KRB What do you think about this?

[Solari]

When I started this, I really wanted to know what people think about this, specially the women that play this game, but I guess we are too few. I wanted also to know why we have this option, and Tom and Anaris answered it, so thank you.

I think this is an absolutely legitimate concern, and one where the modern era should take precedence over ideological purity to the period in which BM is set.

[Kai]

I agree only in the sense that graphic rape RP is just generally distasteful. Rape occurs in BM every day.

[Tom]

It may surprise some of you that similar discussions were had ... by actual medieval nobles!

Scarlett, that entire post was just fantastic. Thank you very much.

[Chenier]

No...I think that strongly discouraging "graphical rape-related RP" is actually a good way of going forward, personally.

I don't see any good reason to want that kind of thing in BattleMaster. There's quite a long distance from "this is something that happened in the period, and it would be foolish to try to ignore it" to "yes, please describe your heinous, brutal acts in as much detail as possible, please."

There's a difference between graphically RPing it, and putting it in RP. I'd have to view the RPs in question to make a judgement, but indeed, if someone spends 20 lines to describe a rape before passing on to the next, no, that's not really desirable. Briefly writing that a character indulges himself is another matter, however.

You're wrong. It was pretty widespread inside medieval Europe too. Jews were often identified by skin tone, and it wasn't that unusual for them to be massacred wholesale. See, for example, the Clifford's Tower massacre in York: http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/themes/norman/the-1190-massacre.

There's also the gypsies/roma who migrated to Europe during the Middles Ages and have been persecuted ever since (often being identified by their skin tone: http://euroheritage.net/gypsieshistory.shtml).

I know that's getting away from the main point of this thread, but I thought it was good to point it out.

Identified by skin tone does not mean killed for it. Medieval Christians had plenty of "reasons" to loathe Jews. And from what I know of the roma, without in any way justifying enthic persecution, their skin tone wasn't the reason cited for discrimination. I do not believe either of these cases compare to modern-day recism, where people are categorized by skin tone, and not merely identified by it. A Jew is a "Jew", not a "differently skin-toned person". It's not the same as defining someone as "black" or "nigger", regardless of his cultural ties and origins.

[Scarlett]

I do not believe either of these cases compare to modern-day recism,

The easy explanation here is that it was pretty unusual to see mixed races in one place. A black dude in London in 1099 would draw a lot of attention.

On the other hand, after the Norman Conquest, you had a lot of Saxon/Norman racism. I am not sure I fully grasp your distinction between 'identified' and 'categorized,' but even talking about two groups of white people from Northwestern Europe, the racial enmity was pretty serious. The two cultures eventually merged into 'English' - aided in part by the rise of a vernacular language (Middle English) and a national identity encouraged by the likes of Ed III and Henry V (or at least a Better than French identity).

If you are suggesting that medieval racism was less pervasive than modern racism (and I'm not sure that you are) then I wouldn't be ready to accept that: I would say that it's exactly the same but with fewer restrictions on what you could get away with doing about it. The Albegensian Crusade mentioned earlier was largely religious window-dressing on a Frankish/Occitan cultural cleansing. If you were an Irishman in mainland England you could probably expect that you wouldn't be trusted and you'd have a hard time finding work. But then you probably didn't go to England from Ireland unless you had money, which alleviates that sort of thing anyway.

I guess the thing that sounds odd to me here is the notion that any medieval person would 'cite' a reason for discrimination. Imagine for a moment where the impulse to discriminate (in the literal sense) comes from, whether you're discriminating in favor of or against someone. It's just human pattern recognition, the same thing that says 'eat this berry but not this one' or 'little kitty OK, big kitty with teeth not OK.' The trouble is that pattern recognition operates on a local level and if you meet, say, three white dudes from Texas in an afternoon, you will (no matter how enlightened you are) form an opinion about Texans, particularly white male Texans, even though your sample size is 2.31*10^-7.  The farther away you are from Texas yourself, the more likely you are to identify whatever behavior you observe as a general trait, even if you do turn out to be enlightened enough to then (correctly) categorize your opinion as a handful of data points insufficient to draw any conclusions. Medievals would take a big risk by doing so: the only real difference between a medieval Duchy and a pre-medieval Frankish tribe or Viking clan is two things: the greater influence of the church and the feudal hierarchy providing a veneer of civilization. They certainly had choice words for people of other cultures just as we do today and there was no motive whatever to take an enlightened stance and help somebody out just because they were a minority. The gypsies had a hard time then for a lot of the same reasons they have a hard time today: here you had a nomadic people, many with few qualms about helping themselves to the fruits of other people's labor, entering society where it took everybody's labor just to make it through the winter. If I were a medieval peasant and some gypsies showed up, I'd exercise some discrimination too. That is is hypothetically the case that 49% of gypsies who would rob me blind are giving 51% of them a bad name didn't really matter in the 14th century: there's no incentive for medieval peasant me to even roll the dice on that gamble. It's not like I win something if I happen to get one of the nice ones. He's not like me, so lock the doors.

The means by which your average medieval person would define their identity was almost entirely local - not even 'French' or 'English' but by their town or region. Words like 'nation' or 'country' were not really medieval terms and the small extent to which they became medieval terms was because of nationalism and jingoism under guys like Henry V where it was less 'define us as xyz' and more 'define us as NOT THEM.'

