Endless Pointless Zak Debate

As the legal process chugs along...

...we’ve been having depositions. For example:

Mandy got asked how I could have “forced” our ex-, Viv to move in with us. 

She admitted--despite what she'd earlier claimed--that I hadn’t forced her to move in with us. She said I called Viv and I asked if she wanted to move in with us. That's it.

When Viv said reasons she might hesitate on the phone (she might have to break her existing lease, for example) I said reasons why these things actually wouldn’t be a big deal and so Viv was like, yeah ok, I’ll move in with you. She did, liked it, and redid the living room.

Viv said the same in her deposition--after much hemming and hawing. So that’s on the books. It’s resolved. It’s down. It’s over. Mandy and Viv were lying about that. They can't say that anymore. We move to the next thing. 

The Rules

Depositions aren’t complicated, the process goes like this:

1. People ask each other questions

2. They answer them

It closely resembles what every sane person since Aristotle would recognize as “a conversation between people who disagree about something” and which the RPG internet calls “An endless Zak debate”.

Of course it's not endless--it's usually pretty quick. (Mandy and Viv could've said the two sentences it took to admit the truth two and a half years ago but they dodged it until there was lawsuits.) It only ever takes a long time if the person being asked questions is lying and is trying to figure out a way to avoid saying that. But even then it ends pretty fast.

What people who complain about answering questions are scared of isn't wasting time (they have enough time to say all the other shit they say online): it's being revealed as liars.

The Great Rebranding

I didn't invent asking and answering questions. This, for example, was on the internet way before I showed up.

Rebranding the most common and efficient way any issue gets solved in any sphere where the truth is admitted to matter (whether it's legal, academic, scientific or journalistic) as “an endless Zak debate” rather than just like admitting that's how grown-ups who disagree have to talk to fix anything is probably the single most toxic thing the RPG internet ever did to itself.*

The arguments raised against just answering questions are, basically:

-“I have a bunch of feelings and therefore cannot be asked to do anything”.

-“Before investigating, I decided anyone who disagrees with me about this is evil and I don’t talk to Nazis”

-“I don’t wanna”

-“Ew, isn't that a  debate” (it's not) "debate is bad"

Whether you think these are good or bad excuses, using them guarantees issues will never get figured out or solved and conflicts never de-escalate. Instead you get…

The Normal Way 

This is how the RPG internet likes to handle things:

1. One person says a thing, articulately, or forcefully or both.

2. People use the tools of social media to spread or otherwise express approval of this take.

3. Another person disagrees in a completely different venue--sometimes equally articulately or forcefully.

4. They never talk to each other. They are never put in a position to answer questions.

5. It never gets resolved ever.

6. Everyone argues about it over and over and complains that it never gets resolved, no-one learns anything, and people who lied or never did their homework are not uncovered and they stick around and poison the community forever by lying about bigger and bigger things.

This is supposedly a really good alternative to talking to people/Terrifying Zak Debate.

A Few Greatest Hits

I would argue all of the biggest problems on the RPG internet have been caused by the online nerd social norm that’s it’s ok to blow off questions. Some examples:

-If not The Original Sin, then a very early one was Ron Edwards claiming, on his own forum, that playing the game Vampire: The Masquerade caused brain damage. When asked for proof, he said—explictly, you can go back and read it—he did not have to answer questions. Ron suffered no consequences. This was one of the earliest examples of folks from his scene—the storygamers—making bigoted statements against people who played other games going unchallenged, which tradition continues to this day.

-The Gauntlet forum’s official policy is “If you ask someone a question and they give no answer, assume the answer is ‘No’” which has got to be the single most abusable and thoughtless rule in the history of forums—and is completely responsible for that community falling apart.

-Edition wars? When D&D’s 5th edition was announced, fans of 4th edition (including many still-active designers) claimed that 4e was very popular and selling well and that WOTC's decision to do another edition was actually based on old people complaining on the internet. They were asked for proof of this. They didn’t answer. They also claimed there was no way people having more fun playing older editions were telling the truth and/or that there was something wrong with people who said this. Again: when asked they provided no proof. This kind of thing is what caused the edition wars.

-The guy who founded the actual website “Storygames” eventually apologized in a thread for the way OSR creators and fans had been treated on his site for years. He was asked what he was going to fix the damage he’d done by platforming stupid gamer hate for years. He gave no answer.

-Arnold K / Goblin Punch literally cited my belief that people should answer questions as a bad thing when he joined the hatemob against me, and when Scrap Princess joined she bragged about how she wouldn’t answer questions or back up the obviously false claims she’d made. This kind of set a fashion in the new OSR where flaunting your total inability to make sense was cool—probably best exemplified by Jared “infinite mao” Sinclair and the Troika Trolls—who delight in their total failure to help each other or anyone else figure out anything. They are currently all blocking each other and hating on each other on twitter because of, basically, they don't want to answer questions.

-Ok, but all this is small beans next to, say, sexism, right? Well: RPGnetters (et al) also made bold pronouncements about how women felt about everything from preferred mechanics to RPG art. Women then showed up to protest these claims. When asked why these women’s opinions didn’t count, the RPGnetters gave no answer.

