aluminiumtrioxid

> NPC doesn't want to associate with people who treat him like **** > bad writing okay

Inclusiveness... iirc Bioware also offered a Goat in 'The Peal' Yeah, I remember those collectible cards. I haven't completed a Witcher game since the first one. Wonder why? Because they... don't have the collectible sex card minigame anymore? I'm honestly confused.

Well, that pornstache is an affront against good taste

Which is relevant to a conversation about the appropriateness of dwarves participating in gay sex... how?

You do realize that your argument has now morphed into "having laws is a slippery slope in itself", right? Nope, you're completely wrong. Please, do educate me how "crime" isn't a human activity and "a peaceful and ordered society" isn't an arbitrary term. lol, twisting and turning & more twisting and turning. The key word is "arbitrary term", as in not set in any principle. "A peaceful and ordered society" is set on principle of no violence and following the law. "A great discussion" is an arbitrary term though. A "constructive discussion", however, isn't.

I have a hard time imagining circumstances where it would be necessary to exclude it. I agree with this sentiment, there is no reason to not make games more inclusive where applicable If you two geniouses think adding animations of men passionately making love to hairy male fantasy-dwarves belong in any entertainment product, you have serious mental issues, and should be shipped off to the nearest psych ward immediately. ...Why exactly? It's not like fantasy dwarves aren't basically short, hairy, bearded men. Why is gay pr0n featuring dwarves especially vile (compared to regular gay pr0n)?

You do realize that your argument has now morphed into "having laws is a slippery slope in itself", right? Nope, you're completely wrong. Please, do educate me how "crime" isn't a human activity and "a peaceful and ordered society" isn't an arbitrary term.

Reiterating a claim without any evidence to substantiate it doesn't make it true. It's an axiom, silly. An axiom, you say? lol, no. The term slippery slope is not a slippery slope in itself. Regulate any term of human activity in the name of an arbitrary term leads to over-regulation because it ends up with a small group of arbiters deciding for the many. Same thing. You do realize that your argument has now morphed into "having laws is a slippery slope in itself", right? "Regulating any term of human activity (crime) in the name of an arbitrary term (having an ordered society where people's rights are upheld) leads to over-regulation" is... debatable, to say the least.

Reiterating a claim without any evidence to substantiate it doesn't make it true. It's an axiom, silly. An axiom, you say?

False dichotomy. There's some excluded middle ground between "we don't moderate unless some really heavy poo-flinging happens" and "nobody is ever allowed to say anything that could possibly be construed as offensive". Again, it places judgement on what a middle ground is on the hands of one or a few instead of allowing discussion grow organically and only act when the snails and ****roaches arrive. Sure, you can treat the forum as a private garden with the most excellent gardener of excellent discussions, but i have seen too many times gardeners burning down their respective gardens in a hissy fit when the trees and the flowers didn't get along as they wished. Whereas I didn't. Reiterating a claim without any evidence to substantiate it doesn't make it true.

Well, that description may or may not apply to me, but it's also kind of irrelevant, because given enough people, it sure as hell will apply to someone sooner or later. Not taking into account how certain people will react and just shrugging "well they need to not react like they do" has never really solved any problem in the history of mankind, as far as I'm aware. Sure, but I'm not saying "WOT needs more stringent moderation". I'm saying "the rules of the forum do not facilitate constructive debate, which sometimes hurts the quality of discussion in topics that are actually relevant to the forum, or are even the very reason for its existence". False dichotomy. There's some excluded middle ground between "we don't moderate unless some really heavy poo-flinging happens" and "nobody is ever allowed to say anything that could possibly be construed as offensive".

I have a hard time imagining circumstances where it would be necessary to exclude it.

Jack London identified himself has a communist and he is one of my favorite writers. There is something you need to understand. A persons political leanings are what they are. They are shaped by education and life experience. They should never be something you take into consideration outside 1) a political discussion/debate or 2) a voting booth. They will color your outlook on life but it should only be by the smallest amount. They should never determine who your friends are, or what entertainment you enjoy, or who you respect. Disliking someone because their politics are not the same as yours (not you personally just in general) is as asinine as disliking them because they cheer for a different sports team than you do. Well, given how flailing about a creator's "politics" influencing their work has seemed to become the favorite pastime of the forum lately, I thought I should nevertheless mention it.

You're admitting your part of the problem? You don't feel the need to rise above the poo-slinging and will jump in with the chimps and throw poo as well? Sure I am! Feeling mildly annoyed and compelled to retort after someone insults you isn't a sign of moral failure, it's human ****ing nature! Which is exactly why "you know this thing you feel right now? you need to not feel it, and then everything will work just peachy" is supremely unhelpful advice - telling people to not feel something is about as useful as telling them to not think of the pink elephant, and only likely to work out in the best of circumstances. Which, you may notice, is kind of a problem if you think about your own life: "best of circumstances" doesn't always happen to people, and usually when it does, it's not while they're posting on an internet forum about video games. Moreover: while you're being mildly annoyed and feel compelled to retort, you're not in the best frame of mind to judge what's okay to post and what isn't. Add to this the fact that you can't judge tone over the internet and therefore everything posted will be taken in a far worse light than it was intended, and you'll have a pages-long thread on your hand that gets nastier and nastier as time goes on - without anybody necessarily being at fault there! And the problem isn't that this will "hurt people's feelings" or "takes away their safe space" or whatever the stupid meme du jour the argument is being equated to; the problem is that everybody feels like their barbs were completely justified and within reason, or, when things get out of hand, that it may not have been justified but it was totally an appropriate response to what the other guy was saying, and none of them is necessarily wrong because, again, annoyed people are judging their own **** as gentle ribbing at most, which might only disturb the most thin-skinned of individuals, while the others' reaction inevitably seems like a much weightier insult than it was intended as (because, again, it's impossible to determine tone and intent in an internet conversation) - but as the argument gets nastier and nastier, the more cognitive real estate gets spent on thinking up ever more creative zingers instead of actually moving the topic forward, and everything just gets clogged down in a quagmire of bruised egos, and the original subject becomes completely forgotten. And the point is that this is pretty much unavoidable unless people are actively spending cognitive effort to combat the phenomena, which, well, good luck to get them to in a frame of mind that's super not conducive to it, especially without any assurances (ie. the goddamn rules) being in place that the other party will behave similarly instead of interpreting said effort as a sign of weakness and doubling down on the hostility.

This is a really cute view, but I'm not expecting anyone to follow rules that are not part of the forum's official rules and guidelines. That's kind of the point of having explicitly written rules on a forum. Moreover: in an environment where people have amply demonstrated they find the very idea of said rules ridiculous, I especially don't feel any obligation to hold myself to a standard that the community considers to be unnecessary. I don't think I need to explain the concept of hyperbole. And, well, if you don't think said hyperbole was deserved after this elitist turd of a post (which, by the way, is actually pretty representative of how Vals tends to view other people, based on his posts in other topics), I guess we'll have to respectfully disagree. "False dichotomy", eh? I guess that's technically true - there are possibilities other than "you've misunderstood what I was saying" and "you've purposefully misconstrued what I was saying". I mean, they're not very likely ("you actually understood what I was saying perfectly at the moment you were reading it, but then kinda forget about it and remembered wrong"?), but they exist. In any case, considering the colossal intellectual arrogance that's just dripping from Vals' posts, I don't think "your reading comprehension isn't matching the monumental intellect you ascribe to yourself" is in any way a personal attack. I mean, let's be conservative and say he doesn't even think of himself as a Mensa-level intellect (which I'm pretty sure he does, but let's, for the sake of argument, assume he doesn't), merely as someone with an IQ of 125 - that means he'd be smarter than 95% of all people. If he's wrong about it, and his reading comprehension is instead on the level of someone with an IQ of 120 - well, he'd still be smarter than 90% of all people. I have a hard time construing "merely smarter than 90% of all people" - an outcome my alleged insult allows for - as "attacking someone's ability with reading comprehension". As for calling someone a troll, well... first off, I didn't call anyone a troll; I raised the possibility of them "misconstruing an argument", an action that isn't the sole domain of trolls. But let's, for the sake of argument, assume that this makes someone a troll: in this case, if they engage in the outlined behavior, they are a troll. The label's not much of an insult if it fits. And, well, if they don't, the allegedly problematic half of the statement doesn't apply to them, so no insult was made.

If the people don't facilitate constructive discussion, I'd argue the people are at fault not the rules. Changing the rules should be the last resort. More rules does not equal better discussion, even more specific existing rules doesn't either. The more rules there are the more they are abused and the greater the tendency is- as the opposite from encouraging actual discussion- to have personal feelings and personal opinion be paramount. Say there were a rigorously enforced "no cheering death" rule. Perfectly reasonable, on the face of it. Still open to wildly different interpretations though. Enforce it even handedly and you end up banning a bunch of people who celebrate Osama bin Laden's death, enforce it selectively and you just get rid of 'wrongthinkers' like Qistina or Oby who cheer the wrong deaths. Is having a Abrams vs T## argument cheering death because they've both used to kill people? Or you just end up not having any discussion at all because you can't be sure which edge of the rules you're skirting as there's an endless list of hypocritical to mutually contradictory precedents where nothing/ something happened previously. Well that would be a valid point if there was no correlation between people's behavior and the forum rules. But rules do change behavior, so I remain unconvinced. As for your second point, I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say. That having overly specific rules for every contingency is bad? Sure it is, but I wasn't advocating for them. What I was asking for is a/ mod intervention before things turn nasty, and b/ maybe having rules that give us a basis to ask for a/. I guess this is supposed to illustrate hypocrisy, although I'm not exactly sure how. "You're not very good at getting your point across concisely" is hardly a personal attack. "You've either unwittingly or intentionally misinterpreted what I was writing; which is it?" isn't one either. Considering I'm talking to a poster who all but called me insane, I think I'm being remarkably civil here.

I can't believe you mentioned that one! I actually have that here in paperback. It was in a box in the closet I'd forgotten about (I have a LOT of books here). I've never read it. I'll start on that one tonight. Given your political leanings, I feel compelled to mention in the interest of full disclosure that the writer self-identifies as a communist, and you can sorta-kinda see this seeping into the ending. I don't personally think it's more than a passing annoyance, and people I know who read the book without knowing about this beforehand said they didn't notice it, so this might be confirmation bias speaking, but I thought this may be something that could significantly reduce your enjoyment of it, so... I'm mentioning it before you get too far.

That's ass-backwards logic. "The right of a person to ruin a discussion is more valuable than the desire of others to see the discussion un-ruined" is putting the cart before the horse. The principle is what it always is- there's a right (or 'right' since the forums are private property) to freedom of expression within certain rules. If the rules aren't infringed then if you don't like what the other person is saying you need to build a bridge and get over it or buy a pack of cards and deal with it. If the rules don't facilitate constructive discussion, I'd argue the rules are at fault, and saying "well he didn't break any rules" misses the point entirely. Someone running around crying 'zomg the rules here suck! Somebody safe space me!' isn't exactly facilitating constructive discussion. Which nobody was actually doing, but I guess intellectual dishonesty and hostile misrepresentation of viewpoints you disagree with do facilitate constructive discussion in your eyes. Which is... a strange viewpoint, but one you're undeniably entitled to. Do I really have to go through this thread and pull up all the times you and at least one other have complained about the rules here these last few pages? You started this conversation. Yea... not gonna do that. But I'll link this search, there you make about a half dozen posts complaining about the rules. Except I never said that "the rules suck", nor does the term "safe space" appear anywhere other than in your fevered imagination. Either your reading comprehension isn't matching the monumental intellect you ascribe to yourself, or you're purposefully misconstruing the argument I was putting forth. Which is it?

You know, for someone who feels a seemingly irresistible need to constantly hammer on how he's intellectually superior and basically God's gift to humanity, compared to whom most people are "uninformed (...) unintelligent (...) idiots (...) wussies (and) children", you are really... not very good at getting a point across concisely. Any point.

Sorry, but... what? While you wouldn't in a million years use SoD/ BG for that purpose using computer games to teach children about real life is certainly a thing every bit as much as using childrens' TV programmes is and has been. Yeah but Junai's post made it sound like there was a trend in gaming to shoehorn this stuff into games not aimed at children. Unless I misunderstood something.

That's ass-backwards logic. "The right of a person to ruin a discussion is more valuable than the desire of others to see the discussion un-ruined" is putting the cart before the horse. The principle is what it always is- there's a right (or 'right' since the forums are private property) to freedom of expression within certain rules. If the rules aren't infringed then if you don't like what the other person is saying you need to build a bridge and get over it or buy a pack of cards and deal with it. If the rules don't facilitate constructive discussion, I'd argue the rules are at fault, and saying "well he didn't break any rules" misses the point entirely. Someone running around crying 'zomg the rules here suck! Somebody safe space me!' isn't exactly facilitating constructive discussion. Which nobody was actually doing, but I guess intellectual dishonesty and hostile misrepresentation of viewpoints you disagree with do facilitate constructive discussion in your eyes. Which is... a strange viewpoint, but one you're undeniably entitled to.

We already had this discussion before.

