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12:18 AM
hey again @nitsua60
 
The purpose of jargon is to facilitate communication around a subject, and it works because experts in that subject know the jargon. I don't know if your question is made up of actual jargon, but if it is, then you've restricted its audience to experts who know that specific jargon. If it's not actual jargon, then you've sacrificed clarity for nothing.
 
I cleaned it up as much as I could without knowing what you were talking about exactly.
I understand the general dilemma, between narrative tools (FATE points, etc.) and sim concerns, but the tools you list specifically are unknown to me
 
yeah, did a bit more cleanup if that helps
 
removing the word "zoom" everywhere it appears doesn't help per se
expanding on what it is you do mean would
 
level of detail
that's it
 
12:21 AM
and that means what
 
...are you saying I need to qualify "level of detail" further?
 
How many creases are on the villains' cravat?
(e.g. managing the spotlight (which character is at the center of the action), pace and timeline, zoom/detail level, and themes in play)
I know what spotlight management is, the other items I can guess at but they aren't standard terms and it's not clear what they mean.
what is an example of a narrativist event in play that alters pace/timeline and throws you out of sim immersion?
 
@Shalvenay I think you mean controlling how much effort is spent on a given moment, both in terms of time at the table and the complexity of the mechanics attached tot he moment.
 
a) when someone says "two weeks pass" because I expect every minute of my character's life to tick away realtime?
 
@BESW yeah
 
12:23 AM
b) Some kind of fast-forward move in a specific scene?
use your words, give an example
So in other words, "we resolved a whole fight in one line instead of round by round" would be an issue?
 
eg, do you describe and roll for every single punch in a fight, or do you spend one or two rolls on the whole scene and describe broadly how the fight went?
 
but that affects immersion why?
 
@mxyzplk -- actually, it's often the other way around -- spending long periods of time building up to a scene vs. getting a problem out of the way
@mxyzplk because the outcome of that fight is sensitive to details -- think "chaos-theoretic butterfly effect"
 
I'll sit here and say "use words give examples" until a full one appears... You're still just making up jargon
 
You're running into that problem where you know what you're talking about, and have a hard time figuring out what other people will need to follow you.
 
12:26 AM
@mxyzplk should I be making up examples?
 
Ideally they wouldn't be made up, since allegedly you're having this problem IRL, right?
 
@mxyzplk that's the thing -- I'd have to root through years of logs to dig them out
and do heavy anonymizing, and all sorts of stuff -- it'd be a pain in the arse
 
I understand how "making decisions based on story vs character" breaks sim, it happens to me too. But this list of things you add in aren't things that are understood by the reader. So whatever you can do to make them into a thing.
up to you. got to run
 
also, when I've tried to provide examples in the past, they've drawn people off onto tangents
"X is wrong! You could improve Y!" when I'm really asking about thing P way over there
it's the difference between finding a what you think is a compiler bug your OHGODSCOMPLICATED program triggers and putting together a MWE for that compiler bug
 
That's another thing you might try and work on: your similes tend to be highly jargonistic themselves, which makes them less than useful. Similes are supposed to help explain a concept for a broader audience.
As a rule of thumb: if your explanatory comparison uses an acronym from a totally different specialty field, it's going to add more confusion than it clears up.
 
12:37 AM
basically, what I want is the RPG.SE version of a Minimum WOrking Example
should "what is the RPG.SE version of a Minimal, Complete, Verifiable Example?" be a meta question?
 
Not sure it'd be helpful.
You've seen the trouble with treating RAW as a universal truth value rather than a spherical cow in a vacuum.
 
or are you saying I should just start hurling big chunks of raw log at people and asking the rest of this Stack to help me cut them down to the parts that matter?
 