-When an RPGnet mod was accused of rape, they were asked a lot of questions about what happened, how, and who knew what when. They didn’t answer and apparently did no internal investigation.

-When someone with Green Ronin was accused of sexual harassment, the company’s heads—Chris Pramas and Nicole Lindroos—refused to answer direct questions about whether this happened, how it happened, what evidence they did or didn’t have, etc. 

-Racism? When the accusations against me came out, everyone who supported my ex was asked why they supported the white girls rather than the women of color—who were telling more consistent stories that actually made sense, were corroborated, and were backed up by documents. Nobody answered.

Literally all of this could be fixed if people would just adopt the social norm followed around every dinner table: you ask a question—when someone doesn’t answer that’s weird and they look like they're hiding something and it’s obvious and everyone knows you can't be trusted.

So, I'm asking you (and there are thousands of you reading this) why are you ok with this? You don’t put up with it at the dinner table, why do you put up with it here?

Or maybe an easier question: does it seem weird to you that this super normal way of interacting in real life is called "Zak debate" here? And that finding out who you can trust is considered bad or not worth it?

—

-

-

P.S. Oh but can't we just never ask questions about anything important and just play games? Sure. There's lots of new stuff in The Store since last I mentioned it, pick something up:

Cube World #46--Goblins and Murder

Cube World #43 --Ths Stair and the Vizier's Secret

Cube World #44--Traps, Traps, Traps

Cube World#45-Warmutants of the Cube

Cube World #47-The Pentamorph and More

Cube World #48 Two Cults

 Cube World #49-Two Gimmicky Dungeons

Cube World #50-Hell on Earth (and in Hell)

Cube World #5-Four Elementals and a Giant's gut

Cube World #52-The Fox Witch and the Freckled Hog

Cube World #53-Quiet Places

-

-

*In the law it's called "depositions" and "testimony" and "cross examinations", in science and academia it's "defending your thesis", in journalism it's "interviews" and "press conferences".

-

-

Incident

A random fan met me and Stokely at the bar and asked me to run a game for him and his friends at GenCon a few years ago. He as nice, so I did.

Then, like basically everybody else, he joined the hatemob.

Then he asked me for a game thing last week--he wanted to buy a pdf.

We talked on the phone after he texted--I was like "Sure, after you publicly apologize for being part of the hatemob that destroyed my life".

He pretended like he didn't do anything. Like he forgot that he picked up a torch, lit it and chased an innocent person with a pitchfork just like all his shitty friends.

I reminded him--I have screenshots.

He was like "Ok, man, but you blocked me"

And I was like "Yes, I blocked you. You assumed the accusations were true without proof and I asked you a direct question, you didn't answer. Both of those things will get you blocked by any sane person immediately."

He admitted that yeah he'd done the wrong thing.

He said ok, yeah, maybe it's a thing, maybe he'll make an apology. Sorry, man.

It's been 20 days, he's done nothing.

-

-

-

This kind of thing happens all the time. Here's one from April:

People contact me, I tell them if they want to make public accusations they need to make public apologies--they always agree that that makes sense. They say they'll do something. And then they do nothing.

The reflexive thing a troll is thinking to write right now is "Well this won't help, dude, duh". Fuck that. People have an obligation to do the right thing especially when their victim won't be nice to them.

Accusations were made: I'm not in jail, I'm not even charged with anything after over two years. I'm not losing in civil court, after over two years of discovery there have been no terrifying revelations of a secret conspiracy. And for all the complaining that I was supposedly a terror on the internet nobody in court or out who has accused me of even internet wrongdoing has come up with a single screencap of me doing anything bad. Every adult who's investigated has come to the conclusion I'm innocent, none of Mandy's friends from when we were together are backing her up, women she asked to testify told her to fuck off and at least one even testifed for me instead. It is most definitely not her word against mine--all of what she's said has been contradicted by eyewitnesses and documents, and anyone who doubts that can just ask for the records. Two years, seven months and two days.

There's an online network for game designers that get harassed. I've repeatedly asked them for help, they talked to me, the case offficer (or whatever its called) didn't take my case--then she herself got cancelled last week.

Are you all doing what this dude did? Are you all just pretending you weren't a part of this? Are you going to keep doing it when I win and then I gotta go through the whole media thing of pointing out why it happened?

What exactly is everyone's plan for when it's a matter of legal and public record that all of this was a farce and you helped? Buy a fake moustache and move to Guam?

-

-

-

There's new stuff in The Store:

#44 is full of traps

#45 has warmutants

#46 has goblins

#47 has THE PENTAMORPH

Buy something.

-

-

-

Gamers Punching Themselves In The Face

I'm going to use an example, which is almost always a bad idea.

I'm going to use an example because it shows the extent of the problem, it shows that the problem still happens now today, and it shows that I haven't exaggerated or distorted the problem. If you have a blog you know what happens if you use an example: people comment on the example, not the point. You go "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a community affected by global climate change" and someone will comment "My cat's breath smells like cat food". Try not to be distracted from the point by the example.

