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Arivia posted:There is a huge difference between rape jokes and an actual serious treatment the author helpfully explained in his dev diaries that it's something he added late in development as a lazy way to make the PCs less willing to work with the pygmy workers what i'm saying is gently caress you, arivia
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Aug 22, 2017 22:07
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in the socialist star trek utopia future where RPGs are a polished artform you could use them to explore a wide array of human tragedy, sure, but we aren't there or terribly close to it and i don't think just plopping that sort of poo poo into games as they are now is going to propel us into that future very well
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Aug 22, 2017 22:07
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I mean while rape is kinda hosed up to bring and would be reaaaally hard to deal with in a tabletop group with the tact it needs, as a GM I'd respect someone whose characters backstory is confronting discrimination and would do my best to weave a story around that that may let them triumph over it but try not to both not sugarcoat it or make it too distressing for the players.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:08
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Arivia posted:There is a huge difference between rape jokes and an actual serious treatment in a text where it is presented unequivocably as a bad thing that needs to be stopped and brought to justice. This is the defense that the Tournament of Rapists guy used. It is also decidedly not the context that BitC has for it. Plutonis posted:That's a thing for the group to decide. If you want to touch or confront modern issues or not should be something that the players and the GM should have a talk about? I suppose they can talk, but I'm already out the door.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:09
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Plutonis posted:That's a thing for the group to decide. If you want to touch or confront modern issues or not should be something that the players and the GM should have a talk about? Jesus, I can't believe I'm agreeing with loving Plutonis about this. @Antivehicular: I was responding to the criticism of Godbound's latest adventure with what you quoted, not Blood in the Chocolate. Towards the latter, it's a horror adventure for a game that has always portrayed itself as being about that kind of thing. You can think it's sleazy, but Raggi's been up front about his black/death metal aesthetic for LotFP from the beginning, and it fits well into that. But of course, again, not everyone (and for good reason) wants to play Cannibal Corpse songs or whatever.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:09
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Arivia posted:Yeah, it's not great. But it is sadly an integral part of the original material Blood in the Chocolate is parodying, and not touching on that would be really weird. Blood in the Chocolate isn't a parody - or if it is, it's not at all funny. It could have almost worked if it was, but then most of the iffy material would have to be taken out. Furthermore, doing a dark parody of a Roald Dahl story is about as redundant as it gets, given that 90% of Roald Dahl's children's stories were already dark parodies of children's story tropes, only it was actually good and funny. Heck, the best Roald Dahl parody I can think of is that a bunch of kids compete for golden tickets and get really excited only to discover it's just a regular chocolate factory with vats and machines. (Though if you really have to, why not put the PCs in a glass elevator that can travel through space and time and explore the world of the haunted unborn!?) But my real issue is that not only is the fetishy stuff terrible, but if you take it out - say the poisons just do damage and the pygmies are just hanging out playing cards - then it's still a terrible adventure. The main explorable space is two corridors; there's nothing for the PCs to actually do in the vast majority of the rooms other than get killed; and the architecture doesn't make any sense. The main boss appears randomly, and there's no escalation over time. None of the significant bits of the backstory appear in the adventure, or have any explanation. Heck, even the objective doesn't make any sense, looking back at it. The absolute best outcome is that the PCs kill Lucia and then hand over the chocolate operation to someone else who has no idea about anything that's going on with the poisons and can't do anything about it. That is assuming that the new owner doesn't get beaten to death by the pygmies as soon as they walk in because it's not likely the 20+ angry pygmies suddenly all disappear because Lucia is dead, so I guess the PCs are meant to kill all the pygmies too. And then there's no guarantee the new owner will be less evil because, hey, hiring some guys to slaughter the owner and the staff of a factory because it's doing better than us isn't exactly a great start on being good. hyphz fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 22:12
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Countblanc posted:in the socialist star trek utopia future where RPGs are a polished artform you could use them to explore a wide array of human tragedy, sure, but we aren't there or terribly close to it and i don't think just plopping that sort of poo poo into games as they are now is going to propel us into that future very well Talking about uncomfortable topics and opening up discussion is how we move forward in general as an art form. Kevin Crawford trying to do a respectful update and narrative based around actual mythological texts in his mythology game isn't something that should be stopped. And conversely the same goes for trying to figure out how to represent extreme horror in games. They're not all winners, but there's a huge gulf between Godbound, BitC, and Chris Fields.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:13
