@doppelgreener For you:

hey @Papayaman1000

hey @Shalvenay

so yeah -- what's been shakin' over there? campaign still going well (if murderously :o) I take it?

oh, always

ah. I'm kind of falling back into a lull here (the PF campaign I was invited into sadly fell apart)

Noooooooooo!

going back to that scene with my Gnoll in the costume shop though...I'm still wondering how you'd solve the problem at hand of "what could the NPC costumer do for a Gnoll who needs to attend a formal occasion without getting kicked out on sight?"

@Papayaman1000 yeah -- combo of new DM with some playstyle clashes meant things weren't that great. opportunities should open up later this summer though as I take next month more or less off to wrap up a project

btw, did I lose you @Papayaman1000?

no

I was just wondering if you missed my question or...?

Oh! Er, sorry, not always the best at picking up on those cues. Hehehe...

Well... ever consider the Mos Eisley policy?

@Papayaman1000 oh? that being?

@Shalvenay "Their kind is not welcome in here. They'll have to wait outside."

@Papayaman1000 hahaha -- that's not what happened in the campaign though. (It probably would have drawn a bit of a...protest from my character to the party's (NPC) sponsor, anyhow)

well, and when that happened it happened to NPCs who were tagging along with PC's

@Shalvenay Well. I dunno. Sometimes, dealing with those character "flaws" is necessary.

@Papayaman1000 (it'd have been slightly out of tone for the city too -- LN city where there are liches that walk the streets as legitimate taxpaying citizens, but a Gnoll is scary enough to get kicked out of a formal establishment on the basis of race alone, in spite of being part of a party explicitly authorized by the proprietor of the place?)

@Shalvenay I... ah... erm...

Yeah, I dunno, I'm not an expert in furry fashion.

@Papayaman1000 it's OK -- I don't think the costumer NPC would be either, haha

I can only assume the main concern is finding something that doesn't pinch all the hair

@trogdor hahaha, yeah -- making it too snug-fitting would be problematic

I mean, I always think that is a problem, but in this particular case it would be worse than normal

@trogdor quite

although I think that'd be only the first challenge our heroic costumer would have to overcome

well, yes

I am not trying to say you should just like, grab the first thing that fits

of course not xD

Well...

hm.

I remember reading an intriguing old Worldbuilding.SE answer that said, long story short, part of fashion is pulling off something uncomfortable. Like, say, high-upkeep Victorian suits in space.

ugh, I hate that idea

But then again, a funny t-shirt combined with an overcoat also looks cool, so

If gnolls are accepted members of society, why don't they have clothes and clothiers?

@Papayaman1000 yeah. I'm not a particularly big fan of that approach, but I can see how it's happened (blasted neckties)

@Miniman said Gnoll is probably a long, long way from an established Gnoll population xD normally, she'd wear her monk's robes, but I suspect that'd get her kicked out of the establishment in question.

@Shalvenay [Old Man GM shakes his fist at you, tailors!]

@Miniman so in other words, if there were dedicated clothiers about, that'd be nice but probably not something that could be counted upon, esp. at short notice

(also, I suspect even if they were reasonably established parts of society as a whole, Gnolls would be...not often seen in high society)

@Shalvenay So, if it's not about fitting in, just about fulfilling a dress code, why not just wear what everyone else wears, tailored to fit?

@Miniman that could work, although I'm wondering what sorts of alterations would be needed to make more typical high-society stuff work for a Gnoll

(other than accommodating the height ofc)

@Shalvenay Typically in the historical periods emulated by games that include gnolls (medieval-ish fantasy), there's no such thing as pre-made clothing. It's all bespoke.

@SevenSidedDie yeah, the costumer/clothier having to make something would make sense, but I'm talking alterations in a design sense

sort of "how would they change the template-of-sorts in their head?"

@Shalvenay Oh, yeah. Probably they'd do it poorly, but well enough to make it clear the gnoll was “civilised” (in the eyes of the local population). A really good tailor could do it — in real history, all sorts of maladies made and make for very divergent human bodies, so good tailors could handle a mere gnoll just fine.

@SevenSidedDie I'm sure they could (they were able to pull it off in the campaign after all) -- I'm more curious as to how as the DM handwaved it

@Shalvenay Unless you're both tailors, it's probably a moot question.

Or an artist. Concept artists with good grasp of anatomy and period dress make that kind of thing their business. And it takes a lot of time to figure out.

Which raises the question: Would muzzles be considered a necessary accessory for "proper" gnolls, like corsets did for women for a while?

@Papayaman1000 hahaha, probably not -- they'd interfere with a few too many functions.

@Shalvenay I would hope, at least.

@Shalvenay As did corsets, but they weren't functions considered important for social interaction.

@SevenSidedDie And there's why I chose that as a comparison.

@SevenSidedDie yeah -- things like eating and talking are a lot more important for social interaction than simply being somewhat restrained in movement

@Papayaman1000 It's not an obvious thing, but yeah, an interesting possibility that would vastly shape the social role of gnolls in a society. Be seen and not heard, indeed. It would make for an interesting social-worldbuilding seed.

@SevenSidedDie Yeah. If I really wanted to explore racey issues, then I'd definitely put mandates like that in for a lot of other races, too -- but then again, the fact that many sapient races are "always [alignment]" kind of does my job for me, now doesn't it?

@Papayaman1000 that makes me wonder just what those mandates would be...

@Papayaman1000 Does it? I find it's so familiar that it doesn't make anyone actually think about it much.