So, This Happened

A relatively successful independent game designer (not I nor anyone I have much history with) wrote a short, satirical tale.

In his tale, he described a hypothetical indie designer writing a game that (depending on how you interpret the tale) is either very niche or very bad. The imaginary designer complains--to comic effect for the hundreds of people who shared the tale--that D&D is making their niche or bad game harder to sell. The Take is a joke at the imaginary niche or bad designer's expense. That's it.

Now, there are lots of things to say about the story here:

• D&D does take up a lot of space in the industry
• An indie game can be successful, though.
• "Success" can be defined in a variety of different ways.
• Independently-produced games have, in the past, competed with D&D in significant ways, even financially. They've even out-competed D&D sometimes. How?
• For an individual designer, financial success might be more likely with a niche game than working for D&D.
• Many things WOTC does are actually unfair. Which ones?
• Many critiques Indie designers have of D&D or its fans are unfair. Which ones?
• Indie culture does have some self-defeating characteristics. What are they?
• Games are not a meritocracy but to what degree can quality be said to exist or matter?
• What things that aren't "quality" do still matter in getting to (any definition of) "success".
• Does popular accessibility ever become quality?
• What if you do have a niche game and know it? How do you define success for that?

et cetera.

After hundreds of people on the internet shared or liked this story, hundreds of indie game designers got very angry and railed against it and the creator of the story. Everyone yelled at everyone.

The Point

The point is that they yelled about nothing.

Literally none of that stuff above got discussed, because:

• The indie game creator who penned the original take responded to critics with, basically "I don't have to talk to you because you're not successful and/or have no structural power".
• The critics responded to him with, basically, "I don't have to talk to you because you are successful and/or you do have structural power".

(If you doubt this characterization, the whole useless pile-up is recorded here, here and here. Feel free to comment if you think I'm wrong)

Both sides have set boundaries on the conversation that are calculated to be impossible to overcome, even for someone who really wanted to engage. The original game creator can't go back in time to be less established any more than his critics can press a button to be successful enough for them to be "worth" talking to. Anyone familiar with nerds will see what's going on here: they're both making excuses to avoid confrontation, and thus to avoid playtesting the quality of their ideas.

The original developer spent literal hours crowing on the internet about his right to use the block button to ignore nobodies.

The critics, in turn, spent literal days crowing to each other about how irrelevant and out-of-touch the original developer was, as were all his kind.

The conversation, such as it was, wasn't about anything that could help anyone make, enjoy or sell a game, it was posturing to each other about who has the right to be listened to, to have their concerns addressed, to make a point, to have a point considered.

More than one critic said "Oh, I would've hoped for better from (the creator who had the original take)" but instead of saying that to that creator, they said it to each other. In other words: the person you're complaining about has done things to make you respect them, but you couldn't even get it together to bring your complaint to them.

Representatives from all the usual hatemob suspects are involved: mainstream careerists, what's left of Story-Games, Troika trolls, Something Awful goons, RPGnet parasites, etc. (Helpfully nobody's calling anyone a Nazi or using the "I won't debate Nazis" loophole. They're just excited to say they don't have to have conversations period.)

"Who has the right to be listened to?" is a real short and boring conversation because everyone instinctively has their own answer. It's about as useful as "Who likes lasagna?".

Everyone wastes a tremendous amount of time announcing and re-announcing and re-articulating their announcement that they're going to ignore each others' points because they don't want to waste time.

And what do they do with all this time they've freed up? The people with experience learn about nothing new and the people who are new learn nothing from those with experience. And everyone's terribly comfortable.

-

-

-

The Whole Story on Mike Mearls

 So, I just finished up that series on what happened behind the scenes on Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. Your response has been good.

I'm planning on doing a series on the whole saga with Mike Mearls, creative head of Dungeons and Dragons, going in to the conspiracy theories there about when I consulted on D&D 5e, the lawsuits, etc. with receipts. It, unsurprisingly, features a lot of the same characters...

As before, this comes with a big "if"--that is, if you care. To be sure I wasn't typing a research-heavy story into the empty ether, last time I asked folks who were genuinely interested to leave a comment. I'm going to ask a little more this time, as this story is going to require more work from me.

If you want the story here's what you should do: one time, using a persistent identity online, fact-check some element of a hatemob conspiracy theory. Find a place where their spreading misinformation, correct it, be complete, follow up in 48 hours or more. As always, never harass, personally attack, threaten or namecall anyone. The point is to check the spread of misinformation. If you're confused, ask a question.

When you've done that, email me: zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm and show me a link or screenchot showing you did it.

As before, if I get 100 responses, that's enough to convince me people actually care about this stuff, and I'll start putting out the piece.

Naturally, this could take a while or might not even happen--in which case, that's fine. No point in going to all the effort if it's not reaching people who want things to be better.

