Diversity in Creation vs. Diversity in Consumption

Mar 10, 2013 by Stacy

The below is an unfiltered look at a post I put up on Google+ in easily-sharable format. Even if you’re unaware of the specific incident(s) that prompted this particular post, I hope that the themes and message will still resonate. As I maintain a policy of no comments on my blog, you’ll have to discuss this within your own circles, or at my original post on Google+. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see that post unless you’re in my circles.

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Since it appears that a number of people in this community feel that it is appropriate to put words in my mouth, I’m going to post this comment response in the same way I posted the original post. It was on a share of my IWD post (below) that +Christopher Mennell posted. In the Comments, Eric Kervina divined my thought process and let everyone know what I was REALLY saying, which was, apparently:
“But by all means, feel free to denigrate anybody doing their earnest best to be decent, and unilaterally declare they are doing it wrong, should you find their efforts wanting.”

After reading some of the back and forth and taking a look at the names of those who +1′d Eric’s divination, I decided to respond and further explain my stance. That response is below.

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Blaming sexism on depictions of women in art or media is victim-blaming. It is the exact same logic utilized when a man defends his sexual assault on the woman by blaming her dress. It takes the responsibility for the bad behavior off of the shoulders of the person exhibiting those behaviors and places it onto the shoulders of a concept, where there can be no harm done. The man gets off the hook for his behaviors, and the concept takes all of the blame.

Saying that teens are more likely to become sexist after seeing women posed or presented in a particular format is also victim-blaming. Whether you deem the poses or clothing “realistic” or “reasonable” is irrelevant. The pictures depicted are those of the female body. Commentary on the depiction of those women’s bodies in this format has the net same result as making those comments about women’s bodies in the first place.

Telling girls that we need to depict them completely clothed in “reasonable armor” looking as masculine as they possibly can in order to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted, hit on, or mistreated sends theexact same message as telling teen girls that they need to cover up because they’re riling all the men to do things they don’t want to do.

The message should always be that sexism and sexual assault are the sole responsibility of the person who is inflicting harm upon the other. Violence is never okay. Treating someone poorly is never okay. The people who DO these things need to be corrected, not allowed to do whatever the fuck they want while we subtly change the media and hope that (eventually) it will have a net effect on bringing the level of assholedom down.

The same thing goes with getting more diverse artwork in books, and I’m talking about global diversity, not the narrow “more plus-sized models” bit that I generally see from the usual suspects in this community. I mean more short girls, more freckled girls, more red, brown, black, yellow, and even chartreuse girls. Girls with tits and asses of all sizes, with curves everywhere, and curves nowhere. Short girls, tall girls, ugly girls, pretty girls, girls that are feminine and passive, girls that are strong and aggressive, bookish girls and kick-ass girls … girls that dress conservatively, and girls that dress provocatively. Girls in reasonable armor, and girls in completely unreasonable armor. If we continually blame the art orders for the lack of diversity, the victim, is again, being blamed. We’re not doing anything to further equality, we’re just begging men for something else for women to consume.

Because really, here’s the point. Forcing male artists and writers to conform to “what women want” does not further equality. It just gives women yet anotherproduct to consume. Conceivably, down the line, some of these women consuming these items may in turn become game developers, but that is a long timeline away, and there is very little evidence to support that such a thing actually works. While the desire to do this may have the best of intentions, it’s just about effective a means of furthering equality as selling women washing machines and lipstick.

Since the dawn of the 20th century, women have been teased with equality through consumerism by an obscene amount. Buy this lipstick and you, too, can be respected at work! Purchase this washing machine and you, too, can have more free time for your own interests! Give us money, ladies, and you’ll have equality! Except that it was male advertising executives and male product designers that either deemed or were told what it was that women really want, sot hey did that.

Equality is not a difficult thing to measure. We have several baselines with which to do it. How many women graduate college, how many women go on to careers, how much women get paid, how many women work on a particular project (and in what roles), and so on.

