They tried to block moderators from the chat room, then escalated to meta.se and were told clearly that they had to Be Nice even in rooms they didn't expect anyone else to be in.
For some time afterward, they were still quite sore and uncomprehending about the whole thing and why their freeze peach wasn't preserved.
@Pixie TL;DR: I'm looking for material about the contemporary experience of First Peoples in South Carolina, with a focus on their culture and contact zones with the communities around them.
@BESW Not an area I have much experience researching, but let's see. What avenues have you tried already, if any? And do you have access to any databases, like through a school or library?
Context: My RPG group is starting up a Bubblegumshoe game set near Myrtle Beach, SC. BGS is very big on cultural/ethicnic/class diversity themes, and one of my players wants to play a Waccamaw teenager (she's a Chamorro and is interested in exploring parallels and contrasts between the experience of Chamorro peoples and Native Americans). But we're keenly aware of how poorly this could play out.
@Pixie Not really any access to databases that I know of. I've been moving through Native blogs trying to find first-person accounts of the experience in SC, I've looked through Native news sites and SC news sites, and I've looked at regional historical sites.
Ideally, I think, my player would like to see some articles or blogs by SC natives about their experience, and also some kind of resource about their cultural structures/traditions/beliefs.
Ah, okay. Hmm, hmm. I did a lot of my research using databases when I was in school, and I still have access to at least some of what I had in school via my library system. EBSCOhost comes to mind. For me, they were pretty useful for digging up magazine and journal articles. Beyond that... [rummages]
But Native erasure in SC is extremely successful; most references to Natives in the state are as historical figures rather than contemporary members of society, and the Natives themselves aren't putting much online.
@Pixie I think there's some weird EBSCO thing that means I might be able to get into it just because I'm on Guam, but there's a process I'll have to research.
@nitsua60 There are three tribes called Waccamaw, and my player would be happiest if she can find out enough about the Waccamaw Indians of Conway and Aynor in Horry County, as that's exactly mapped to the region we're lightly fictionalising for our game.
I've found their website (not much info, then hacked three days after I found it and still offline) and their Facebook page (mostly some notes about meeting times).
@trogdor I found that out when I read the Waccamaw Siouan website: "The Waccamaw Siouan are not affiliated with the Waccamaw people of South Carolina (aka Chicora Waccamaw) and the Waccamaw Siouxan of Farmers Union, South Carolina."
It's the Chicora Waccamaw I'm interested in, but they seem to call themselves Waccamaw Indians.
Still, anything about the contemporary experience of Natives in SC will be reasonably applicable to any of those tribes. It's the cultural bits that I don't know at all how transferable they might be.
Lerch, Patricia B. "“A Good Ol’ Woman”: Relations of Race and Gender in an Indian Community." Neither Separate Nor Equal. Ed. Barbara Ellen Smith. Temple UP, 1999. 57-74.
@BESW I think that you linked to Writing With Color before (am I misremembering?). Have you tried searching around there? And if you can't find anything relevant, it might be fruitful to send them an ask.
ELLIS, CLYDE. "Waccamaw-Siouans." The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 6: Ethnicity. Ed. CELESTE RAY. By CHARLES REAGAN WILSON. U of North Carolina, 2007. 246-47.
"In 1989 years of planning and hard work came to fruition when the University of North Carolina Press joined the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi to publish theEncyclopedia of Southern Culture. While all those involved in writing, reviewing, editing, and producing the volume believed it would be received as a vital contribution to our understanding of the American South, no one could have anticipated fully the widespread acclaim it would receive ..."
@Pixie I've read their articles on Native Americans, and it helped me with some of the sorts of things to search for, but I also got the impression that sending them an ask wouldn't be very helpful unless they have a SC Native who can answer.
@BESW The things I'm citing I've got text-access to through my school's database subscriptions; I'm figuring if anything I toss out there looks good to you then it's on to "how do we find an e-copy for BESW?"
Looks like I've also got the nine-volume "Journal of Gen. Peter Horry," if ever we wanted to know why he thought he was cool enough to get a county named after him =\
From the Google preview, "Waccamaw Legacy" looks like it doesn't have a lot about the contemporary experience except in a strictly "legal struggle" sense.
