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Old 10-10-2015, 10:52 AM   #101
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Default Re: Odious Personal Habits

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
Not a joke as there was a legitimate research experiment measuring its effect on how attractive others appear.
That doesn't mean it's not a joke. More than one joke is also a truth.
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Old 10-10-2015, 11:10 AM   #102
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Default Re: Odious Personal Habits

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That doesn't mean it's not a joke. More than one joke is also a truth.
The best jokes are Ha-Ha-Serious.
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Old 10-10-2015, 11:44 AM   #103
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How does a species reproduce when they find each other repulsive?
In the webcomic Blooming Fairies Orcs are repulsive for each other and this is solved by Orc females having saliva that is aphrodisiac.
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Old 10-10-2015, 07:32 PM   #104
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The thing with OPH: Eats Humans/Humanoids/whatever is that you eat them like you eat chickens, trout, or cows - you "dehumanize" other humans and reduce them to the level of animals in a pretty profound way. Cultures where cannibalism is practiced do it either in drastic survival contexts (the way Western European cultures practice cannibalism today) and in ritual contexts where eating the body is part of a ritual that is reserved for humans - it's specifically reinforcing that you're eating human.
Yes, that's a very good analysis. It fits how Keltic cannibalism works in my Ärth setting. That does have some shock value for many people (non-Kelts, and particularly people from Abrahamic cultures), but nobody eats brains often enough to justify the H in the acronym OPH.

At most it's a Reputation if someone has done it twice (but I don't think anybody has done that since the early iron age - you only eat someone's brain if he or she is in some way a very special person), or if somebody habitually engages in various grisly practices (one NPC wants to get himself a cloak made out of Human skin, to fulfil a prophecy, and he and several other characters also dissect corpses) but even then the one-time cannibalism would be a kind of footnote, quite possibly justifing bumping the Reputation up from -2 to -3 or from -3 to -4, whereas "once ate someone's brain" is only a -1 to a subset of the world's population. It wouldn't be the main "thing".
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Old 10-10-2015, 07:40 PM   #105
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In a Muslim culture you're probably wrong. OPH is culturally relative.
But a -15 OPH is the top end of the scale, and even a -10 OPH needs to be really really bad. That was the basis of the post of mine that you quited. Based on that, handling your own food with the wrong hand can't be more than a -5 OPH.
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Old 10-10-2015, 07:51 PM   #106
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I think we're discovering that some of these OPH might get mitigators for Not Amongst Own Kind.
William is right that OPH's are culture-dependent. I just don't agree with him about the eating-with-the-wrong hand thing specifically, because the OPH scale is very coarse-grained.
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Old 10-10-2015, 08:03 PM   #107
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How does a species reproduce when they find each other repulsive?
They find each other's Appearance repulsive (more or less).

But what if they don't care as much about Appearance as we Humans do?

The Felinoids of my mildly silly space opera setting care only to a limited extent about Appearance aethestics, although they ascribe a bit more importance to a healthy body (this justified GURPS' basing Sex Appeal on HT), e.g. in terms of muscular functionality and fur quality (they became apex predators even before they became a technological species, so their main concerns are or were parasites and infectious diseases).

What they do care about seems to be partly scent (all individuals smell subtly different, and they have keen noses) and on the other person being socially or intellectually interesting (the later bit partly explains why Felinoids are somewhat more likely than other species to enter into intimate partnerships with members of other species - a kind of "xenophilia").

I think if you wanted to simulate that aspect of them in GURPS (or in Sagatafl) you could "normalize" the effect of Appearance modifiers on them, taking the average of it and of zero, so that any modifier is effectively halved. Or reduce to 2/3 only for a less drastic effect.

Or you could say that Humans are the "reference species" of the setting (which would be reasonable - they're almost everywhere) and that it's not important enough to actually simulate that particular aspect of Felinoid social interaction and social evaluation.
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Old 10-10-2015, 08:23 PM   #108
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But a -15 OPH is the top end of the scale, and even a -10 OPH needs to be really really bad. That was the basis of the post of mine that you quited. Based on that, handling your own food with the wrong hand can't be more than a -5 OPH.
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.
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Old 10-10-2015, 08:46 PM   #109
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Default Re: Odious Personal Habits

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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.
Yes. "AUGH you put your poop hand in my food!" is a pretty horrifying realization.
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Old 10-10-2015, 09:07 PM   #110
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Default Re: Odious Personal Habits

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Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen View Post
But a -15 OPH is the top end of the scale, and even a -10 OPH needs to be really really bad. That was the basis of the post of mine that you quited. Based on that, handling your own food with the wrong hand can't be more than a -5 OPH.
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.
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