I see myself as a feminist. I know by putting that out there at the beginning I’m raising a lot of expectations about what I care about, how I react to things, and what I’m likely to defend. I’m also a relatively laid back person, despite some of my blog rants, and I’ve been through a long journey trying to understand sexism and feminism. For me this journey was many small cycles of “not getting it” punctuated by bursts of insight as I incorporated new ideas into my worldview. I grew up in the gaming world and for a long time I was so used to how things are that the roots and implications of the many traditions were invisible to me.

I’ve also watched many of my friends go through various cycles of getting and not getting aspects of sexism, racism, and other -isms. I’m not going to claim to be super enlightened… I mess up on ableism issues all the time… but I’ve reached a point where that cycle is familiar to me.

When I read WotC’s article what I saw was Jon Schindehette going through one of the early cycles of trying to understand sexism. He was “not quite getting it” and honestly if he’s just starting to struggle with these issues, I can’t blame him for not understanding them all at once. I’ve been there and I’ve fallen in the same pitfalls. I wish he had gotten further along before he wrote a public article… but he has my empathy as to why getting there takes time.

Jon tried to approach the problem logically and understand what sexism is and what it’s doing to gaming. He fell short on three fronts. One is that he didn’t do enough research on discussion that’s already taking place in the online community. Blogs like Go Make Me a Sandwich contain lots of resources that include frank discussion of the sort he’s trying to elicit. Tumblrs like Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor include loads of beautiful examples of art that’s attractive and pretty while presenting characters who look like people rather than toys. The fact that Jon didn’t bring up any of these resources makes me suspicious that he didn’t do this kind of research. He tried to start from square one by himself and he suffered for it. It’s a lot easier if you build on the work others have already done. ;)

The second problem Jon ran into was that he got into his logical investigation and backed off when he was starting to get somewhere. The definition of sexism he found, which seems quite reasonable to me, was, “Sexism is defined as having an attitude, condition, or behavior that promotes stereotyping of social roles based upon one’s gender.” That’s a good start. After talking about it for a bit he failed to take the next step and investigate gender roles.

To start understanding how sexism could promote stereotyping, you need to ask: “what gender roles might we be perpetuating?” Wikipedia has a good overview of historical gender roles. However, in the last 30 years, gender roles have changed. The “perfect submissive wife” ideal is not what our societal norms think women should be anymore. Unfortunately, there are still some very damaging gender roles out there for men and women.

One of the ones that hurts women the most is the idea that they must always be physically attractive and sexually available for men. This is sometimes called the Beauty Myth, and it’s the big problem one Jon missed. The Beauty Myth says a woman can be a brilliant rocket scientist, but if she isn’t also pretty, she’s not really worthwhile as a woman and no one will love her.

One of the roles that hurts men the most is the idea that they can only succeed financially and aren’t particularly physically attractive to women. This is also called the Success Myth. This is rather insidious because the Success Myth says that an average man needs to find a high paying job if he wants any hope of attracting a woman. If he suffers setbacks in his career or prefers to do something that is low paying, then he’s worthless and no one will love him.

Here’s a good summary of these two roles and how they hurt us from a male perspective.

The twin roles define a lot of our popular culture and they bleed into our fantasy as well. The Beauty Myth is why people fixate on making female characters beautiful even when “beautiful” crosses the line into impractical and unrealistic. The Success Myth is why we’re still unbelievably stuck on the “guy succeeds and then guy gets the girl” story plot.

Back to Jon… the third thing that I think went wrong for him is that he stumbled into some very basic fallacies talking about an -ism. This is a pretty common mistake and while embarrassing, isn’t all that surprising. Fallacy one is to assume that whatever went before is ok by virtue of being tradition. This was mostly justified by “market forces” in the article. If all tradition was free of -isms life would be sunshine and kittens and I wouldn’t have to write any blog posts in the ‘feminism’ category. :)

More seriously, a lot of people think “feminism happened, sexism is done now, right?” and sadly the answer is no. It takes a long time to change culture and there’s a lot of momentum. That’s not to say we need to flip out and throw all of our traditions out the window tomorrow. We can start by calmly taking a step back and making a few rational changes at a time towards a better, less -ism filled world.