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Arivia posted:You know that's not what I mean. No. No I do not know that. So far in this thread you have defended the adventure with the sinister decadent eeeeevil queer folk and the racist rape gangs, and James Fuckin' Raggi. Your next defense is of the adventure where being sexually assaulted makes you unclean and impure. Follow your own loving line of thought and consider why I keep asking you if you're sure about this. quote:If you're policing the entire hobby like it's still selling adventures to neonate and teenage males, then of course it's not going to go anywhere. A reasonable treatment for adults of a mature topic isn't an issue if it's handled well, and Crawford did, with reason. Sure, it's not appropriate for everyone and not everyone wants that in their game, but it's not a black mark against Godbound that it did treat its subject matter maturely instead of the Abyssal Exalted or whatever. More then one thing can be bad.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:18
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I still have to enjoy the 'main villain is a female coded for queer' defense for BitC being progressive, because that means we can pay no mind to the pygmies being coded as black, slaves, and rapists. It really is Joss Whedon levels of 'feminism' in that you throw it up as a hastily-constructed wall to shield yourselves from criticism.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:19
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hyphz posted:Blood in the Chocolate isn't a parody - or if it is, it's not at all funny. It could have almost worked if it was, but then most of the iffy material would have to be taken out. Furthermore, doing a dark parody of a Roald Dahl story is about as redundant as it gets, given that 90% of Roald Dahl's children's stories were already dark parodies of children's story tropes, only it was actually good and funny. Heck, the best Roald Dahl parody I can think of is that a bunch of kids compete for golden tickets and get really excited only to discover it's just a regular chocolate factory with vats and machines. A parody doesn't have to be humorous - it can be an exaggeration merely to comment on the original source. Exaggerations to the point of horror as parody are not that uncommon. With the caveat that I haven't done as close a reading as you have (at least I presume you did, if you're reviewing it for Fatal and Friends), let me try to respond to some of your other comments. I don't think the factory is laid out nearly as illogically or as linearly as you think - there are plenty of connections between the different rooms, and a party could traverse them in a number of different ways. The rooms aren't just death traps and suggest possible things to do in them, but even if they were that fits both the horror genre and most D&D adventuring anyway. Lucia's actions are prescribed on page 23, and are not random - they even include her responses if she finds out the factory is being attacked! Then there's the guards, the pygmies themselves, etc. I think you just might not be familiar with the short descriptions of most OSR stuff, where not much is prescribed and it's up to the GM to decide how things go. The adventure tells you to introduce the backstory to the players before play, and then provides more detail through both NPCs and written materials. The objective makes a lot of sense - it's the concern about the factory outdoing everyone else with their goods and resulting corporate espionage in the original Dahl story! And there's two pages breaking down the resolution, including answers to all the situations you've brought up.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:34
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Countblanc posted:in the socialist star trek utopia future where RPGs are a polished artform you could use them to explore a wide array of human tragedy, sure, but we aren't there or terribly close to it and i don't think just plopping that sort of poo poo into games as they are now is going to propel us into that future very well My current FFD6 game has several of the players who started serving their evil empire start to realize they had a hand on enabling or even being responsible for several horrible things and now want to turn against such a horrible system. And while yes that doesn't mean that a game about playing as disgruntled Wehrmacht is a good idea at all in the current days or even this century, I'm getting an interesting story out of it.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:36
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Plutonis posted:My current FFD6 game has several of the players who started serving their evil empire start to realize they had a hand on enabling or even being responsible for several horrible things and now want to turn against such a horrible system. And while yes that doesn't mean that a game about playing as disgruntled Wehrmacht is a good idea at all in the current days or even this century, I'm getting an interesting story out of it. Well yeah, but there's two elements you have going that the other topics of discussion don't: Buy In and Tact. If your players go into the game knowing or even wanting to deal with being part of an evil imperialist force (like there's any other kind, right) and you as a GM know or are open to being told how far it should go, that's just how good games work.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:42