And, again, so much of the available material is outsiders talking 'bout people they aren't.
I did find this guy, Dr. William Goins, who seems to be a Cherokee citizen and scholar who gives presentations in the area.
@BESW That is a list of federally recognized tribes. They're state-recognized, not federally (I read in a news article that only the Catawba are federally recognized in SC).
what invites the specific discrepency between Federal and State recognition in this case? or is it just the usual weird thing of them thumbing their noses at each other?
@trogdor Tribal recognition is... weird. It's an attempt to acknowledge that the United States was built on the exploitation of thousands of sovereign tribes, and to return some amount of that sovereignty to them, and give the tribes political (and often physical) space to be their own nations while retaining, effectively, dual-citizenship for their peoples.
This means that it deals with all kinds of international policy edge cases regarding how the Federal, State, and Local governments are allowed to interact with sovereign nations.
'cause, yanno, in any other situation it'd be deeply frowned upon for South Carolina to sell some of its land to a sovereign nation.
So the interaction of funding, taxes, ownership, citizenship, everything, has to be hashed out on a federal and state level, and while the feds have one blanket policy each state gets to do its own thing for the parts it's responsible for.
Oh, wow, I think I just hit the motherload and it's got drama coming out of its ears. I'm not gonna link anything until I can sort out the hearsay a little.
so different requirements means some confusion, and probably at the very least going with the Federal one to be on the safe side? (because it dates back further)
But the idea of an independent system of self-government gets hairy.
Federal rules require that there was an established political authority in place from 1789 to present (wth allowances for minor gaps in the record--something like a demonstration of its existence once every 20 years suffices), while our state only requires that since 1934.
There are a couple of other places where federal rules require 1789 as a starting-point, but states have said "get real, man, we killed 80% then marched the other 20% thousands of miles, you think they kept their scrapbooks!?" (Or the legalese/less-insensitive equivalent.)
In any case, my town and my employer have been involved in a thirty-year litigation effort to fight our local neighbors' efforts to have the BIA defer to state status when considering petitions for federal recognition.
@trogdor the sad thing is that a lot of the state rules on these things that rely on 1900-or-so as a boundary do so because that's actually a really good proxy for 1789, so sayeth the best research out there.
Okay, so now I'm finding evidence of an ongoing conflict over leadership of the tribe that started about ten years ago and involves tens of thousands of dollars of the tribe's money.
So when the BIA wanted to standardize and adopt those best-practices developed in the "laboratories for democracy" that are the states, and do so in an effort to recognize exactly the same people that the current rules, if followed to their bitter ends, would recognize anyway...
Many politicians who claim to care about saving money suddenly say "wait--that would mean the we recognize a bunch of tribes? Well, let's put the brakes on that!"
You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool th...
That reminds me, I need to get back to working on site stuff, including looking deeper into RegEx. But my uses for it are pretty rudimentary, so I haven't run into any problems yet and don't expect to.
It's not without its own pitfalls--and I'm still going to be hard pressed to find contemporary first-person resources--but it's a little less.... AUGH.
<inductiveload> reportingsjr, well they do scan the outside of every envelope and keep the records, so if they have an incomplete address, they can look up previous mail <inductiveload> either that, or a level 50 postmaster who just knows where the mail goes
@BESW about your research project: it looks like you tried to contact one or two librarian types. Did you also attempt to contact the tribe directly? (I may have missed that in the last ~200 messages; if so, apologies.)
I don't want to link to the conflict, I don't think that'd be helpful.
But suffice to say that in a Sleuth game like BGS, incorporating the real-life Waccamaw in any capacity would require us to make judgements about guilt and motive of real peoples.
I know you're going for a certain tone in your game. However, from a research view I would think that getting to know a major, recent conflict would shed much light on the current state of affairs for a modern Waccamaw teen.
I picked a monster out of the Monster Manual and converted it to a playable race for the exercise. Actually interested in using it, now that it's done.
@JackStout It's pretty cool! My first thought is that it might have too much stuff - none of it is overpowered, but there is a lot of it.