The second fallacy Jon made was while talking about his three images. He got a bit muddy because he couldn’t see the modern roles affecting them and drifted into the “it’s really all opinion, anyway” argument. There is some opinion in everything, I agree. Sadly the existence of a systemic problem in media and in gaming media specifically isn’t really up for debate. It’s been discussed at length by a lot of people, especially authors. You can’t use the fact that some people can’t identify prejudice to justify prejudice not existing at all… that’s downright Paranoia levels of circular logic.

I want to be clear: being a bit blind to sexism doesn’t mean you’re some sort of horrible misogynistic asshole who’s running around saying terrible things all the time, it just means you haven’t quite figured out how to see sexism hidden in the world around you. All of us have been there, you don’t need to be ashamed of it, just do your best to keep an open mind and learn. :)

The final fallacy that Jon fell into was the “a few people complained, but lots of people like it, so everything must be great!” The argument “lots of people agree with me, therefore I’m right!” is not meaningful, especially when you’re talking about -isms. It’s an appeal to base social pressure and has no bearing on the correctness of your argument.

I suppose at this point you’re probably wondering how I’m going to justify the title of this post. Well, to be totally honest, as much as parts of the article irritated me, Jon redeemed himself in my eyes by taking the initiative to write about something as scary as sexism in the first place, making an honest (if flawed) attempt to learn, and asking for our input.

I can remember the first time that I tried to write up a post on a feminist topic. I think my hand was actually shaking when I pressed the “Publish” button. It’s scary putting yourself out there to talk about any issue of prejudice, because we all know our culture is so ready to throw a firestorm back in your face if you get anything “wrong.” I appreciate and respect that Jon was willing to try and that WotC was willing to let him.

When I reached the end of his article I was overjoyed that he openly solicited our feedback and I was presented with a comment box to put my thoughts into. Wow, was I happy. I didn’t even realize how happy I was until I’d spent an hour skimming and “liking” other people’s comments. I wanted a chance to speak to WotC directly and he gave that to me, which I’m deeply grateful for. The number of people who posted ernest, well thought out comments, some with great links to resources, made me feel better about the community. It made me feel like other people believe I belong here. :)

A lot of the commenters were talking to Jon too and most were very civil. Some offered him links to resources (like some of the ones I posted above) and encouragement. I’m hoping he’s taken some of those links and moved forward on his own path to understanding.

So, thank you, Jon, and thank you, WotC. It had some issues, but I appreciated the outreach and the effort that went into it. Please keep learning and write more about sexism and other -isms in gaming in the future. :)

It’s acknowledged in the costuming community that people don’t need to be exactly the same as the characters they dress as. You don’t need colored contacts to perfectly match eye colors and it’s ok to dress as characters with body shapes or even genders that are different than your own. There are a lot of tricks the community accepts to make these costumes flattering: padding, control undergarments like corsets, chest binding, makeup, etc.

The one think you can’t do is paint your skin darker to portray a dark skinned person.

I can’t say that I instinctively understood why this is hurtful. I understood why it could hurt someone in theory, because there is such an enormous history of white people in dark makeup mocking dark skinned people. That was more than enough to stop me from doing it, even before I saw some of the really horrifying Victorian costuming magazines with “Negro” costume suggestions for the kids.*

For a long time there weren’t a whole lot of dark skinned characters that I wanted to dress as. I think this had less to do with my taste and more to do with the deplorable state of media in general. But in the last 5 years, I’ve started to see characters like Katara and Kyra. I started to want to cosplay as them.

The previous “no skin darkening” rule stopped me, but I was more confused and unsure about cosplaying without makeup. It wasn’t until more recently when a friend linked to this article that talks about Paizo’s race and gender sexualizing choices that I started to realize there was another issue, that was more than just a second issue.

There’s a history in the USA and in Hollywood of whitewashing characters. This came up when Avatar: the Last Airbender was made into a movie. I was not so thrilled about it at the time, because Katara was cast as a skinny blond girl, nothing like her original design. It seemed very unnecessary, just excluding for the sake of excluding.

When I read the post about Paizo and saw the part about the costume contest advertising using a white woman dressed as one of their darker characters, it clicked for me. Even though I can’t change my race, if I dress as a character who normally has dark skin, there are going to be people out there who don’t see a white woman who loves a dark skinned character, they’ll see the character being whitewashed.

This is worse, because I can’t paint my skin darker to portray the character more accurately without some people seeing it as mocking. There’s no way for me to express my love for Katara or Kyra through costuming without hurting someone.

