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Haystack posted:I might be wrong, but I think the new image is for their Free RPG Day offering. Which, granted, is going to be a New Runequest quickstart booklet. I guessed it was for both but after rereading things they were only talking about the quick start rules and adventure. The main book is allegedly done and they're sourcing the art so I thought they'd be showing some of that. I'm excited to see what they have in it because so far the stuff they've done for Glorantha has been great. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 16:43
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The "monstrous" races occupy a weird headspace for me, because I tend to care more about the law-chaos axis of the alignment grid than the good-evil one these days. I think it gives a better idea of their character since the way D&D handled good-evil in 3e (the last edition I payed attention to as far as alignment) was dumb and excessively humanocentric when it was also considered to be fundamental forces of the universe. This doesn't change them that much, but it gives you the opportunity to address certain things. Like you'd never meet an Orc slaver, since Orcs are Chaotic and slavery is a structure of Law. You'd be more likely to find a lone Orc out in the world than a whole band, since Chaotic groups splinter and reform often over differences of opinion. Hell, emphasizing Chaos in their alignment pretty much turns them into hunter-gatherers and adventurers instead of real adversaries. That's why I dislike the Good-Evil portion, because it straightjackets groups into these dumb nationstate ideas where there's X number of Orc chieftains per Y Orcs instead of just letting them be a group of green dudes and dudettes with no real organizational structure. This doesn't get into the whole Moorcockian Law vs Chaos thing, which if you're not running a game set in his world, why use it, instead I just view the Law-Chaos alignment to be more of a order versus freedom thing, with most people falling into a Neutral camp where they tolerate some order and some freedom.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:44
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Serf posted:Hence why they are The Best. It's true.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:52
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That kind of just makes the Orcs sound like bizzaro  They're cool with beating people into submission as long as no contracts are involved.
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Mar 10, 2017 18:14
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Rockopolis posted:That kind of just makes the Orcs sound like bizzaro How is that different from your average PC group?
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Mar 10, 2017 18:25
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Kwyndig posted:The "monstrous" races occupy a weird headspace for me, because I tend to care more about the law-chaos axis of the alignment grid than the good-evil one these days. I think it gives a better idea of their character since the way D&D handled good-evil in 3e (the last edition I payed attention to as far as alignment) was dumb and excessively humanocentric when it was also considered to be fundamental forces of the universe. Law vs Chaos: Epic Rap Battles of History
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Mar 10, 2017 18:53
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Alignment is bad and having an entire species be evil is weird unless they're made out of evil
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Mar 10, 2017 18:57
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I think the Law-Chaos thing is also pretty dumb when applied to an entire species. If humans are anything to go by, there's no simple one-size-fits-all label that can apply to our morality/philosophy. And in terms of where a species falls on the alignment spectrum, the monstrous species are usually gonna be on the negative side. One thing I thought about doing is making alignment into an in-universe label, where documents written by people in the world identify other species as being "chaotic evil" or "lawful neutral" as a way of exposing their own biases.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:07
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Law-Chaos isn't any less dumb than Good-Evil. If you aren't building elaborate anthropological justifications for all your NPCs' cultures, why are you even in this hobby? 
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Mar 10, 2017 19:42
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The Deleter posted:Dwarves are more relatable because, much like us, they make constant huge fuckups and ruin everything around them for everybody. People don't repeat the "dug too deep" thing for nothing. And this is why people need to read The Silmarillion, because it is "constant huge fuckups (by elves): the novel." Turns out being ageless and wise and mighty doesn't cause you to make zero mistakes, it causes you to make fewer mistakes, and the ones you make are really loving bad, because you make them from a place of immense power and pride.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:44
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I still prefer Cold War style proxy wars between Celestial Union and Diabolic Pact factions. Not exactly Cold City, I guess.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:48
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Law-Chaos isn't any less dumb than Good-Evil. If you aren't building elaborate anthropological justifications for all your NPCs' cultures, why are you even in this hobby? I'm totally down for designing cultures. I just think limiting a species to a single culture is pretty dumb. Giving species multiple distinct cultures is cool and good, as is having cultures comprised of many species.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:51
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Arivia posted:Libertad did a writeup of just that on his blog. It's a great way to redeem the ToT I think. That sounds cool. Do you have a link? My Google search turned up nothing.
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Mar 10, 2017 20:54
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Simian_Prime posted:That sounds cool. Do you have a link? My Google search turned up nothing. Here you go: http://quasarknight.blogspot.ca/2016/07/weavebound-godbound-hack-for-forgotten.html
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Mar 10, 2017 21:05
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I wonder how easy it would be to hack Godbound into a Magic: The Gathering game. Planeswalker powers are pretty ridics after all.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:14
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Siivola posted:I wonder how easy it would be to hack Godbound into a Magic: The Gathering game. Planeswalker powers are pretty ridics after all. An Amber hack already exists, and that's vaguely related?
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Mar 10, 2017 21:34
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Siivola posted:I wonder how easy it would be to hack Godbound into a Magic: The Gathering game. Planeswalker powers are pretty ridics after all. Well there is a Kaladesh supplement for D&D here: http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/plane-shift-kaladesh
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Mar 10, 2017 21:35
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They've also released similar supplements for Innistrad and Zendikar. It's a bit curious how they've only started making D&D stuff only now. A couple of years back someone hypothesized that Wizards didn't want to cross the streams because D&D supplements might gently caress with the creative team on Magic's end, which sounded reasonable enough. Guess now that D&D team is like one writer and a juror, and the Magic creative is writing big fancy setting artbooks anyway, someone in the Magic team figured they could just brew something up in-house to sell more stuff to D&D nerds. Darth Various posted:An Amber hack already exists, and that's vaguely related?
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Mar 10, 2017 21:50
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Lichtenstein posted:Goblins are cool and good because they're little green living pretexts for fun shenanigans, regardless of whether you're framing them as comic reliefs or clever schemers. I definitely like my goblins as comic reliefs. Whenever I run a game it's pretty much become an established tradition for me that the players will be fighting goblins, and there's always two goblins that sound exactly like Beavis and Butthead. I don't even know how it started, but it's just stuck with me. Given the chance I would definitely play a goblin in pretty much any fantasy RPG, provided the setting doesn't assume that goblins are always to be killed on sight or that the GM doesn't subscribe to the idea of "Well since you decided to pick a non-traditional race for your character you should expect having to roleplay lots of dumb and unnecessary fantasy racism."
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Mar 10, 2017 21:50
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Siivola posted:I'm not at all familiar with Amber, other that it's diceless and very storygamey. Is there an F&F about it? People trying to hack Amber into other systems are usually trying to adapt the book series than try to modify the game that the late Eric Wujcik wrote which was also based on said series.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:57
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Siivola posted:They've also released similar supplements for Innistrad and Zendikar. I'm quite annoyed that they're doing it now, now core d&d is the wet fart of 5e, of all times.
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Mar 10, 2017 22:33
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On the one hand I feel you, but on the other, eh, I dunno. I mean, it's not like the D&D rules are a particularly good fit for the setting in the first place, y'know? The Art of Magic: Kaladesh is gonna move way more copies than D&D: Kaladesh ever could, and probably can fit more setting detail to boot without all the rules and numbers getting in the way.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:01
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The first article on playing D&D in that one MtG setting was extremely boring and was basically just a collection of stats for PC races and monsters, and even most of the monsters were like "Eh, use this monster from D&D that is kinda similar, whatever." I mean, even if you're not a huge grog about the mechanics of magic in the lore of MtG you can easily tell that D&D's Vancian magic is a really poor fit for MtG settings, and alignment would need to be replaced with some kind of a wheel of colors or poo poo like that. It reminds me of the time me and my friends played D&D 3e in the Warhammer setting without any changes, which in retrospect was a really bad fit for the setting.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:22
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If you added a couple of prestige classes, feats, equipment and two dozen spells, you'd have a classic third edition D&D supplement. 
