John Kim, on Vincent Baker’s blog:
And you know, when I look at people’s reactions to Dogs in the Vineyard or even Kill Puppies For Satan, I don’t see many people offended—judging by the threads on RPGnet or such. Vincent may get a clueless email or two, but most people just don’t care. The recent games people have gotten up in arms about are games like Blue Rose and Wraeththu. Guess why?
Context: Dogs in the Vineyard presents a sort of backward highly patriarchal society, but this was okay because we players are supposed to be in a position to judge it. (And also, the rough historical analogue did have this kind of patriachy.)
On the other hand, Blue Rose presents the trope of romantic fantasy, depicting a lot more gender / sexual equality than most fantasy. And yes, on several major fora, Blue Rose is held up as some oppressive tract, crushing down on the rights of the heterosexual.
Interesting, that.
April 11th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Tons of people have gotten mighty offended at Dogs. I don’t know where John is getting this stuff from.
Blue Rose is in wider distribution, so it gets more forum play. Since Dogs is spread by word of mouth, rather than marketing, the forum play it gets tends to be positive. This is true regardless of the content of the games.
yrs–
–Ben
April 18th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Ben, I’m prepared to believe you, but I haven’t seen it. I’m expressing what I’ve seen. Where have you seen this hate for Dogs?
I’m reading right now a thread on RPGnet called [Dogs in the Vineyard] Why haven’t you bought it? — where anyone who simply says “I’m not particularly interested in playing Mormon paladins in the Old West” gets multiple responses that that is no excuse not to buy and play Dogs.
Is the hate in places different than RPGnet? Or do you interpret things different and feel like there is a lot of hate for Dogs on RPGnet?
April 21st, 2006 at 8:59 pm
Remember Particle Man?
Because Dogs has buzz, not ads, it gets a different kind of hate. People say “How can I fix this setting so that nothing offends me?”
yrs–
–Ben
June 7th, 2006 at 6:02 am
we play a cyperpunk game where the world is very sexist, but the sexism is reversed. Women are sexist to men.
There is a lot of background and many campaigns by different gms about how that came about, but its very unusual and cool.
Its not really feminist as the way it developed is women act like men and are more violent, while the men like like women.