{"id":45852,"date":"2019-03-10T06:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T10:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=45852"},"modified":"2019-03-09T23:46:29","modified_gmt":"2019-03-10T04:46:29","slug":"6-touch-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=45852","title":{"rendered":"#6 Touch Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

Players can roleplay with each other, or they can roleplay against each other. The former lends itself to creating great stories filled with interesting people. The latter is just a good way to amuse yourself if the campaign sucks.<\/div>\n


<\/p>\n

Shamus Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here is the most unpopular strip I\u2019ve ever written. Some people became very, very incensed at what happened to Marcus\u2019 character. Enraged. I wrote a strip about one comic character\u2019s character groping another character\u2019s character during an out-of-context aside that didn\u2019t even involve the GM, and I was accused of making \u201crape jokes\u201d. I actually thought what I wrote was pretty tame compared to some of the crazy griefing stories people have told me.<\/p>\n

But the difference between what I was trying to say and what people were hearing was so big there was just no reconciling the two sides. I never stopped to figure out how many people quit reading, but some did leave and never came back. This was probably the low point of my webcomic adventures.<\/p>\n

Internally, Shawn and I called this event \u201cOMG RAPEGATE\u201d.<\/p>\n

But just to be clear: Rape is bad and you shouldn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here we go, ZOMGRAPEGATE \u201807. (Shamus left out the \u201cZ\u201d.)<\/p>\n

In any collaborative endeavor, you\u2019re going to have the occasional bump or misfire, where things don\u2019t turn out as planned \u2013 especially early on, when you\u2019re still finding your legs. This was ours, with the added bonus that thanks to the popularity of DM of the Rings, we had several thousand people around to see it.<\/p>\n

I think part of it was hit on the head pretty solidly by one of the commenters on Twenty Sided back in \u201807. The real punch line of this strip isn\u2019t here, it\u2019s in strip #7, with Chuck\u2019s line about \u201cexploring gender roles.\u201d So part of the problem was that instead of one day of a joke that could be taken in a way we didn\u2019t intend, people had like a week+ of that joke.<\/p>\n

We actually spent quite a bit of time writing and rewriting this strip before it went live. I thought the basic premise was funny (\u201cNew guy makes a ridiculously sexed up female character, old player is annoyed, has his character make out with her\u201d) but that we needed to handle things carefully so that it didn\u2019t come across wrong.<\/p>\n

And then it came across much wronger than either of us had anticipated.<\/p>\n

This might get us in more trouble, but here\u2019s a peak behind the scenes. I don\u2019t remember what Shamus\u2019s original punchline was, but it wasn\u2019t \u201cImproved Stamina.\u201d I came up with a number of alternate suggestions, and Shamus made a few more, and in the end he settled on Improved Stamina, which was I think a mistake. As one of the commenters back in \u201807 pointed out, you don\u2019t need Improved Stamina to make out, but you would want it for sex. Anyway, here are some ways this strip almost ended<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of these are every bit as \u201csex, not makeouts\u201d as the final punchline, but I think a few them would really have lessened the negative reaction back when this originally ran. (In particular, \u201cWhere is the Clasp on this thing?\u201d works very well, but I\u2019m a huge fan of \u201cLend me some suger, I am your neighbor\u201d, even if Chuck would probably never make an Outkast joke.)<\/p>\n

Ah well, hindsight, 20\/20, all that.<\/p>\n

A few more thoughts:<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: I find it fascinating that even this early on people were willing to read the reality of the Player Characters as being every bit as valid as the reality of the Players. We\u2019d barely shown the PCs, but most of the people who were offended weren\u2019t upset at what Chuck did to Marcus, they were upset at what Ramgar did to Sapphire. This was a reaction I don\u2019t think either of us had expected.<\/p>\n

B: This was the first time I\u2019d really come across the idea that if someone creates a piece of media depicting an act or opinion, that it must mean the creator is endorsing or supporting that act or opinion. We had a lot of people who thought Shamus and I were saying rape is ok, or that playing female characters is a terrible thing to do, or that we were homophobic, or all kinds of things. This was very strange to me, as my previous comic featured chain smoking, graphic murder, sex, torture, and much more. I don\u2019t think anyone ever thought I was endorsing any of those things. (Except sex.)<\/p>\n

For the record \u2013 I generally find the characters in CB somewhat repulsive pretty much all of the time. That\u2019s kind of the point. These are horrible players who are also generally self absorbed, rude, obnoxious, hypocritical, and slightly insane.<\/p>\n

C: I think it was a matter of expectations among the audience as well. People reading Doors and Windows knew it was a film noir\/horror story, so sex and violence were to be expected. Coming from DMotR, people expected the occasional Legolass style joke, but not Gimli molesting the new guy.<\/p>\n

Anyway, see you on Friday when the saga continues. If we can have a thoughtful discussion of 2007\u2019s dramasplosion and what went wrong here, that would be awesome.<\/p>\n

EDIT 2019: I still think this joke can work. Or at least, I think it’s possible to do this joke without upsetting a major segment of the audience. I think Shawn is right that “Improved Stamina” is what really put an ugly image into the heads of some readers. That, combined with the way I took what was conceptually a single joke and stretched it out over three strips, is what led to the unpleasantness.<\/p>\n

If I’d gone with one of the other punchlines<\/a>, I think this could have gone a lot better. <\/p>\n

Not sure why I went with that line and not the others. I think I liked that it referenced a misapplication of the rules. I’ve always loved making that particular style of joke. I love situations where players use the rules in ways that are technically legal but obviously ridiculous. If you can create an absurd situation by obeying the letter of the law while flagrantly violating the spirit of the law, then that’s a huge win in my book.<\/p>\n

For example: Your party finds themselves in a fantasy-world town where everyone believes the world is flat. It’s actually round in this setting, and you need to somehow convince the townies of this before they’ll agree to fund your voyage. So the bard uses his “deception” skill to convince them that the world is round. The DM will argue that this isn’t deception because you’re trying to convince someone of something that’s already true. So the player argues that actually, their bard ALSO thinks the world is flat, thus making this count as a deception. Silly meta-gaming stuff like that really tickles me.<\/p>\n

Looking back 10 years later, I’m thinking a better version of the “improved stamina” line would be, “If I try to undo this clasp, would that be a grapple roll, or lockpicking?” That’s a little wordy, but it sort of works as a dual joke. You’ve got the misapplication of rules, and you’ve got the old joke about how guys find bras hard to take off.<\/p>\n

Even if you object to the joke – or even if you object to people objecting to the joke – please try to keep it civil in the comments. Thanks!<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45852"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46158,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45852\/revisions\/46158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}