Having spent 20 years of my life as a woman not only working in a male-dominated industry, but working in the male-dominated SIDE of that male-dominated industry, I know very well what that picture looks like. Chances are, that pink-it-and-shrink-it website “for women” all about making smart financial choices and being the mommy you always dreamed of was hatched from the mind of a male entrepreneur who wants to get on this “for women” bandwagon. Chances are, he hired predominately male engineers to build out the site with a few women thrown in here and there. He may go so far as to make sure plenty of women are hired, but chances are those women will fit “traditional” roles doing things like project management, human resources, product management, and administrative assistance. Yet, when his fantastic website is launched, it will be lauded as something women desperately need in a world dominated by men!

Hypocritical much?

I’ve seen that pattern time and time again in my professional career, and I see it happening in the RPG industry as well. If all a woman wants is diversity in consumerism, she’s not actually fighting for any sort of equality other than the equality of consumerism (which has been skewed towards women since the dawn of advertising, but that’s another discussion altogether). What she should be asking is, “How many women did you hire to build this product, and what were their responsibilities, and how much did they get paid?” if she wants to start pushing the conversation towards actually achieving true social equality. SO MANY of the self-proclaimed experts on social justice in our community NEVER ask these question. They only ask about art depictions and rape depictions, and it astonishes me that when +Zak Smith  consistently suggests that more diversity in hiring automatically LEADS to a more diverse product AND actually directly moves the equality needle, he’s frequently shouted down.

Take the measurements that I gave you: Break down how many women are working at games publishers, the percentage of women broken down by department and responsibility, the amount that those women get paid versus the amount that their male counterparts get paid, and add in the turnover rate based on gender, and you have a crystal clear picture of whether or not a publishing company actually does anything to further equality. And while the frame of reference here is about women, the same measurements should also apply to race and sexuality.

I can guarantee that a majority of the RPG publishing companies out there would completely fail this test, yet many women are just asking them to ask their male artists to depict women in another way while not only NOT asking them to hire for diversity, but actually defending them when they don’t. Yes, finding the right candidate is hard, but moving the needle of equality is alsohard, and also a worthy task. Excuses blame the victim, too. If there were only more women available who could DO this, then we’d hire them! They’re there! It may be harder to find them, but they’re there! So are all the different cultures, and sexualities. All there, all represented, all filled with fantastic artists and writers and managers and dreamers. Not taking the time to look for them is lazy and foolish.

Now, Eric (and all the people who +1′d him) put words into my mouth that I did not say and do not believe.

Think about what that means. Counting Eric, seven visible people have decided that they know better than I do what I’m stating when I write. Seven people have decided that they have the capability of looking into my mind and divining what I was think, and they all seem to have enough arrogance and hubris to determine that what they’ve divined – without ever so much as meeting me once – is correct.

This is not surprising, as this is their MO. Take a piece of artwork, whether it’s a game or a book or a single image, divine what the creator was thinking, then react to that divination. It does a wonderful job of stirring up the masses and creating attention, but unless they can step directly into the mind of the creator – and we haven’t developed mind-reading technology yet - they’re just reacting to a fiction they’ve developed in their own heads, and applying that fiction to someone they don’t even know.

The only part that I agree with even remotely is “should you find their efforts wanting”. YES! Should I find their efforts wanting is the PERFECT reason to tell them! In no way, shape or form should mere intentions excuse someone from offensive behavior. Looking at the list of who’s +1′d this, I can see why those people would definitely want to hide behind the idea that mere good intentionsare enough to excuse bad behavior, but it doesn’t - especially when the people you are offending are of the same social class that you’re claiming to protect.

A lot of sexist things occur based on good intentions. Societies that require women to take a secondary roll in life and wear protective clothing believe that they are doing this for the best interests of the women. They believe that they have the best of intentions and are protecting the jewels of their society. That doesn’t suddenly make it okay to cut off their genitalia.

So don’t come in here and tell me that the “good intentions” of a publisher who asks the males who work on their projects to produce “female friendly” work outweighs the fact that they didn’t do the very first and easiest thing they coulddo to further equality – which is to hire more women.

Asking to become better consumers isn’t enough. It’s like getting to the glass ceiling and saying ‘Okay, I’ll just stop here’. If you’re really intent on moving the needle, if you really want to be a catalyst for change, you have to be able to say that’s not enough. It isn’t enough to merely be a games consumer, we won’t achieve true diversity until the game creators are diverse.