Second is that 4d6 is a lot of damage at level 1; personally, I find level 1 is quick enough and broken enough that I don't really care about it much, but if I was planning a campaign which spent any time there I'd be worried. 3rd and final thought is, what class do you see them playing as? They look like good Monks, Rangers, or Druids, but that's odd thematically.
I did feel like a lot and to balance that I tried to make sure that things weren't buffed by the ability increase. Not sure whether that worked.
It looks like a monk/ranger type to me as well but that developed out of the base creature's higher dex/con and its truesight. I don't know that the PHB offers a class that complements the flavor of a nothic.
What would you have done?
If I rewrite it, I might convert some of the features to racial feats.
Maybe it's because i don't know what a nothic is, but I can't understand the logistics of a lineage of people who have no connection to each other and appear semi-randomly across the world. How do they reproduce, for one thing?
Something like that typically works out at the table. Perhaps they're the creations of someone mad, or they cold be humans that adventured a little too far.
I'm worried that you've created a group whose culture is having no culture, whose family is having no family, and who get employed by a wide variety of influential and resourceful people yet almost nothing is known about them.
It sounds like a role-playing black hole--creativity is best promoted by a framework, not a blank page--and like the powerful people in your world have no background checks for their employees.
I once added a scene to a long campaign that built a new origin story for the warforged of Eberron, a race of wood and metal constructs that have become sentient. Wasn't planning to do that here, and still don't want to. But I could, if I decided to run it as-is.
The only personal experience I have with 4e, is from that D&D game on Facebook (which I have forgotten the name of). I stopped playing when I reached the point that I couldn't get to later adventures without either x friends participating, or paying real money
I've always been a character tyrant. I don't let players create characters without my involvement. Keeps characters from overshadowing eachother or becoming useless within the story.
I would probably still be doing it if I still had the PDF's and access to the builder,... and if 4E questions were still asked with any kind of frequency
@JackStout ah, for Fate, I typically only want to make a character if I am gonna use em
@Miniman it is indeed, but I have never felt the urge to do it on anywhere near the same level with any other system
I did love how streamlined character creation in 4E could be (I did have acess to a builder that just showed me all the options according to what kind of options they were IE; feats, powers, items, PP's ED's
@JackStout I had an intention at the time to play all those characters too, though I did know I wasn't going to be able to, even though I didn't know the whole time we wouldn't be playing 4E for longer than we actually ended up doing so
Many of my characters were made to minmax optimise to a specific goal, and still be not terrible at most other things. eg, my super-fast SR2 character, or my AD&D2e Dwarf locksmith (maxed Open Lock by level 2; maxed Find/Remove Trap by level 3 or 4)
@Adeptus The player's around me don't optimize anything. It puts me in a position of build a perfect fighter, than making changes to bring them back a step.
@JackStout If you've got a perfect fighter and others have an average wizard/cleric/druid, you're probably on near equal footing (*depending on system and level)
@JackStout Sometimes I come up with personality etc, then build around that. Sometimes I build to be as <whatever> as possible, and come up with a personality afterwards. My dwarf locksmith was a bit of both, I think. I can just imagine him criticizing the workmanship of a lock as he picks it. "What, was this made by goblins? Psh!" "Damn fiddly Elven locks! I'm always afraid I'm gonna break 'em!" "Ah, a good Dwarven lock! Look at that workmanship! I'm taking this one with me..."
however, there were also times he needed to ask if he could not push someone with an attack, or choose how far he pushed them, or try to more strategically push them into a better area
later, when he was leaving, he wanted "a disposable character" so I made a dwarf berserker who hurt himself rather often to do more damage XD
I have a quick D&D 3.5 question: d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesMagnificentMansion.htm Even at 20th level, that "mansion" can't seem to get even as big as my bare-essentials quadplex apartment. Am I reading this right?
Like... a 10-ft cube is the same as saying 10 sqft of apartment space. CL 20 x 10 x 3 = 600 sqft .... which is not even as big as my frikkin apartment!
And they call that a "mansion" ?!
Some online discussions are saying it's 30 cu. ft. / CL, but ... no, no it doesn't frikken say that!
@EmrysTernal A 10ft cube has a base of 100 sq feet. So at 13th level when a wizard can first learn/cast the Mansion, ergo the smallest, it's 3900 sq. ft.