I can’t tell the rest of fandom how much I want more characters like Katara by representing her at a con and that makes me really sad. If the world wasn’t full of systemic racism against non-white people, I might be able to, but the world is broken. It would be stupid to get mad at other people for being hurt by a broken world, so instead I’m going to be mad at the broken world for denying me what I want and hurting everyone.

I hope that people who can portray these characters without hurting others do. I want to see more Kataras and Kyras, and any number of other characters who aren’t white. I desperately want the costuming community to do them justice.

I wish there was more I could do to help.

* I need to scan these at some point so you get the full horror of them. The Victorians stop being so romantic and quaint when you remember how nauseatingly racist they were.

I made eye contact. I smiled. I asked vendors leading questions about their products like I always do. I found that in a minority of the time they treated me as if I knew nothing about gaming even when I said that I played RPGs. I’ve had people do this to me before. I look really young for my age, so I normally don’t mind letting them just assume whatever and go on with their job. The pitch is usually much the same, it just includes more intro and layman’s terms. This time it was different, because I realized that they weren’t making these kinds of assumptions about Alan.

There was one booth we stopped at where Alan was supremely uninterested and I thought the setting looked kind of cool. I picked up a book and skimmed the back, looked up at the nearest guy in the booth (there were three, all male, sitting around not doing anything), smiled, and asked some trivial question about the setting. The booth guy, instead of answering me, literally turned to Alan and answered my question. I was so shocked I just kind of stared at him. Alan was pretty startled as well.

There were other incidents, but that was the worst, the one that stood out above the others. I left that con feeling for the first time in my life like I did not belong. It hurt so much I couldn’t even express it.

When I was a kid GenCon was the one place outside my home where I felt totally accepted. I’ve attended almost every year of my life. I literally said my first words in a GenCon. Now it felt like the con had rejected me.

Soon I got angry. The man in that booth, he was probably half again as old as me. The chances are I’ve been to more GenCons than he has. I’ve been playing video and board games since before I started pre-school. The chances are I may have been gaming as long as or longer than he has. Fuck him. Fuck him and fuck his sexism.

GenCon doesn’t belong to just him. It belongs to all the gamers and geeks who attend. I attend and it belongs to me too. I sure as hell want the other people who attend to be less sexist, but even if they aren’t, I belong there and it’s also mine.

I’m not going to let prejudice drive me away from a hobby that I love.

Merry Christmas, 11 by ~Himmapaan (click on the image to see it on deviantart)

I want to wish all my friends, family, and blog readers (probably the same as the first two groups but hey, if you’re here I want to include you!) a happy winter holiday season and a lovely New Year.

Don’t forget to put the T-rex back in Christmas! :)

The song Baby It’s Cold Outside is creating a myth, a sort of idealized view of a romantic relationship. In this particular myth we’re told the girl resists the boy’s advances, saying no, possibly giving excuses of several sorts, but since the boy is persistent, the girl gives in and they’re happy. The important thing is, she gives in because she really does want to, she’s just worried about what people will say, so she needs to “put up a good fight”.

If a man buys into that pattern of romance, he really should badger and push his girlfriend for sex over and over, no matter how much she says no. Because she wants to have sex underneath, she just can’t admit it, or she won’t be a “good girl.” Now her boyfriend can’t tell sincere no’s from “coy” no’s and may be coercing her into sex (which incidentally is rape). Still he may honestly believe that she doesn’t mean what she says because he’s been taught this false model of how women act by popular culture.

This is the problem that I have with Baby It’s Cold Outside. “You should pressure her because she really does want to, even when she says no” is not a message I find acceptable. No means no and yes means yes. Teaching people that they’re interchangeable if you push is a nasty slippery slope. That slope is exactly where popular culture was standing when Baby It’s Cold Outside was written in 1936.

Please try again. This time actually tell me about your game.

Don’t confuse “world back story” with “stuff I need to know about your game”. Back story is nice, but it doesn’t tell me anything about what my experience is likely to be when I play.

Things about your game that I care about include:

• What I will be doing?
• Who I will be playing?
• Are there any interesting major themes I should know about?
• What style is the game (theater, horde, jeepform, etc.)?
• Is there any existing source material (books, tv shows, board games*, etc.) the game is based on?
• Why will your game offer me a different experience than the other games (I could be playing)?

Keep in mind that if something is going to be a huge super secret surprise which you’re going to keep under your hat for 10 whole minutes in the game, you should just tell the players in the description. They can pretend they don’t know for 10 minutes and if it’s that vital to your game they need to know about it to figure out if they’re the right players for your game.