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A Google Spreadsheet Changeling: the Lost Character Sheet v3.0

Feb 1, 2013 by Stacy

When I first started Steam & Crumpets, I put together a Spreadsheet Character Sheet through Google Spreadsheets that I could use so I could have access to everyone’s character sheets. It was a rousing success, and after some feedback and time actually using the sheet, I was able to make a second version… and I want to share it with you!

The sheet is super easy to use and has some automated special functions to help make using it easier that I’m going to detail in this post. If you’d like to skip all that (most of it is available on mouseover of cellst hat have notes), then simply follow this link, then go to File -> Make a copy… for your very own copy.

Now, on with the detailed explanation!

 

Update Log

[2/1/2013] Released Version 3.0

Need Help?

Version 3.0 adds the addition of a ‘Help’ tab in the spreadsheet (the tabs are located at the bottom of the screen). This tab highlights many of the special functions of the character sheet and XP log (which is also new). It also gives you legends for the special auto-fill boxes.

The Basics

Anytime you see a cell with a little black triangle at one end of it, you can hover over that cell to get a helpful little note. In most cases, I was able to give specifics on game mechanics and character creation. In all cases, there are also book page numbers to guide you to a deeper explanation, and in some cases all you’ll have is the reference to the page number in the book.

 

 

 

Filling in a ‘dot’ is as easy as putting a ‘.’ in the cell. The Spreadsheet will automatically change the background color of the cell to make it look like you’ve got a filled-in ‘dot’. To delete a dot, you can just target the cell, then hit the ‘delete’ key on your keyboard. If you need to add a specialty to a skill, there should be enough room to place it next to the skill name.

 

In addition to the grey dot that you see above, you can also choose to use some additional characters to easily change the color or dots. You might want to do this to keep track of points that you’ve gotten from certain pledges or contracts, points from second-hand skills, or to explore what you might want to do with your experience points in the limit. The new ‘Help’ tab in the character sheet has the legend helpfully listed for easy access. It looks like this:

 

HEALTH: Your health behaves a little bit differently than the rest of the ‘bubbles’ on the sheet as you can record several different states. First, record your permanent Health – basically, the number of times your character can get hit with lethal or aggravated damage before they die, in the top row (Stamina + Size). Do this just by putting ‘.’s in the appropriate number of cells. They’ll come out in a dark green color, like in the example below. Additional states can be recorded, along with temporary health that your character might get from special abilities.

Also added with version 3.0 is an extra line below the bottom of the health bar, allowing the player to record the penalty states in the last three boxes of that character’s health, and now instead of hiding the special characters that record health, they are being displayed.

Damage and health are recorded according to these legends:

Additional information about the  recording health and taking damage can be found on the ‘Help’ page of the character sheet.

Glamour: Glamour is now recorded as a number rather than as a set of bubbles, since the amount of glamour a character can have can get pretty big. Also, there are spots to record the maximum amount of glamour a character can have (according to their Wyrd level) and how much of the glamour can be spent per turn. The tables for both of these pieces of data can be found by hovering over the black triangles.

Willpower: Record your permanent willpower score in the top dots, and your temporary willpower in the bottom dots, using the ‘.’ method. When you use a point of Willpower, just delete the ‘dot’.

BONUS: For particularly high-powered games, there is enough room to put up to eight dots for any of the skills, contracts, merits, etc… just select three of the sells adjacent to the empty cells that are already outlined and ready to act as a ‘bubble’, select them, and copy them (ctrl-c or option-c).

Then, paste the cells into the empty slots. The cells will come complete with the formatting necessary to just put a ‘.’ in the field to fill it.

 

NEW! XP Log

As a special request by Shoe Skogen, I’ve added an experience log, and I’ve also tied it into boxes around the character sheet that display statistics about your character’s experience. This should make it easier for you to keep track of when you get XP, how much you spend, and how you’ve spent it.

