Not the point. 😉

The point is that out of nowhere a guy who started off seeming nice enough turned out to be an assaulter. I’m mega-suspicious of everybody so I didn’t get taken by (much) surprise. Most people aren’t as paranoid as I am. To them that would have come from nowhere and they would have had no chance to stop it.

That’s the issue. If I meet a bear in the forest, I know roughly what to expect. I know to avoid it, not to irritate it, not to get between it and its children if they’re around. A bear is a known quantity. (A dangerous known quantity, but known.)

If I meet a random man in the forest, I don’t know what to expect. There’s a good chance he’s a perfectly fine, sweet, gentle, decent human being.

Or he could be a Hans.

There’s no way to know, and if it is a Hans, the lack of any possible witnesses in the forest plays doubly against me.

Yes. instead they learned that violence is how “adults” solve problems.

Not sure that’s such a great return lesson.

Oh GOD no! If that had turned into a fight I would have lost, unequivocally. The only reason I “won” is because I circumvented his planned script and had a knife. (Knives are the Great Equalizer in enclosed spaces for weaker parties.)

The fact I had to literally threaten with deadly force, though … Remember that “bear or man” thing?

This is why “bear”.

First I’ll double up on this one:

Amber Diceless Roleplay

Pair it with Theatrix so you can see two completely different approaches to diceless, non-stochastic games. Amber and Theatrix make a fascinating “compare and contrast” study.

To your list I’m going to add (or at points replace with):

• Chivalry & Sorcery (1st edition)

The first game designed from the ground up as a social simulation where your character’s place in society is far more important than grubbing through dungeons, killing things, and looting their bodies. (Indeed for some characters that would negatively impact their experience and growth!) I might put it alongside Traveller to show the difference between a game having a setting and a game being the setting. Also the grandfather of later “mega-mechanics” game systems.

• Bunnies & Burrows

To my knowledge the first attempt at making a game (and a pretty CRUNCHY game at that!) that is 100% based on non-human protagonists.

• Runequest (1st or 2nd edition)

First non-class-and-level game. Second game that came with a detailed, very non-European fantasy setting. Maybe put it alongside 1974 D&D to show how early people started breaking off from the D&D style.

• Maelstrom Storytelling

I’d actually replace Apocalypse World with this because it is the very first game, to my knowledge, that broke completely free of even the vestigial wargames roots of RPGs, complete with traditional story structuring being part of the game mechanisms, no fixed attributes (and no numerical ones), scene-level resolution (you roll once for an entire scene, not turn by turn). It’s innovative enough that it’s of interest. It’s good enough that it’s worth studying. And it has enough mis-steps and flaws that it’s worth discussing. Pretty much any “storygame” owes a debt to this game.

Thanks. I’m sorry you’re going through all that shit you’re going through right now Down South™. 😥

Ayup. And once you learn to decode that behaviour it makes life a lot easier.

Horror stories that turn into “happily ever after” stories are a personal fav, truth be told!

Oh ugh. I want to excoriate you for dumping her because of a disability, but … how do you have a relationship with someone who will never grow up?

The poor girl. But … also, you dodged a bullet.

That’s always fun. It’s like going on a date with Andy and heading off back home with Bert.

(Side note: if he hadn’t been such a creep and asshole during the dinner he’d have been repaid for “the expense”. He was a looker.)

Yeah. Dad wanted a son. He didn’t get one. So he made one. 🤣

I’m being unfair. He never once treated me like a son he didn’t have. But he cared about me his idiosyncratic way. His way of saying “I love you” was “here’s a knife; this Sunday we’ll start practicing”.

Thankfully I was brought up in a time before online dating services, etc. “Computer dating” was this awkward thing that was difficult to use, so I did it the old-fashioned way: meeting people in person.

(As a side note that I promise is entirely unrelated to the rest of this post, I was brought up by what Brits would call an RSM, but in Canada is a Chief Warrant Officer. One from the infantry. Don’t file that away for later. It’s entirely unrelated.)