-Z

-

-

-

What Really Happened to Vampire 5e, Chapter 6: You're Eating Maggots, Michael

Chapter One  - Chapter Two - Chapter Three -

 Chapter 3.5 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6

"Shut Up And Take The Pain"

So we talked about the hatemob calling trans creators' work transphobic, and calling Jews Nazis, and siccing dictators on game designers but this chapter contains the worst part. I'm tempted to skip straight to it, but first I want to spend some time with the other people who worked on the game.

So you know what I think and you saw some of what Kenneth Hite had to deal with because of Evil Hat hatemobbing on Vampire--but what about everybody else? While it started with me, Ken and The Art Director, by the end I'd been gone for over a year and there was a whole team of socialist Swedes and other RPG creatives working on the new edition.

Privately they all said a lot about being angry at the mob, but people also talked about depression, mental breakdowns, and destroyed careers. I'm going to stick to quoting the less personal stuff, so none of them get in trouble.

This is during the second wave, when Dog With Dice wrote the Jews-Are-Nazis article:

Someone else, much later, after the damage had been done...

Last month, yet another creator on the project reached out right after I announced I'd do this series...

This is consistent: people are scared to talk, fleeing the industry or to the edges of it, Olivia, Ettin and the rest are "malignant, bottom-feeding-trolls" and the "Pile-On-Club".

Pretty much no-one who ever worked on or even liked any version of Vampire got what they wanted.

The Worst Part

In a world that made any sense, what happened to Vampire should have been a Pizzagate-style cautionary tale about the danger of believing conspiracy theories. And it should've been that immediately. Because--as-noted way at the beginning--sales were ok and more people signed a petition supporting the game than spread the conspiracy theories.

While a diplomatically-worded petition leaving the names of all the bad actors out couldn't save Vampire, the sentiment that spawned it should have at least been enough to prevent the situation generally in RPGs getting worse later--everyone looks at the steaming crater full of troll-takes where once there was a city and goes "Oh wow, what a mess, let's all agree not to do that again"--but it wasn't. By way of explanation, I'm going to zoom in on one example:

Meet Chris Handley, Chris has had a World of Darkness podcast for over ten years, Chris has written World of Darkness stuff for Storytellers Vault, and Chris was also someone who read this blog and liked my work. Years ago he said he wanted to be my friend on social media, so I added him.

One day, before all this, Chris and another WoD fan were talking in a thread casually about having a beer with Olivia Hill. I did literally the only thing any responsible adult seeing this could've done: I warned them and anyone reading the thread that Olivia Hill was a certifiable harasser and to watch the fuck out. Like: where Olivia lived, you could legitimately be arrested for doing the shit Olivia did to her colleagues. I didn't call Chris or Chris' friend names, I didn't act like they should've known already, I didn't say a word in anger. I just told them what I knew because obviously it's not ok to normalize the presence of someone known to be that dishonest and dangerous.

At the time, Handley thought this was just gosh darn rude and so...joined the hatemob. So far, so normal: you tell someone their trollfriend is a troll, they disagree and start smearing you, too. That's a normal day on the internet, but what happened next is what makes this a story:

So years later, after all the things I discuss in this series happened to Chris' beloved Vampire, Chris--being a relatively typical World of Darkness fan--is up in arms, Chris is completely pissed, Chris signs the petition supporting White Wolf, Chris has a phone conversation with the White Wolf guys in May 2017, Chris writes me to say...

• He now recognizes Olivia Hill's role in all of this and says she and her usual suspect pal Holden Shearer had acted in "God awful ways".
• He treats Olivia and her circle with "a fairly large barge pole" due to their "pearl-clutching" and says Olivia's "gone off the deep end".
• He says all of Olivia's accusations against me were "bullshit".
• He believes Olivia screwed over backers on a Fate-system Kickstarter and used the money to move to Japan. 
• He says he was on my side me about Olivia's wife attacking us over the Maxim article, Chris calls it "misplaced outrage".
• He also throws in, for good measure, Olivia and co were also unnecessarily pearl-clutching about Kingdom Death.
• He likes and buys my work.

And you would now expect this series of emails to end with "Thank you so much for trying to warn us--years before this happened to Vampire--about Olivia Hill because nobody else did. I am so sorry I didn't listen and I'm sorry I gave you any shit about it."

But it doesn't. Chris was actually writing to say he was still mad that I warned him and his friend about Olivia Hill. Here they were trying to talk about drinking beer with the delightful proven hatefactory Olivia Hill and here I had to go and say something unpleasant.

Remember the snakes have legs video?

This is how it ends:

The snake (who, being a snake, clearly has no legs) tells the guy to stop telling people that snakes have legs, so the guy unfriends him. The snake.

The reason nobody took what happened to Vampire to heart in later years is that instead of doing anything about the harassers, people attacked anyone trying to warn them.

And it's somehow worse if you have receipts? In the middle of this, Patrick Stuart, my co-author on Maze of the Blue Medusa, had a mental breakdown and joined the hatemob. He wrote in his hatepost that while, yes, while Olivia Hill had done fucked up things, the fact I had pointed it out and collected evidence to prove what Hill was doing, in the form of her dozens of public posts, was insane and "creepy".