RPG scenarios aren't verifiable/reproducible in the same way code scenarios are.
Neither. Don't succumb to false dichotomies or audacious extremes.
The answer lies in the middle, and requires more effort.
It's not reducible to a universal formula, it requires the work of evaluating a particular set of problems and the audience you're presenting them to, to identify a useful example and figure out how to present it with a focus on the problem itself.
 
because I can't do this all myself -- at some level, I'm not even sure precisely what I'm looking for in my logs, and I've had problems in the past where I've tried giving people examples and as I said, they've gone off on tangents instead of addressing what my example was supposed to demonstrate
 
I understand that, I've had similar problems.
You've got a complex, unusual situation. It's not easy to explain.
 
12:47 AM
The worst part is that I can sketch some of the more narratively-problematic scenes from memory
but I'm not sure how to match them up to the specific problems listed
@BESW -- is my problem that trying to explain the concepts is simply jargon/made-up-verbiage all the way down?
 
That is a major stumbling block, yes.
If you can expand the concepts into plain description that'd help clear up what the real communication challenges are, rather than the artificial ones imposed by your style.
 
...I'm not sure what plain language is for some of these concepts -- at a certain level, you have to expect understanding, or it really does become turtles all the way down...
 
1:22 AM
Decode as much as you can and then maybe folks in chat can help with the rest.
 
yeah, I took a shot at decoding it more with my last edit
 
1:35 AM
@Shalvenay hiya
 
@nitsua60 how're things going?
 
@Shalvenay I feel like you and Gunnerkrigg Court would get along well. Or horribly, yanno.
 
I just found a "game where players role dice."
If I wasn't 97% sure that's a typo, I'd be very intrigued.
 
@nitsua60 hahaha
 
Man, trawling the free games in DTRPG is a trip. Here's a "game harkens back to those glory days of gaming where one rule reigned: Make The Game Fun."
Aaand here's something that describes itself as "Fiasco crossed with Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, with a heavy dose of Alien." [adds to cart]
 
 
1 hour later…
2:59 AM
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[playtest](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "STAR TREK ADVENTURES - Living Playtest Sign up");
 
3:22 AM
0
Q: Should users refrain from "partial answers" in comments?

YasskierThere are situations, when you know SOMETHING that is related to the question but its insubstantial to be a proper answer, in example lets imagine a question: In which edition of game X dwarves are allowed to play as mages? Now lets say that I know a bit of game X, but I haven't played a wh...

 
 
4 hours later…
6:52 AM
@TheOracle [wince] Someone thinks scifi.se is representative of Stack sites.
 
 
9 hours later…
3:43 PM
@doppelgreener holy wow, what's going on with that GM? (Thanks for the edit and pointer, btw.)
 
@nitsua60 He's placing extremely unrealistic expectations on players to solve a very different problem.
 
I haven't yet figured out what problem the GM's trying to solve...? Realism?
 
from the description it sounds like some players aren't aware of what their character can even do, and this particular player might have a problem with taking too long on their phone to look things up (they are not exactly a fast device to navigate sometimes, especially if the dude just has all his spells in a doc or is accessing the SRD or something).
the GM might be trying to solve that by putting extremely unfair game-ruining expectations on players, and may be spoiled by his prior experience with potentially KRyan-calibre game experts.
Either way they're unrealistic expectations, un-fun, and the GM's clearly overshooting the mark trying to iron-fistedly solve a game problem that the OP has not described him simply trying to talk to them about.
 
4:11 PM
@doppelgreener -- easy fix is to staple a page of spell info to his charsheet xD
a "crib sheet" if you will
 
@Shalvenay I rather agree with that. Printing out the information you need is probably loads easier. Paper's easy to rifle through.
But the phone could be as much of an issue as the people who are going "... what can my character do again?" potentially multiple times each session. They are all new though. It's also common that a game will have people with varying levels of commitment.
In a hypothetical game group it's not unreasonable to have this combo: one person's read the book cover to cover and the supplementary source material and is onto the first novel printed in the game world, another person's read about their class and studied some game mastery, a third at least remembers what their class can do, a fouth spends their time studying and playing video games and has totally forgotten about their character since last weekend.
(the fourth archetype may be someone who's just playing the game to spend time with their friends, or they're interested in the game but they just don't care about it as much as the other things they could do during the week, or a number of other things.)
 
