally retarded people would be subhuman), and certainly not definitive evidence that female warriors are realistic much less commonplace.
And that's your strongest link. You link repeatedly to the 'Women as Warriors Homepage', which is just filled with crap and garbage. Would you like me to explain?
However, there is both textual and archaeological evidence of women among the Scythians (albeit a minority) who enjoyed a fairly high status.The textual evidence consists of the famous Amazons, whose name is from the Greek a-mazos(without a breast), from their alleged custom of arresting the development of one breast to facilitate using the bow. Although the Amazons are featured in Greek myth, Herodotus, when he traveled in the Black Sea region, heard tales of actual women who had been warriors and war leaders.
A significant number of burials of warrior women have indeed been found, some with evidence of battle wounds. In the Scythian region west of the Don 40 such burials had been found by the late 1990s, some in conjunction with royal grave mounds, and in the region Herodotus called Sauromatia, east of the Don, some 20 percent of excavated warrior burials from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE were of women.
Herodotus connects the Amazons, whom the Scythians called Oiorpata, "man-slayers," with the Sauromatians, who he says were a mixture of Scythians and Amazons and spoke Scythian. Herodotus's Sauromatians seem to be distinct from the Sarmatians who later displaced the Scythians from the western steppe (and for whom there is no evidence of warrior women). Herodotus says that Sauromatian women had to kill three of their enemy before they were allowed to marry. The appearance of warrior women in Scythian society appears to be a late phenomenon, judging by the age of burials, and may have been a reaction of some sort to the great change in Scythian society brought about by contact with Greek civilization, or, on the other hand, by social changes set in motion among indigenous peoples in the Black Sea region by the arrival of the Scythians. Such a change would be unlikely for the "real" Scythians from the steppe, among whom male dominance was already great when they arrived in the Black Sea region. The Sauromatians, however, might have been indigenous people, among whom there was relative gender equality, which led some women to become warriors.
That is a matter of style. The style of D&D by Arneson and Gygax is more adventure game oriented - mapping, avoiding combat, maintaining your strength for when you need it. Violence occurs in most any adventure, but is not its focus.If that WERE the case, it would be reflected in play. It is not.
Actually it is not a victory, a victory would be never having to address this again. As a woman I see battles we thought we had one having to be fought over and over again.