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Harvey Mantaco posted:This thread makes me want to play 4e more than anything ever. Then this thread has done a good thing. More seriously while 4e's great it does require a bit more setup than everyone's comfortable with on the GM's end, and everyone has options now so it can take a bit longer to play and get used to. The latter two are things that have happened because there's fun bits non-wizards now get, but it's a valid criticism to say they can induce analysis paralysis, particularly when you've just got a character or if you start a high level toon (you don't need to do that, btw; the game is fun at level 1 without the usual "excitement" of getting one-shotted by kobolds and stuff). I've found myself torn between 4e and Something Awful's own Strike! RPG because I simultaneously really like the vast reams of stuff I have to play with in 4e, but also know I can spend way too long on pregame setup for it and it's not good for me, so something lighter might be better. Chill la Chill posted:I've actually bad mouthed certain board games or non-4e D&D games while talking to friends before. Or trying to explain to a grog until I realize they're a grog and their mind won't be changed. But doing it while a game is going on? Lol who does that? I just let people play their PFS games and don't bother them but when they ask why I won't join I do tell them why. Yeah, to be clear I never even mentioned mechanics in my convo. It was just "Oh fourth edition? You know they made fighters MAGICAL ANIME NINJAS and you're playing an MMO, right?"
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Aug 26, 2015 22:54
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spectralent posted:In 3.5/PF, combat is often super short because something got hit with a save-or-die or save-or-suck and the combat's basically over on turn 1 or 2 though! That's better right? 3.5/PF is the rise of "uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" based combat, where the caster makes a monster lore check to play 20 questions with the DM, then thumbs through his spell list looking for something that pierces the current chump's immunities, then micromanages his familiar/summons/animal companions, and then tries to fit the square peg in the round hole when he hasn't memorized Dunk Aboleth or whatever he needs that moment. I'm pretty sure a lot of people who have played 3.5 derivatives, especially in organized play, have had the six seconds in-game/sixty minutes at the table experience.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:58
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ProfessorCirno posted:Most nerds have a nasty combo of a) having few to no actual social graces, and b) being overwhelmingly taught by society that their opinion is the most important and correct thing in the world. I'm not sure about B. I always figured the opposite. "Good taste" or mastering (real) D&D is more less what they have. They need to assert their relevancy in the culture they've entrenched themselves in. That's why they hate new people and new things, because they know they're getting left behind. If the pool gets better their position in the social order becomes lower in the grand scheme. Why would anyone play with these fuckers if there's cool young people, or a fresh new system?
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Aug 26, 2015 22:59
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I think what happens with B) is that when nerds discover another person with similar nerdly inclinations (like, playing tabletop RPGs) they assume that this person would really liek to have a loud nerdy discussion about what SUCKS and DOESNT SUCK about their mutual interest. It's some weird form of establishing pack dominance. It also doesn't help that nerds seem particularly prone to not understanding the difference between facts and opinions.
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Aug 26, 2015 23:02
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spectralent posted:Yeah, to be clear I never even mentioned mechanics in my convo. It was just "Oh fourth edition? You know they made fighters MAGICAL ANIME NINJAS and you're playing an MMO, right?" I witnessed someone attempt to berate someone who was completely new to tabletop gaming for believing that essentials would be alright for his new group to get their feet wet with. The newbie had no idea what was going on and I eventually intervened with "Do you know a better game to start with?" and he just kind of stammered for a bit then went back into his rant about how psions were too powerful.
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Aug 26, 2015 23:03
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Bleu posted:3.5/PF is the rise of "uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" based combat, where the caster makes a monster lore check to play 20 questions with the DM, then thumbs through his spell list looking for something that pierces the current chump's immunities, then micromanages his familiar/summons/animal companions, and then tries to fit the square peg in the round hole when he hasn't memorized Dunk Aboleth or whatever he needs that moment. I'm pretty sure a lot of people who have played 3.5 derivatives, especially in organized play, have had the six seconds in-game/sixty minutes at the table experience. I usually got lore checks, followed by immediate slam-dunking. Or 90% of the time slam-dunking because everyone knew what we were fighting. I think I first went to look up tiers when I had a soulknife run into the center of a mob, use his free whirlwind attack to deal like 10-15 damage to them all, then when the wizard cycled around to his turn everything got entombed in stone.
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Aug 26, 2015 23:04
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Most wizards skip over "Dunk Aboleth" in favor of "Dunk Anyone" or even "Enable Dunking" on the party Fighter. Not saying their won't be times when the average Joe Wizard has to twiddle his thumbs or spend a spell on something it's not ideal for, but it shouldn't be that often.