So I met Hans after having him introduced to me by some mutual acquaintances. Not friends, just people I knew, and who he also knew. He seemed nice enough in the club, so when he asked for dinner later, that seemed fine by me. A few alarm bells started to happen over dinner however, chief among which were:

1. He treated service staff like shit. That’s a HUGE red flag for me and pretty much tanked the “future dates” option forever.
2. He mentioned several times how much he really likes “Asian women”. (Yikes! Yes, Hans. What every woman wants to hear is that you’ve just reduced them to an ethnicity and a resulting fetish object.) That’s another huge red flag for me (this one from previous experience).
3. He ordered for me. Not on behalf of me after I’d told him what I wanted. He’d decided what I wanted to eat.
4. Now I’m not exactly above a bit of drinking (like the sea is not exactly above the clouds) but something in the almost strategic way he kept instantly refilling my glass when I’d taken a mouthful was not sitting right with me.

(Another side note for people not experienced in dating: if someone is trying to subtly intoxicate you more than you want to be intoxicated, GET THE FUCK OUT RIGHT AWAY! This ain’t goin’ anywhere nice. Don’t be polite. Don’t give them another chance. Your physical safety is waaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than their fee fees. And maybe you won’t have to pull a blade. Oopsie! I accidentally foreshadowed!)

So after the increasingly alarm-raising meal, he drove me to where he thought my home was. (I never reveal that on the first date for reasons which should be obvious by now. There was another three-block walk home.) We then had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: Goodnight. Thanks for the meal.

Hans: You’re not going to invite me in?

M: It’s late and I have to get up early tomorrow.

H: I spent <number>DM on this meal. I expect something for the expense!

That’s when he reached for me, clearly angry, clearly making a grab. And that’s where the completely unrelated fact about my father comes into the picture. (I lied, see.)

He was bigger than me, stronger than me, and I was in a pretty tight car (Opel). I wasn’t going to be getting out before he had a hold of me. So I didn’t. I moved in toward him. Specifically I head-butted him in the face. By the time he’d registered what had happened I had the knife out and pointed … well, where he wanted me to show attention obviously. See, Dad taught me a few things, one of those being “do not escalate: bypass it all and go straight for blood” (paired with unconventional attacks that will get past people playing the escalation game). He grabbed for me so I eschewed the usual process of protesting, struggling, trying to escape, screaming for help, etc. while he would have escalated to a tighter grab, maybe over mouth, and further violence. I went straight for the violence and initiated it, wrecking his script.

The other thing Dad taught me was to a) always carry a knife, b) make sure the knife is easily pulled out, and c) how to use it. So poor Hans had to live with the fact that the woman he was almost certainly about to assault now had a wickedly sharp blade at his junk and a face that said she not only could, but was a hairsbreadth away from “would”, use it.

Me: Goodnight. Hans. Get your hands off me. Put your hands on the steering wheel.

Hans: <A long stream of local dialect I couldn’t follow. It didn’t sound nice.>

And after that I took the long way home to make sure he didn’t somehow follow me.

Yeah, it seems you need a baseline instilled into you at critical junctures of your upbringing to have it at all. After that it can be trained, in effect, but only if you have it to begin with.

I’m with you on this. I even switched my SNACKING away from sugary anything.

Well it’s not really tofu of course. But it’s given the name 鸭血豆腐 (duck blood bean curd) or just 血腐 (blood curd) because, well, it looks and has the vague texture of tofu. (Cheaper alternatives are made with pig or cow blood, but the real thing is duck blood.)

I’m somewhat sensitive to lactose. I can take small amounts, like, say, a small ice cream bar twice or thrice a week, but past that … things go very wrong.

Blood products taste fine to me (blood sausage, black pudding, blood “tofu”, etc.) but my stomach rebels when it hits.

I won’t touch raw flesh: not steak tartare, not raw fish in sushi, nothing. This is just me hating the taste and texture.

Oh, and rum. Love the taste. Does to me what blood does.

OK, that’s somewhat reassuring.

What’s your gut feel? Incompetence? Accident? Or attack?

I dread every day that ends with a “Y”.

I think empathy can be trained. Children in general (I mean very young children) have no empathy. They’re vicious little sociopaths. But if they’re gently introduced to empathy as they grow, by the time they’re, like, 5 they will have empathy. (Those who were not taught to be empathic by 5 will never be able to develop it.

coughMuskcough coughTrumpcough

But you can lose empathy over time. Trauma can make you lose empathy. Fury (c.f. my above rant about COVID-19) can make you lose empathy. Tragedy can make you lose empathy. THAT kind of empathy loss, however, can be re-learned. It’s not even all that hard. The world just has to stop beating up on you a while, or you just have to meet someone who has it worse than you do to snap back.