@doppelgreener In one of my game groups it's basically six copies of your player 4, me, and the GM =)
 
@nitsua60 hahaha. would you say that's actually a problem, or is the game going OK?
 
Game's great =)
Expectations are understood!
 
Right! But then it might become a problem if the GM expects everyone to be at a more highly-engaged methodical level, finds the absence of it to be a problem, and is trying to "fix" it.
That expectation might have been created by their previous gaming groups. It may also be a symptom of forgetting what it's like to be new and not wanting to have patience with newbie behaviour.
 
4:23 PM
@doppelgreener Yeah -- and being able to glance at an extra page stapled to a character sheet is far quicker than pawing through the SRD or a doc on one's phone
 
@Shalvenay i quite agree with you
 
also, the act of making up the cheatsheet should help the player get the stuff in his or her head too
@nitsua60 -- sadly, speaking of cheatsheets, I can't print off anything right now (I was going to print the base moves pages from the DW SRD, but the box with the dead SATA controller just so happens to be the family print server too)
 
@Shalvenay yes to all these ^^
 
(I put the cheatsheet advice in an answer btw :) including a suggested cheatsheet format for 5e)
 
4:38 PM
Anyone here know much about US aquaculture? Specifically: my wife's cutting most meats out of her diet out of objection to industrial farming practices. (And the non-industrial alternatives are out of our budget.) But she's wondering about farmed fish--what's that industry look like?
2
 
@BESW might know things, though he isn't in mainland USA
 
@doppelgreener The group I was mentioning is the same one whence comes my eight-starred starboard comment >>
Basically, we all just sit back and play. Whenever someone--GM included--has a rule-question they tend to turn to me and I hand them a book open to the right page. And about twice a session the other players gasp when my character does something awesome 'cause, yanno, I actually know what the character can do =)
 
@nitsua60 AFAICT -- industrial practice has been improving, slowly but surely, over the past few decades (partly because stressed-out, roughed-up animals are harder on the humans involved in the process, and partly because of consumer demands)
 
is this ^^ in re: land-based or marine farming?
 
land-based
 
4:51 PM
aquaculture's very different, but i only know things about Australian aquaculture
 
@doppelgreener that's probably more or less representative though
 
fishing exeriences radically different pressures and concerns, there's no reason to suppose any land-basd farming changes are indicative of anything in terms of fishing
for example in Australia the concerns are getting healthy, large specimens, avoiding water pollution, avoiding impacting breeding populations in wild waters via in-land fishing, etc
 
 
3 hours later…
7:32 PM
@BESW We've had a question about "Help! My friends don't roll-play their characters!"
But you could see how he had a problem with them roll-playing instead of role-playing, he just didn't know how to spell "role"
 
hey there @Zachiel
 
@Shalvenay would someone declaring a knife stab without telling you the direction, or the motion, be one of the problems in your game?
Also, crosspost-hello!
 
@Zachiel indeed it would be
 
Is this one of your zoom-issues?
I mean, is it among the problems you're trying to solve with the question we're workshopping?
And if I'm right, you'd want to be able to say this other player that you need more detail in order to know if and how you can parry, but you want to do it without OOC chatting?
 