NOTE: Previously, the experience box on the character sheet was edited directly to add experience to the sheet. This box has now been locked, and displays the total sum of the experience from the XP log as well, as do the boxes on the XP Log tab. To add experience to the sheet, just add lines to the experience log. There is a small, working version of this functionality on the Help tab for experimentation.

 

 

 

Coming Soon

For the next version, I hope to start developing and adding in some quickie tools (either through a web interface or right through the Spreadsheet) that will allow players and GMs alike to develop Pledges super fast and keep track of what their oneiromancy rolls are.

 

How to Use

As a GM, I’ve been using these character sheets both for the players and for the major NPCs. I may develop something that allows for something more like ‘stat blocks’ for NPCs here in the future, but for now it’s working just fine.

You can give this link directly out to your players if you like, and have them make a copy of the spreadsheet. When they’re done, they can share it with you by hitting the blue ‘Share’ button in the upper-right hand corner of Google Spreadsheets.

Happy Gaming!

 

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Cornelius Rattlebag’s Magic Emporium

Jan 6, 2013 by Stacy

A Rogue Artificer’s Catalog of Steampunk Goods

This is my entry into the 2012 Secret Santicore project (as was posted about here on Wampus Country). The request was for a some steampunk magic items for a rogue artificer. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what a rogue artificer was, but I extrapolated out to ‘neat Steampunk magic items’ and went from there. You can also access the catalog via google drive at this link. There’s some more things I’ve been wanting to add, but I haven’t gotten a chance to. My hope is that when I make a change I’ll keep this up to date with a changelog to show you what’s new.

Also be sure to check out the rest of the Secret Santicore projects. There’s a metric shit-ton of awesomely usable material there. Get ready to dive in. 

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A New Round of Banners

Jan 4, 2013 by Stacy

I’ve been slowly releasing these on Google+ as I’ve been making them, with the promise that I’d come back and put them up here!

All of the previous banners I’ve made have been using older, existing photographs and manipulating them into the proper size. For this set, I actually took all of the shots with the dimensions in mind so that they could stand alone.

I’m sharing these under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Feel free and use them for your profile banners, to highlight posts, and, of course, for their most important use – as event banners for all the awesome hangout games you’re going to run!

 

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Why I’m Not Interested in Seeing The Hobbit

Dec 19, 2012 by Stacy

(And why that kind of pisses me off.)

I’m dealing with some latent Geek issues lately. First, Disney bought Lucasfilms and everyone (or close to everyone) in the Geekmunity went apeshit bonkers over the chatter of three more films taken out of George’s wretched little hands and maybe given to someone who grew up on Star Wars instead of the guy who abused the franchise to death. Still, I wasn’t thrilled. Not a freaking little tingle of excitement spread through my obviously geeky little body. Nope. I just sat there and said, ‘Meh’.

Now, a couple of things are happening in conjunction. First, the new Star Trek trailer is going around:

Then, The Hobbit was released. Okay, maybe I got the order wrong (no idea), but that just underscores the deep feelings of apathy that I get when I look at all of these old franchises pushing more material in the same worlds that they’ve been pushing material in since I was a kid. Add on top of that all of the comic book movies, and, well, you have a recipe for my own, personal apathy.

Now, dear reader, please do not make the mistake some Google+ers did of assuming I’m talking about originality. I’m not. I know all of the old cliches about everything having already been done (but not by you). This apathy I’m feeling doesn’t go that deep. I could probably watch the same story play out in a million different new worlds in a million different styles with a million different characters and not find myself as hopelessly bored as I am with the same franchises that I was interested in as a kid. You know which ones they are. We all do. Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, DC, Marvel, Harry Potter (which just drug on far too long – I never got past the third movie) and I’m sure there’s two or three that I missed stuck in there somewhere. We’re all Pavlov’s Dogs – trained to drool whenever a ginormous film studio poops out another big-budget sci-fi action film placed in one of the worlds that we’ve loved since we were children. As much as I want to drool, I find the whole experience getting more and more hollow with age. It was still novel when the first LOTR films were released. Now, it’s just stale and a little hollow. Like putting a coat of paint on my old toys and saying ‘Please, buy them again!’.

