Recently got email from someone asking me to promote Fae Nightmares, a new Savage Worlds-rules-using tabletop RPG Kickstarter project, and their reasoning was solid, so I have backed the Kickstarter and am writing about it here even though it is urban fantasy with faerie overtones and that is, to put it generously, not really my thing at all. (Although the Savage Worlds ruleset is generally excellent, so that’s a plus.) At this writing they’re only about $4K away from funding with twelve days to go.
The reason I’m backing this Kickstarter is because it’s actively advertising itself as gender-neutral and LGBT-friendly. That is, to put it bluntly, pretty goddamn ballsy in the RPG world – which is approximately as bad as the comics world when it comes to queer-friendliness and anti-sexism, and I know that sentence will start a lengthy debate about whether RPG fandom is as bad as comics fandom when it comes to sexism and homophobia, and the answer to that debate is “nobody wins.”
(Someone here is probably going to mention how White Wolf’s games always had gay characters and I don’t want to get into that debate either, but suffice it to say I have been subjected to more than one rant from a gay gamer friend about how White Wolf treats homosexuals as Pokemon. I do not feel equipped to judge that on the merits, but on the other hand it’s White Wolf, who managed to create one and a half truly great RPGs – Mage, and Ars Magica, which only counts for half because Chaosium started that and WW just took it over later on – and so, so, so much that was just awful, so whatever, somebody else can defend White Wolf.)
In short: these folks are banking on RPG fans being willing to pay hard cash for equality in-setting, and I think I have to support that. And given how many of you reading this are the sort to say that [INSERT VARIOUS NERD FANDOM HERE] should be more open and tolerant and non-assholic, I think you guys should too. It’s only $15 for the PDF, and that’s not bad at all as RPG e-books go.
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I think RPG fandom is, in some ways, worse about women than comics fandom, but I’m not sure there’s any useful way to measure that, and a lot of my experience in RPG fandom is 20 years out of date.
Chaosium didn’t start Ars Magica. It was from Lion Rampant, which was co-founded by Mark Rein*Hagan; Lion Rampant merged with White Wolf Magazine to become White Wolf Games. So it’s not even exactly true to say White Wolf “took over” AM–it’s more like AM took over White Wolf.
It might be changing. I know that the writers of Pathfinder say that any NPC or Iconic is to be assumed bisexual unless stated otherwise. They do still have boobtastic armour on their women, though they also gave us the first sensibly dressed succubus:
http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/63944230345/filbypott-a-succubus-wearing-full-armor-instead
If you don’t think Exalted was a great RPG, well, I have to question your judgment in all other gaming-related matters.
Enh. Trying to be friendly to LGBT and aware of gender issues isn’t anything new in RPGs. Blue Rose (co-authored by Steve Kenson, one of the few openly gay RPG developers out there) was kind of the first game to tackle positive portrayals of homosexuality in gaming (not counting White Wolf, who tends to take one step forward, one step back, and gets pushed another two in whatever direction by the consumer base).
As for gender issues, a lot of games at least make some sincere effort to acknowledge that maybe gals want to play too. Alternating use of pronouns on a chapter-by-chapter basis is how Eden Studios does their books I believe, and I’ve seen a few companies specify that hypothetical GMs are female and males are players.
I’m not saying the industry is perfect, but I do think it’s deserves credit for listening more than it used to.
I was the token female in every gaming group and EVERY GODDAMN TIME I had to be cleric. Had these situations been real-life and not(obviously) role-playing, I’m just saying a lot of my prayers might have accidentally gone tragically unanswered. But then again, I suppose that’s what I get for playing with sexist jackholes.
And I don’t think altering pronoun usage to pretend your imaginary GM is a lady is going to make any sort of difference.
Added a Reminder on it so I can look at it later. It’s way outside my preferred genres, but if I haven’t grossly overspent my budget on other Kickstarters, I think I can spare $15.
Changeling: the Lost and Hunter: the Vigil are both fantastic.
Honestly, there aren’t “good” WW games so much as better and worse settings overlaid on essentially the same basic game.
