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Old 10-10-2015, 09:39 PM   #111
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Odious Personal Habits

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Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
Yes. "AUGH you put your poop hand in my food!" is a pretty horrifying realization.
Sure, but is it as bad as "AUGH, he eats people!?!?! He might eat me!!!1!"
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Old 10-10-2015, 09:41 PM   #112
Peter Knutsen
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In Muslim cultures, isn't it characteristic that you get a big dish of food that everyone pick up barehanded? "Your own food" is not well defined in a culture like that.
It is somewhere between fairly common and very widespread, yes (consult GURPS Arabian Nights if a more precise answer is desired). And yes, in such a situation the penalty for "handing food to others with one's toilet hand" is the one that should apply. And that might be a -10 OPH.
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Old 10-10-2015, 09:48 PM   #113
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*Given how often even self-professing "believers" of my own faith get things wrong, I don't know how relevant it actually is.
Religion and culture are often hard to tell apart.

There may well be a quranic sentence, or a hadith, that defines touching food with one's left hand as being sinful, but my take on things is that it's a Middle Eastern thing, one that arose long before the 6th century, and that a Jew or a Middle Eastern Christian (or even a Middle Eastern Zoroastrian) would be about as horrified at seeing food handled with the toilet hand as a Middle Eastern Moslem would (and likewise that a Moslem many generations removed from the Middle East might not be horrified at all, in fact might even notice it, same way few if any westernized Jews would).

So in GURPS terms it's a CF thing, not a Theology thing (although it should probably also be an OPH thing).

Or if you employ the CF/RF split that I've suggested as being useful for historical fantasy campaigns (that itself being a simplified version of what I do in Sagatafl, e.g. to simulate my Ärth setting) then the toilet hand thing belongs in the CF camp and not in the RF camp, according to my take on things.
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Old 10-10-2015, 11:58 PM   #114
David Johnston2
 
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Sure, but is it as bad as "AUGH, he eats people!?!?! He might eat me!!!1!"
Note that the "eats people" OPH doesn't require you to kill the people you eat. Carrion eaters also get it.
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Old 10-11-2015, 10:51 AM   #115
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OK, a 15 point OPH has to be something horrible and most of the stuff here isn't all that horrible. So my contribution to the idea of a 15 point OPH is:

Rapes little girls in public on a routine basis and expects to get away with it.
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Old 10-11-2015, 12:06 PM   #116
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Default Re: Odious Personal Habits

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Originally Posted by Otaku View Post
*Given how often even self-professing "believers" of my own faith get things wrong, I don't know how relevant it actually is.
Religion and culture are often hard to tell apart.

There may well be a quranic sentence, or a hadith, that defines touching food with one's left hand as being sinful, but my take on things is that it's a Middle Eastern thing, one that arose long before the 6th century, and that a Jew or a Middle Eastern Christian (or even a Middle Eastern Zoroastrian) would be about as horrified at seeing food handled with the toilet hand as a Middle Eastern Moslem would (and likewise that a Moslem many generations removed from the Middle East might not be horrified at all, in fact might even notice it, same way few if any westernized Jews would).

So in GURPS terms it's a CF thing, not a Theology thing (although it should probably also be an OPH thing).

Or if you employ the CF/RF split that I've suggested as being useful for historical fantasy campaigns (that itself being a simplified version of what I do in Sagatafl, e.g. to simulate my Ärth setting) then the toilet hand thing belongs in the CF camp and not in the RF camp, according to my take on things.
The full comment to which you were replying is

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According to RAW on p. B22 a -10 point Odious Personal Habit would be "Constant bad puns" or "Spitting on the floor".

Using the "wrong hand" to eat with could indeed get quite high depending on the culture. In this instance a cursory search indicates there may* be a religious aspect as well and there seems to also be a probable hygiene thing. Even if those cleansing themselves after defecating with their left hand and having no good way to clean said hand afterwards are throwbacks to a bygone era (like when you find that random person that still has an outhouse), it might take a while to shed the association from the mind of popular culture. Consider the sayings persist long after what inspired them has faded away.

If whswhs is correct about the serving practice of sharing food in a communal dish and the above two are also true, it is at least plausible (if not likely) that you just hit the -3 threshold. Some of the nastier OPH examples from RAW may be even worse, but it is a matter of the maximum being set at -3, even if something is hypothetically far worse.

*Given how often even self-professing "believers" of my own faith get things wrong, I don't know how relevant it actually is.
I have added emphasis in the hopes it clarifies what I was stating:

The "religious" consideration is apart from a more general "social" consideration though they may have a shared cause. This is actually quite common, though it can get muddied due to the various different faiths, the various different divisions within said faiths and perhaps most important personal understanding of said faith (not just how someone interprets something, but how competent they are in their faith).

Something can be viewed either negatively or positively by both the theist and the atheist, commonly held in the culture, but the exact reason why can differ. In most cases, something that both would agree is "wrong" will be because of natural consequences, but also because of something else for the theist like divine revelation. In this case, besides the practical reasons for a society responding poorly to using the wrong hand to eat, those belonging to a particular faith may have additional reason to respond poorly. The section of text you did quote was just me pointing out that I had not done in depth study and so passages of Muslim holy text that favor "right" over "left" that I encountered while barely looking into this could have been taken far out of context... but like similar Christian passages would be if used in a similar manner.

I also was pointing out that even if everyday life experience no longer contains the source of the original negative reaction, it may still persist for some time afterwards.
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Old 10-12-2015, 01:33 PM   #117
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The way fish do. They deposit the reproductive material on a rock and leave.
Now that I think of it, Lotr does a few times desribe orcs as being "spawned" rather then born, and that may not be just a given character's Fantastic Racism.

What would be more orcish? The ones we see are the one's that fought their way to adulthood amid millions of orc larvae?
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Old 10-12-2015, 01:39 PM   #118
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Rapes little girls in public on a routine basis and expects to get away with it.
That probably gets you Social Stigma (Monster), if not Enemy (Police; Hunted) or even Enemy (Howling Mobs; Hunted). I'm not sure you could do it often enough for it to count as a habit.
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Old 10-12-2015, 01:58 PM   #119
David Johnston2
 
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That probably gets you Social Stigma (Monster), if not Enemy (Police; Hunted) or even Enemy (Howling Mobs; Hunted). I'm not sure you could do it often enough for it to count as a habit.
You do need to pick a setting for an OPH. Assume it's a setting where there's no legal age of consent, the person in question is a man of rank and his victims are socially negligible. At that point public displays of his propensity (probably not actually raping them in public but making it blatant how he are using them) might just be a 15 point OPH, inspiring disgust but not legal sanctions or mob violence.
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Old 10-12-2015, 03:25 PM   #120
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That probably gets you Social Stigma (Monster), if not Enemy (Police; Hunted) or even Enemy (Howling Mobs; Hunted). I'm not sure you could do it often enough for it to count as a habit.
You can if you are a dictator or well-connected with one. Or a slaveowner which comes to the same thing on a smaller scale. You will still get a lot of Enemies.

A slaveowner who rapes slave children in public will have 15 point OPH among his slaves pretty obviously. Among freefolk he will probably have up to 5 points because it is a distasteful practice even when not threatening("rather an ill-bred fellow, don't you know"). What he does in private matters less-they're his slaves after all. Though one rather bitter Southern woman pointed out that Stowe actually didn't go far enough because she made Legree a bachelor.
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