Car News

Thanks for the Supreme Court coverage, Mike.  I do hope the last line of your article was a typo, or else Scalia's knowledge of English grammar is as bad as his knowledge of Constitutional law.  :-)

Back in the early 1980s, the rape charge was leveled against table-top RPGs, even though unlike computer game software, there was rarely any provision for it in the rules.  As a result, one of my research efforts was to find an authenticated case of a PC rapist.  This was four or five years before CAR-PGa was organized and so I didn't have that valuable assistance.  Mythworld was in the final testplaying stages, although it had been demonstrated at Origins '84.

We had a new player who was absolutely horrible.  He played like the corporate media said games were played. He had already lost one of his PCs (we generally play two at a time so a player isn't out of the game if one is killed or incapacitated).  As soon as we found the captives were were hired to rescue, this idiot pipes up with, "first we rape all the women."  After all that searching, I had a real case dumped in my lap!

A centaura in the band tried to deliver a slightly more forceful version of a slap in the face by pawing. Because of force and rapid repetition, paw is a horse's most potent weapon.  The location roll was to the head; the hit roll was critical - it gets through armor, so the helmet went flying; the damage roll was maximum 2D8+2D6!  We had neglected to provide for pulled hits.

The player departed forever while we suspended play until we could work out rules for pulled hits, but he still brags about how he helped testplay Mythworld.  The detail he overlooked, in addition to his bad playing, was that except for one dwarf and his human, the whole band was female!  

Actually, the rules provide that such action would cause a visit by a proficient band of constabulary with sufficiently powerful magic to straighten out the facts in the case and weapon skills to enforce it.  As the mixed band would indicate, in this game all sentient species are considered equal under the law.

The court's case has no simple answer and must be watched carefully - especially how narrowly or broadly the decision will be constructed.  Either way, the precedent it creates may well be more important than the decision itself.

Paul Cardwell