That’s the most important thing. You want the right players in your game, the players who are the best match to the game. The better they understand the essence of your game, the better they can self select for you. Casting will be easier, you’ll have fewer mysterious drops, and everyone involved will be happier! ;)

* Unless you’re Mike Young, please don’t try to write Jumanji: the LARP. Do write Clue: the LARP though. I want to play that!

Well, I haven’t played exactly that game. He’s actually suggesting something lighter than Gumshoe. The spirit is similar, since it encapsulates skills determining if you find stuff automatically based on whether you have them or not. It sounds like in Cook’s case, he’s trying to maximize immersion by limiting when the players pause to roll dice. This supports a very old school style of play that encourages players to interact heavily with their in-game environment. In the case of Gumshoe, I believe the design goals has more to do with successfully modeling PCs following the trail of a mystery. You may learn more or less about what’s going on based on how you attack the investigation, but the system guarantees that you won’t end up stuck because you missed all the clues (which is no fun for the players or GM).

The lack of rolling to find things in Gumshoe hasn’t hurt the achievement I felt when I found things or when we solved the mysteries, I promise. The thing I think folks might be missing is, it’s not like having a GM fudge rolls. You aren’t “just being given things,” you earned them by spending your character resources on those skills and not others. There’s still plenty of rolling to flee horrible monsters or to convince crazy people not to shoot you in Gumshoe. If you spend all your points being good at noticing stuff, it’s going to get rough when you need to run away!*

A system like the one Cook is recommending could easily be generalized with the existing skills in D&D to allow you to run more investigation focused plots. This wouldn’t require major rules re-balancing or new kinds of die rolls, just a change in how the GM interacts with their players. If you focus on giving PCs information based on the things they are good at (maybe which skills they have trained for example) you can give them a world with a lot of detail while making them each feel like they have different tools to use to understand it.

If you also follow the three clue rule you have a much better guarantee that your players get most of your clues. When they use those clues to their advantage they’ll feel great. When they can’t make heads or tails of them, you’ll have more avenues to feed them stuff that keeps them going in the right general direction. If you want to do mystery and tactical combat in a fantasy setting, it’s a win-win.

*This is a gross simplification. There are a lot of trade-offs when you build a Gumshoe character and it just isn’t possible to be good at everything. ;)

What bothers me is that people often assume buy-in is static. You either like the world or you don’t. You’re either hyped about the system or you’re not. Your character is either the best thing since sliced bagels or she’s more boring than a wet towel in a half filled hotel housekeeping cart.

This is silly and it sets you up for self-fulfilling prophecies.

Sometimes you’re going to love what’s going into a game, you’ve already bought in and that’s awesome. You have no problem! When buy-in is high your excitement forms a cycle. You’re really into this, so you spend time and effort on your part of the game (your character, plotting your next move, writing back story, etc.). You get more excited and chances are that other people will find what you’ve done cool too. They feel inspired and buy in further as well. The cycle repeats.

Sometimes a game / plot / system / character / party / etc. doesn’t inspire you. You’re feeling kind of blah about it. If you assume that buy-in is static, there’s no reason for you to spend time or effort on that game. You’ve decided that you’re never going to care about it any more than you do now. There’s no possibility for a cycle.

If other people are really into the game, maybe you’ll eventually get excited or maybe you’ll never buy in.

If you assume buy-in is non-static, when the game is at least ok and you’re feeling blah you should always make an initial push to spend effort and time on it. Write some extra back story, spend time learning about the game world, or conspiring with the other players about PCs’ plans. Things still might not click, but there’s a chance that you’ll kick start that cycle and you’ll find yourself really into a game you thought was hopeless. Your excitement will raise the general level of buy-in and the game will get better for everyone.

This is a no lose situation for you. You try to “get into the game” more and the game can only get better. You have all the same options you had before if the game doesn’t improve.

Even if I’m wrong and your personal buy-in model is static in some cases (for instance you will never be excited by some GMs or systems), it’s worth making that initial push if you think the game has any promise at all. At worst you spend a bit of time and effort to discover that a game’s really not for you. At best you turn a blah game into something great!

Several initiative cards

When I started running 4th edition D&D I was intimidated by the prospect of being in charge of a combat. The sheer amount of information that you need to handle during a fight is kind of overwhelming. There are piles of monster defenses, initiatives, and all sorts of powers to juggle. The GM needs to make sure combat flows smoothly, which seemed incompatible with keeping all of that stuff straight and keeping 4 to 6 players on task.