That's ass-backwards logic. "The right of a person to ruin a discussion is more valuable than the desire of others to see the discussion un-ruined" is putting the cart before the horse. The principle is what it always is- there's a right (or 'right' since the forums are private property) to freedom of expression within certain rules. If the rules aren't infringed then if you don't like what the other person is saying you need to build a bridge and get over it or buy a pack of cards and deal with it. If the rules don't facilitate constructive discussion, I'd argue the rules are at fault, and saying "well he didn't break any rules" misses the point entirely.

Holy ****, I was just about to recommend the Kingkiller books. But, you've apparently already read them, so nevermind. Mistborn is... fine. By which I mean a "really really good, crazy steampunk-wuxia-superhero mashup". Some interesting twists and turns. Great worldbuilding regarding magic (it's supremely logical and internally consistent). Definitely not what you were asking for, though - on the other hand, Sanderson's Warbreaker features some political intrigue and has a somewhat interesting backdrop, even if it's fairly light on "atypical plot progression" (no hero's journey to defeat a dark lord, but the story is fairly straightforward and predictable regardless). I've heard great things about Stephen Brust's Vlad Taltos books and Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series (the former being basically fantasy noir, kinda like the Witcher, while the second is about a bunch of scoundrels doing scoundrel-y things). Haven't read either. I remember reading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy not long after Game of Thrones and thinking the two were somewhat similar. Of course, Farseer slightly predates GoT, which has basically given birth to an entire subgenre of its own since then, so I'm not sure how similar I'd think them now. If what you're mainly looking for is a series with lots of political intrigue and atypical plot progression - so essentially: a Game of Thrones-clone -, you could give Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire trilogy a chance. I only gave the first book the most cursory attention and threw it away, labeling it as an edgy GoT-wannabe, but that sounds like a feature, not a bug here. If you're willing to tolerate fantasy that very deliberately goes against the aesthetics and assumptions of Tolkien, The Scar by China Miéville fits your description to a T - if the "Arcanum meets Lovecraft" aesthetics doesn't turn you off, and your definition of "political intrigue" includes power struggles on an anarchistic floating pirate state. Few authors manage to fuse the dark and gritty so well with a genuine sense of wonder and infinite possibilities, but be warned: while the plot is far more complex than it seems at first glance, it kind of drags its feet for the first half, and the main character is pretty unlikeable. Which is not much of a problem if you can fall in love with the worldbuilding (easily comparable to Planescape), but I don't think you're the kind of person who gets the same sense of childlike joy from exploring the weird and unusual as I do. Calling it a fantasy series is even more of a stretch, but since you professed your love for Free Stuff, I'm going to go out on a limb and also nominate Twig. It's basically biopunk alt-history featuring a gang of kids gifted with greatly enhanced cognitive functions and a few other low-key superpowers through the wonders of child experimentation. The POV character is the social manipulator of the group, so intrigue abounds (imagine Tyrion Lannister in a 10 year old's body), and as usual for the author, things start out pretty terribly for our heroes and steadily get worse over time, so there isn't even a whiff of any hero's journey silliness - moreover, if the setting can be said to have a dark lord*, the protagonists are staunchly in service of it. The prose is at times uneven, but the plotting, the characters and the worldbuilding are top-notch. Content note: if there's anything horrifying you can imagine to happen with children thrust in the middle of a civil war waged with crazy biological (and occasionally chemical) weaponry, it's probably going to happen sooner or later. If small children getting splashed with acid/digestive enzymes, subjected to pain so overwhelming they tear their vocal chords screaming, getting mutilated in various ways (eye trauma being one of them) is a dealbreaker for you, I recommend avoiding the series. *The Crown States are the worst; although their evil is a very banal, dare I say, industrialized kind of evil.

Well, I quite like rpg.net's rules and guidelines. Paraphrasing and leaving out a lot of really specific sub-clauses that would make little sense here: - Be a good citizen of the forum. Trolling or otherwise sabotaging the peace of the board damages the quality of discussion and is not acceptable. Being “right” is not an excuse to engage in behaviour that degrades others' experience. - Do not make attacks against other gamers. Challenging arguments and ideas is fine, but not attacking the people holding them. This includes attacks on an individual poster, or groups that any reasonable person would assume to plausibly include fellow forum members. Video game industry professionals are assumed to be users of the site for this purpose. Racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic posts will not be tolerated. - Your posts should contribute to discussion. Post in the appropriate forum. - The staff moderates to the spirit of the rules and the context at hand. Conforming to the rules to the letter is not a magic talisman against moderation if your posts are bad for the forum.