And every White Wolf game eventually has creepy sex stuff shoehorned into it so I’m not sure how much WW can be used to judge the industry on this subject. (Exalted 2e was doing fine on this front until the Infernal book and then holy shit)
Thanks, man. It’s really appreciated. Savage Worlds is my favorite ruleset but the publisher has this horrible, inexplicable habit of putting barely-dressed women on the covers of the genre companions (when your superheroine is covered up more than your horror heroine, you have a problem) and a Savage Worlds licensee coming out in favor of gender equality is really bold.
I don’t think altering pronoun usage to pretend your imaginary GM is a lady is going to make any sort of difference.
Yeah, it’s a culture problem that has adopted misogynistic values. The only thing that alternating pronoun usage is to open the door to thinking about alternate roles for genders. The individual still has to step through, and when the response is “Eww, no way!” (…and is generally more virulent and toxic, misspelled, all-caps and degrading…) it’s easy to see where the problem lies. People are bringing to the table what they have learned about life. As gender-balanced values permeate the culture (and encounters resistance, because the old values benefit the holdouts), the sub-cultures will begin to examine where they are as they bring in people with these values. And the fight will be re-played on the sub-culture level.
Cookie, I know where you’re coming from. My gf had a dm who insisted that her Paladin character, because she was high charisma and female, has huge boobs. Oh, if the character were male? Leadership and oration. He didn’t see the problem with this. She left the game and eventually left the friendship.
RE: changing gender pronoun usage.
Cookie, you’re not wrong, but you miss the point. I mean, the alternative is to present all default players as male, which would be fair to call a step backwards (it sure as heck doesn’t help promote any sense of inclusion).
RE: Exalted
Parts of the setting are great, parts are juvenile at best, and parts feel like a cheap marketing ploy (“we’re enlightened now. Here’s a transgendered signature character! Take that D&D/Pathfinder/critics!”). I’d just be happy if they made a working ruleset, and did more stuff like the Tya (rather than the usual White Wolf stuff where magical people use magic to change their gender and nobody cares).
No, the alternative is to go gender-neutral.
Examples: instead of
“The player then his Favored Abilities” or “The player then selects her Favored Abilities” you use “The player then selects their Favored Abilities.”
And before people jump down my throat, YES, you can use ‘they’ and ‘their’ as singular pronouns. It is in fact legitimate from a prescriptivist standpoint. So instead of flipping between he and she, or even worse, constantly saying stuff like “The player then selects his or her Favored Abilities” you can simply use a gender neutral word and avoid all the fuss entirely.
@Dasz “And every White Wolf game eventually has creepy sex stuff shoehorned into it so I’m not sure how much WW can be used to judge the industry on this subject. ”
That’s probably true. But, I’d argue that it’s most often something that is tightly coupled to the themes of the games. How do you write a game about vampires without at least recognizing that there are going to be some sexual elements that might come up? The entire literary body of vampire stories is pretty much one long metaphor for loss of innocence/virginity. So until you figure out how to take the creepy sex stuff out of vampires and fairy tales and serial killers, then is the problem simply that WW shouldn’t make horror games? As a genre, horror has often had a certain sexualized nature associated with it. Often, that’s the point of a horror story (both in the bad examples like innumerable vampire movies that exist primarily to show nude woman and in the good ones, like Dracula, the book).
I have to agree with Murc regarding gender neutrality. Speaking as a member of the excluded gender, I find arbitrarily switching the pronouns to be kind of patronizing, because we all know there ain’t no lady GMs in the real world (or not very many, for sure), and it still has all the players as male, which still leaves the token female real-life player all alone in a world drowning in testosterone.
Malovich, I had that exact same thing happen to me, in fact. Kind of why I gave up on gaming.
MGK: you right.
Pledged.
Vampire was great. Werewolf was great. Exalted was great.
Lots of BS in them? Sure. Still great.
That said, I applaud every effort to get some gender-neutral and LGBT-friendly atmosphere into the roleplaying world. As anyone who has ever listened to the public channels in WoW can attest to, it is sorely needed.
not to nitpick, but Lion Rampant was the original publisher of Ars Magica. They later merged with White Wolf Magazine after Mark Rein-Hagen took the game and most of the company from Minnesota to Georgia. The linked article has all the sticky details.
