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MU Peeves Thread
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@imstillhere said in MU Peeves Thread:
IMO, it’s not great to take a stance like ‘the church is in control of reproduction’ unless players are explicitly allowed to take a swing at that institution and that massive social control. Are they allowed or encouraged to make motions back to their own autonomy? Fuckfruits for all?
‘The church is in control of reproduction’ is one thing. ‘The church is in control of people’s bodies and everyone is chill with this IC because that is our ooc policy’ is uhhhhh less good.
I’m going to push back on this.
A game should disclose elements of its IC setting which are going to be dealbreakers for people. If you read an element of a game that is a dealbreaker, and decide “Oh man, don’t want to play there because that’s not something I’d find fun,” that’s good! The system is working, and now that game can select for players who will engage with the setting in good faith, and the players who would hate that setting can go elsewhere.
But saying, “Oh, I hate that element of the setting, so it’s a bad game unless you let me make a character who will try to dismantle that setting because of my OOC dislike for it…” well, that’s not good. That’s a dick move, unless the game is specifically set up to be ‘about’ cultural revolution.
Let other people have fun doing their thing. You don’t have to be involved. Not everything has to be for you, and no game should feel obligated to cater to or support characters that are just there to be disruptive because their players don’t like the setting.
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@Pyrephox said in MU Peeves Thread:
A game should disclose elements of its IC setting which are going to be dealbreakers for people. If you read an element of a game that is a dealbreaker, and decide “Oh man, don’t want to play there because that’s not something I’d find fun,” that’s good! The system is working, and now that game can select for players who will engage with the setting in good faith, and the players who would hate that setting can go elsewhere.
But saying, “Oh, I hate that element of the setting, so it’s a bad game unless you let me make a character who will try to dismantle that setting because of my OOC dislike for it…” well, that’s not good. That’s a dick move, unless the game is specifically set up to be ‘about’ cultural revolution.
Let other people have fun doing their thing. You don’t have to be involved. Not everything has to be for you, and no game should feel obligated to cater to or support characters that are just there to be disruptive because their players don’t like the setting.
This is something I’m running into as I start looking into L5R more and more. In a setting where your own dirty eyes can deceive you (you can clearly see that waterfall, but the imperial maps say there isn’t a waterfall… until the Imperial maps are updated, this means that the Emperor has declared the waterfall does not exist)… you can remove any perceived problem with the setting by simply having the Emperor declare something is legal now.
But also, how much will changing things affect the vibe of the setting? Is tricksy.
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@Tez I didn’t gloss over it, that was part of my point re worldbuilding by describing how reproduction is handled. In this case reproduction is handled by fuckfruit and the church of fuckfruit.
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@Pyrephox
I have seen other games use a ‘social contract’ (credit given to this blog post for the details) and I think having policies presented this way is much more productive than just saying “this is the way it is IC”.The social contract approach tells me if a theme’s elements I find potentially problematic are there to be engaged with in a compelling way, to examine a particular theme, or if I’m expected to swallow it straight-up because that behavior is just part of the world that staff wants to live in. Given that there are a list of potentially problematic human behaviors that used to be (and in some communities still are) normalized, this is an important distinction for players to have.
Without this context, I don’t know what “engaging with the setting in good faith” looks like, and I don’t know whether to be squicked IC or OOC.
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There are so many other places where one can have as many children ic with no limits other than not being able to force another player into participating without their consent. Or even where you can force your pc into a family or whatever without consulting the other people in it (just need approval from staff) via themes of background adultery by npcs shared by family members ect.
I don’t think every game need take that approach, and honestly I don’t think any type reflects on the humanity or the character of the runners.
Its okay to not like something, there’s no personal character judgement in that either or shouldn’t be imo. I think people from similar backgrounds can have very different reactions and interest levels in RP that might touch on things that echo that experiment.
If you find something grating or stupid or distressing, then it’s important to listen to that and walk away from it. You don’t/shouldn’t pick a painful scab with a game. I wouldn’t assume anything about people with a different reaction or who want to explore those themes or aren’t bothered by the setting though.
Even fuck fruits aren’t unique. That’s what changeling had to do at some point didn’t they, when the first rule about all changeling could not have children was instituted there was a goblin fruit or whatever. But that was decades ago so I may be misremembering, I do remember a large cry about it from the people who loved rping out being pregnant and the like. Which again, no real shade here, family play is fun for those who like it.
I think the other thing is emphasis though. This game does not penalize adoption over “real” children, which also can be a sensitive topic! And it makes sense given this topic too. The game doesn’t so far seem to be terribly centered around All My Trueborn Children that I have seen. So it might be a meh to some folks that it would be a bigger problem if that was what a great deal of emphasis was placed on.
Given the significant restrictions for a married in PC too, I am not even sure i would consider this a game in which building families and setting up dynasties in the scope of the game is even something heavily emphasized as something everyone should do in the scope of the game but I’m going to guess a lot of people also really haven’t read up on that either, and there may be some surprises when the door opens to ic marriages between pcs.
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While I appreciate that fertility and reproduction is a really sensitive topic that I - as a gay cis man who doesn’t like or want children - am not best placed to entirely understand, I think it is worth pointing out there is some added nuance that does seem to have been missed.
I think it is just worth clarifying that since the game opened, the staff have been pretty clear that while sex and romance are fine, they wanted people to hold off on marriage and babies. There have thus far (to my knowledge) been 0 IC marriages and 0 IC pregnancies, so nothing ongoing will have been changed or need to be retconned by this.
