I'm thinking of ICv2's quarterly Top 5s, which I've been told is supposed to be the most accurate information available but they won't say exactly how they arrive at their numbers.
Pathfinder does consistently top the charts, with D&D and Star Wars and a few others showing up frequently, but it's not at all regular except for Paizo's position on top.
I'll confess, I am quite surprised. Most gamers I know either never moved from 3.5, moved to 4e and stuck there, or have ended up at 5e. (Sometimes via 4e, sometimes not)
We can reasonably infer that the sudden increase in D&D numbers is due to 5e, but we could (less reasonably) assume that their online digital store for older edition material is booming.
Alright. Nice talking after a bit of absence. I am going to dedicate the rest of my night to the slaughter of brain cells in a holy jyhad enacted by Mr. Johnny Walker.
@BESW I read that post as well as someone else's response to it and Seanan's response back -- what she linked from her Twitter. I think I linked it earlier, but I shall see if I am not dreaming and it is the Twitter one...
(Unless you're talking specifically about the most recent response, but I think the other one was more enlightening.)
I'm not sure I'm willing to follow the gender argument as far as it wants to take me; it smacks of the "Pro-X means never talking about X poorly ever" dichotomy. I'm not saying there's not a point, just that it seems to stretch a bit far.
Shaenan's last post there is largely an agreement with the response. She does talk about the self-insert concept being a driving force of that, and I'm not 100% in agreement (at least, not that is the driving factor -- it is one of several), but that's the only point on which she really differs.
@Miniman The problem is, you can think of them, sure. But the general public isn't going to call them that.
@Pixie Her response is a re-framing of the previous one. She's less interested in grand and sweeping generalisations, and more interested in providing specific examples and articulating clearly what the problem with them actually is.
So I say it's more measured, and not trying to drag me away into extremes.
@Miniman No. :P By that I mean those characters are not known popularly as Mary Sues. People occasionally point it out, but overall they are regarded as "super cool and awesome," not flawed characters, not Sues.
Which is why they're useful for pointing out the dichotomy.
It's an unfortunate fact that this question is primarily opinion-based. For example, I tend to see any tragic hero with something terrible in their past and a bit of an emo streak as a probable Sue.
But I'm aware that this is a character archetype that some people really engage with.
@BESW I'm just not sure I agree with you on this. Seanan's response is a good one, yes. But the other poster gives multiple concrete examples and states their issues pretty clearly (and also addresses the context of teenage girls learning to write being shamed for not doing so perfectly, which I feel is an important one).
And this sort of conversation reminds me of why so many early murder mysteries --the best, most famous ones that dealt with major social themes and intimate personal exploration-- were written by women: murder mysteries weren't "legitimate" fiction and so were ignored by the critical community.
This meant that the people who wrote murder mysteries were free to explore style and substance in ways which would have been not just unpopular but unpublishable in any other genre... and these were the things many women of the time wanted to write about. So they wrote murder mysteries.
Although, really, it's not specific to the murder mystery genre either.
Coded gay characters of that era are subtle to us because our society has lost most of those codes.
Christie's and Allingham's readers would not have been doubtful at all about the sexuality of those characters.
For a more recent example of that kind of code shift, remember that The Village People were not recognised as codedly gay by the majority of the public during their heyday, and in fact were considered by many to be intensely manly.
(And, drawing on an earlier conversation in this chat, that "Pinko" as a derogatory term for a Communist sympathiser actually meant "gay Communist sympathiser" in its earlier iterations.)
You remember the slimy effeminate Joel Cairo in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon? He was explicitly, openly gay in the original Dashiell Hammett novel of 1929.
It was not a flattering depiction of that orientation, but it was not at all coded.
(And in my personal reading, the disgust of the narrator with Cairo's sexuality seems to be purely Spade's own prejudice and fear, rather than the author's. Sam Spade is not supposed to be a nice, open-minded guy.)
One perspective I have on this is my first characters were absolutely, positively, 1000000% Sues. Textbook. The shame I experience over them being what they were, and the kinds of narratives I placed them in, is probably disproportionate to the circumstances.
Most people are embarrassed about their past works, sure. But I get stressed out that my natural learning process followed a path that is in some circles the worst thing you could possibly be. I feel intensely embarrassed that I dared not be born with a natural sense of balance and characterization.
@Pixie See, one thing about Sues for me--especially as a stage in the process of developing craft--is that one of their primal defining qualities (success purely because the narrative mandates their success, the way Holmes' deductions are always right only because the narrative says Holmes' deductions are always right) is a fundamental quality of one of the earliest kind of stories most of us get exposed to: the fairy tale.