@Sisyphus: Having sexual elements is one thing, but I really could have done without the underage rape/pregnancy fetish character in the Infernal book, which is really more what I’m talking about.
Whatever the person actually meant by it, “treating homosexuals as Pokemon” is a much more entertaining mental image than it has any right to be.
“I have been subjected to more than one rant from a gay gamer friend about how White Wolf treats homosexuals as Pokemon.”
The closest I can come to contributing to this conversation is to recall the Children of Gaia splatbook for one edition of Werewolf: the Apocalypse. A huge, HUGE amount of text in that book was dedicated to the relationship between the POV character (a gay male werewolf born human) and his lover (a gay male werewolf born a wolf). I can’t remember if it was tastefully done or not, but given how much real estate the book devoted to a gay man fucking a wolf, I tend to doubt it was.
I will be backing that kickstarter, though.
Yeah, I think I know the book you’re talking about. That book was terrible and I think the same guy got to shit up at least one of the Mage 3rd splatbooks as well.
I’m more entertained by the idea of, like, “Bi-Curious College Roommate! I choose you!”
Oh boy, sexism in tabletop roleplaying games. That’s a fun one.
There are writers out there who make an effort to be more inclusive than others do, but MGK is still 100% right about the fact that openly declaring your intent to make an RPG that’s LGBT friendly and anti-sexist is ballsy because the RPG fanbase is jam-fucking-packed full of some of the most regressive, whiny, “but what about the menzzzzz?” manchildren outside of reddit. Like, you know how ever since Anna Sarkessian started up her video series that a plethora of complete fucking idiots and assholes have come out of the woodwork to basically throw a fit that someone might imply that video games and video game culture might have some entrenched sexism? Take that and apply the whole “the lower the stakes the more people will argue” factor since no stakes are really lower than tabletop RPGs and you have an idea of how bad it can get.
White Wolf made Charnel Houses of Europe which is quite possibly the single most genuinely mature roleplaying product that the hobby can lay claim to. They also made Pimp: The Backhanding and let someone put their child rape demon pregnancy fetish in an Exalted sourcebook (and published Changing Breeds and there’s the cover art to Savant and Sorcerer and the Exalted 3 Kickstarter preview that was a charmset geared towards turning people into fuck-addicted sex zombies by “ravishing” them, etc. etc. etc.). For every example of genuine maturity and respectful handling of subjects you can find in this hobby there are 100 “Slayers Guide to Female Gamers” or Black Tokyos out there.
@Sisyphus: Maybe, but did we need Infernals, or werewolves setting up rape camps? Do we need Holden talking about how rad the new Magic Powers Designed Only For Rape that he’s writing are?
I don’t fucking think so.
@Murc
I mean something else by “prescriptivist.” What do you mean?
And why can’t we just use “one’s favored abilities”?!
I see. I’d play neither Werewolf nor Exalted. I was trying to put the comments I’d seen in the context of what I’d actually played. Vampire can, legitimately, have some creepy sexual themes (especially with regard to ghouls). It’s also, I think, White Wolf’s flagship product, so the one that I, mentally, associate with the company most readily. However, it seems like creepy sexual themes are sort of integral to most vampire stories, so some of the criticism, in that specific context, didn’t make sense to me. I also always wanted to find someone to play Wraith with, but it’s a brilliant concept that is sort of hard to do at the table (the Shadow in particular is something that some players have real trouble with), and had read Charnal Houses. So reconciling that White Wolf with what I read here, I was sort of puzzled. So by pure chance and the fact that neither Werewolf nor Exalted ever looked interesting enough to me, I’ve missed the big WW offenders it seems.
No I’m pretty sure Vampire’s had some skeezy stuff too amidst the myriad of splatbooks and supplemental material. Clanbook Tzimisce is rather infamous for its cover art of a person with a big ol’ vagina face. I’m positive there’s more than that but I’m not a big Vampire person so someone else can weigh in.
Here’s a more accurate way of describing the situation that’s endemic to tabletop RPGs as a hobby; there is zero quality control or pressure from any quarters to be better, either from editors or fans or other creators. Not every Werewolf or Exalted book is full of shitty rape camp stuff, those things aren’t integral to either game in even the slightest bit. So the question then is “how does this stuff get into books which get published?” And the answer is basically:
1). The way TRPGs is created is “unprofessional” in the sense that they aren’t really handled with the same degree of professional oversight or quality standards as other things (ostensibly) are. A lot of RPG writers are freelancers being paid a penny a word, margins are thin all over, and it basically seems to be a coinflip whether any given editor will actually veto something or just let it on through. And that was when White Wolf had editors, these days White Wolf is basically a handful of guys and a Kickstarter account since CCP (who owns White Wolf now) got hit by the recession and basically laid the TRPG division off.
So the people who write stuff like rape camps and demon child rape or rapeghost magic powers, either nobody in a position of authority steps up to tell them “no this is dumb and also terrible” OR the only people in a position of authority think that stuff is awesome.
2). When stuff like this does get published any outcry against it is drowned in a sea of nerds making shitty arguments about how they know a girl who said she liked cheesecake art so therefore sexism is over or that rape in games is perfectly fine because there’s violence in games and that totally isn’t a false equivalency at all. Take any given shitty thing that’s ever been published in an RPG and you can find people tripping over themselves to heap praise on it and shit all over anyone who suggests that things like “magical Nazi rape machines” might be in bad taste are white-knighting politically correct social justice warriors out to destroy the hobby.
3). The TRPG hobby is small and insular and greying and resistant to change.
So you have an exceedingly niche hobby that grows more niche with every passing year, with no real professional standards for anyone who wants to bill themselves a “professional game designer” and publish, and an audience that largely either doesn’t care about issues like that or actively shouts them down when presented with them. RPGs are so under the radar and so low stakes that it’s hard to get any sort of ball rolling because the pressure to sustain it runs out easily.
So this is a side issue: Kickstarter hates it when I try to use my US cards for a CAD project. My credit card company and my bank are like ‘no we approved the charge but then it was bounced by the company’ and KS isn’t much help. Is anyone else having this issue? I also wanted to back the River City Ransom reboot but basically had to give up when it would not accept money.
@highlyverbal
A language prescriptivist would be one who subscribes to prescriptivism; that is, that there are a set of rules when it comes to grammar, language, and spelling, and one should hew to those rules. As opposed to a descriptivist, who is very big on things in actual widespread use (splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions) also being considered correct even if they aren’t formally so.
Using “one” isn’t always going to scan right; there’s nothing wrong with it, really, but singular they/their has a long history and will have your back covered in almost all cases.
Re: Exalted… I’m not sure how they were supposed to “Win” on the whole Infernals thing. That was a book about playing the insane evil servants of insane evil gods who are, literally, seeking to twist the world into their own private unending hell of death, slaughter, revenge, and rape. Said gods were violated massively and turned into engines of fear and flame by OTHER gods who are the putative forces of good in that setting.
So building an eternally pregnant/raped underage child incubator for their crazy cosmic servants is about par for the course for that setting. The world of Exalted is messed up. It would be different if the writers had been lionizing things, presenting Malfeas as a cool sexy place worthy of emulation. But they weren’t. It was presented as a fucked-up version of hell. The Age of Sorrows is a terrifying dystopia! They could ignore all matters sexy in favor of all things violent, of course, but that would have been odd.
Oh lord, I had a potential friendship just absolutely self-immolate to the ground the last time I said anything at length about why I think the art in RPGs is a primary factor in shoving female gamers away.
Which kind of underscores why projects like this one are needed. Kudos to them.
@Murc: They win with Infernals by leaving creepy fetishism out of it. I’m sorry, but the excuse of “it’s eeeevil so it’s okay” is complete and utter bullshit. Every horrible asshole trying to defend this kind of bullshit goes for that one and I won’t buy it this time either.
@Dasz
Except you have to actually make the argument that Infernals was fetishizing that stuff. I’m open to being convinced there, but… I mean, by that standard, D&D fetishizes extreme acts of violence and repressive, undemocratic social orders.
Exalted as a whole was about superpowered ubermen kicking the shit out of each other and treating regular people like objects; hell, the game mechanics even referred to regular joes as “extras” and explicitly made them a lesser class of being. Once you’ve accepted that as something interesting enough to roleplay in, I’m not sure you can get that upset about the setting going to its logical conclusions.