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Aug 26, 2015 23:48
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Power Word: Dunk
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Aug 27, 2015 00:12
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Circle of Protection from Chaos Dunk (10')
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Aug 27, 2015 00:59
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Speaking of playtesting, what was the deal with TSR's no playtesting rule? What was that supposed to accomplish?
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Aug 27, 2015 01:07
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Ratoslov posted:Circle of Protection from Chaos Dunk (10') A circle is a hoop! You fool! You've doomed us all!
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Aug 27, 2015 01:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:Speaking of playtesting, what was the deal with TSR's no playtesting rule? What was that supposed to accomplish? It was "you nerds shouldn't be playing games on company time" from management as far as I've heard.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:13
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For a while in the early 1980s, TSR was run by people who seemed determined to loot the company down to the baseboards. Fifty relatives on the payroll (each with a company car), writing personal checks against corporate accounts, etcetera. Lots of people showed up for work, played their home D&D campaign on company time, and went home and cashed their paycheck. No actual product development, just, y'know, "playtesting". Like napping at your desk and calling it brainstorming, only as official company policy. Eventually new management took over and one of the first things they did was ban playtesting on the clock.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:18
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I can't remember which TSR writer it was, but someone repudiated the rumour that Lorraine Williams banned playtesting. And it was not someone who had nice things to say about her in general. By the same token, I haven't heard that TSR employees in the early 80s got paid to do nothing but play D&D at work.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:25
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occamsnailfile posted:TBH this kinda makes me want to read the Gerrold novels now I know, right? I liked the idea of fighting against an ecological invasion, but the chest-beating jingoism turned me off. The Wikipedia entry puts a much more interesting complexion on things. unseenlibrarian posted:Given what I've seen of the GURPS playtesting process the few times I looked in on it, I would not be surprised that it was more board culture influence than anything Carella inserted directly. I didn't realize they actually had that much influence on the process. I only went in there a few times, back in the late 3.Revised era, and left because it looked like wall to wall argument and grump over minor things.
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Aug 27, 2015 02:01
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Bieeardo posted:I didn't realize they actually had that much influence on the process. I only went in there a few times, back in the late 3.Revised era, and left because it looked like wall to wall argument and grump over minor things.
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Aug 27, 2015 02:05
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spectralent posted:More seriously while 4e's great it does require a bit more setup than everyone's comfortable with on the GM's end Having DMed 2E AD&D, 3E, and 4E, this is so incredibly wrong
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Aug 27, 2015 02:29
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Halloween Jack posted:I can't remember which TSR writer it was, but someone repudiated the rumour that Lorraine Williams banned playtesting. And it was not someone who had nice things to say about her in general.
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Aug 27, 2015 02:43
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Darwinism posted:Having DMed 2E AD&D, 3E, and 4E, this is so incredibly wrong We're not interested in the opinions of people who have experience with the systems. Come on!
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Aug 27, 2015 02:58
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FMguru posted:SJG's official forums (dating back to the io.com and dialup BBS days) have always had sad old white libertarian men as their cultural base. spectralent posted:Yeah, to be clear I never even mentioned mechanics in my convo. It was just "Oh fourth edition? You know they made fighters MAGICAL ANIME NINJAS and you're playing an MMO, right?"
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Aug 27, 2015 02:59
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TheTatteredKing posted:I'm not sure about B. I always figured the opposite. "Good taste" or mastering (real) D&D is more less what they have. They need to assert their relevancy in the culture they've entrenched themselves in. That's why they hate new people and new things, because they know they're getting left behind. If the pool gets better their position in the social order becomes lower in the grand scheme. Why would anyone play with these fuckers if there's cool young people, or a fresh new system? Both? Nerds overwhelmingly belong to some very specific demographics that are in a constant state of being told they're the most important people in the universe, but have That One Little Thing that stops them from taking the crown. Then they see a hobby where they can be entirely socially relevant. MadScientistWorking posted:Really? That is how Lorraine Williams got put in place in the first place. She literally was put in place to spite Gygax who noticed that the Blume's and other people were embezzling the company. Other way around - Gygax put HER in place to get TSR afloat as it was drastically hemmorhaging money, and she succeeded, then arranged to have the Blumes all get kicked out. Except then the Blumes sold her all their stock, making her majority stockholder. Gygax then tried to fire her and declare the sale of stock illegal. When that didn't work he "voluntarily left" the company himself. The whole early history of D&D is literally just everybody backstabbing everyone constantly, it's kinda great. Halloween Jack posted:I can't remember which TSR writer it was, but someone repudiated the rumour that Lorraine Williams banned playtesting. And it was not someone who had nice things to say about her in general. Mike Breault said it here. Going off what he said, it's not that they were disallowed from playtesting, it's that they were in full on shovelware mode and didn't really have time or resources to playtest stuff. Of course it's real hard to take anyone's word from that time period for a vast number of reasons; between the constant backstabbing going on between executives and the hilarious unprofesionalism that was the standard in nerd industries, etc, etc. Just read into how hosed up early WotC is.