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Plutonis posted:My current FFD6 game has several of the players who started serving their evil empire start to realize they had a hand on enabling or even being responsible for several horrible things and now want to turn against such a horrible system. And while yes that doesn't mean that a game about playing as disgruntled Wehrmacht is a good idea at all in the current days or even this century, I'm getting an interesting story out of it. that's fair, but i do think that certain bad things are a lot less likely to hit home with a player personally. it's a very different thing to find out your party has been helping to commit genocide - something most people in developed nations are rather divorced from on a personal level - and sexual assault or being targeted because of your character's gender identity. my ex-partner was a rape victim and was really uncomfortable during that rick and morty scene where the bean man tries to rape morty in the bathroom, but laughs at the absurd levels of awful violence elsewhere in the show. maybe it does ultimately come down to specific groups, i don't know, i might be talking in circles here. maybe some groups would react to genocide and slavery the same way my ex would have reacted to a rape subplot. but i think you'll find way more people uncomfortable with the latter than the former.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:46
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ProfessorCirno posted:No. No I do not know that. I haven't said poo poo about Raggi. Blood in the Chocolate is by Kiel Chenier, and the Godbound adventure is written by Kevin Crawford. Unless someone's wearing a bad plastic mask somewhere, neither of those are James Raggi. My argument about representation in Blood in the Chocolate was about the adventuring party - the active, agentful characters - depicted in it. Not the villainess. And Blood in the Chocolate (at least in my reading) doesn't try to associate queerness with negative qualities. There are queer villains, victims, and adventuring characters. Lucia is a vile, villainous character - in a horror module. She fits the genre of the text. If you want to advance the claim that her queerness is set up as something negative, then please show me your close reading and I'm willing to listen. I'm plenty familiar with literature that portrays queer people as bad with a variety of value judgments - but there's a difference between that and a text that just has a bad queer person in it. Yes, the pygmies in BitC are pretty terrible. I feel horrible even writing it out that way. But in terms of revealing and parodying the internal racism of the original Chocolate Factory texts, it makes some sense. BitC attempts to point out that it is the twisted tree that has made them as such, and does ascribe both their physical and mental status to that, but that can easily be missed. I'd've rather had different language used instead of the racist pygmy, but the general thrust of portraying them as victims of the Chocolate Factory themselves instead of happy, idyllic workers is a good horrific treatment. It's my understanding of the Godbound adventure that the victims are declared unclean and impure by their abuser in order to cover up his own actions, and that it is the PCs job to stop that shaming. If I'm wrong, I apologize.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:48
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Countblanc posted:that's fair, but i do think that certain bad things are a lot less likely to hit home with a player personally. it's a very different thing to find out your party has been helping to commit genocide - something most people in developed nations are rather divorced from on a personal level - and sexual assault or being targeted because of your character's gender identity. my ex-partner was a rape victim and was really uncomfortable during that rick and morty scene where the bean man tries to rape morty in the bathroom, but laughs at the absurd levels of awful violence elsewhere in the show. No, I think that's true. Some stuff does hit closer to home for us generally as people in Western society. I myself have some stuff that makes me duck out of my comfort zone and that I wouldn't necessarily want to deal with in an RPG. And we're all learning and trying to unpack a lot of this stuff we've been taught by oppressive forces. You definitely need to talk this stuff out with your group; you shouldn't spring it on them; and in general having a frank discussion about comfort levels and what's appropriate. RPGs demand that. But there's a difference between the games we actually play and the texts people write to inform those games.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:52
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You've repeatedly stated that BITC is in keeping with the HEAVY METAL trappings of Raggi's game?
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Aug 22, 2017 22:53
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Removed
drrockso20 fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 22:55
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Mr. Maltose posted:Well yeah, but there's two elements you have going that the other topics of discussion don't: Buy In and Tact. If your players go into the game knowing or even wanting to deal with being part of an evil imperialist force (like there's any other kind, right) and you as a GM know or are open to being told how far it should go, that's just how good games work. Well my point is that while there are CERTAIN topics that are impossible to bring to a TRPG table, I believe that as long as good thought is given into it, MOST controversial ones can be dealt with maturely and actually good narrative-wise by players and GMS.