Luckily, I met Jeff Sorensen at GenCon and he showed me how to use monster initiative cards. These cards let me literally hold all the stats I needed for a fight in a single hand. This massively upped my confidence in my ability to run fast, fun combat encounters.

Monster cards for some of my NaMoDesMo creatures*

When I got home I made up my own quarter-sheet card template similar to Jeff’s and started making cards. I made cards for monsters and cards for heroes. They made my game seem so much more polished when I had them ready to go each week.

All my monsters “take 10″ on initiative to speed up the beginning of combat and the players write their initiative values on their cards and pass them up to me. Then I sort the cards by initiative and flip through them as the fight progresses. I turn cards sideways to denote PC’s holding actions and move their card if they delay their entire turn to a different place in the order.

As I collected more and more of these cards I realized that I needed somewhere to store and organize them if I was going to reuse them. So I commissioned a custom recipe box on etsy from this gentleman. I affectionately call it my box of death.

The box of death

I make my cards with a semi-manual process because it forces me to read through the creatures’ abilities and consider how they could be used in combat. I pull the text for a monster from the Compendium using my D&D Insider subscription and then format it onto a Word template manually. The template has been refined many times over the last two years. When I’m done formatting, I print my cards on cardstock and cut them with a paper cutter.

Sometimes I make custom monsters for game sessions and sometimes I pull from what’s in my box. At the moment I’m working through the first Monster’s Vault in my spare time and making cards for all the monsters. I already did something similar with the MM3. This gives me lots of random monsters to pull from if I need to create an encounter on the spot.

If you’d like to make your own cards for personal use, please feel free to use my monster card template or my PC card template. If you redistribute monsters made with the template digitally I ask that you link back to this post and credit the template to me. (I hope it goes with out saying, but) Please don’t redistribute the blank templates, instead link to this post if you want to show them to people. ;)

Both templates are Word files and I can’t promise they’ll layout correctly in other programs like OpenOffice. I’m not a graphical designer, so my layout ability is shaky even without Word “helping” me. The text uses styles, so when you add new powers, you’ll want to look at the existing styles and reuse them. If you want to use the same icon set that WotC does, this gentleman has made a lovely font called Game Icons available for that purpose. I’m too lazy to use it much of the time, but it’s really neat!

If you use my templates I’d love to hear any feedback you have. I’ve tried to make them as usable as possible over the last two years. I’m sure that other people will have different thoughts and use cases beyond my own.

* A pdf version of this set of monster cards is also available. I’m slowly making cards for my NaMoDesMo creatures, but don’t currently plan to releasing the rest of these publicly.

I spend quite a bit of time with teenagers through my work with the Pirate Party. One thing that strikes me is that they don’t watch movies, at least nowhere near the quantity I did when I was a teenager. Just like I threw out my TV set 15 years ago, maybe this is just the natural progression of culture. Nobody would be surprised if we moved from monologue-style culture to dialogue- and conversation-type culture at this point in history.

I’ve heard other people talk about how works that you can’t interact with “damage” culture and how things that society does to remix them, like fan fiction and anime music videos, are a way of “repairing” culture. That whole concept always sounded ridiculous to me. Now I’m wondering, did it sound ridiculous because I don’t think culture is damaged by a movie or did it sound ridiculous because for the majority of my life I’ve been acclimated to the idea that if you love Star Wars and want to tell a Star Wars story there is nothing wrong with getting your friends together and playing a Star Wars table top RPG?

I started identifying as a gamer in my teens and part of being a gamer is assuming that almost any “monologue-style” piece of culture is fair game for you to turn into a game (which I would think qualifies as something more conversational). We don’t get in trouble for this. No one issues DMCA take down notices on our campaign journals or sicks SWAT teams on our Friday night gaming group.

No one tells us that we’re bankrupting Star Wars movies when we run a Star Wars RPG.

In essence, I already “own the rights” to play with mainstream culture as much as I want. So for me, where’s the “damage”? Before today I didn’t really consider the fact that most people aren’t free to do that. They don’t have an outlet to love things in a creative way that’s not technically criminalized. I still don’t see that as cultural “damage” but I do think it’s screwed up. Someone writing fan fiction isn’t hurting Star Wars monetarily any more when they post it online than I am when I sit down with my friends for an evening pretending to be Jedi.