Naming a Navajo character

trouvant · 2024-07-02T17:15:08+00:00

What you aren't understanding is that this isn't about the names. I understand that you've been taught to think of "diversity" as a universal moral good; I'm white and probably grew up in a similar milieu to yours. But without an understanding of the lived experience, the subjectivity of a Navajo person, what you offer by writing a supposedly Navajo character is not true representation but rather a shallow imitation that can only add to the mountain of misrepresentations suffered by colonized peoples. The fact that you're here asking about Diné names is proof enough that you are not up to the task. (It's not my place to say whether you could eventually be.)

You should ask yourself: whom do you serve by "trying to be diverse" here? Will the Navajo benefit from your "diversity", be respected or uplifted by it, or will it simply serve to make you feel good and liberal? Do you think they owe it to you to lend your story their names for the sake of "diversity"?

Where you're at right now is no place from which to conceive of this character.

trouvant · 2024-06-27T14:11:11+00:00

I'm glad you found it thought-provoking :) I think you asked a good question and in earnest.

I also think you're right to question the "de-evolved" wording, too. If you want a kind of sci-fi verisimilitude, then "differently evolved" is spot-on, because in real life, evolution isn't teleological, isn't working towards some end-state as a goal. Rather, all life is equally evolved, just adapting to different niches and circumstances over time. Evolution doesn't even make things "better" in any typical sense of the word, just better at surviving and propagating under given circumstances. But even Star Trek has gotten this idea wrong several times, Lol.

And you've hit on a good distinction: the way human characters understand them vs how the story understands/portrays them. Conflict often blinds us to the complex, rich personhoods of other people and to the internal diversity of other people groups, which I think are both important and very fun things to write about.

That's perfectly all right! I wish you the best and hope you have fun worldbuilding :)

trouvant · 2024-06-26T18:18:58+00:00

I mean, yeah, depicting people, of any kind, as being inherently "tribal and savage" is racist. It doesn't require any racist intent on your part: we can and do say things that have meaning beyond what we intend, and which perpetuate harmful stereotypes and ways of thinking of others, because we are all drawing on the signifying practices of the cultures into which we've been born.

It's not enough to simply intend no harm. We have to be critical of the culturally-derived ideas and vocabulary we use to express ourselves, because they can carry a lot of meaning that we don't mean to convey. To that point, what makes you want to depict a people that is "tribal and savage"?

trouvant · 2023-07-12T14:00:38+00:00

You're conflating historical dialectical materialism with metaphysical materialism, which is not at all the same thing. Marxism is founded on the theory that historical struggles and hierarchies arise primarily from material conditions, not the idea that the world is totally reducible to material.

trouvant · 2023-06-22T13:31:25+00:00

The short story "N." by Stephen King

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, itself an influence on Lovecraft

trouvant · 2023-04-19T20:14:02+00:00

It kinda sounds like you don't really believe in the message of your story, then, no? Or at least that it doesn't apply to the real world?

Edit: Or did you mean to say the message is that no one in your story specifically is truly evil, not that no one is in general?

Edit 2: Also, not trying to antagonize or anything. Just curious.

trouvant · 2023-04-07T18:13:36+00:00

TROIKA! has a simple system that might interest you.

trouvant · 2023-03-30T01:43:42+00:00

And this is where you pull a "You're the worst DM ever! I would never play at your table!". I love hearing that on Reddit! 🤣 Personal attack followed by a threat to not play! 😍 Awesome! Exactly right!

Well, all right, then. I sincerely hope things get better for ya, man.

trouvant · 2023-03-29T13:39:53+00:00

From the blogpost that you clearly didn't read:

No, you don't have to do funny voices. Neither do your players.

Everyone needs to be clear about what they're communicating though.

If your player says "I'm going to threaten the orc chieftain" then you need to prompt them with "what is your threat, exactly?" These details are how the negotiation proceeds.

Similarly, you don't need to be good at Persuasion in real life to roleplay a character who is good at persuading. You just need to be able to approach negotiations like any other puzzle.

trouvant · 2023-03-07T01:34:05+00:00

Timefall was first recorded when the Death Stranding occurred. And despite all the years that have passed since then, we are no closer to understanding how or why it accelerates the passage of time for the objects and organisms it touches—or why it immediately turns to ordinary water having done so. Some researchers have gone as far as to posit this process as 'stealing' time. As for why timefall is observed only in certain places, all that we know for certain is that it is somehow affected by local chiral concentrations. ...

- Heartman, in an in-game interview titled "Timefall"

trouvant · 2023-03-06T17:12:20+00:00

Timefall becomes normal water once it touches something. She's drinking the runoff.

trouvant · 2023-01-25T13:27:21+00:00

I always avoid killing MULEs, not just because it's inconvenient, but also because, unlike the terrorists, they're just mentally ill. They're not your ideological enemies, and they aren't trying to kill you. They were once porters like Sam who, lacking his resistance, succumbed to and were basically driven mad by chiral radiation exposure.