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Aug 27, 2015 03:03
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ProfessorCirno posted:Other way around - Gygax put HER in place to get TSR afloat as it was drastically hemmorhaging money, and she succeeded, then arranged to have the Blumes all get kicked out. Except then the Blumes sold her all their stock, making her majority stockholder. Gygax then tried to fire her and declare the sale of stock illegal. When that didn't work he "voluntarily left" the company himself. ProfessorCirno posted:Just read into how hosed up early WotC is.
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Aug 27, 2015 03:09
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ProfessorCirno posted:Other way around - Gygax put HER in place to get TSR afloat as it was drastically hemmorhaging money, and she succeeded, then arranged to have the Blumes all get kicked out. Except then the Blumes sold her all their stock, making her majority stockholder. Gygax then tried to fire her and declare the sale of stock illegal. When that didn't work he "voluntarily left" the company himself.
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Aug 27, 2015 03:11
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I will note going off their Glassdoor reviews, WotC has not improved in that time, and may have gotten worse.
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Aug 27, 2015 04:05
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MYFAROG WHO TOOK MYFAROG ILL FIND MYFAROGquote:If this mythic world tries to portray vikings, what's wrong about them being racists? Also, people back then were mostly slaves, nobles were truly tested and noble among regular folk. Also men and women had very different roles back then. Surely in their barbaric view of life, they were what we now call racists. The setting is not nice, but it may be quite accurate take on how it was 2k year ago in Scandinavia. Racism is nothing more but a survival instinct on primal level. quote:Question: is the problem that you'd never play this game (hell no), OR that the game even exists in the first place? The first one is easily supported, the second one is pretty hard to justify. quote:
quote:
quote:No, the poster I replied to implied that freedom of speech needed to be limited based on whether or not it deliberately preaches harm. This is far too nebulous of a phrase and open to interpretation, legally, hence it's possible to run into interpretations where pro-Nazi crap IS promoted (depending on who's in charge), and anything against Nazism is illegal. That is my point. arms spread, falsetto: ~every loving tiiiiiiiime~
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Aug 27, 2015 05:00
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Fossilized Rappy posted:I've never really understood the "fighters with extraordinary powers are anime/weaboo/shounen/whatever noun-as-verb you wish to you" thing. European mythology is full of warriors who do crazy poo poo: Beowulf swims in ice cold water with full armor for a week straight, Cu Chulainn hulks out and destroys entire armies, Jack the Giant Killer murders giants with his wits and his weapons and eventually beheads the Devil himself, etc.
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Aug 27, 2015 05:03
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If you want to play as racist magic vikings with dangerous combat you should play Heroquest over kvlt papyrus D&D.
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Aug 27, 2015 05:54
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Thanks for TSR discussion. I should really finish Designers and Dragons.Fossilized Rappy posted:I've never really understood the "fighters with extraordinary powers are anime/weaboo/shounen/whatever noun-as-verb you wish to you" thing. European mythology is full of warriors who do crazy poo poo: Beowulf swims in ice cold water with full armor for a week straight, Cu Chulainn hulks out and destroys entire armies, Jack the Giant Killer murders giants with his wits and his weapons and eventually beheads the Devil himself, etc. I think it's because OSR D&D took a very high-level approach to representing the martial prowess of a Fighter, and then that got misinterpreted into later D&D works as "the Fighter is not magical", which then further mutates into "the Fighter cannot and should be able to perform any feat that is supernatural. A Barbarian/Paladin/Ranger could, but that's because they have access to some form of supernatural power source. The Fighter does not." In OSR D&D a single combat round is 1 minute long, and the Fighter's superior attack bonus, superior AC, and superior HP is supposed to be representative of all sorts of anime weeaboo bullshit that they're pulling off within that one minute to juke, dodge, dive, dip and dodge around a skeleton, smashing its legs in, parkouring off the goddamn walls and so on and so forth. You extend this to AD&D and they become even more fearsome: multiple attacks, THAC0 that quickly becomes way way negative (which is good!), Exceptional Strength, Fighter-specific CON bonuses, Weapon Specialization rules for even better THAC0 and even more damage and even more attacks. Or Rules Cyclopedia's Weapon Mastery where they can just flat out deflect projectiles out of mid-air, impale a dude with a trident, stun a fool all drat day, and the damage of a club goes from 1d4 to 1d6+6 AND it provides a 4 AC bonus. Hell, Gygax himself wrote that a "saving throw" is "whatever the story needs the characters to do to avoid danger", up to and including the Fighter just hulking the gently caress out and taking the dragon's breath weapon right on the chin and shrugging it off. ... except that in the minds of players, a single attack roll is "one