We’re adults, now. We might have grown up flying around model Enterprises and X-Wings made of Legos, but I’m more interested in seeing the new worlds and new strands of imagination those early periods of play created in the minds of young geeks who are now geeks in the prime of their lives, at the top of their careers, ready to show the world what they can do. I want to see all new toys. Worlds that have depth and life and interesting stories associated with them. Worlds that can turn into NEW franchises, franchises that my kids might get an opportunity to crush on in the same way I crushed on all of those older franchises. I feel like, by and large, we are stagnating… stuck in the worlds and with the stories that we were told when we were children.

When I posed this question on Google+, I got a mixture of reactions. Some were defensive about being allowed to like what they want to like (my opinions on how I feel about things are mine alone – I don’t expect others to share them, and I have no truck with people who don’t feel burnt out on these franchises). Some were in agreement, and others told me that the newest, most interesting stories are actually not being told on the big screen (unless you have a very large monitor) – they’re being told on the Internet… so now I have a whole slew of links to peruse to find the hidden, secret, yummy new stuff as opposed to the old, tired franchises.

So consider this my plea not just to movie studios, who will follow the dollar regardless of where it leads, but to the men and women who are writing those worlds, building those environments… those who are my age, who are in the prime of their lives and at the top of their careers, those creative people out there who, like me, grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek and Tolkien and everything in between…

…it’s okay. You can stop remaking the old stuff. Now that you’ve made it to the big time… can we see something new?

No comments on this blog, now! I’m handling it all via Google+! If you’d like to comment, jump to the G+ post here.

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More Event Banners for Your Hangout Games

Dec 16, 2012 by Stacy

While I was working on relaunching this blog, launching my new Tumblog, and various bits and pieces around the Social Media landscape, I took the opportunity to make more hangout banners!!! Enjoy!

Also, welcome to the new layout! I finally found something that I was pleased with mostly right out of the box so that I can focus on the actual blogging instead of the web development.

 

 

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How Stacy Preps Sessions: The Philosophy

Oct 15, 2012 by Stacy

Getting better at session prep … my observations.

When I was 19 and running games, I seldom wrote down anything that I planned to have happen. Games would go like this: Get paid. Run to gaming store. Use rent money to buy new books. Run home. Crack open book. Play until dawn. This often resulted in tons of fun and lots of cacophony, but there was never anything as cogent as a theme or a plot.

I sort of just made shit up as it happened. Much fun was had.

Later, I’d start to get plot ideas, and I’d just run them from my memory. I’d get an idea for a snippet of a scene, or a plot formation idea, and I’d run with that little kernel of whatever. The details, I’d make up as we went along. This resulted in a little more theme and plot, but not a whole lot as I found that my memory is just as fallible as any human’s. Consistency? Meh, who needs consistency?!

Lots of making shit up, but still … much fun was had.

Then, for YEARS I determined that in order to run a game, I had to have everything prepped from start to finish before we sat down to even the first session. I went from doing things with very little prep to believing that if I didn’t have every NPC statted down to the last one and every scene determined ahead of time (in a flowchart kinda way in case the players made other decisions), then I wasn’t being an effective GM, and should stop doing that.

I still ran, and I was never that prepared, but I believed that I just wasn’t prepared. I was too lazy, and, thus, a mediocre GM at best.

Then, Steam & Crumpets came along and I thought I’d have the perfect chance to be more than just a mediocre GM.

The first couple of sessions were extremely well prepared. I had floorplans and discussions all planned out, orders of events, details to read aloud about how things looked and felt and smelled, flowchart-style bullet points on what to do if the players did X or Y. I finally got to the point where I honestly thought I had achieved this golden status of ‘game prep’ that I’d been reaching for for so long …

…and it frustrated the fuck out of me.

Players don’t pay attention to flowcharts. A series of if/then statements about scenes only works if the only options available are the if/then statements in the flowchart. When a player goes off the reservation and/or comes to a situation where they make a decision decidedly not in that if/then box, the resulting confusion on my part as I try to sort out what should happen next is a momentum halter. Not to mention, there were enormous blocks of text that I had to wade through to find the answers to rather simple questions.