@Zachiel not only that, but how to do it without tiring other players out from having to expend energy they'd rather not expend on combat
that conflict of detail levels is part of what that question is asking about, but in a more generalized sense
 
7:53 PM
Because my experience with that is that you can either:
A) assume the best case for you, and if he complains, well, it was his fault because it was him leaving you enough space to wiggle your reaction in (this will quickly get people think that it's unreasonable to play with you because they don't want to make the effort of thinking to better tactics at that zoom level, which is what you just said you don't want to happen)
B) find a way to specify which detail level you want and if they don't provide it try to go for outsmarting them while avoiding consequences (i.e. decide to jail and not
 
@Zachiel we can't really see each other's character sheets if you will
compounded because most people don't play to a mechanical charsheet
we have a description-space that we can use for OOC notes, but that isn't particularly helpful I find
 
Ok. To be blunt, I don't have a solution to your problem and I don't think one exists. You would like to have communicate players something that's deeply tied not to their characters but to how the players are narrating them, and you'd like an IC way to do it. Provided such a way exisits, I highly doubt it will be applicable without breaking immersion at the other end (i.e. breaking character in order to tell a morale)
 
hrm. we'll see where the question goes I guess :)
 
I have been playing in games where you don't use mechanical sheets, and combat is usually decided with T1, T2, T3 and similar mechanics (T1 is basically "state everything your character has equipped and at hand in your first sentence, then the first one who flunks and describes something that the opponent can use to injure him usually wins". T3 IIRC is "everybody writes fast, ythe first one who writes the actions without grammar errers or typos manages to do it")
I have never been a fan of these T systems, and I've never played combats in those games, but I've seen many OOC sections in the
On the other hand, I'm not the most versed in psychological tipping other players towards intended behaviour, so somebody might disprove me.
 
8:29 PM
for a character to manage their own story requires them knowing they're in a story and breaking the fourth wall to talk about it
a character in a sealed game world with an intact fourth wall knows nothing more about the story they're in and its direction than you would know about your story if you happened to be a character in one right now (in real life, yes, you, right now)
so i do not think narrative management can happen fully from the perspective of non-meta-aware characters
that said i don't know why having an OOC conversation is stigma here, unless it's the group that prohibits OOC conversation
 
@doppelgreener Probably because of a "metaplay is bad" mindset.
 
if the stigma is that OOC narrative management breaks simulation (because players care about what makes for a good story, not maintaining strict cause and effect and integrity of various in-universe rules systems like whatever the equivalent of chemistry/physics/etc is) that's a conversation we've gone through before, and the notion is "yeah well that's what happens, that's not a priority over having a good story"
 
I know this mindset from D&D based games, where metagaming could provide unfair advantages, and from freeform games where knowing what others plan might inform my decisions. (I'm currently in two game where it is forbidden, as a precautionary measure, to state out the thoughts of our characters).
But the problem with this mindset is that it often (again, personal experience) expands outside the initial scope of the rule and it becomes a nearly absolute: "any type of metagaming, for whatever reason, is bad" becomes a dogma.
(Then a friend of mine said "but even creating this character instead of that one is metagaming, where the meta is the kind of game you're playing" - basically, metagaming is something that at this point is decided by whoever is the accuser at the moment: a weapon to unleash on anyone for any reason and that is always effective. But I digress)
 
if the idea is that maybe if characters have to manage their narrative within the world, they'll have to pay attention to its rules at the same time... that's fair, but it requires meta-aware characters
@Zachiel "unfair" seems like it would be a very subjective choice of word here too
heck, in original D&D games, metagaming was expected
@Zachiel wow, that's some awful dogma
 
8:45 PM
@doppelgreener Unfair as in "the game is balanced against people not metagaming" (why have the dragon's resistance be something you can discover -or not- with a knowledge roll, and then balance the game around the players casting the right spells anyway) and as in "the other players are not doing it, repent!"
@doppelgreener It's what the vast majority of D&D players I've met use. Probably because of the vulnerability issue I just described, or similar events.
So when one says "let's have this happen, it will be awesome for the story" it has hapened I got told "this is not a book. Have what happens to happen happen, and learn the joy of good things happening randomly" (I must admit it is truly a joy when random things go well.)
@doppelgreener Thinking about it, Knowledge as I know it was born in D&D 3e. I wonder how this was managed before.
 