In fairy tales, things happen to title characters mostly because their names are in the title. They may be good and virtuous but they rarely have agency: the story twists around them for no good reason except that's how these stories work.
Likewise, a Mary Sue warps the reality of the story simply by existing, and is granted agency through narrative fiat.
It's really quite natural, given the kind of story we're usually weaned on, for our early writing to mimic its tropes in other less appropriate stories.
As we gain control and awareness--and are exposed to more forms of storytelling--we learn to sort out which conceits and tropes mesh and which... don't.
We see it in RPG players, too: raised on action and adventure films we initially tend to create PCs in the vein of film heroes--who are often loners who stumble into success, or are superlative and unique beyond all others in their world, both a poor fit for the teamwork game of competent heroes which many RPGs want to be.
I agree, it's quite natural, and people learn by imitating, especially children. But what the general usage of Mary Sue does is take that process (which can start at any time in someone's life) and make it a bad thing.
Then it gets applied to any number of female characters who are too good at something or good at "too many" things or who may be self-inserts. Even ones who are executed comparably to male characters who are not called Sues (or Stus, but as Seanan pointed out, the technical existence of that term means very little). Sometimes it's used so loosely that all it really means is "I don't like your character."
I found a good article once about its use in a historical context and the effect it had on female writers in the Star Trek fan community... I wonder if I could find it again.
I can't thus far. C'est la vie.
But I did rediscover this, which is an account of the experience of a female fan in the 60s. It has nothing to do with this discussion specifically (except that their characters would likely be considered Sues), but it's fun.
I managed to get the mattress cover and the fitted sheet on. I have given up in a jumble of top sheet upon which one is sitting and refuses to move. I guess sitting on the sheets is a step up from attacking them like before.
@trogdor One cat we used to have was a force to be reckoned with when he was angry. I named him Snuggles because, well, he was also very snuggly. When he wanted to be. But he was a frightening cat, probably Maine Coon (enormous). My sister used to wake up to him sitting on her chest, looking at her.
@lisardggY My mother's gave birth in her sleeping bag.
"Nice, warm human. Perfect place!"
@trogdor Haha, some cats also like hair. Our devil-cat loves it.
George is the worst cat I have ever met, but I also like him. It is his goal in life to break things and bother other cats. For a while, the mere sight of me in the hallway would cause him to go on the offensive, rolling around in anger, yelling at me in the squeakiest voice, lunging at me if I approached... because he was mad I wouldn't let him in my room.
The only thing he would do in my room was pick an inaccessible corner to squat down in and get even angrier and also scared of the other cats in the room.
But he really, really wanted to do this. Every day.
I've got some like that who are actually allowed in. George is... an exception. He has scaled some interesting surfaces and smashed some interesting things, and he doesn't get along with either of the cats who stay in here permanently.
I think the only reason he doesn't care so much about getting in anymore is that Shadow has decided to chase his butt out on sight. She used to be more timid, but now she's just like NOPE.
I don't even try to stop him anymore because it's inevitable. He usually doesn't go further than the laundry basket by the door.
She is the sweetest cat in the world... to humans. Intensely dislikes all other animals. That's why she lives in this room (there are 8 cats in the household, and 4 dogs).
@trogdor That's what you'll believe... until the final moment.
Iiinteresting. I'm still not done with that garlic/magnet article, but it's very cool and relephant to understanding Ars Magica AND to understanding a lot of the kinds of miscommunication we run into on this site.
I also find it very accessible, apart from a few phrases which I think are deliberately over the top.
Bad summary: The way we interact with claims about truth is influenced by how we categorise the sort of things those claims are about.
Ancient Greeks thought both garlic and magnets were "things which attract and repel." Such forces, they knew, interacted to enhance or reduce each other. The claim that rubbing garlic on a lodestone would make the lodestone no longer attract iron was totally logical, to the point that questioning it was laughable.
Modern people have reclassified garlic and magnets into generally unrelated categories, so now we find claims that rubbing garlic on a magnet will make it lose its attractive power to be laughable illogical.
We feel no need to test our belief that garlic has no effect on magnets, just as Plutarch felt no need to test his belief that garlic had an effect on magnets--and we feel this way for exactly the same reasons that he did.
> However, I don't know how to do this with Old World of Darkness rules. I don't even know whether it's possible.