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Mar 10, 2017 23:29
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Siivola posted:I'm not at all familiar with Amber, other that it's diceless and very storygamey. Is there an F&F about it? I mostly meant the books, which Kwyndig also points out. There are a bunch of parallell worlds mirroring earth. Crazy powerful people go there and do stuff. Kinda sorta like planeswalkers. Note that my knowledge about either franchise is spotty at best. There is an F&F of the game. It's not very charitable.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:33
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I've been thinking that Shadow of the Demon Lord would be a pretty good starting point for an M:TG hack. Its magic traditions look like they line up pretty cleanly along M:TG'S colors, for one thing.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:37
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To return to the Law vs Chaos bit from before, because I had a whole lot of time on my hands today at work: Law vs Chaos works more as a broad set of guidelines, rather than something more stringently defined. One of the biggest complains about D&D is how bogged-down it got in the minutiae of the 9-poins axis and what was considered good or evil and the corresponding law and chaos element attached to it. It's both more stringent and more vague than it needs to be, with people interpreting it all very differently from player to player (and edition to edition). However, if you stick to purely a Law vs Chaos dual axis, it has the capacity to give more nuances towards what is considered 'good' and 'evil'--far more than the 9-point grid ever could. Someone can have the Law alignment but interpret it in an entirely different manner than another person, but still fulfill the requirements of being Lawful. A crime boss, whose organization has checks and balances and internal codes that everyone must follow, is still criminal but is, in the broad category, Lawful. The paladin who tried to bring the crime ring down, who arrested the crime boss rather than slay him outright so that he could face the court of law, acted and performed in a way that's obviously Lawful. His lawyer uses his vast knowledge of the loop holes in the legal code to get the crime boss off the hook for his various criminal activities; this too, is still Lawful, however slimy it might seem. Similarly, Chaos can fall under degrees of interpretation. A rogue who steals from others is Chaotic as he does not acquire his goods through the proper channels, circumventing the law to further himself--even if he in turn uses his leftover profits to help an orphanage. An orc who raids outlying villages for food and clothing is acting Chaotically, even though it might be to supply his clan with much-needed supplies. A power-mad wizard who controls a town through increasingly more arbitrary and insane commands might be considered lawful, but he's doing so in defiance of the lawful word of the king on his land, and thus acts more Chaotic. Was what you did good? No, but it was Lawful. Was what you did evil? No, but it was Chaotic. In the cosmic scope of things that's all the two inscrutable powers behind Law and Chaos care about. If taken to its logical extreme, you have things like the Blood War--devils versus demons, Law versus Chaos. Both sides of the war are irredeemably evil, but they each fulfill their respective alignment. Now, that's just interpretations of the dual axis, and each of the examples could slip into the opposite side of the axis at any given moment. People are not strictly Law or Chaos in real life, obviously, and people fluctuate practically every day on what would be considered lawful or not. Law and Chaos does potentially offer a more interesting dynamic if the kind of world you're playing in (D&D, basically) has alignments as some sort of palpable elemental force with its own motivations That said: alignments are still dumb. It's just less dumb when you're working with two points instead of nine.
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Mar 11, 2017 00:26
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Actually, a rogue who steals from the rich and helps the poor is following a personal code and is thus lawful.
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Mar 11, 2017 02:09
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Law/Chaos is worthless garbage.
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Mar 11, 2017 02:22
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remusclaw posted:Fantasy races always end up being forehead aliens or animals, regardless of the shape they take. The prior uses the alien as a stand in for other cultures or subcultures and the latter obviously. What is the titular "Alien" aside from a combination of traits seen in some of the less cuddly animals we share this space with? The Dwarf as the working class bloke is constantly at odds with the stuffy Elves who live uptown. This is true, but you can at least create more significant differences (physical or psychological) that set them apart from humans. If you have something like dwarves where the difference is mainly "is shorter" and you're riffing on human cultures largely anyway with them, I'm not sure there's a compelling need for them to be a separate species. Just had an idea for a notion of a stock fantasy world where you could make the fact elves / dwarves / whatever are different "races" actually a misconception rather than reality, though.