All IC and no empowerment to make meta-level decisions makes Jack a dull boy
@Zachiel that's valid too.
 
@doppelgreener The real problem is when some of the meta is good, some is bad, and the rules are kept hidden.
 
9:03 PM
@Zachiel Intelligence checks were totally a thing before 3e. d20, roll under your stat....
 
@Zachiel yeah
often because they expect you to learn the rules as you go through what basically are normal social-induction/social-cueing processes
 
@nitsua60 Oh ok it was an ability check rather than a skill check.
@Shalvenay Dunno. Some things that the characters should know before they constantly live in the fictional world are better be stated explicitly IMO
You are not in that society.
 
9:29 PM
Playing Venture City as Honeymoon, a superhero who is a swarm of bees in a human suit. @EvilHatOfficial
**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):**
[BoH](https://bundleofholding.com "Buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!");
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[playtest](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "STAR TREK ADVENTURES - Living Playtest Sign up");
 
9:44 PM
I never thought that writing an "aha, I see what you did there" in-game forum post was this hard
The thread starts with the description of a party flyer.
I want to do the "I write my actions letting readers imagine the responses by the other party, then someone else writes the real replies in a complementary post"
 
Like listening to one side of a telephone conversation?
 
So I go "hey have you heard of the party?" I then listen to whatever the other character says, raise an eyebrow and add "Well, good thing they invited you, have fun", then a new reply to which I sigh - and then the other persone goes "If they invited me, you come as well".

I just spent two hours to explain him that I also need a first sentence that informs me that he's invited to the party. Which he then adds after his existing sentence.
@BESW Exactly, but then you see the other part and all replies click together.
 
That's... really hard to do the way you're trying.
Leaving room for them to steer the conversation without making your side totally generic.
 
we are communicating through Skype to get this done
it's not like I'm expecting this to magically work
 
10:29 PM
@SevenSidedDie Thank you for that sympathetic commnt. It's put some of the behaviour I've seen in a new light -- and it's helpful to have someone more or less vouching for the concerns I expressed.
@Zachiel if it's not spammy, I would suggest actually splitting your posts into segments - the others' reply marking where a segment begins and ends - and posting them in order. It's good to have a plan, but it'll be an improvement for reading's sake.
 
10:43 PM
@doppelgreener I just hope it comes across as sympathetic all around. It's a community that (like geekdom not long ago) gets more criticism than deserved, yet has internal problems that do merit constructive criticism that unfortunately gets lost in the noise. It's a sucky position for a community to be in.
 
Ursula Vernon, before she got Legit Famous, was Furry Famous and made a lot of her money off anthro commissions and furry conventions. Her old Livejournal posts have a good bit to say about "the basic harmlessness of furries" and the struggles they face internally and externally (including some practical criticisms of that CSI episode).
So, yeah, I think you've got the crazies/normals ratio for furries kinda backwards.
 
Werewolf rom-com title: "Bribe Me With Carpaccio"
@BESW it's the same problem that Islam faces, in a way -- the crazies wind up being the loudest because the rest of the community blends in, no?
 
@Shalvenay See also: Christians, the LGBTQ+ community, LARPers, video gamers...
 
@BESW yes, good examples all
 
And there's a line to walk between "I can't tell other people how to behave, please just ignore them" and "I shouldn't be quiet about such harmful practices in my community."
 
10:57 PM
@BESW it's about 1000x worse when the crazies have sticks, so to speak
 
Aye.
In my personal experience and on the accounts of various friends and contacts, many furries are, if anything, too concerned about visibility to stand up against the toxic minority.
Subcultures labelled as "deviant" do have an extra layer of problem, in that tolerance easily becomes permissiveness in a subculture where tolerance from the wider community is so rare.
(See: the geek social fallacies.)
Tolerance and inclusion become valued so highly that they can override other basic values.
 
I don't find all of this disagreeable, but I also stand by my advice to be very cautious when entering furry RP groups. Optimistic, but cautious.
 