@EmrysTernal Don't feel bad. People regularly get cubic conversions wrong. The last time I wrote a big answer needing cubed math, I got it orders of magnitude wrong the first, uh, three times, I think.
On the bright side: the Mansion is way cooler than what those online discussions are depicting!
Am I a hypocrite to both answer a question and mark it as a dupe? (I answered it before realising it was a dupe, if that makes any difference... though I kept editing after...)
This one time I wrote an answer to demonstrate a ten times bigger spider was a thousand times heavier than a regular spider because of cubic conversions (not ten times heavier).
So, yeah, cubic conversions are surprising. In part because we work in a natural world where they rarely happen.
@doppelgreener Also depends on your definition of "ten times bigger". Common usage probably agrees with you, though. 10x the height, 10x the width, 10x the length.
@SevenSidedDie Hello. I wrote an extemely wrong answer several days ago, and I am going to try to improve it. I want to make it way shorter, while still keeping the needed info. Do you think it will be OK if I only keep the elementals' stats adapted to VtM strapping all the reasoning given to them, redirecting users that want reasoning to WtA book?
First off, everyone really liked the system, from a mechanical perspective. While one person had a bit of trouble grasping the "difficulty 4, but you can lower it with spends" rule, especially for possible stability loss rolls... Thankfully, everyone was very supportive.
That said it does mean that a character can DEFINITELY do something and lower the odds to 0.
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, as a DM.
(That is, assuming they have the points to spend)
It felt a bit wrong, but worked out all-right, all things considered.
I was a bit worried that the investigative skills would be very passive and as such boring.
Well, no one but me seemed to figure that one out, so it was good.
@Shaamaan Presumably, the "points to spend" is a limiting factor? ie, they may be able to do this for one or two rolls, but after that, they'll run out of points & be rolling against the full number?
@Adeptus Absolutely! Which is why it worked out fine in the end. It still feels weird when a possibly unlikely scenario plays out perfectly for the players.
But, well, yeah, they need to spend points.
Like I wrote - it feels wrong when it happens, but overall the result of the campaign was good.
My players engaged in a wee bit of min-maxing, but that was mixing player knowledge and character knowledge. Nothing too major, and I don't think it was the systems fault.
@Shaamaan I think this has to do with a certain kind of playstyle that, eg, @trogdor really likes: discovering what the GM has prepared, with the trust that it'll be cool.
@Shaamaan Well, there's a big difference between "scaring the characters" and "scaring the players." The latter is much harder, and often unnecessary/inappropriate.
(If you haven't read Nightmares of Mine, I highly recommend it; it's got whole sections on the different playstyles, when they're appropriate for what kinds of players, and how to achieve or avoid them.)
At least, I always thought good horror should at least creep the players out too.
In any case, I'll inquire a bit more into this later - we finished pretty darn late, so we didn't have much time to talk about the details of the whole experience besides agreeing that everyone had fun.
True. Again - I'm not complaining. Everyone had fun, myself included, so... yeah, there's that. I WAS hoping to creep my players out a lot more than I apparently did. Or perhaps I DID, but don't know it? That's why I think I need to talk to them when I have the chance.
While not specific to GUMSHOE, I think I can say that the players achieved a very superb (as far as storytelling goes) bittersweet ending. They solved the case, defeated the bad guy, but at a high cost.
One (somewhat expendable) character panicked and ran off into the darkness, never to be heard from again, another was hurt during the final confrontation, another was reduced to a gibbering (but alive) mess (he also survived) and the last character got impaled... seriously wounded, but because the one person with first aid ran off into the darkness, there was no one left to help. With 1 hp away from death, it was sure he would die soon...
Like, the size of a given ability's pool--was it mostly there to give a general sense of the thing, or was there a big difference between having a 3 and a 4?
@Baskakov_Dmitriy You should probably be able to safely assume readers have the VtM and WtA book. We are not in the business of helping people circumvent copyright by mass reproducing book content such that they don't need the book themselves, we do expect we can point people to page numbers and sections and so on. We can quote material from the book for fair use when it makes our answer clearer or is necessary to explain stuff.