swing", and that's if you're already not misremembering the way things were. If you visualized the Fighter as just "I swing at the enemy, I hit or miss" (and I wouldn't necessarily blame you for thinking this, because that's the intuitive perception), then it becomes easy to mistake the Fighter as some regular joe schmoe, and that gets built-up over years and years and layers and layers of rose-tinted glasses as gospel. When D&D started to become less abstracted and they started giving other classes more specific attack moves to perform, they should have done the same for the Fighter, but since there's all this hidebound cruft built up over how the Fighter is actually rather mundane, then instead of getting explicit demonstrations of all the sweet attack options that they were supposed to have been doing in that 1 minute of combat, they just get a basic attack because c'mon Steve, that's all they were doing in our Basic Red Box games, right? gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 05:54
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ProfessorCirno posted:Most nerds have a nasty combo of a) having few to no actual social graces, and b) being overwhelmingly taught by society that their opinion is the most important and correct thing in the world. IME, nerds are one of the most religiously fervent groups out there. Only instead of bashing peoples heads in over the exact nature of the Trinity, they threaten people with death and rape over whether Monks belong in D&D, which Lovecraft stories are canon, or the Han Shot First bullshit.
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Aug 27, 2015 06:07
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Am I allowed to be a monk who illuminates manuscripts, keeps an apiary and grows a herb garden?
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Aug 27, 2015 06:22
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DigitalRaven posted:To be fair, Atlantis is already a racist utopia, because pretty much all modern Atlantean stuff comes via Madame Blavatsky and she was a demented racist who thought black people were descended from those few Lemurians didn't gently caress animals. Wasn't classical Atlantis not supposed to be taken seriously but as a metaphor for what Plato thought the ideal society would be?
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Aug 27, 2015 06:41
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Shadeoses posted:Am I allowed to be a monk who illuminates manuscripts, keeps an apiary and grows a herb garden? Play Ars Magica.
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Aug 27, 2015 06:44
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Mors Rattus posted:Play Ars Magica.
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Aug 27, 2015 06:47
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Covenant, but yes.
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Aug 27, 2015 06:48
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Comrade Koba posted:IME, nerds are one of the most religiously fervent groups out there. Only instead of bashing peoples heads in over the exact nature of the Trinity, they threaten people with death and rape over whether Monks belong in D&D, which Lovecraft stories are canon, or the Han Shot First bullshit. The Trinity is Healer, Tank and DPS. 
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Aug 27, 2015 07:22
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Today I found myself having to resist the urge to grog when I realized that the IKRPG isn't in scale with any of the miniatures they sell. Their minis are somewhere in the 28-32mm range, IKRPG is in 1/72 scale for some reason.
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Aug 27, 2015 07:27
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MadScientistWorking posted:Well that was hosed up in a sexual harassment is a-ok sort of way. FMguru fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 09:58
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point of return posted:Wasn't classical Atlantis not supposed to be taken seriously but as a metaphor for what Plato thought the ideal society would be? Plato's Atlantis is. Blavatsky pretty much invented the modern Atlantis, along with pretty much all the rest of the "New Age" bullshit.
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Aug 27, 2015 10:07
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Today I found myself having to resist the urge to grog when I realized that the IKRPG isn't in scale with any of the miniatures they sell. If nothing else I think they were using the same kind of mechanics as the wargame (movement measured in tape measure inches, 2d6 with boosts, etc.)
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Aug 27, 2015 10:37
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Nessus posted:What, the original d20 one or the current one? Unless they put out a new line, which I would not put past any company, I would think that one of the sell points of the IKRPG is that you can use your Warmahordes army as play pieces. Yeah the new one. It explicitly states that one inch is six feet... Which is 1/72 scale. So all the miniatures they currently make and sell for the game are wrongly sized for it. Not that it matters since the game works on bases only, but still. But that game has all kinds of messed up scale. The longest range gun in the game only has an effective range of about half that of an actual historical firearm of a similar type, and realistically since the guns in IK are really more late 1800's in type they probably have an effective range that's about a fifth or sixth of a real gun.
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Aug 27, 2015 10:49
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