"Damn Y'all, White Wolf": Ableism in Exhalted.

[theotherbaldwin]

Pretty interesting analysis of ableism in the Merits and Flaws of 2nd Ed. Exhalted. A Former White Wolf writer weighs in with a comment, too.

An excerpt:

Thing is: Because I’m making a new character I’m taking an enormous hit on experience and power - the character I’ve been playing has more than twice as many experience points as the GM is giving me

Comments

[namiko]

I'm torn between wanting to say.... Yes, it is pretty terrible that they would assume that there wouldn't be enough people with various speech and/or hearing issues that a semi-decent, semi-standardized sign language exists, and knowing that there are a metric asston of gamers who would abuse the everliving fuck out of it if there was (Remember thieves' cant

[theotherbaldwin]

Probably a better solution would have been to make it a 5-point flaw and make "sign language" a 1-point linguistics skill. IIRC, WW works languages through families anyway - i.e., you take a dot in "romance languages", not specifically Italian or Spanish or whatever, so there's no reason a dot in sign couldn't represent fluency with your regional standardized sign language and the chance of passing familiarity with other versions that you might encounter.

I think this is pretty much the best solution.

Even with players we trust, we sometimes find ourselves doing things like declaring that there's no one under the age of 10 in our Conan game so the berserkers can't dual-wield babies because improvised weapon doesn't explicity deny living creatures >.>

WHAT

[namiko]

The same player is also responsible for a lack of basilisks in an old Warcraft game I ran. I'm starting to think I should just issue blanket proclamations at the beginning of every game he's in that living creatures can never be used as weapons. Ever. No matter how cleverly you use your class skills. And even if the lore supports riding them into war and your character has a strength of 22. ;-)

[mullenkamp]

See, given my past groups, I didn't even blink an eye at that. I had a whole group full of those types once...

[ellindsey]

"Even with players we trust, we sometimes find ourselves doing things like declaring that there's no one under the age of 10 in our Conan game so the berserkers can't dual-wield babies because improvised weapon doesn't explicity deny living creatures >.>"

That would seem to me to be a clear-cut example of a case where the GM should over-rule the game rules rather than declaring something that doesn't make any sense. Either that, or have in-game consequences of using babies as weapons, such as NPC heroes being hired to hunt the PCs down.

[namiko]

Hi! I'm Cassie. I don't think we've met.

The thing about the babies? It's an intentional, humorous (well, to me, anyway ;-)) overreaction to the sort of odd logic leaps that go through some of my friends' minds. Which is more fun: just saying "the rule doesn't work that way" and moving on, or watching my players try to come up with some way around the lack of babies? They've started getting pretty creative... and I think I caught them eyeing the party scholar for handholds...

More on topic, but dealing with the rules assumptions of people who aren't named Dave, if WW hadn't put the thing about the sign language in there, I think most GMs would just assume it exists and the person with the speech/hearing issue would be able to use it (Holy run on sentence, Batman!). More rules aren't always better. Games are tricky that way.

[theotherbaldwin]

TThis is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.