I want to write the next sentence nine-hundred times in letters of fire 300 feet high:

I don't know what kind of world anyone lives in where a creator can just make up a lie that a colleague threatened their children and that's not a Jesus shit, full-court press, all-hands on-deck, holy-fuck, mother-of-all-that-is-holy-and-unholy 100% epic emergency where that creator is recognized as a massive threat to anything they touch that you need to do something about asap. Chris knew Olivia was lying, Patrick knew Olivia was lying. And somehow their reaction was Zak, why are you telling people?

Let's leave out all the things I've reported and only talk about complaints other people have about her: Olivia's been thrown off twitter for harassment, Kickstarter backers on several projects have said Olivia ripped them off, she was thrown off RPGnet for doxxing, behind-the-scenes every full-time developer I've met calls her a piece of shit, Shoe Skogen says she sexually harassed her, and her girlfriend/employee Francita said she was an abuser. What does Olivia Hill have to do for it to be ok to call her out? Dynamite the Eiffel Tower? Hijack a schoolbus and eat the kids? Shoot your mom down in a public street and drop her corpse in lime? 

(Asterisk*)

And then on top of that: all the other stuff Olivia did. And then all the stuff Ettin did. And all the people from all the other forums and game companies. The most sympathetic and well-informed people decided it was not only better for them to do nothing, but that it was also bad to do something.

Since then:

Paradox basically closed White Wolf down.

Robin Laws, probably the most respected voice in the game industry, has kept right on podcasting regularly with his friend Kenneth Hite--and still has publicly said nothing.

The Vampire team, despite being privately pissed-off and supportive of each other, has said nothing. 

Olivia Hill smeared more people and grew her Twitter following to over 10k until her girlfriend called her out for abuse, at which point a few RPG people complained and then, well, nothing. She's suffered no consequences. She also said her "views have changed" since she first began her harassment campign.

Ettin kept on and smeared more people until I sued him.

Rob Donoghue at Evil Hat has seen zero consequences.

Crystal Frasier has seen less than zero consquences. WOTC hired her on the new Ravenloft.

And pretty much everyone else has either kept quiet, joined the hatemob or themselves been cancelled. A few have freaked out at their own behavior and left the game scene.

Literally no-one now publicly defends any of the accusations made against the game in any detail. 

The end.

I designed this and wish I hadn't

Next

You might have heard I was involved in a secret email conspiracy with Mike Mearls, longtime creative head of Dungeons & Dragons. You might've heard I sued him. You might've heard a lot of not-terribly-informed things spread by a lot of people already featured in the story you just read.

Next up, if anyone reading genuinely cares, I will tell the whole story, soup-to-nuts, with receipts, about what happened with Mike Mearls. I'll get you the details tomorrow (EDIT: Within the week. I'm travelling.).

Chapter One  - Chapter Two - Chapter Three -

 Chapter 3.5 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6

*Ooh, edit: Earlier I wrote she got permanently banned and made a new account, but I just realized (9:43pm Pacific 18 May) it's possible that Olivia changed her @ name on twitter to the new one, then some troll took her old @ name and got themself banned, thus resulting in her old twitter name having a ban notice due to no fault of her own. I have no way of knowing which, so I am defaulting to caution. She may be simply a lying abuser and not a lying abuser who has been permabanned from twitter.

What Really Happened to Vampire 5e, Chapter 5: Snakes Have Legs

 Chapter One  - Chapter Two - Chapter Three -

 Chapter 3.5 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6

Snakes Have Legs

Maybe you've seen this video. If you haven't and can't be bothered to click "play": A snake confronts a guy who is telling people snakes have legs. The snake doesn't have legs.  The snake asks about the source:

For "Daily Testicle" read "Ettin", moderator on RPGnet and Something Awful /tg.

Previously

It's 2018 and Vampire: The Masquerade, 5th edition--produced by White Wolf games, a division of Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive--is trucking on after weathering a variety of internet hoaxes, including:

• Cis dudes claiming a game co-authored by a transwoman was transphobic
• Not-Jews saying Jews are Nazis

Surely. SURELY. The RPG community will not fall for a third conspiracy theory from exactly the same guys who spread these? And, surely, surely, it wouldn't be a conspiracy theory about the same target? And surely, surely surely, if it did, then after what happened to Rob Donoghue at Evil Hat, at least no reputable company would join in? 

Here we go.

So, again, I'm long gone by this point--I didn't write a word of the new Vampire tabletop game.

On November 8th, just a few months after "Jews are Nazis..." some snakes-have-legs-thinking-idiots retweeted yet another Ettin hate-take three-hundred and eighty-nine-times.

Let's unpack:

• In the Camarilla book, the Vampire team (still operating on the policy: real real real, personal political horror) created this piece of in-game lore that Chechnya's state-sponsored murders of LGBT+ people were actually disguised anti-vampire pogroms.
• Realistically, really, honestly, in good faith, the actual effect of this on most readers was either they barely noticed it and just kept reading because it's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to read in a book trying to be now now now real real real personal political scab-picking horror or "Oh, there are anti-LGBT+ pogroms in Chechnya? Wow that's a bad thing, I am glad to learn about this real-life issue in a made-up game about vampires".
• Let's say you thought differently. Would the best way to address that be maybe approach the designers or...a viral harassment campaign?
• On November 8th, 2018, Paul Matijevic aka Ettin (who is not L or G or B or T or +, so far as anyone knows) dug the paragraph up and launched the idea this Chechnya reference was Social Justice Bad. (Receipts for this whole chain of events.) This was at least the third time he and his goons had aggressively mined the game looking for something to have a bad-faith take on since it was announced.
• All the usual suspects bought it, hook, line and sinker.
• His take went viral.
• It went so viral someone from the actual Chechnyan government found out about it.
• The Chechnyan government began to put real dictatorship-scale pressure on White Wolf, claiming this White Wolf book was slanderous.
• Before the month was over White Wolf had to apologize to fucking Chechnya.

Now, there might actually be LGBT+ people of good faith who read the content as disrespectful or, more likely,  just failing to read the room, but, broadly:

Nobody could explain any way the paragraph itself could cause harm--nobody was seriously claiming that people playing would be fooled into thinking vampires were real and homophobes weren't. 

And: If you write a made-up vampire story based on the genuinely monstrous truth about a dictatorship being genuinely monstrous to marginalized people and then it makes that dictatorship mad, that would usually be taken by most people as a sign you're on the good guy team and, if anything, perhaps a tad too zealously so.

Ettin somehow avoided the obvious conclusion he'd just helped a homophobic dictator retaliate against the game pointing out what his regime did:

Once again, a guy who:

• ...is a Something Awful goon...
• ...admits repeatedly to being a troll...
• ...is described by everyone who knows him in the industry as "a troll"...
• ...lies so often he got quite successfully sued over it...
• ...literally no-one has ever said isn't a troll...
• ...is a white straight cis dude...
• ...got caught twice already doing the same thing to the same victims...

...was believed and shared and treated like something other than The Daily Testicle. This guy:

And, again, exactly like the incident five months before, actual adults with jobs in the mainstream RPG industry inexplicably helped him. 

Cam Banks, formerly of Atlas Games and Margaret Weis productions, author of Marvel Heroic RPG, chipped in the day after Ettin started the ball rolling:

As did Crystal Frasier, of indie RPG giants Green Ronin and Paizo, the company that makes Pathfinder (and now freelancing for WOTC):

As pointed out last chapter with Rob Donoghue, these are people who could have easily dealt with any perceived problems with their colleagues' work in a non-viral-hate way.

Cam Banks and Kenneth Hite--head writer on Vampire--know each other. I don't know if Frasier and Hite do, but Hite was on good terms with Crystal Frasier's direct superior at Green Ronin, Nicole Lindroos. There is absolutely no reason either of them had to follow Ettin's lemming-pile.

This was more Thanksgiving Uncling in action--full-time creators with reputations and prestige in the industry stabbing colleagues in the back by supporting bad-faith troll takes.

"Moral Masturbation at Somebody Else's Expense"

So that's how, but doesn't cover the why. Part of it is, as-discussed earlier, the hatemob had been obsessively looking for imaginary flaws in this game ever since White Wolf put out a video game with my name on it.

But as for why they're a hatemob in the first place, Crystal Frasier herself helpfully explained in a thread just this year:

The weirdest part of this is the end, where she goes "We've all fallen into this trap". No, Crystal, it's just you and your friends who do that. Most people don't actually serially join viral hate campaigns around fake issues because they trusted the same lying dudes over and over. Like it's pretty common to understand that "When your moralizing doesn't fix anything or protect anyone, it's just moral masturbation at someone else's expense". That's a really normal thing to know.

Unsurprisingly, despite having just enough self-awareness to write that thread, Crystal hasn't apologized to anyone involved, neither did Cam, neither did Ettin, neither did any of the hundreds of gamers who fell for it. They didn't even unfollow Ettin.

And what about when moralizing goes beyond "not fixing anything or helping anyone"? When it ratchets up to full-on hurting people?

Find out next time in What Really Happened to Vampire 5e, Chapter 6: You're Eating Maggots, Michael.

 Chapter One  - Chapter Two - Chapter Three -

 Chapter 3.5 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6

What Really Happened to Vampire 5e, Chapter 4: Thanksgiving Uncles (or: Evil Hat gets involved)

Chapter One  - Chapter Two - Chapter Three -

 Chapter 3.5 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6

Thanksgiving Uncles

So in the US, every Thanksgiving on Twitter, we're all reminded that when we go, on our holiday, to our turkey table, we must confront our racist uncle. We are encouraged to squint over the peas from the far end of the table, and call out his Trumpy, overtanned ass.

You've heard this one?

In the story, it's not the whole family who is racist--it's just this one uncle. But the rest of the family doesn't bring it up. The idea is: we all have convictions and know the right thing to do, but acting on it is a whole other thing.

Seldom discussed is why the job of calling out the Uncle falls only to the activist or the terrible teenager: it's because there are other motivations in the world besides doing the right thing--other loyalties.

Your progressive mom does not call out the racist uncle because he saved her from drowning in that lake when she was 12 and he was 14.

Your liberal dad does not call out the racist uncle because he owns a three-quarter share in their grocery store.

Your aunt does not call out the racist uncle because she hates arguments.

Your cousins don't call out the uncle because they're angling for the inheritance.

etc.

In the RPG community, Thanksgiving is GenCon, and the most consistent core of the family are those designers and publishers who've been coming back year after year after year for decades. They know central Indianapolis' bars and steak houses, they know whose table is usually where on the floor, they have lost dice beneath hotel couches in every state of the union. They are familiar names, people like Mike Mearls, Monte Cook and his handful of designers at MCG, Chris Pramas and Nicole Lindroos and Steve Kenson at Green Ronin, Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue at Evil Hat, Robin Laws and his Pelgrane folks, and Kenneth Hite--who wins an Ennie every year for best podcast (at minimum) along with Laws and is seen posing centerfold-style above with several other family members at the Ennies in the picture above--there are a few others.

Unlike many younger designers, these people are definitely not going anywhere. They made some choices a long time ago: they are sticking with this career forever.

They have a family-like relationship, and "family" does not mean "They all like each other" family means "Every one of them has a little bit of a relationship to every other one of them whether they want to or not." Family means: they're in a boat, the kind that can be rocked.

The major Thanksgiving Uncles here are Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks at Evil Hat. The folks discussed in previous chapters--Olivia Hill, the Something Awful /tg goons and the RPGnetters who copy them--are their Donald Trump. They may not agree with everything Mr Trump does, but they donate to the cause and support him when it counts.

Most of these other designers and publishers, for the most part, want nothing to do with bottom-scraping trolls--often for the very selfish reason that they themselves have been targeted by RPGnet and company's omnidirectional rage at anyone with enough name recognition to score lolpoints off of.

But Evil Hat keeps inviting them over. 

Anyone with a hate take (other than "Why does Evil Hat pay such low rates? And where are the people of color in your organization?") they invite them in. Evil Hat literally recruited off of Something Awful. Like someone who worked at Evil Hat literally waded on the /tg forum and said that if anyone wanted to get started in the RPGs they should totally contact them.

Rob Donoghue, the more-talkative face of Evil Hat, deals with questions about why Evil Hat does this exactly how a racist uncle responds to you asking about that whole Build A Wall thing. "Well, you know, it's to get a reaction, I just think..." Any words he can hang on to in order to maintain a facade of respectful distance from the hate he's signed on to.

So...the family doesn't talk about it. They read threads, they know gossip, they have people they don't respect, but they still have to drink together, eat together, be on panels together, have turkey together, get medals together.  It's undiscussed.

The Dog and the Dice

So, if you remember back to Chapter Three, Olivia Hill, the hatemob had heard I was working at White Wolf on account of the Vampire video game I'd done with Sarah Horrocks. I'd been thrown off Vampire's 5th edition, but they had no idea--three more chapters to go and nothing in the story from here forward is about me--but they don't know that., which meant in their mind the game was still Tainted By Zakness.

This meant that when Vampire 5e was announced, the hatemob spent the next year raking over press releases, interviews, beta rules, and any other shred of Vampire news looking for excuses to attack it.

Remember: I was long gone. I didn't write a word of the new tabletop game.

People who still hung out on RPGnet--many of whom had no idea I'd ever been involved (or even who I was) followed the loudest and squeakiest wheels--Olivia Hill, Paul "Ettin" Matijevic, etc.--who had an axe to grind. Vampire 5e had to be problematic. Somehow. They were like those Japanese soldiers on the island of Lubang who kept fighting because they didn't know the war was over--except they were on the winning side.

Nobody can manage to just say "This made me uncomfortable because of my issues, I guess I need a content warning". The tone would soon collapse into total underwear-on-headery but in the beginning it was like a spaghetti-o-stained YouTuber explaining how Actually, 2001 is a bad movie because it lacks a basic grasp of...

There was baby-eating (like in Dracula by that total edgelord Bram Stoker), there was a smattering of Old School Renaissance-style mechanics, but the thing that finally got them pulling off their pants to drape them over their faces was that someone found a paragraph where the writer was trying to describe how a loss of humanity would trigger the angry-type vampire characters to get mad and they used the word..."trigger".

Rather than thinking this was maybe Ken or one of a handful of other middle-aged game designers using a word that meant less to them than it did to the Extremely Online, Ettin and company decided that White Wolf was deliberately attempting to mock the mentally ill. 

There are hundreds of simple examples of this kind of motivated reasoning around Vampire. Martin Ericsson, one of the Important Swedes at White Wolf, is a big nerd, of course,  so he calls himself "Martin Elricson" like, y'know, Elric. And he signs his emails "Blood and souls" like, y'know, in the extremely well-known-especially-in-RPG-circles fantasy classic Elric series. And Something Awful goons were like "Blood and souls? That sounds like Blood and Soil! Nazis! Nazis!" It's not like they google him. And when he explained it, it's not like they apologized or did any introspection.

It got worse when White Wolf put out something which had, among other things, a picture of some dice. The dice had a 1 a 4 and an 8 and another 8. Most people were like ok, sure those are dice, and turned the page--but the mob decided THATS A NAZI DOGWHISTLE!!!! In responce to said whistle, a dog duly appeared.

Specifically, this invited a long post by a teenage-vampire-erotica-writing furry known only (then) as "Dog With Dice". Dog With Dice had an elaborate multipage conspiracy theory that Vampire 5e was designed by and aimed at Nazis. Dog With Dice is not famous or influential and the post was riddled with mistakes that were (altogether now) easy to check. But that never stopped the Something Awful goons.

The post went so viral White Wolf actually had to do a press release and an official video to address fan uproar. Most fans didn't care--if the chat during the video was anything to go on--but as discussed in Chapter One, normal fans who just want a game don't do things.

None of it was in good faith. Anyone in-the-know enough to care what the acronym "VTM5e" even meant knew enough to be able to figure out this made no sense. Yet somehow not one of them remembered to mention: I'm fucking Jewish. 

Now, at first this all may sound like a repeat of last chapter, because mostly it is. Goons lying and doing bad faith readings again.

But this wave of harassment was different because an actual almost-full-time game guy, a family member--Rob Donoghue, co-founder of indie-mainstay Evil Hat--retweeted it--and then said it was "damning". 

Again: Evil Hat, who makes the Fate RPG and Thirsty Sword Lesbians and puts out Blades in the Dark. One of the biggest names in indie tabletop RPGs.

It's one thing for the racist uncle to like Donald Trump. It's another thing for him to point his fork across the cranberry sauce and tell your boyfriend to go back to Mexico.

Food Fight

This may be a subtle point but this is where the story goes from being "yeah the internet is trash" to "the entire RPG scene is trash".

Up until now this has been a story about people who could fairly be called "trolls"--commenters whose main place in the RPG constellation will be as, at most, people who complained about something.  The entry of Rob Donoghue onto the stage signals the entry into the Vampire hatemob of RPG people who have had a sizable impact on the current game scene via things they actually created.

It also signals the entry of someone who not only had privilege and structural power but had every human reason to know better. Rob may have not liked me, since I was constantly pointing out how his company promoted conspiracy theories and paid starvation wages, but he knew Kenneth Hite. Like as a face every year at the Thanksgiving table and a guy to talk to.

So, of course, I wrote a post about it:

This was Evil Hat's first public response, from Rob's co-founder, Fred Hicks:

This means Fred read my blog, which is something his people call "stalking"

Down in the little "likes" bar for this piece of hatespeech you can see who endorsed it, including perennial Evil Hat mainstay Sophie Lagace (first avatar), Cam Banks, author of Marvel Heroic RPG and formerly of Atlas Games and Margaret Weis Productions (6th avatar down), and Lowell Francis of storygames/OSR crossover podcast/discussions site/general indie RPG enterprise The Gauntlet. These aren't anonymous names hiding behind anime avatars, they're game industry people with resumes.

That's a lot of Uncles who have a problem with a Jew asking not to be called a Nazi.

Here are some bits from the texts I had back and forth with Kenneth Hite at that time. I haven't included his end because this was private, but including my end should be enough to show the tenor of the conversation...

After three days, Ken did eventually manage to get Rob to apologize. I don't know if it was with Robin Laws' help or not:

My "handling" of it. Where I typed on my blog that you shouldn't call your friend Ken a Nazi when you know he isn't. When I said maybe linking your colleague to the promotion of worldwide genocide isn't a great example of adult conflict resolution. What a horrible and unnecessary burr I am beneath the great and shiny saddles of mighty captains of indiegaming.

Anyway so this was a crowning moment of shame, right? The indie RPG scene's most aggressively compromised Uncles are called out at the table for their longstanding habit of retweeting frantic troll backwash and privileging their connection to the darkest depths of the RPG scene over the lives and careers of peers they know and claim to respect, right? Obviously putting Ken Hite in a position where you Google him and get "Nazi" was clownshoes stupidity right?

Surely at that point Evil Hat heads Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks stop following Ettin and other folks from his scene on Twitter, and Ettin then goes on and apologizes, then all the other Something Awful goons too, then their RPGnet clones do, too, and Olivia Hill apologizes for escalating things to this point, and surely someone actually realizes I don't work at White Wolf (maybe by asking them?) and tells everyone to calm down, and everyone realizes Rob and Fred are, at best, really stupid and stops paying any attention to them and they begin boycotting Evil Hat and John Harper decides he doesn't want to be associated with them and leaves, and the entire scene has an agonizing reappraisal of why it's so vulnerable to viral conspiracy theories. Right?

Of course not, before the year was up they did it all over again, only more and sillier. But that's for Chapter Five: Snakes Have Legs.

Chapter One  - Chapter Two - Chapter Three -

 Chapter 3.5 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6