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Also I would buy Crawford's justification for why the adventure needed to cleave so faithfully to a piece of 17th century Chinese historical fiction more if it wasn't being created for a game that was essentially Jack Kirby's Exalted. Going "but the research said" is some weak poo poo when you're dealing with a world of clockwork auto-cossacks and magnetic rifles.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:19
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Jesus.gnome7 posted:Realtalk, tabletop games, both as a hobby and a medium, would be significantly better if they were strictly PG-13. I disagree, Breakfast Cult is more M.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:28
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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. Nah. I mean I'm the guy who constantly has issues with making his horror games too goofy and light-hearted, and this is still dumb as hell. The actual answer is simple social contract stuff: don't run genuinely upsetting stuff in your game unless everybody at the table explicitly signed off on it. In fact, this even applies to things that aren't viscerally upsetting at all, if you're playing an RPG you should be talking with your players about everything, mechanics, tone, genre, how much narrative responsibility the GM is going to share with the players, etc. Not necessarily in tremendous depth but enough to know what they like and what they absolutely don't want. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 02:32
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The thing about sexual stuff in RPGs is that the people who truly want it will put that into their RP regardless of what the game designer did or didn't put into the book, and anything sexual that the designer does put in there will be a glaring source of discomfort for a lot of people, even if it's perfectly mature and consensual, among other things because most people RP with friends who they don't have that kind of relationship with. I tend to avoid putting stuff with sexual connotations in my games, but to me it feels less like a creative limitation and more like taking into account the kind of experience I want to design for. I don't think it should be strictly PG-13, but the medium does seem to have a bit more than its share of weird sex stuff given the type of activity it is.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:51
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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. No it wouldn't.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:52
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Halloween Jack posted:This statement makes no logical sense; there are huge differences between different versions of D&D and there is no way in which it can be said to be "solved." There's an old essay from Ron Edwards where he goes into the very early history of D&D, talking about things like the Judges Guild supplement, Warlock, the Arduin Grimoire, all that, and his overall point was that these things were descriptive, not prescriptive, of play. That is, people played D&D however they understood it, and made up a bunch of stuff along the way, and essentially documented the stuff that they made up when they published poo poo like critical hit tables and vast city records and new NPCs. The essay was, given its timing, probably taking a shot at the then-burgeoning OSR movement, but my takeaway was that he considered it somewhat pointless to want to "recapture old-school D&D" because the actual experience was so disparate across different groups that there really was no one platonic way of playing D&D - at least not in the sense that we might think nowadays with a more stringent set of rules. LongDarkNight posted:Sweet Christmas, one of my buddies has hardon to run a Champions game and I'm reading the 6th edition rules now. There is so much math and so many modifier and rules that my brain shut down so hard I thought I had a stroke. I just want to make an opossum with Duplication powers whose alter ego is the hero Multipossity, why is this so difficult. Champions 6th Edition is arguably the simplest treatment of the game yet, considering that there are no more derived statistics. Increasing your Offensive Power simply costs points directly, as opposed to earlier versions where you'd have to increase your Dex and recompute the new Offensive Power from there. dwarf74 posted:So I am hearing various reports that Starfinder is basically nothing new under the sun(s), and is pretty much "Pathfinder in Space" without much in the way of innovation or streamlining. From an eagle's eye view, Starfinder is really just Pathfinder In Space, so if you already didn't like the idea of playing Pathfinder, you're not really getting anything new But to compare it directly to Pathfinder, there are some changes that can be rather significant: * Point-buy is the default ability score generation method * No more iterative attacks. There are still Full Attack actions, but they're always just 'make 2 attacks, with a -4 penalty to both', and they're not governed by BAB anymore * No more 5-foot-steps. There's just a "Guarded Step" that moves you 5-feet, does not draw AOOs, and costs your Move Action. * Hit Points + Stamina Points greatly increases low-level survivability, and restoring Stamina with a 10 minute "Short Rest" + 1 Resolve Point lets Resolve Points act as a governor on adventuring length * Hit Points and Stamina Points are gained in flat amounts. No more rolling for HP. * No more crit confirmations. If you roll a nat 20 and the result is also/still greater than or equal to the target's AC, it's a crit * Combat maneuvers have been simplified to just a normal attack roll versus [(K)AC + 8] * Dying and death rules have been simplified: if you hit 0 HP, you're dying. You lose 1 Resolve Point for every turn you're dying, until you receive some healing or are stabilized. If you're at 0 Resolve Points and you lose another Resolve Point, you die. * "Flat-footed" is now just a condition that grants -2 AC * There are 20 skills, compared to Pathfinder's 35 * Base damage is expected to increase over time: a longsword is 1d8, but you'll upgrade that to a 10d8 molecular rift longsword by level 17 * No more classes with 2+INT skill ranks per level, like the Fighter. The Starfinder Soldier has 4+INT skill ranks per level, and all converted classes are assumed to get buffed to 4+INT if they only had 2+INT in PF I'm somewhat bitter about all this because it retroactively proves that all the rabble-rousing that Dancey did about D&D 4e being too different was unmitigated bullshit. As far as consensus, people who already don't like PF won't find anything in Starfinder to redeem, but as someone who already enjoys d20 to begin with, I personally wouldn't mind running/playing this.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:53
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Honestly, most of the people whose work we'd want to bar under this policy are the ones who can't seem to do anything that isn't edgy, so the problem writers are fairly easy to spot.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:53
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I'd much rather play as a muscled and epically boobed Frazetta amazon babe ripping off an orc's spine with her bare hands than playing something PG-13.