It could also be "does it exist," "can changelings really do it," etc
i am tired and a little out of it but mainly i am seeing a question that does not have a thing in it with a question mark on the end to delineate exactly what we're supposed to be responding to
So, yeah, my takeaway is that we have categories for things/ideas, and we "know" how those categories interact on a gut, instinctive level.
So if we "know" what categories two things occupy, we automatically "know" the range or limit of how those two things can possibly interact, and considering possibilities outside that range is... laughable to the point that we will feel no need to test or challenge our rejection of those possibilities.
This is a very useful shortcut for our brains, and it's been explored on various levels in many different fields (artists often have to re-build their shape-of-thing category shortcuts) but it's also limiting.
In day-to-day life we'd probably find it hard to function without the category-interaction shortcut.
But I think, for example, a lot of the conflicts on Stack Exchange arise from people with clashing ideas about what things go in which categories and how those categories interact.
Like, Shalvenay's challenges could potentially be read as a category mismatch between reason, emotion, motive, and narrative.
For many people the "why people do things" and "how people feel" categories are assumed to interact more strongly with each other than with the "what is logical" category: logic, for these people, has little to do with emotion or motive.
Thus any argument predicated on "It is logical to want/do a thing" is nonsensical to them, because in their minds it's a category error to claim logic influences motive.
Right; categories are not necessarily connectable in "right" or "wrong" ways.
What's more important, I think, is recognising that they're connectable in different ways, and that this is often the source of miscommunication.
So when we see that Plutarch claims his knowledge of garlic-magnet interference is based on life experience, we can actually figure that he's not lying any more than we'd say that our life experience tells us garlic and magnets have nothing to do with each other.
Neither of us is saying we rubbed garlic on a magnet: we're both saying that everything about the world we live in tells us the experiment is unnecessary and silly.
This is really REALLY important, because very often we think the Plutarchs we meet are deliberately obtuse or just stupid, when what we're actually up against is a difference of category: bizarrely but legitimately, the world DOES work differently for Plutarch than it does for me.
So when I meet someone who has personal experience that the d20 System is a universally capable engine which can run any game perfectly well; or who believes that a Manifestation of God is definitionally virginal; or feels that using a particular Chamoru orthography now makes all previous orthographies wrong; I should assume that this is a careful, considered, intelligent, sincere understanding which is coherent with the world they live in.
...and that means I can't in good conscience laugh at it, however laughable it may seem; nor can I claim insincerity or trolling as a way to disregard them.
...but gosh is it hard sometimes.
And yet, isn't it awesome to discover that we live in so many worlds crammed up next to each other, rubbing together like cats and balloons?
for my own part i got some kind of category mismatch with people: i was an introverted kid and did not spend much time around a lot of people, and spent a lot of time with games, drawing, computers, etc. i learned that things in the world generally had a pretty logical response based on what you did with them, and that given the same apparent beginning conditions this could often be repeated easily for the same results over and over.
Now I understand the appeal of Ars Magica: more than most other RPGs, it's a tool for leaping into a world where garlic makes magnets stop working, where an oak twig will stop a poisonous snake, and dried plants bloom in the middle of winter!
i made the mistake of putting people in that category too, and tried to learn about their responses rather than the person going on behind them
and since people are fundamentally at least a little bit insane, and contain far too much for learning their responses to ever be remotely useful, learning about the person going on behind them is the only really effective way to learn about interacting with people
there was an upside though: i became proficient in a variety of problem-solving and programming tasks, and as part of that i developed the ability to really easily think in terms of highly abstract concepts that cannot be reduced to words. there are people who find it hard to program because they can't find a way to relate programming concepts to what they know in the real world. i can just pick up the ineffable concept and work with it.
> “But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
this meant, when it came to people, once i started noticing the signs of paradigms of thought I already had all the wiring necessary to wrap my head around the fact someone else may be seeing the universe fundamentally differently to me, and i was able to wrap my head around what that way might be
yeah ;) I am very good at it. But my skill of learning about people is incomplete.
There are critical bits missing and I am still in the process of figuring out what they are and developing the gaps I've noticed.
One thing is: being willing to define things. To an extent I don't want to do this. If a parent praises their kid for being really smart, well, some day the kid's going to say something stupid and their parents will look at them funny. Bam, the kid realises that to get by, they need to be smart, all the time, and can't be dumb. Defining people means you leave only so much room for their behaviour when you interact with them.
@doppelgreener This is where the old advice comes in: Be specific in praising or condemning an action or choice, rather than conflating that action or choice with an innate quality.