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Aug 22, 2017 22:59
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I agree but there's just too much bespoke poo poo to get into for the same to apply to, like, published adventures. It's something that requires a lot of direct communication and a light hand to get right.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:03
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real-world problems i want to deal with in an rpg: capitalism real-world problems i don't want to deal with in an rpg: sexual violence
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Aug 22, 2017 23:05
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Extremely same. EDIT: Like, even attempting to broach conversation about playing poo poo like the Godbound adventure as is to my group would be a major fuckup on my part and that's at the shallow end of this pool.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:06
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Agreed.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:07
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Mr. Maltose posted:I agree but there's just too much bespoke poo poo to get into for the same to apply to, like, published adventures. It's something that requires a lot of direct communication and a light hand to get right. Absolutely, and as I just posted, I agree with that sentiment. But there's a gulf between how it's handled in actual play with our groups, and the actual products and texts people generate. It's the converse side of "any game can be good because you can change it to fix it or do whatever you want:" any actual text has to be taken as itself, not what we'd make out of it in play ourselves. Serf posted:real-world problems i want to deal with in an rpg: capitalism Arivia fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 23:09
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Arivia posted:And that's fine - but that's your own tastes and preferences, and shouldn't be a prescription for RPGs in general. I'm not telling anyone what to do. But I will talk all the poo poo I want.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:14
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You could make an argument for dealing with uncomfortable topics in very focused, narrative RPGs. Maybe. But LotFP and Godbound are at their core retreads of loot and scoot dungeon crawling and are completely unsuited for some nuanced way for a group to talk about sexual violence. Especially coming out of the OSR with its twin pillars of GM as God (so GTFO with player agency) and Rulings Not Rules (so GTFO with player agency yet again).
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Aug 22, 2017 23:14
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Yawgmoth posted:just because there might be a giant blue diamond at the bottom of an outhouse is no reason to dive in and start rooting around with your bare hands I'm going to disagree with you politely here. There are a number of modules by diverse authors in OSR that are interesting and of good quality in terms of writing and material. For example my favorites are Stars Without Number, Godbound, Silent Legions, Qelong (Ken Hite; LotfP), Scenic Dunnsmouth (Zzarchov Kowolski; LotfP), Price of Evil (Zzarchov Kowolski), etc.. To paint with a broad brush and say, if I may paraphrase, "OSR is like the bottom of an outhouse" indicates you haven't searched for any items of quality in the field. Maybe you don't want to, and that's fine, not everyone does. It doesn't mean however that items of quality are not there presently or will not be published in OSR in future, nor does it mean that exposure or mere reading of an OSR manuscript corrupts one morally. To an extent "the majority of OSR is poo poo" would be a better statement or "I really don't like OSR because the majority of their products are poo poo." Frankly I wouldn't disagree with either of those statements from my own experience, but it's disingenuous to write off the entire field. RPGs are great because one can borrow and modify ideas from system to system. That is why writing off an entire field is somewhat limiting to an author or player's scope. Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 23:15
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Serf posted:I'm not telling anyone what to do. But I will talk all the poo poo I want. Cool. Cascade Jones posted:You could make an argument for dealing with uncomfortable topics in very focused, narrative RPGs. Maybe. With the caveat that I haven't actually run it, Godbound is meant to start at name-level play as far as I know, which is more than just dungeon crawling. Certainly its scope is much larger and more involved. A lot of LotFP products do boil down to dungeon crawling, sure - and they're not nuanced discussions, absolutely. They're horror pieces, and sexual violence does fit under horror. It's disgusting and vile, but that's kind of the point of modern horror. If you think sexual violence doesn't belong in horror at all, well that's a larger question dating back to Last House on the Left, if not before.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:22
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Cascade Jones posted:Especially coming out of the OSR with its twin pillars of GM as God (so GTFO with player agency) and Rulings Not Rules (so GTFO with player agency yet again). But neither of those are true Helical Nightmares posted:I'm going to disagree with you politely here. There are a number of modules by diverse authors in OSR that are interesting and of good quality in terms of writing and material. Thank you, this is probably closer to how I should have responded to Yawgmoth's comment, but for some reason I've been on a bit of a hairtrigger lately(made worse because I've been finding it harder lately to properly articulate my thoughts)
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Aug 22, 2017 23:25
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Apropos this, #feminism touches on some of this territory in nanogame format. I keep meaning to check it out. http://storytelling.pelgranepress.com/feminism-a-nano-game-anthology/
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Aug 22, 2017 23:31
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Yeah, Godbound's GM advice section is basically the opposite of the GM is God, it's "The players are going to run rampant over your precious setting and that's going to make your job so much easier because they'll practically write adventures for you" and "Don't fight the ridiculous scale and impact they can have, embrace it, if a Pantheon gets the local king upset, it's the -king- who should be worried"
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Aug 22, 2017 23:33
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Subjunctive posted:Apropos this, #feminism touches on some of this territory in nanogame format. I keep meaning to check it out. Sweet, I need to pick this up. Thanks for the link!