@SevenSidedDie yeah, and most of the folks who do think about it get as far as going "that's total baloney, of course sapients have free will and significant behavior variance!"

@Shalvenay For examples see: Hitler, Colonists, and southern Americans circa 1840.

@Papayaman1000 I mean -- more in a physical sense than a legal/psychological one

@SevenSidedDie It's to the point where making a character like an orc or a lycanthrope actually a decent guy that the players get in trouble for killing is considered a "DM dick move".

@Papayaman1000 I'd say it's more of a thing in the world you'd have to declare upfront

@Papayaman1000 In hindsight, things like that have been part of my slow slide towards human-only settings and alignment-less rulesets (though not always both at the same time).

I mean guys there's such a thing as half-orcs which either gives very unfortunate implications on all sides or means that some orcs are pretty stand-up people

@SevenSidedDie There are many, many, many reasons why my homebrew system will have no such concept as 'alignments'.

@Papayaman1000 yeah -- I actually tend towards human father + orc mother for my half-orcs partly to keep the unfortunate implications side down

@Shalvenay Good on you, Shal.

@Shalvenay That has some pretty unfortunate implications too.

@SevenSidedDie I'm not a huge fan of human-only fantasy settings, but I'm very glad that D&D has shifted away from alignment mandatory

@Miniman I'd say they're less obvious/in-your-face than the other way around is seen to be

@SevenSidedDie Same, though my group is generally more toward the end of "We may want to play games with fun physical combat, but we have a hard time coming up with acceptable targets to fight."

And I'm currently struggling with how to run a Stargate campaign without letting the franchise slide on the problems with its premise.

@BESW on that front, I see targeting as three categories: behavior, association, and identity

@Shalvenay I found that I started gravitating towards them more as I became more interested in sociopolitical themes in games. Humanity has just so much potential variation, that I noticed that alternative humanoid species just mucked up the nuance, since I had to walk the stereotypes back so hard to make them useful setting elements.

targeting by behavior is "the party gets attacked by bandits and has to take them out" or "the party is chasing down some murderer/demon-summoner/..."

We tend to use sophont variation allegorically, to get a little distance on a human issue by putting it in a less immediately personal context so we can explore it more easily.

@SevenSidedDie ah. I find myself writing settings where humans aren't a thing, actually

@BESW I hear you.

...And there was that campaign where everyone was the many diverse kinds of elves.

@Papayaman1000 A boulder that keeps casting fireball sounds pretty interesting, actually.

[face/palm] I did that once.

targeting by association is "these folks are cultists of <insert evil entity here>" or "these folks are from <rebel group that needs to be put down>"

targeting by identity is what we know as racism etal

@BESW That sounds pretty awesome.

@Papayaman1000 Ursula Vernon's D&D campaign established a home for demon orphans.

I once ran a campaign where the party rehabilitated a pirate king who ran a city on the slave trade.

the worst part is that, in any other circumstance, even the slightest hint that a character could be a threat to life, limb, or loot is a signed writ of execution on their head

In another game we were so friendly to a goblin that he switched sides and established a dynasty of goblins who worked with the party's nation as advance scouts who'd sneak into enemy territory and make friends with the locals so the enemy army wouldn't have local cooperation.

@BESW That sounds like a really fun campaign.

Kinda reminds me of how getting killed by an orc in [that one LotR game or something] makes him go up in rank in his clan

@BESW I love it when the party goes social instead of stabby with stereotypically “speedbump” monsters.

As part of the plot the party kept time-skipping forward years or decades or centuries, so we got to see the Friendly Clan grow and spread.

@SevenSidedDie yeah -- that can be a very nice touch :)

(said gnoll had a bit of a spotlight moment when she was able to glean some intel about a werejackal band the party was hunting from some fleeing hobgoblins in the woods, which the party let pass by the way)

@BESW I want in on this campaign.

@Papayaman1000 It was a D&D 4e game, in which we defeated the Unfathomable Being From Outside Time And Space with a Feelings Cannon which forced it to feel our mortal emotions.

@BESW so Steven Universe as a pen&paper MMO

But with a lot more tentacles and demonic sacrifice.

@BESW A warm tentacle drapes over your shoulders and down your front, like some friend of yours putting a supporting arm around your shoulder :)

@BESW So the same thing but as seen through fanart. Gotcha.

The time skips were because the party was going to be at the climactic final scene where time and space were being rent asunder, so their place in time and space was retroactively uncertain; this was how I handled players who couldn't make it to a session, their character just slipped sideways through reality and didn't stabilise until the player returned.

@BESW Did you ever play Chrono Trigger?

Nope.

Interesting - there are some similarities there.

The main context of the game was a centuries-long war between the tiefling-run human empire and a federation of dragon-ruled nations.

But I wove it with the 4e Tomb of Horrors mega-adventure, and then cascaded the fallout of that story into a Mythos-inspired finale which helped determine the outcome of the war.

I see you're a believer in keeping things simple :P

It was one of the longest campaigns I've ever run.

I loved the 4e setting, it had so many cool things to get into, and that was probably my only chance to run a 4e campaign, so I grabbed it.

(As much as I love the contemporary 4e Points of Light setting, the war between Bael Turath and Arkhosia is just brilliant and I couldn't resist putting the campaign in that time.)

[rummages]

This is from that 4e campaign:

@BESW I feel you, it was a brilliant campaign in part for that setting, and the rest of it was due to your ridiculous ideas :P

@BESW wow, that takes me back

I feel like this could be a preview of MST3K season 12: