Hot Wet Planet

Thanks to the beautiful people at Fandom Wank, I discovered this thread over at RPG.net about a game called, ahem, Hot Wet Planet. It's pretty much as horrible as it sounds. Or as Darren MacLennen put it, "You can develop your writing skills by playing a dumb barbarian, a rape victim or a tentacle monster."

Here are two "attribute scores":

Attr = Attractiveness, beauty, appearance. It's chosen as -2, -1, +0. +1, +2, etc... It may not be more negative than a -2 for any player-character. +0 is normal, but still considered attractive by human standards. For female characters, Attr adds to Def when they are attacked with harmful intentions (such as somebody trying to kill them or injure them), but subtracts from Def when they are attacked with lustful intentions.

So, if you're a woman, being hot means that you can't be killed, but you can be raped.

HWPE = Hot Wet Planet Effect, which is an overall level of the Hot Wet Planet's mysterious energy influence upon the character. The higher the HWPE, also the higher the character's libido & constant arousal (more than exponentially increased for each level up), but also HWPE can add to Psi for "danger-sense", and makes it less likely that the character will be attacked for the purpose of becoming a meal. On the negative side, a higher HWPE makes it more difficult to resist the Hot Wet Planet's mental & emotional effects. A higher HWPE for the guys makes them more aggressive, domineering, sexist towards the girls, more likely to fight each other, etc... A higher HWPE for the girls makes them more submissive, more shy & easily embarrassed, a lot hornier & wetter (all the time), less able to cover themselves, and overwhelms their willpower to force them to flirt & sexually expose themselves - even when they don't want to, nor intend to - and magnifies pleasurable sensations. The mental & emotional effects can be countered by Det.

And some more game text!

In addition, some unidentifiable element of the environment is changing the survivors, eroticising them, making the females constantly horny yet more shy at the same time, more youthful, more like a guy's wet-dream fantasy, and removing all their body hair from their neck to their toes. The guys get bigger dicks, muscles, a penchant for crude violence, and that sort of thing, as if the planet was turning the men into barbarian warriors.

In the background, unknown at least at first to the Offworlder survivors, the planet's higher lifeforms have a simple mass-mind that is using it's powerful psionics to mentally influence and sometimes dominate the humans in lecherous ways, having it's strongest effect on the females (who gain the benefit of being occasionally protected, & subtly forewarned about real dangers); many of the younger (or younger appearing) women discover they are incapable of wearing underwear, or any kind of pants, or even anything more covering than an indecently short tunic or mini-dress...and the effect is becoming stronger with the passing of time.

Then there are the Tentacle Monsters to contend with....the size of a small car or as large as a house, in many shapes and forms, but always having phallic tentacles and a sexual obsession with humanoid females.

What more needs to be said? But, on dear lord in heaven in whom I don't believe, a great deal more is said. The author of this game is offended at people's offense, apparently living in a world where publicly discussing wanting to pretend to be a rapist tentacle monster is socially acceptable. Still, it's handled with the typical RPG.net subtlety of trolling the person, flaming them, and then banning them, but, hey, it's RPG.net. That's why people go, I guess. But, yes, a great, great deal more is said.

This hobby is depraved, isn't it?

John McCain and Gamers - I don't think he likes us, hehe.

From McCain's own website comes this little gem, "It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others." That's from Mike Goldfarb, McCain's campaign manager.

The really goofy thing is that a lot of servicemen and women play role-playing games. It's no surprise, of course, that McCain's campaign is a little out of touch, but unbeknowst to them they just alienated a fair number of people who are his core constituency. Gamers are generally pretty touchy about this kind of crap, too. It seems particularly inane to create a new kind of discrimination in this day and age, based on a person's hobby.

Apparently someone straightened Goldfarb out because he recanted with this: "If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American." Considering McCain's health care plans (read: do nothing) I don't believe that he's interested in our physical stats, and considering his education plans (read: cut yet more taxes on rich people and abandon yet more schools) I don't think he's lookin' out for my mental stats, either. ;)

Cyclops - MASTER OF ASSASSINS

Okay, does anyone out there think that this makes even the slightest bit of sense? Cyclops is ordering people to do assassinations. He's authorizing the use of torture.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, but I'd mostly thought we were past the point of thinking that what was "wrong" with comics is that they didn't have a high enough body count. That it would be be some kind of improvement if every comic book protagonist (at this point, the word "hero" in no sense applies in the modern sense) treated life with absolute contempt.

And the reasons are so . . . creepy. I mean, the whole Endangered Species storyline . . . am I the only person who was all creeped out about that? The problem is that their genetic uniqueness was gone and that they, as a species, were "dying out". So it was okay to do anything to preserve mutants as a "species" because they were "dying out".

Why would I find that creepy? Because, well, first, I don't think that they're a different species. They can breed with "humans", humans largely find them attractive sex partners, blah, blah, blah. While mutants might on some levels qualify as a new species, on others they don't. Indeed, the very word "mutant" implies that they aren't a different species, but merely unusual genetic variations within the larger human gene pool.

Which gets us around to number two. There have often been groups of humans who possess certain genotypes who have been very quick to accuse other people who lack those specific genotypes of being a different species. The best known are the fucking Nazis. And, more generally, any racial supremacist movement you can think of.

So, yeah, I was pretty deeply creeped out about this obsession over the X-gene and it's distinction of mutants into a separate species, one so important that by the time we get over to Messiah Complex the mutants are willing to kill and torture to "protect". The reasoning they use is the reasoning of all the racist nutjobs who think that their "race" is superior to other people's race, and it's being threatened by all those filthy mud people, so it's okay to grab a few of them and burn them alive.

They've become what they hated! Scott Summers has decided not only that Magneto was right, but that he didn't go far enough and has added torture to murder, justified as protecting his "species". This used to be the sort of thing that they fought. It'll make it hard to read the book when these people try to stop someone like Magneto (who has been variously retconned over the years that to find the stuff where he was a laughing megalomaniacal supervillain trying to conquer the world, you've got to go back literally decades - so he's definitely morally superior to Cyclops nowadays) or even Mister Sinister. Cyclops is willing to torture people and kill them to enact his racist agenda, not too differently from Mister Sinister.

But, WOW, the composition of X-Force is even more boggling. I think Warpath is a pretty racist caricature, albeit more gentle than in days past, but whenever the X-writers get near Native Americans it quickly gets deeply stupid. But, still, his participation on X-Force is almost given. And Wolverine, of course.

But then we come up on X-23. Here's this girl - and it is important to remember she's a girl, a legal minor - who has been horribly abused to be shaped into a child killer. Her psyche is altogether crushed, she's almost totally incapable of normal human interaction. She was brought to the school for the specific purpose of getting her away from that kind of bullshit, to learn to interact with humans as friends and loved ones instead of viewing them as obstacles to kill to get to her objective. Cyclops takes this girl and puts her on the team because she's good at tracking and killing. Cyclops has decided that it's okay to destroy X-23's soul because he doesn't want to get his own damn hands dirty.

Which is another thing - this gutless motherfucker is sending other people to do his dirty work. I have trouble interpreting that in any other way than cowardice. He's pretty good at sneaking around, he's got this great tactical sense, huge amounts of experience, and powers that are quite good at killing people. He fits the profile to a T. But, y'know, it's better to let X-23 drown in blood than for him to step up and do the things he asks of others.

Needless to say, I'm not terribly pleased with this. If anyone can make sense of why the writers and editors thought it was a good idea, I'd like to know.