@BESW yeah, i guess i can actually relate to people as being, like... "X is an intelligent person," and leave room for them to be dumb, and "X is really kind, but can be kind of a jerk sometimes"
(Also I think this would help explain why peoples' looks often match how they behave: based on their looks, people made judgements on how they are, then interact with them based on expectations they'll behave that way. I know a guy whose face just happens to have a permanent sneer. This perfectly matches his behaviour: he's the guy you'd look at and expect a witty and down-the-nose comment from.)
@trogdor one of the logical-thought types includes analytical people (such as myself) who logically analyse and break down and solve things, which we do because it is one of the range of extraordinarily good survival tactics. and it works for lots of things! so why not. (but we are not robots, as you say.)
when I was younger, I thought of emotion in a moderately negative light
I saw it as kind of stupid, the way some people would ignore, or a least not notice, logical solutions to a problem just because they were upset (sometimes by the problem itself)
as I got older, I realized it wasn't always actually easy, and from an observers point of view I couldn't always really accurately judge someone else's highly emotional response to something
and, not to say I had not done anything stupid before hand
but there came a time in my life where I noticed some of the same "stupid" behavior in myself
also, not to say that acting emotionally is only stupid
but that is the way that I saw it at the time
of course, I still get peeved off when I see a character in a show or a movie doing stupid things
but that seems pretty different
and emotional thought usually takes less time, under emergency survival situations, emotional thought gets you through (if you get through at all) at a more acceptable pace than logical thought
it's just as useful in it's own way, it just happens not to be perfect for everything
This is something I've thought about more recently: fictional characters generally (except where it's the POINT of the thing and/or the creator is really super-skilled) need to be more logical and less emotional than real-life people would be, because the audience can't feel the character as much so is judging their actions from a more logical point of view.
Actually, reading the Director's Cut of Narbonic is probably a great example of how to effectively convey characters on multiple rungs of the logic/emotion motivational ladder and get heavy audience investment.
I'm running a DNd 4e campaign right now and whenever my players finish an encounter one of them immediately wants to loot everything that he remembered seeing in the room and as a result usually gets all the treasure ( no one else gets a chance to speak. Logically, his character can't be in two p...
It's a setting with attendant supporting mechanics/hacks to the Fate Core engine.
> In The Secrets of Cats you’ll play magical cats whose duty is to protect their poor, vulnerable humans—whom they call Burdens—from the many threats that lurk in the night. > Part I focuses on the duty of cats and the world they inhabit, while Part II gives you everything you need to create and play an empowered feline. Part III describes an old mining town called Silver Ford and Part IV outlines a story set there called Black Silver. When kids exploring the old silver mine one Halloween unleash a terrible evil upon the town, can your cats save the day? Finally, Part V suggests complicatio…
> Fate uses pithy phrases — called aspects — instead of ability stats as the defining character mechanic. Game currency (called Fate points) is spent to invoke aspects for bonuses to skill rolls, and earned when aspects complicate a scenario. Skills (or approaches in FAE) compose the heart of the action system, used to determine the degree of success or failure on any action for which both outcomes would be interesting. Conflicts use stress to inflict temporary damage while additional aspects represent lasting damage.
@Aaron It is difficult to play FATE without roleplaying. It is also difficult to roleplay in FATE while ignoring mechanics. The system actively fights trying to treat them as separate things.
@BESW Thanks for the link. Fate sounds really interesting. I think I'm gonna wait for a convention or something like that to try fate though, cause I don't think it'll be a good fit for my group.
@Sumyrda It's my group's current default system. One thing we like is how different players can have different levels of 'crunch' without interfering with the intraparty power balance.
@BESW We just got started on DnD5e after playing DSA (the dark eye) 4.1 for 7 years. What we liked about DSA was the very detailed world and the complicated rules - but recently we decided that combat just takes too long with all the maneuvers so we switched to DnD and went on a dice shopping spree together.
I played D&D 3.5 and 4e for about seven years, and had a lot of fun, but I'm now happier in systems that give more focus on motive and drama, and provide equal mechanical "airtime" to both physical and social conflicts.
I'm also enjoying super-small systems; Fate's the most complex system we use these days. Most of the other systems we play have rules that fit on a sheet of paper.
I need some help with writing a question. I can't seem for form it into a coherent question and am all over the place trying to explain what I want from the question.
Are there any [Traits](http://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits) that would benefit a caster focusing on the Abjuration school?
Character design is a buffing support. Classes are [Bard](http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/bard) and he will be Prestiging into the Abjurant Champion from Complete mage (3.5)
I have not been able to locate any guides that have any abjuration specific traits. I have found traits that are useful to all casters but my focus is on the abjuration school.