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Aug 22, 2017 23:34
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drrockso20 posted:But neither of those are true. Then we have had very different experiences with the OSR and its proponents. Arivia posted:With the caveat that I haven't actually run it, Godbound is meant to start at name-level play as far as I know, which is more than just dungeon crawling. Certainly its scope is much larger and more involved. A lot of LotFP products do boil down to dungeon crawling, sure - and they're not nuanced discussions, absolutely. They're horror pieces, and sexual violence does fit under horror. It's disgusting and vile, but that's kind of the point of modern horror. If you think sexual violence doesn't belong in horror at all, well that's a larger question dating back to Last House on the Left, if not before. I'll admit my bias in thinking sexual violence doesn't belong in horror gaming, since horror is a lovely genre for collaborative gaming. At the end of the day I don't want to buy either adventure, waste 3 hours on either adventure, or waste 3 hours on any table wanting to play either adventure.
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Aug 22, 2017 23:47
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Cascade Jones posted:I'll admit my bias in thinking sexual violence doesn't belong in horror gaming, since horror is a lovely genre for collaborative gaming. Me: Boy I sure can't wait to sit down and spend a few hours of my precious, fleeting time on this earth doing some elfgames with my friends! *racist pygmy rape gangs/religious rapeventure" Me, drained of all energy as a man in the desert: why tho...
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Aug 22, 2017 23:53
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Helical Nightmares posted:To paint with a broad brush and say, if I may paraphrase, "OSR is like the bottom of an outhouse" indicates you haven't searched for any items of quality in the field. First off, it assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. Chiefly that I haven't looked for "items of quality". Personally I'd love to see decent quality OSR items because I have a good number of friends who would love to play them instead of having to spend their free time cobbling together new concepts for games all the time. But what I've found is entirely in the band of quality between Passively Bland and Actively Terrible, leaning towards the latter. If you like them, I don't hate you for it and I'm not going to try to stop you, but I do think you have questionable taste. Secondly, to argue that one can't write off an entire grouping based on the majority of the works in it is just loving laughable. I don't have to read every single word of the collected works of the OSR library to call it garbage, just like I don't need to keep reading past the first Xanth novel to know it's not going anywhere good. Even if I said "hey I dropped an entire jewelry store's inventory in that olympic swimming pool filled with raw sewage, you can have whatever you can fish out but you gotta do it naked" would you do it? What if it were five jewelry stores? Ten? 20? How many gems need to be covered in poo poo & blood before it's worth it to risk hepatitis? Does it matter that you can't see anything glittering on top? Because for me personally, it's gotta be a lot higher than 50% and I wanna see you toss at least one Rolex in the pool. Lastly, a handful of good (or "good") works doesn't justify the existence of all the bad ones. A diamond mine filled with raw sewage is still an untenable mess that needs to get cleaned out before anyone should do anything with it, even if everyone who contributed to it was drinking Goldschläger beforehand. Even if there are some "good" ones (and of the ones you listed as your favorites, only Scenic Dunnsmouth manages to get to "I wouldn't pay for this but I might flip through it while I wait for my friends to finish up" level) it doesn't change the fact that there's a lot of poo poo, it surrounds the alleged diamonds, and unless you go specifically hunting for them you aren't going to find them. I stand by my initial ruling of quality, but I will amend the description: It's an unlocked dumpster behind a chinese takeout place in a bad part of town. There's a fantastic variety of garbage, a similar assortment of shits have been shat on top of it by people you'd never invite in your home, but if you walk by it enough times and hold your breath you might catch someone about to toss something worth keeping into it.