You see similar discussions come up in histories of Native Americans. There is a sense that (white) people two hundred years ago were these awful, thieving, rapacious villains who swindled these guys out of all their land and aren't we so much more enlightened today. Maybe they were, but nobody - of any color - is different today. We've just built rules and restrictions into our system that make it much harder to get away with that sort of thing, though of course there aren't really any comparable scenarios of 'that sort of thing' in the West today so it's pretty easy to pretend that our rules and civilization are so much superior to how things were two hundred years ago. But the more I read about medieval history, and BM often bears this out, the more I think that the human animal has not changed very much in a thousand years except that he is bigger and smarter than he was and he has built a lot of cultural scaffolding to distance himself from the vulgarity of his ancestors. And for good reason - I'd much rather be alive today than in 1317. The one and only symptom of a species that has really moved beyond this intervention by pattern recognition into their affairs is a species that can honestly admit to being blind to such things: a state where they really do not matter. We use race, gender, and wealth as clubs to get what we want or to feel better about ourselves or to advantage one group at another's expense all the time. We justify it by saying it's meant to right past wrongs, and that's certainly an honorable motive. The outcome, however, is that we spend a lot of our lives pointing out that this group is different than that group and favoring one over the other on an arbitrary basis. This is not more or less racist than a thousand years ago: it's the same sort of Battle of Peopled Grouped Differently dressed up with a lot of intellectual sophistry.

To tie all this back into BM, one of the really neat things about BM is that you can see how similar we really are, even with our 21st century attitudes toward a lot of medieval notions. And that's with the added restriction of having to write and read complete letters: there is no analog for the heated argument in a room full of your peers where you have to save face. We may not have tribes anymore, but we have the same tools nature gave us to identify people as 'same = trustworthy' or 'different = suspicion.' And even as we point out some awful consequences of this kind of discrimination in the past, we'd be naive to shut down our mechanism for discrimination entirely.

[Chenier]

I wasn't really saying it was better or worse, I just don't tend to consider them to be quite the same.

[egamma]

I think an "Adult" checkbox could be placed next to the "send anonymously" checkbox, and people could check it if they think their RP could offend others. Then, people could edit their preferences to hide the Adult posts, the same way they can hide OOC posts.

[Scarlett]

But we have adult themes all the time. Are we then going to police people who don't check it based on our idea of what's adult and what isn't? Or get annoyed when we miss something because it was checked adult?

I have no problem with the vast majority of adult content. I wouldn't check a box that says 'hide me from adult content.'  I've also run into a couple people who have posted stuff about rape before and I just don't read it. I am my own checkbox.

[Anaris]

I think an "Adult" checkbox could be placed next to the "send anonymously" checkbox, and people could check it if they think their RP could offend others. Then, people could edit their preferences to hide the Adult posts, the same way they can hide OOC posts.

No.

There's content that's appropriate for everyone in BattleMaster, and there's content that's appropriate for no one in BattleMaster.

Graphic depictions of rape fall in the second category.

[Lavigna]

As a woman and since mostly women suffer this crime it is needless to say i dissaprove it.

Someone mentioned something about " it's ok to kill and burn but not rape"

Although you have a valid point it is considered harsher yes. I happen to be a lawyer in real life and i will say to you that rape is considered the ultimate sin even in prison.Rapists and Pedofiles most of the times die in prison in the most cruel way , killed by fellow prisoners. It is a prison law and they show no tollerance against such people.I faill to understand   why although i have thought of it extensively.
When it comes in game, as many others said earlier rape was rather common in Medieval Times.All kinds of nasty things were common in such era.Even in my country that had no medieval period in the same terms when it was invaded by some countries  itgot pillaged, burned and the women got raped.In fact this is why countries that had conquerors for extended periods (mine had them for 400 years) you cannot consider them pure blooded not only because some did mix at will, but because raping was common and  having children from their rapists was common as well. It is history and not Game of Thrones or any other fictional book.

In game the burn pillage and rape is an option. By pressing that button you perform one of these actions and all of them are considered cruel and unfit for nobles.Choosing to rp rape is a different story. I do not believe that players who do it should be reprimed ooc but put down in character, if of course your own character dissaproves of such actions.

I have played a barbarian in the past, she killed many for fun, she dueled almost everyday and enjoyed blood a lot.She enjoyed burning enemy families and she would remain neutral and unintrested against people who raped.

The rest of the characters i played so far would seek to behead such person, if he had a position they would protest him and would make sure he suffered their protests forever. That kind of discourage i approve.

It is a cruel action but in game it should be dealt in game. If your character dissaprove it make sure he never does it, make sure he refuses to follow such order and hunt down those who perform such actions.

[Kai]

Hunting down someone for allowing their men to rape enemies would be like atheism tbh.

[Tom]

Hunting down someone for allowing their men to rape enemies would be like atheism tbh.

No, it wouldn't.

Atheism is something that simply did not happen (in public) in the age.

Moral standards were something that DID happen, even if it was the exception.

[Shizzle]

Then again I'd think public atheism mostly didn't occur because of the very real political power of the church. And BM doesn't really have dominant religions in the way medieval Europe did.

^{But let's not make this a thread on atheism}

[Chenier]

^{But let's not make this a thread on atheism}

We certainly wouldn't want that to happen. :P

So did anyone actually do a really graphic RP, or is this all just theoretical?

[Scarlett]

I haven't seen any recently but I have seen maybe 2-3 over the years.