That's not exactly what you're conveying, though. You're saying "not all furries."
That last line in particular is... well, disturbing in its implication that you'll be lucky to find any furries who aren't dysfunctional oversized children.
 
You're basically saying, "and some, I assume, are good people."
 
11:13 PM
I don't know whether this will come as news or not -- I don't recall what I've spoken about along these lines in conversation with you before -- but I've spent a lot of time on and off in various roleplaying-oriented circles, some of them primarily furry, many of them primarily non-furry.
No type is immune to its ailments, but the furry circles exprience far more dysfunctional behaviour, and in the mixed groups, there's strong correlation between being strongly identifying as furry & having socially dysfunctional behaviours that will cause a problem for group play.
I also experience furries being less mature than their peers, and I experience the people who play as furries or play in furry circles who are more mature and socially functional pointedly not strongly identifying as furries themselves --- they would describe themselves as being present or merely having a character or being a fan of the art but distinctly not "a furry". I had a conversation with one such person earlier tonight.
 
Then maybe make it clear you're talking about RP challenges with mixed furry RPG groups instead of describing 'out' furries as broadly dysfunctional across all social contexts?
I have very little RP-specific experience with furries, but my social interactions in other contexts are dramatically different from yours.
 
I'll consider how to rephrase.
 
It's problematic to describe an entire group of people based on your or my personal experiences with a small fraction of them, so your re-phrasing could maybe focus on your experience instead of generalising it to "Gosh, the stereotypes all furries are brushed with must be right."
 
@BESW No, "based on the interaction with loads of different people across these contexts, I've had a terrible experience along these lines. Oh, there's a stereotype about that which people generally agree with. How unfortunate."
I didn't go "oh, a stereotype, it must be true".
 
@doppelgreener That'd be a much more reasonable thing to say. Especially the "how unfortunate" bit, which isn't present at all--instead you say that it's a negative stereotype which is probably true.
I mean, it'd probably be even better without mentioning the stereotype at all and sticking to experience-based advice in the Stack style.
(You also don't actually mention what your experience is. You say you have experience, then go straight into the popular conceptions and stereotypes.)
The only hint at what your experiences are is describing the stereotype as "well-earned."
 
11:25 PM
on a totally different note -- was it only the 5e PHB whose first printing suffered from bad bindings, or are the first printings of the 5e MM and DMG susceptible as well?
 
@Shalvenay Main-site question?
 
> In general I'd advise optimistic, cautious approach when joining internet roleplaying situations with people who identify strongly as furries. It's been my experience across a variety of roleplaying contexts and fandoms that furry circles tend to exhibit and insulate socially dysfunctional behaviour (and, in mixed groups, tend to be toward the more dysfunctional end).
It's an unfortunate situation for those people to be in. There's definitely a lot of mature and well-adjusted and socially functional people, but it's going to be a mixed bag, and some of the furries conscious of these probl
how's that reading?
 
@BESW I recall there being an existing mainsite question on it
 
2
A: Is the first printing of the D&D 5e PHB known to fall apart?

AdeptusYes. It is not restricted to the PHB either, the whole initial release has binding problems. My local library's copy of the MM had pages coming loose, a month or two after purchase.

 
righty-o
 
11:27 PM
Only about the PHB, and one single answer mentions the MM.
@doppelgreener That's much better.
It says what you've experienced.
 
It does look much better, too. Is there anything in there I can yet improve, or badness I could weed out?
 
@doppelgreener One thing I think deserves a mention, but I don't want to try to build a whole answer around - the rape thing means that this is not a group of people they should be hanging out with, period.
 
When I read it I noticed I'd made broader statements than I'd intended (but, well, were literally what I'd written, now that I had forgotten merely what I was intending).
 
@doppelgreener Well, I think it's a bit worrisome that the answers thus far have glossed over --yes, exactly what @Miniman just said.
 