@Murc: Did you read the Infernals book? Ignoring your ludicrous false equivalence, how you can read the bits about rape girl and not see it as borderline pornographic(at best) is beyond me.
As to “extras”: do you honestly need me to explain to you why a game with a heavy cinematic focus refers to narratively unimportant characters as “extras”? Can you honestly not see the difference between abstracting combat with characters that are no realistic challenge to PCs and writing painstakingly detailed descriptions of a child being raped full of corrupted soul babies and she enjoys it?(because of fucking course that had to be part of it)
There’s absolutely nothing about Exalted’s setting or the Infernal Exalted themselves that says “oh yeah, an underaged child perpetually raped and kept pregnant with hell-babies is not only necessary but thematically appropriate.” Holy shit, the world of Exalted has absolutely nothing to do with fetishy child rape fantasies, what version of Exalted have you been reading?
Of course I say that knowing that White Wolf did in fact allow someone to write a book featuring fetishy child rape prominently in the opening half and then published it.
Exalted is also far from the only RPG to have “mook” rules. Sorry, you’re going to have to pick another angle if you want to justify underaged child rape in games, thanks.
This actually reminds me of the fallout of the Exalted 3 rapeghost thing where the person who created those magical abilities as a preview for what Abyssal abilities might look like (Abyssals being essentially the champions of the lords of the Underworld) tried justifying it by going “but but but Abyssals are meeeean! Vampires!” and it’s like “so the only way you could think of to highlight that was with sex magic? Not magic that deals with obsession or passion in a general sense, SPECIFICALLY magic for turning people into fuck-addicted sex ghosts?” The argument’s bullshit no matter how you slice it. If the only way you can think of to write something like that is to go for the rape then you can fuck right off with your weak tea justifications.
@Dasz
I have in fact read the Infernals book, yes. I did not find it at all pornographic, though, assuming that by “pornographic” you mean “intended to titillate and arouse me.”
I do concede that it is full of all kinds of awful, squicky, horrifying shit.
So is the Abyssals book, though.
So is Exalted as a setting.
Again: Exalted as a setting is about increasingly insane supermen battling other increasingly insane supermen and using regular people as objects and props. The Solar book includes detailed instructions on how to forcibly violate peoples minds and make them your slaves, and how to enslave minor deities to your will and make them do your bidding.
The Dragon-Blooded book includes detailed instructions on how your Dynast can own their own collection of slaves and how to leverage those slaves into power and wealth for yourself. Oh, and also demonstrates that the Dragon-Blooded are, culturally, a collection of creepy sex maniacs.
The Lunars book has detailed instructions on how you can fuck animals to breed your own race of half-men, half-goat abominations to conquer the world with. Later supplements would flesh this out with additional mechanics.
The Abyssals book includes detailed instructions on how to murder the world. Also on how to violate peoples souls and turn them into metal for weapons you make, spending multiple pages going into detail about rendering down someones soul and condemning them to an endless, screaming eternity of pain so you can have a cool sword.
The Sidereals routinely violate people on a deep and intimate level, and their very Charm trees are, literally, pages upon pages of very graphic detail about how you can twist someones entire life around for no better reason than to make the paperwork line up.
I could go on.
I didn’t find anything in Infernals that was more or less horrifying than anything I’d found in any of the other fatsplats or supplements. I completely disagree that the materiel is presented in a way intended to fetishize or glamorize it, any more than the many, many pages of text they spend on the fact that Desus abused and brutalized Lilith back in the first age fetishized and glamorized domestic violence.
As for the extras thing… it isn’t just that Exalted abstracts out unimportant characters as “extras”. That’s baked into the setting and the cosmology. Being an “extra” means you get hurt more easily, heal slower, and are generally dumber, slower, and less important than a hero. If you get very lucky and Fate smiles on you, you can become a Mortal Hero, and avoid some of that shit, but in the Age of Sorrows, the powers that be literally decide that some people will be definitively, objectively lesser than other people. That’s kind of awful, isn’t it?
@Murc: Yeah, you have no idea what this conversation is about. I was half joking before, but you really do need me to explain to you why “corrupt decadent society” and “fate magic” are not the same as “rape/pregnancy fetish slave described in extreme detail” and I honestly cannot be bothered. You’re making a bunch of ludicrous false equivalencies and ending with a bad attempt at “superpowers have bad undertones”.