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Aug 23, 2017 00:27
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The thing about throwing rape into stuff is people very rarely seem to ask if doing to is necessary to get the desired result. Even Kevin Crawford, who I generally have much more respect for as both a game designer and a person than the vast majority of OSR luminaries out there, has basically planted his flag on the hill of "well it's based on this real world myth/legend here, so that's why" even though it would be extremely easy to devise another plot point which creates the same sort of dilemma for the adventure but doesn't actually require the crux of the matter to be a serial rapist and divinely institutionalized shaming of rape victims. I'm willing to accept the argument that there might hypothetically be a reason to incorporate something like rape into your game when literally nothing else will suffice for what you're attempting to create or convey but in purely practical terms I have never seen a single instance of a tabletop RPG book that included rape as any sort of element in a fashion where you couldn't substitute something else instead and nothing of value would be lost. Blood in the Chocolate doesn't even have that going for it, and I have no idea why anyone would feel compelled to go to bat for it.
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Aug 23, 2017 00:36
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Yeah, if the only way you feel you can trigger a sense of revulsion or oppression in your audience is commoditizing sexual violence, then maybe it's time to read more books until you have more tools at your disposal.
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Aug 23, 2017 00:44
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Arivia posted:A parody doesn't have to be humorous - it can be an exaggeration merely to comment on the original source. Exaggerations to the point of horror as parody are not that uncommon. With the caveat that I haven't done as close a reading as you have (at least I presume you did, if you're reviewing it for Fatal and Friends), let me try to respond to some of your other comments. I don't think the factory is laid out nearly as illogically or as linearly as you think - there are plenty of connections between the different rooms, and a party could traverse them in a number of different ways. The rooms aren't just death traps and suggest possible things to do in them, but even if they were that fits both the horror genre and most D&D adventuring anyway. Lucia's actions are prescribed on page 23, and are not random - they even include her responses if she finds out the factory is being attacked! Then there's the guards, the pygmies themselves, etc. I think you just might not be familiar with the short descriptions of most OSR stuff, where not much is prescribed and it's up to the GM to decide how things go. The adventure tells you to introduce the backstory to the players before play, and then provides more detail through both NPCs and written materials. The objective makes a lot of sense - it's the concern about the factory outdoing everyone else with their goods and resulting corporate espionage in the original Dahl story! And there's two pages breaking down the resolution, including answers to all the situations you've brought up. Ok. First of all, again, exaggerating Roald Dahl to the point of horror is a dumb idea, because Roald Dahl himself already did it better than you will. Secondly, (and screw you for making me open that drat PDF again) the problem with trying to paint Lucia as an evil capitalist is that.. well, it doesn't make any sense. Lucia's described as successful because she's invented the chocolate bar centuries earlier than real history, when everyone else is selling drinking chocolate. She has a natural monopoly because the transplanted tree lets her alone grow cocoa in Germany. After that point, literally anything else - making the chocolate addictive or harmful or poisonous or whatever - is making her business worse not better. If she was a determined businesswoman she wouldn't be doing anything like that. If every death is a victory for her, why isn't every chocolate in the adventure poisoned to cause death? Furthermore, there is nowhere in the adventure where the PCs can find out that the chocolates are addictive, unless they eat some and then meta-game the effect on themselves. If that knowledge is public and accepted, then it stops being evil because people are choosing to eat it knowing it is addictive. If there are no other brands of chocolate bar on sale, how does anyone know it's Lucia's specifically that are addictive instead of bars in general - and if they don't know that, wouldn't they be fine with Lucia being brought down as long as another factory replaced her? The adventure says that Lucia removes the harmful effects from her chocolate before sale, but the entire chocolate production line is described in the adventure and there's no component that does that. It's ridiculous and makes Lucia's character a discoherent mess. Also, why we don't put dungeon crawls