@Miniman holy jeez I didn't even see that. Wow.
 
11:29 PM
Yeah.
 
That's kinda one of the reasons I was appalled at your "Oh, that's what you're gonna get with furries" thing.
 
@BESW -- I'm wondering if it may be easier for me to simply take my PHB/MM/DMG set into a local bookbinder for rebinding than to try to get them exchanged (considering I won't likely ever see the FLGS I got them from for geographic reasons, and I'd rather not be without them for several weeks of mail-exchange)
 
Right. More editing then. Much more.
 
@Shalvenay [shrug] I'm not really an expert on that kind of thing re: ease of access, since any attempt I'd make involves at least $20 shipping and a service that is willing to use the USPS.
 
@BESW ah. there's a major bindery and a small-shop bindery within a day's round-trip drive, and also a small-shop bindery in the city proper in my case. I may have to call around and ask about turn times....
 
11:35 PM
I've got a small print shop with binding capability about five minutes down the road, but I'm not sure they do repairs.
...there was a time when I had all the materials to re-bind it myself.
 
As I understand it, archival-quality rebinding is a rather specialised subset of binding skills/services.
 
Yeah, the quality you're looking for will make a big difference in who can do it for you.
Library binding, for example, is Serious Business.
 
I'm just looking for something that won't break in two years' time the way the original one on my PHB already has :P
@BESW the good news, though, is that major shop I mentioned does library-grade binding (they do binding work for the local university library)
 
My 3.5 PHB survived five or six years of near-constant use ferried from house to house each week, across the ocean at least six times, and getting widdled on by a demon-possessed housepet.
 
@BESW yeah, WotC's printing press definitely goofed re: the first printing of the 5e books
 
11:40 PM
The spine is starting to peel off at the top and bottom, but it still holds together.
(My 3.5 DMG lost the last half of its index a few years in, though.)
 
[submits edit]
[inadvertently wrote something dumb which casts furries in yet a different poor light]
[more edit]
 
And I'm not sure how I feel about their choice of glossy stock for the pages. It probably helped the book survive the demon attack, but it made it very hard for me to write notes in the margins.
@doppelgreener "Wiles," I hope.
 
@BESW pardon?
 
"Wiles" can't really be the word you meant to use there, can it?
 
[looks up]
uh
no. what word do i mean?
 
11:43 PM
"They're really bad at being devious and cunningly manipulative"?
 
social knowhow?
 
"Mores," perhaps.
 
specifically i accidentally phrased it such that one reading would be that furries make rape jokes all the time.
 
@BESW -- speaking of glossy...I'm really unhappy at whoever missed the memo that our workstation monitors were supposed to be matte
 
Much better. I'm not exactly sanguine about "those people," though.
 
11:47 PM
"It's an unfortunate situation for them."
 
a/the community/subculture
(Trying to avoid us/them terminology and conflating individuals with a group.)
Remember your trick about flipping the genders on statements about women?
Imagine reading what you've written with "lesbians" or "gamers" instead of "furries" and see how it feels.
(I also try to imagine that the person I'm talking to has a beloved grandmother who belongs to the group I'm describing.)
 
hmmmmmmmm.
 
Remember, this person's brother is part of the problem. That's... complicated.
 
So, what I'm considering doing, now that I'm aware these people were even making rape jokes, is instead dropping that paragraph entirely. The question pulls up some quite awful stuff and I'm concerned now that the paragraph is saying "well, yeah, but, that's furries for you, be careful".
 
It kinda is.
At the very least, I'd hope the fact of their furriness is tangential to the real problems.
I mean, I know a lot of furry cons are aggressively adopting and policing "A costume is not consent" policies, but that's not exactly unique to furry cons either.
 
11:57 PM
Off it goes.
I'll put it back if I think of a way to mention it and make it very clear it's tangential, but I won't be actively thinking of a way to do that, so it's probably not coming back.
 
[upvotes]
 

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