The choices available to me on how to deal with out-of-the-box thinking were limited thanks to the enormous amount of prep that I’d already done. The ideas, thoughts, and decisions that the characters made in the game were creative and interesting, but I had a tough time imagining how to fit them into the story that I’d written. A lot of the time, even though I had more work done for my games than I ever had done before in the 20+ years I’ve been running games, I felt like I was being hobbled by my own prep.

After a few sessions, I ran out of content that I’d pre-generated and didn’t have time to make more. I found myself frustrated because the players were circling around parts of the plot that were unimportant as if they were the most important things in the world. They kept coming back with empty results with their searches, and I could tell that some were getting frustrated at the wild goose chase that they were on. *I* was getting frustrated, too, because here I was with all of this well-planned story, and the players weren’t able to actually FIND the story.

So, quite on accident, I went back to running a session or two the way I used to – with heavy improv. So, I took some mental inventory, and after prepping in this way for the last 6-8 game sessions, I’ve found a way that works for me incredibly well. Now, I’m not saying here that this is the one and only true way. This is my way. Try it out if you like, and then tailor it to suit how you like to run games.

Stacy’s Game Prep Rules

• Do prep with bullet points, not paragraphs. Each one should take up no more than 1-2 lines. If you find that a bullet point is longer than that, split it up. Bullet points are easier to read in the middle of a game session than paragraphs.
• Don’t decide how the PLOT will go, decide how the actors driving the plot will behave. In other words, spend more time prepping NPCs and really getting into their heads, especially of your major antagonists than you do on anything else.
• Do give the NPCs goals, however. I find that those goals go much further to writing a plot (the NPCs end up writing it for you) than anything else.
• Don’t decide what your NPCs are going to do until you’re prepping for that session. This one is pretty important to me. Once I abandoned the idea that I make the plot and just let the NPCs drive the plot, I also realized that I shouldn’t decide things for the NPCs until they’re actually reacting to something. Thinking about how the NPC would react to further his or her goal (or save his or her ass) makes for some deeper, more interesting NPCs than just using them as automatons to fulfill the GM’s goals. The distinction is subtle, but to me it makes all the difference in the world.
• Don’t prep too much too far in advance. Things change all the time. If you do that, you’re going to find yourself with material that you’ll never use. Have enough prepped for the next two sessions, but leave out a lot of the extreme details for the latter part until the former is completed.
• Do prep what you’re bad at improvising. For me, that’s mainly names of both things and places. I like to think I do a pretty good job naming my characters, but only when I get the chance to actually think about those names. So, when a new NPC is about to make an appearance or just starts to exist in the world, I name them right away. That’s usually the first bullet point.

I haven’t completely mastered my own rules, yet. For example, I’m still feeling around as to what makes up about two sessions worth of prep. I usually prep too much, thinking that the players will drive through more content in theory than they actually do in practice. That ends up being a waste of time as it can often change.

However, preparing for games has become much, MUCH simpler, and much, MUCH less time-consuming. Also, more enjoyable. The games have become more enjoyable, too. The worlds are becoming more and more an echo of the people who play them than they are my own vision, and as a Storyteller/GM, that’s like gamer’s crack. I still have players coming to me and apologizing for their zany ideas of off-the-wall requests, but honestly … I don’t mind them, I relish them and enjoy them for the creativity they represent … and I’m no longer prepping myself into corners where those ideas represent a threat to the chronicle/campaign/story/etc…

My NPCs are diligently going about their days and living their lives, even if my players don’t interact with them for weeks and months at a time. They’re not just robots there to give the players clues or new quests, they’re people they interact with on a regular basis. I want the players to connect with the NPCs so that if/when those NPCs die, they really feel something, even if that something is a grudging respect for an antagonist that’s been plaguing them for who knows how long. When I sit down to do game prep, the first thing I ask myself now is, “What have all the NPCs been doing in the meantime?” Then, THEY tell me what the next session is going to be like.

YMMV, of course. I don’t think there’s one perfect way to prep for a game. What each person needs in game prep tends to differ by quite a bit. I’ll detail the tools I use and maybe even share some game prep notes of mine for past games in a future post (if there’s interest).

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