This is all stuff I’ve seen done better by other people and it was still wrong then, so I’m going to accept that I’ve done my best to point out the gaping flaws in your almost-arguments and stop responding to you.
@Dasz-
So, you’re conceding you don’t actually have any kind of argument beyond saying I’m engaging in false equivalencies without actually backing that up.
Glad we understand each other.
@Thomas Wilde: “JIMPARSONS, I choose you!”
“JIMPARSONS uses Bazinga. It is super-effective.”
@Murc:
Thank you for taking the time to provide a great reply. I think we do pretty much agree on “prescriptivism” in general… although I am like a million times more pedantic than you and, thus, I would love it if people who wished to assume the mantle of prescriptivism felt some burden to present a smidge more detail.
Specifically on “their” singular… well, I understand that there is a long history of using it that way, but that doesn’t yet rise to the level of “prescriptivism” — you seem to be suggesting that after some point (maybe centuries!), descriptivism morphs into prescriptivism. No way. In fact, if you look up “singular + they” in wikipedia, you will find in the first paragraph: “Though singular they has a long history of usage…, its use has been criticised by prescriptivists.” [ellipsis added]
I am such a prescritivist. I think there is an a priori reason to avoid blurring third person singular and third person plural. I feel that this linguistic structure is effectively a prescription for how “they” should be used. (However, I must admit I find it very difficult to assess how seriously this was taken prior to the formalization of grammar in the 18th century; which led me to wonder what happens when the descriptivist usage predates the prescriptivist. My head exploded.)
Please don’t misunderstand me, I think that resorting to singular “they” is a reasonable solution for many people to pursue; I just don’t think it is a prescriptivist one. I am still putting some of my verbal energy into “one” and I find that it is less awkward with more practice (anticipating problems practically solves them) and more exposure. YMMV.
I’m fond of some of WW products, particularly Werewolf, but you don’t have to go very deep to see that there are a lot of problematic bits. Creating Ethan-Heals-the-Past, a very white kid, as the representative NPC for a Native American tribe; the man-hating femenist slant to the Black Furies (the early depictions in particular); ethnic stereotypes within the tribes; describing conditions like mental illness as “Flaws”, etc. It was encouraging that they seemed to at least be trying to improve with each edition, but seeing that some of had carried over all the way into the 20th anniversary book was still disappointing.
All I have to say is that I’ve played Exalted before… and man, am I glad I don’t game with Murc.
MGK, thanks for calling attention to this game. I like the Savage Worlds rules, and this is a good thing to get behind. I need to see if I can stretch my KS budget to cover it, since I’m currently pledging to the Reaper mini Bones 2 KS as well…
Adding to Grazzt’s comments, Paizo’s definitely working to be LGBT-friendly (they use the gender of their iconics to pick pronouns, so I’d argue that’s probably some effort to be gender neutral too). Paizo’s current Adventure Path features a transgender character with that being simply treated as part of her back story.
Paizo isn’t without their issues though. They don’t shy away from going to the well of “here are the not!Romani with their mysterious Gypsy magicks and propensity for roguish thievery” for example. I mean, it’s not “World of Darkness: Gypsies” level but it’s still pretty eyebrow raising in the year of our lord 2013 that RPG writers are still looking for a way to shoehorn in stereotypical Gypsies, and it’s even better when the artists give you stuff like: http://paizo.com/image/content/PathfinderSociety/PZOPSS-Guaril.jpg
There’s some other hinky stuff there too, nothing to the degree of Nazi rape machines or rape camps…well okay, there was the whole thing where they made sure to note in the Pathfinder corebook that most half-orcs were the product of rape and when questioned about this basically said “yeah, we COULD make orcs more of an actual race and less a bunch of stereotypical evil cutouts who rape all the time, but that sounds HARD, something something Tolkien something something tradition.” And some of the details of their not!African culture are kinda ehhhhh. Plus like Grazzt says their artists sure do love their cleavage/boobplate.
…
@murc if that’s “par for course” for exalted idk if that’s what I would call a *defense* of exalted