@BESW MOST investigative abilities were a bit more general, i.e. it didn't matter if the players had 2 or 1 (as long as they had 1). Except for one ability, which was heavily needed during the session (outdoorsman, which I said in advance that it will be needed). Yes, there was a big difference between having it and not having it, where it was being used constantly by the players and gradually declining, giving the sense of dread that if it runs out completely, they're screwed.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy So if you feel like you can cleanly redirect people to the book ("read this part for more information on that"), and it might improve the answer to do so, go right ahead. We do that a lot in our answers.
Finally, health (for obvious reasons), and anything that can restore health and stability (I gave my players a bit of a hand and allowed the use of psychoanalysis and hypnosis to alleviate some stability losses, with the former being a "mental bandaid" which straight up restored it, while the latter was a more flimsy blanked - strip it away and it all comes crashing down again).
As for other abilities, like weapons or firearms, it's a bit more of the latter. At least, I guess it depends on how much fighting there is in your game.
While it was a bit wrong of my player to look at my dice throwing skills, it really did cause players to go "oh F**K" when I rolled a 3 and dealt 8 damage (final bad guy)...
@doppelgreener If I knew that it would definitely be helpful, I would do it. But I, sadly, don't. I will try and check if my answer becomes better. THanks.
@Shaamaan Can you give me a quick example of the Investigative abilities in play?
BTW, @Baskakov_Dmitriy, "Possible duplicate of [question]" is a formula phrase used across the Stack Exchange on both mainsite and meta, in a comment added automatically by the system the first time a duplicate vote is cast for a particular pre-existing question; future votes cast for that particular duplicate automatically add +1s to the comment. I'm sure you've seen such form comments before, and you'll be familiar with it if you've ever cast a close-as-duplicate vote yourself.
Really? How so? It's saying that one person thinks it might be a duplicate but leaves room for people to disagree, because closing a question is rarely done on one person's un-supervised say-so.
I don't have to be absolutely positive in order to cast a close-vote; otherwise I almost never would. Four other people have to agree with me, so I can act knowing that if I'm wrong there's a buffer.
4
And as I said in the comments, there's a rule of thumb on the Stack that duplicate answers mean effectively duplicate questions; I found the meta.rpg.se question which had the answers closest to those I'd have given, but felt no need to say more poorly what had already been said.
Doppelgreener was kind enough to do the work of re-phrasing all the different variant answers to all your different elements, with links to the original questions. I felt it would be more valuable for you to see the breadth of the discussions rather than summaries of cherry-picked examples, and also wasn't able to dedicate that time to the issue.
@eimyr I've got a crime and characters and everything!
....now I just have to research the Chicora or Catawba and design a fictional tribe that's respectful of their reality.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy If you've got a beef with the phrasing, that'd also be a good thing to talk about on Meta Stack Exchange. They changed "closed" to "on hold" for that reason.
@eimyr I was hoping to find out enough about a particular tribe to use them in the game, but the more I found the more I realised I needed to avoid Real Person Fiction.
Had some of my own prejudicial assumptions blown out of the water in the process.
It was answered correctly, and that answer was marked as "accepted." A year and a half later the rule changed, and AceCalhoun submitted a new answer that incorporated the new rule. So the accepted-and-now-wrong answer sat high at +25, the new-and-correct answer sat at +5-or-so for a while.
Disappointed that the question was "broken," I threw a 50-pt bounty on the question, with a note that it was intended to reward AceCalhoun's now-correct answer, and threw comments on each post in the question to that effect. Now, a week later, the correct answer outranks the accepted one, and perhaps someday OP will switch their "check." It was out of whack for a while, but it didn't take much--50 pts from me--to get enough eyes on it to basically straighten things out.
Yeah, active intervention in the few cases of major discrepancy is preferable to enacting drastic network-wide changes to try and engineer those problems away at the cost of other, more constant benefits of the current system.
I constantly remind myself that by being a registered user I'm already part of "the 1%" w.r.t. people who actually use one of these sites; being active in meta probably bumps that to being part of "the 0.1%."
I suppose being one of B,E,S, or W would put one in "the 0.025%," eh?