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Mar 11, 2017 02:39
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Countblanc posted:Actually, a rogue who steals from the rich and helps the poor is following a personal code and is thus lawful. And yet despite that, they're breaking the law, which in and of itself is an unlawful act and veers towards chaotic. Or neutral, at best. The axis can get funky like that. It might be better served as a point of perspective and divorced from the whole metaphysical angle. Ferrinus posted:Law/Chaos is worthless garbage. Outside of a setting made specifically with that in mind (D&D, Stormbringer) I agree. It's more a thought exercise for me.
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Mar 11, 2017 02:41
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D&D is made specifically in mind with law/chaos, but it doesn't work and law/chaos is terrible and everyone functionally ignores it.
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Mar 11, 2017 02:48
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Kwyndig posted:The "monstrous" races occupy a weird headspace for me, because I tend to care more about the law-chaos axis of the alignment grid than the good-evil one these days. I think it gives a better idea of their character since the way D&D handled good-evil in 3e (the last edition I payed attention to as far as alignment) was dumb and excessively humanocentric when it was also considered to be fundamental forces of the universe. I think what's weird to me about "monstrous humanoids" as a designation (aside from the whole "humanoids vs. monstrous humanoids are basically Us vs. Them" bit) is that, regardless of of how lawful or chaotic they're supposed to be, they're never really depicted as having civilizations outside of various levels of warband organization.Even kobolds, who are Lawful and depicted as skilled craftsmen and engineers, seem to have no civilization, culture, or even art aside from an EL-appropriate number of increasingly-arcane traps. I know we shouldn't expect elaborate anthropological rigor from D&D, but if we're going to have sapient humanoid enemies as such a linchpin of the game, it'd be nice if they made even a token effort to give them societies and not just encounter sizes and tactics. If I want to run an encounter with no sense of humanity or moral ambiguity about the enemies, well, we've got dozens of stat blocks for various mindless giant arthropods, you know?
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Mar 11, 2017 02:51
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Antivehicular posted:Even kobolds, who are Lawful and depicted as skilled craftsmen and engineers, seem to have no civilization, culture, or even art That they let outsiders see... 
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Mar 11, 2017 03:09
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Ferrinus posted:Law/Chaos is worthless garbage. Enough! Let's replace it with the Authoritarian/Libertarian|Left/Right compass.
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Mar 11, 2017 03:13
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Plutonis posted:Enough! Let's replace it with the Authoritarian/Libertarian|Left/Right compass. Freebase: Live Action Role Playing in THE WORLD OF REALITY posted:ALIGNMENT
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Mar 11, 2017 03:19
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No Hoxhaist alignment? Pass.
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Mar 11, 2017 03:26
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Plutonis posted:Enough! Let's replace it with the Authoritarian/Libertarian|Left/Right compass. This but unironically as I hack Blades in the Dark into Liberal Crime Squad
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Mar 11, 2017 03:26
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Pope Guilty posted:The elves from the most recent Laundry novel are pretty good. Fun fact Charles Stross invented the Githyanki. (http://www.unboundworlds.com/2014/07/how-charles-stross-invented-the-most-metal-dd-monster-of-all-time/) I feel like it kind of showed. EDIT: I apologize for re-uncorking the mind flayer slavery bottle.
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Mar 11, 2017 03:31
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I ran a one shot fantasy game once where I had the dwarves be obsessive lumberjacks instead of miners. The players thought that was cute, until they realized I was actually going whole hog with the historical lumberjack bits, and they stumbled into a bunk of dwarves screaming about the hogan boys and playing a game of 'hot rear end'. They got kind of quiet after that. I'm not sure why.
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