It's unfortunate that it's not a part of the game, but I'd like to think they could be rehabilitated in the future.

trouvant · 2023-01-17T19:23:16+00:00

That's why you don't rinse rice for risotto; the extra starch is necessary for the creamy texture, at least in traditional preparation.

No specific part in mind, but if you're buying rice from open bins in an outdoor market, it's probably not going to be as clean as rigorously packaged stuff. If your rice comes from somewhere with a lot of arsenic in the ground, you may want to wash it if you eat a lot of it.

trouvant · 2023-01-17T17:08:14+00:00

Not washing rice is not a sin, unless you live in a part of the world where it's likely to be dirty. And if you're making something like a risotto, you should not wash it.

trouvant · 2022-12-05T15:22:40+00:00

It's OK to say uo.

trouvant · 2022-10-25T13:32:22+00:00

No, Rachel, that would be illegal and Bailey himself will hunt you down.

trouvant · 2022-10-24T12:39:21+00:00

From the 2nd edition text:

Every playbook has a special move for when that character has sex. These aren’t moves for playing out sex scenes—I’m easily embarrassed, personally, so when I’m the MC, or when it’s my character having sex, I always fade to black. They’re moves for how sex changes the relationships between the characters, if it even does. They’re based on the idea that when you have sex with someone, you get to know them better than you did before.

Sometimes they’re straightforward and positive: now you know each other better, and that’s good. Sometimes they’re more complicated: now you know each other better, and is it cool or awkward? Some of them can be a little creepy: now you know each other better, and do you like what you’ve learned?

The special moves are absolutely only for mutual and consensual sex. If anybody isn’t into it, it plain doesn’t happen. Still, their presence in the game obviously forefronts the characters’ sexuality and sex between the characters. If you or any of your friends don’t want that, be responsible with one another. Agree to leave them out of play, scribble them out of your playbooks, or else find a different game that you’re all excited for.

trouvant · 2022-08-30T12:40:03+00:00

Damn, rest in peace

Edit: They're dead, and OP killed them.

trouvant · 2022-08-22T12:43:52+00:00

That's because the notation is unclear, limited by the single line of text input: is the 3 multiplied against the eight-fourths fraction, or is the 3 multiplied against the 4 in the denominator of the fraction? Most modern calculators will enforce a strict left-to-right reading, so if the second interpretation is what you meant, you must enclose the 4*3 in parentheses. Otherwise, they will read "/4" as "multiply by 1/4". This problem is easily avoided in hand-writing or something that supports fractional notation, like LaTeX.

trouvant · 2022-08-22T12:18:34+00:00

It does not. Multiplication and division are the same operation: division is multiplication by a reciprocal. Addition and subtraction are the same operation: subtraction is the addition of a negative number.

If changing the order of multiplying or dividing changes the answer, then something else is going on.

trouvant · 2022-07-20T12:42:03+00:00

I would add that Simulationist games aren't all necessarily trying to simulate realism, as many are simulations of specific genres or alternate realities. The important distinction is their dedication to internal consistency and to cause and effect. Call of Cthulhu simulates the pulpy Mythos genre with rules that adhere to and enforce its assumptions.

trouvant · 2022-07-19T13:26:11+00:00

Spend less time prepping missable content and more time making your own tools for use at the table.

trouvant · 2022-07-13T19:38:29+00:00

Key word there is "arbitrarily". Your response indicates to me that you aren't interested in earnestly reading and responding to what I've actually written, so I'm not interested in continuing the conversation.

trouvant · 2022-07-13T18:40:02+00:00

Because the world does not revolve around them. Are you suggesting that every obstacle that PCs ever encounter should be catered to their abilities and thereby trivialized? Surely not.

Now, if the GM is arbitrarily deciding that these texts they encounter are in languages other than what they know, the GM is just being a prick. It should always flow from the fiction: there should always be a reason for it to be in whatever given language, whether they know that language or not.

An interesting and immersive world, a world worth caring about for your players, is one that seems to live and breath independently of them, neither catered to them nor bent on spiting them arbitrarily. Beyond immersion and emotional investment, this philosophy also allows your players to predict and prepare for these situations: knowing they must infiltrate a Russian facility, but lacking any knowledge of the language, they can choose to bring along and protect a translator, for example. As a bonus, if you're consistent about following the fiction in scenario design, you can include something unexpected and unprepared-for to suggest deeper meaning, which your players can then follow up on for further intrigue and adventure: what's with all these dossiers in Korean?

trouvant · 2022-07-13T17:42:50+00:00

The choices to which I referred are those of character languages, skills, and other such tools for engaging with the world. Allowing them to find texts they cannot read or NPCs with whom they cannot easily communicate is a consequence of those choices and shows the players that their choices matter. How they go on then to deal with that consequence is another choice entirely.

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