in cities. If any of the PCs gets body horrored, why don't they just leave and go to a doctor or the police with evidence that this was done to them inside the factory? And yes, I got that the PCs are effectively being hired by Slugworth. Which is doubly stupid, because Slugworth was a villain in the original book and a "test" in the musical version. So obviously the players are going to be predisposed to believe that the person hiring them is the villain, not Lucia. Here's the full description of Lucia's actions: quote:Roll 3d6. Lucia de Castillo starts play in the corresponding room on the Main Floor. She moves counter clockwise to the next room every 10 minutes. She is accompanied by four pygmies who act as her assistants. Once she has visited and inspecting every Main Floor room, she will ride her paddlewheel boat down the Chocolate River to get to her Inventing Room. She will work there for 5 hours, then make her way to her Quarters to sleep. If Lucia is certain things are not going her way, she will retreat to her Quarters to prepare an ambush. She will call out for reinforcements from her window to her Factory Guards waiting outside. So, yea. Leaving aside that there are only 19 rooms on the main floor (and Lucia can't be in the first two, although they're outside, so that actually makes sense) you could roll a 4 on the dice, in which case Lucia is standing in the entrance lobby and fighting her could be the first thing the PCs do. (Heck, I've just noticed you could roll 1-1-1 in which case she is hanging out in the guards' quarters for no reason at all.) What does "not going her way" mean? The guards outside sound the alarm if intruders come in, so if Lucia hears that alarm she.. calls the same guards who just sounded the alarm!? Duh! Also, a really great place to prepare an ambush is behind a locked door that as far as you know the enemy can't open, and to call out for help to your allies who the intruders have almost certainly already killed to get in. Now, the layout. There are three main corridors, areas 7, 9, and 15. All of the main rooms in the adventure branch off these, and some have connections between them, but none have any access to deeper rooms that aren't accessible by the corridors. Here's the description of one of the rooms: quote:14. ROASTERY AND MILL. A broiling dark room filled with ovens, metal contraptions, a giant mill, and conveyer belts. Here cocoa beans are roasted, then milled and ground into cocoa nibs. There are 30 pygmies working the ovens and the machines at any one time. They are focussed on their work and do not pay attention to the player characters unless they are disruptive. The room is so hot that a player character must roll 1d6 each round she remains in the room. On a roll of 1, her Constitution score is reduced by 2 points for 1 hour. Subsequent rolls reduce her Constitution score and if it is reduced to zero, she falls unconscious from heat stroke. The pygmies are unaffected by these conditions. Unattended player characters who fall unconscious are dragged by pygmies back to their village as prisoners. Cocoa nibs are carried via conveyer belt into the Liquor Flow Room. So the PCs here have two choices. Try to steal the beans, which are one of the items Slugworth wants, which likely means fighting all the pygmies; or leave. There's no clues to the backstory, no other information, no interesting mechanisms to play with and nothing to do. Pretty much all the North side of the factory rooms are basically that in different ways.
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Aug 23, 2017 01:04
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Arivia posted:Also there wasn't anything wrong with that Godbound adventure. For a game about playing godlings and so on, that kind of material is a common part of the mythological record. Crawford pointed out it's specifically taken from his research, and it matches so much mythology it's a pretty fair inclusion. You all really need to chill about there being sexual assault or something in a game at all. Having it be a relevant plot element is far different from FATAL or whatever. I'm honestly surprised by this defense, but fair. For Storms of Yizhao, I would have preferred at least a content warning somewhere. Even if it's just to save me the disappointment of buying an adventure that looked good on the blurb, but reading to find out I'd never actually be comfortable with running it.
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Aug 23, 2017 01:35
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Realtalk, tabletop games, both as a hobby and a medium, would be significantly better if they were strictly PG-13.
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Aug 23, 2017 01:50
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gnome7 posted:Realtalk, tabletop games, both as a hobby and a medium, would be significantly better if they were strictly PG-13. At the very least if that was the expected norm and anything outside of that had content warnings it would be good.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:08
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