"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...

[erf_]

You had me at White Wolf.

What is it about their games that engenders the most uncomfortable roleplaying sessions ever?