Had I been Spes, I would have avoided the phrase “Humans in Ignovis are universally infertile from birth” as my opening sentence on that page, as it is just too emotive. From reading it a few times myself, the takeaway is that “everyone can be fertile if they eat the magic fruit,” so there is no biological bar to anyone having children, if they just eat the fruit.
There has been absolutely no suggestion that the church is going to block anyone from having children. In fact, the accompanying BB post explicitly states that if you are married and want a baby, you can entirely handwave the process and get the fruit as and when you wish it.
In fact, it is worth noting that there is no monolithic “the church” but actually seven separate regional religions and one (largely) atheistic secular administration handling the distribution of the fruits. So you would really have to do a lot to piss off every source of the fruit to the extent it was impossible to get.
I, as the player of an unmarried gay character, specifically raised the point of how my character could have a child if they wanted with Spes, and she was very encouraging. we talked about how my character could adopt if they wished to and how that is very common.
Because this is ultimately a medieval fantasy Lords and Ladies game where everyone is a high-powered member of the nobility, I would (perhaps wrongly) assume most people would understand that kids will generally happen within the context of marriage, which is part of the theme when they sign up for such a game.
So, the only real grey area is quite rare cases, such as an unmarried couple, a female character who wants to be single mum, or a same-sex couple who wants to have a child by surrogacy, as examples. From playing other Lords and Ladies-style games, all of these seem to be vanishingly rare in the genre.
Even in those instances, there is no suggestion that it will be denied or even particularly difficult; you just need to put in a request and talk it through with the staff. The only real concern that Spes has raised in her post is that she doesn’t want anyone to have an unplanned or unwanted child inflicted upon them, so (to me) it just seems like a box-ticking exercise to make sure everyone is consenting in those cases.
As I said before, I appreciate it is a really emotive topic, and people can have a very visceral reaction (and that is not wrong), but those points had not really been brought up, and I did think it was worth bearing them in mind as for me they do somewhat change the character of the policy.
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I would also like to add my two cents from my experiences and takeaways from the game as I play (as much as I can due to RL time constraints). I did not see any issue with the clarification of IC theme that was added, because from the previous lore that was available, having children did add potential dire results that can affect a region, or even the realm.
“However, the moment the first child was born to this second generation of Beyonders – the Lost Generation who have never experienced even a moment of life in their respective “real” worlds– new rifts tore open the sky, dozens of them, each responsible for a new threat.”
So having the staff put some sort of thematic control over birth of children in the game makes sense. Now, I don’t know when the staff decided on the official IC system, but the game is still in Beta and I would personally give the staff the benefit of the doubt that they are treating Beta as a real Beta. Now the Betas of video games nowadays that is basically a free advertisement to pre-order the game.
The various posts on this subject though is definitely an opportunity for me to learn how some people can be very uncomfortable with this decision since the bbpost update didn’t hit me as hard as it hit some of the other players or those who are keeping an eye on the game.
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@Pacha you say nothing needs to be retconned by this because there are no IC children, but that doesn’t make it true.
At the very least, you can’t know everyone’s RP all the time. Did someone mention having a period? Do they have periods without the fuck-fruit? Did someone mention trying for kids? At the very least, they would have known about this in that conversation, etc.
While sure, no big IC pregnancy or child needs to be retconned, you literally can’t know that nothing needs to be retconned.
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I can’t tell if I’m proud or ashamed of how effortlessly “fuck-fruit” has caught on.
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@GF said in MU Peeves Thread:
I can’t tell if I’m proud or ashamed of how effortlessly “fuck-fruit” has caught on.
Surely there is a German word for you to be both, simultaneously.
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@GF Its actually a One Piece cross over. Its called Fucky Fuck Fruit.
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Point well taken.
There are no pregnancies that would need to be retconned. However, yes, I totally accept the point you made that some other potential RP around the issue might have been impacted.
Thanks for bringing that up.
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@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:
There has been absolutely no suggestion that the church is going to block anyone from having children. In fact, the accompanying BB post explicitly states that if you are married and want a baby, you can entirely handwave the process and get the fruit as and when you wish it.
In fact, it is worth noting that there is no monolithic “the church” but actually seven separate regional religions and one (largely) atheistic secular administration handling the distribution of the fruits. So you would really have to do a lot to piss off every source of the fruit to the extent it was impossible to get.
If it’s so easy to handwave the entire issue away, then why exactly is it lore there to begin with if it’s just that easy mitigate?
To me, if you can just handwave that, then I guess from my perspective, I don’t see a point in the lore even existing.
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I somewhat agree with you. I was mostly responding to the concern that a lot of people had raised about “The Church” controlling people having babies, and obviously, given the situation in the real world, that is alarming when taken out of context.
So, I wanted to add the context I thought was being missed, but I cannot speak to what was in Spes’ mind when she wrote it.
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I, for one, hope that it isn’t discriminatory! Let the gays and lesbians have babies, too, if they partake of the fuck-fruit. Just how weird can we get with it?
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Did anyone answer if you have to eat it or if it has to be involved with the intercourse in some way?
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@somasatori …I really hope ‘fuckfruit’ isn’t literal.
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It says “The fruit’s flesh is soft and juicy, with a small, edible seed at its center. Technically, the seed is what grants fertility, but the flesh is said to provide for healthy pregnancies and birth.” and also “For a couple to become fertile, both individuals must consume the Evenplum.” so I do assume it is intended to be taken orally, as opposed to a suppository.
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@Pacha The fruit has a single seed, which is the source of fertility, but both partners have to eat it? So they have to split the seed?
