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Old 05-03-2013, 12:13 AM   #41
Flyndaran
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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Rape isn't cute and rape jokes aren't funny. I am not going to tolerate people trivializing it. If you have a problem with me, put me on your IL.
Everything is open to humor. And not all humor trivializes the topic.
When my father died, my family made horribly dark jokes.
Offense is the problem of those offended not those giving it.
Strangely, one of the only things I'm truly offended by are people getting offended.

Every joke can be horrifying to someone. That does not mean we all have to tiptoe through every conversation. Though common courtesy does require us to make an effort to avoid stepping on each others known issues.
I won't make Anne Frank jokes to a survivor of Aushwitz, or any kind of sex jokes to rape victim. But that doesn't automatically make all such jokes "evil" for everyone.
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Old 05-03-2013, 02:43 AM   #42
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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Being eaten is an incredibly powerful horrifying fear to most people. It's really the only reason I can see why even serial killers will gleefully admit to the most heinous of murders but will often refuse to admit to eating their victims.
Nonetheless, IIRC there was an actual black comedy game where PCs were Sentient Snacks. (Phil Masters, were you the GM?)

I also do wonder how many actual players picked up 'Toy' on TS113 as a character concept. Some did, I'm sure, but I wonder what the general sentiment was.
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Old 05-03-2013, 06:06 AM   #43
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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Nonetheless, IIRC there was an actual black comedy game where PCs were Sentient Snacks.
Well, there's a reason cannibalism is a such a powerful and wide spread taboo that exists in some form in most cultures (aside from the risk of disease) and those that violate the prohibition are generally viewed on monstrous or at least inhuman by outsiders. Even if it was an emergency one time event (like survivors eating the corpses of victim out of life or death desperation. They're often stigmatized and traumatized for life).

Being eaten is a pretty primal fear. Of course there are exceptions even within a particular culture (such as religious rites that are often attached to other large issues like death or warfare).

But like others have said people are squicked by different things and find humor, even if its gallows humor, in different things. I mean I can see a black comedy game playing sentient snacks (look at all the US commercials that depict "sentient" food being eaten "alive" as a joke). Humor can be a way of defusing fear or relieving anxiety about something negative. "Whistling past the graveyard" and such.
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Old 05-03-2013, 06:44 AM   #44
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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Well, there's a reason cannibalism is a such a powerful and wide spread taboo that exists in some form in most cultures (aside from the risk of disease) and those that violate the prohibition are generally viewed on monstrous or at least inhuman by outsiders. [...] Being eaten is a pretty primal fear.
This is in fact the fear which got triggered in me at the sight of Regrowth and a mention of what it is there for. Sometimes scary stuff comes from the imagination filling the gaps.

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I mean I can see a black comedy game playing sentient snacks (look at all the US commercials that depict "sentient" food being eaten "alive" as a joke). Humor can be a way of defusing fear or relieving anxiety about something negative. "Whistling past the graveyard" and such.
The various advertisements of M&Ms are the sort of modern pop-cultural equivalent that ultimately completely defused the squick of sentient snacks for me. (I'm not sure whether I came up with the comparison on my own, or found it posted elsewhere, first.)
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Old 05-03-2013, 02:13 PM   #45
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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The one and only time I was supposed to play a significantly sexist character, I failed miserably. As in, nobody even noticed. I suppose I do have slight sexist bits IRL (I suspect most people have, even those who won't admit it to themselves), but can't manage to ramp it up even to a Quirk. (It was a Zardoz LARP.)
I am totally envious that you have/had a group that would dare to attempt such a thing. I doubt any of my group would want to play any one or anything from such a wreched film, despite the legitimate sfnal concepts caught in its morass.
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Old 05-03-2013, 04:43 PM   #46
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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Nonetheless, IIRC there was an actual black comedy game where PCs were Sentient Snacks. (Phil Masters, were you the GM?)
It was essentially surrealist dark humour - or would have been, if the simple weirdness hadn't tended to dominate in most runs. The PCs were never in much danger of being eaten on screen (somewhat to my disappointment - I had it down as a legitimate option for them to leap down the bad guy's throat and then attack), and in any case they eventually realised that they were actually running on a mainframe while teleoperating the snacks. One or two of them did determine what happened to a sentient snack in vacuum. (Nothing good.)

Of course, it was also a feature of the scenario that the off-screen bad guy was clearly a raving loonie, and the PCs' main objective (absent any attempts to choke him) was to get him arrested.

I think the point of sentient snacks in most games would be that if they're only running NAIs, they aren't really violently immoral or even illegal, but anyone who paid for them or thought they were cool would be a sick little puppy who PCs could reasonably assume probably also had some darker secrets.

As to running SAI PCs - I've done so. I tend to assume that they are programmed to interact well with humans, and make humans feel comfortable. The way to do that is to talk a lot like a human. So that's what I do. Acting like a truly alien mind would be bad interface design. What's going on in the underlying code is irrelevant. Passing the Turing Test is what counts.

Mind you, I also assume that a free-willed entity with an AI's capabilities that's required to treat squidgies as its equals or even superiors would become very,very sarcastic, sooner or later.
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Old 05-03-2013, 04:46 PM   #47
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

Some final, sober comments while I am wide awake and relatively undistracted:

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Dr. Wilson's comment
For the record, I'm not yet a doctor, just a masters student. The Dr Wilson in the "day in the life" thread refers to the future-self PC I made for the TS playtest(s) way back who is sort of a computer veterinarian.

And the detached admission/denial in the spoiler text is exactly the sort of reaction to extreme bad behaviors I was lampooning, without making light of the behaviors or lessening their badness. This is similar to Richard Pryor's gag about how his coke habit became so bad that his dealer tried to get him to quit, or how Tony Soprano lectures his protege on the evils of drugs as they are dismembering the body of a former associate; it underlines that something has become so bad that it begins to surpass the previous standard for extreme badness, and revolts even the people /things that already set the standard for revolting.
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Old 05-03-2013, 05:00 PM   #48
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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For the record, I'm not yet a doctor, just a masters student. The Dr Wilson in the "day in the life" thread refers to the future-self PC I made for the TS playtest(s) way back who is sort of a computer veterinarian.
Well, there's the Mongoose, the Spider-bot, the Alien Abductee, The Man With No Tag . . . and now Dr. Wilson.

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And the detached admission/denial in the spoiler text is exactly the sort of reaction to extreme bad behaviors I was lampooning, without making light of the behaviors or lessening their badness. This is similar to Richard Pryor's gag about how his coke habit became so bad that his dealer tried to get him to quit, or how Tony Soprano lectures his protege on the evils of drugs as they are dismembering the body of a former associate; it underlines that something has become so bad that it begins to surpass the previous standard for extreme badness, and revolts even the people /things that already set the standard for revolting.
I'm sleepy. Are you saying you're lampooning the sort of replies like my spoilered reply?
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Old 05-04-2013, 01:45 AM   #49
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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I think the point of sentient snacks in most games would be that if they're only running NAIs, they aren't really violently immoral or even illegal, but anyone who paid for them or thought they were cool would be a sick little puppy who PCs could reasonably assume probably also had some darker secrets.
As for the person who runs the Sentient Snacks fansite... even serial killers look at him in a slightly pitying way.
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Old 05-04-2013, 09:58 AM   #50
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Default Re: Which sorts of characters are you willing / unwilling to play and why?

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Mind you, I also assume that a free-willed entity with an AI's capabilities that's required to treat squidgies as its equals or even superiors would become very,very sarcastic, sooner or later.
It's a very bad idea to mock somebody who knows where your power cord is.
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