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Aug 23, 2017 02:56
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I'm not kidding by the way guys, I have a problem where I try to write Alien and it comes out as Scooby Doo instead. 
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Aug 23, 2017 02:59
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It's porn. And, whatever, that's fine, enjoy your porn, but just like with porn, you have to have a certain kind of relationship with a person where you are fine watching porn with them and seriously, this is key here, they have to be fine watching porn with you. That right there is a certain level most don't reach with their gaming group. Now, with stuff Like Bloody Chocolate, you have to be not only willing to share your porn with others, but also the fact that you are into violent rape fantasy porn, and it seems like in general there are too many people in gaming totally willing to do so even when their gaming buddies would prefer they wouldn't.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm not kidding by the way guys, I have a problem where I try to write Alien and it comes out as Scooby Doo instead. The latter sounds hell of a lot more fun to play than the former. I've been running pre-written adventures for Shadow of the Demon Lord for over a month now, and the setting and tone really aren't to my taste even if the system is fantastic. I can kind of shift things around and take it into Evil Dead 2 territory, so that's good at least. It's a lot easier and more enjoyable to me to make things funny than it is to make them horrifying.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:08
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My take is that people should be free to publish creepy rape games and we should be free to call them pathetic and despicable. I suppose it's technically possible that one day someone might make an RPG involving rape that I could play around my wife... but I'm not holding my breath. If you get 4 women in a room, the odds are very high that one or more of them has been sexually assaulted. Most women who have been assaulted are not interested in having that poo poo show up in their games. It's a topic that is off limits for me in my writing for just that reason.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:17
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Serf posted:The latter sounds hell of a lot more fun to play than the former. Sure, but it goes back to what I was saying about delivering what your players signed up for. I'm running Demon: The Descent and while I can kind of justify the first antagonists the players met being kind of silly (because today's silly-spooky obstacles are tomorrow's sympathetic victims) I do eventually need to bring some of the paranoia and dread the game aims for. I don't need to be viscerally gross or anything, but I do need to set the stakes a little more convincingly.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:18
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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. Kwyndig posted:At the very least if that was the expected norm and anything outside of that had content warnings it would be good. Yeah, and yeah. For that matter, there should really be a mass-market RPG that's strictly G-rated. Mostly for when people want to play with their kids, but also as a pushback against a lot of the negative assumptions that come baked into a lot of popular RPGs (the centrality of murder comes to mind). ...and also because I would play the hell out of Cucumber Quest, the RPG.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:26
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Heckin same. There's some of that out there, like Costume Fairy Adventures or Hero Kids, but its definitely uncommon.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:38
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My feelings about the Crawford adventure, based on what I've read here, is that it seems well-intentioned enough, but: if the intention is to have the players all decide that the victims are in no way "impure" or culpable for their crime, rape is really not the crime to do this with, given the unfortunately non-trivial chance that one or more of the players may consider real-world rape victims to be "impure" or culpable for their crimes. It's not some kind of Interesting Moral Quandary to explore at the table; it's a belief system that causes substantial harm to real people. (In general, a lot of roleplaying games that try to explore "difficult real-world issues" have problems with treating those issues like Fascinating Moral Quandaries seen at an abstract, instead of real crimes and harms done to real people, who may very well be at the table trying to enjoy some goddamn elfgames and not want their personal pain dug up to be batted around as an intellectual exercise.) Overall, I feel like the main issue with mature material in roleplaying games is that most of the genre still hasn't gotten beyond an adolescent viewpoint on sex in general, where it only exists as a violent crime, a "sin" or "vice," a gross-out punchline, or a transaction undertaken with a tavern prostitute. I think it's fine not to have sex as an element at your table at all, but it's frustrating for it to be there, but only in these degraded, juvenile forms. (I would personally support a moratorium on the use of succubi in D&D modules, particularly succubi posing as helpless damsels in distress so they can
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Aug 23, 2017 03:38
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I'm a huge goddamn Crawford fan, but that's one product I just won't buy. On a personal level, I wouldn't be comfortable running it, and I think Antivehicular sums up lot of its problems on a conceptual level as well. I think that even in elfgames there may be space to seriously deal with those sort of topics, but I don't really feel that Godbound is a particularly good place to do it.
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Aug 23, 2017 03:53
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Cascade Jones posted:Then we have had very different experiences with the OSR and its proponents. I disagree that horror is a lovely genre for collaborative gaming. That said, it really does have to be collaborative - everyone has to really want to play a horror game (otherwise there will be tone-breaking jokes or no real buy-in) and it requires a tremendous amount of trust from your group. Like, say, your group to trust the GM that they're not going to go straight for rape-as-shock crap. As GM, you have to trust your players not to spoil the mood, but they are always putting more trust in you that you won't cross certain boundaries - whether personal or good taste or whatever. I think there's good discussing here but it's a little frustrating to me when people say that, "no, horror games just don't work as a concept." Some people really do enjoy horror and there's systems that capture it well. A good GM - and many modern systems - can tailor the level and type of horror to what the group wants. Some of my current favorites: - Delta Green reminds you that part of the horror is what you're doing to keep Cthulhu from leaking into the world. - Ten Candles invites the players to the GM side at points and asks them to come up with the spookiest thing they can think of just now. - Murderous Ghosts also lets two people have a creepy time while building in safety valves to get out if you're no longer feeling like a horror game. - Red Markets explores the crushing weight of economics using zombies. Ten Candles and Murderous Ghosts are quite lightweight and empower the players in their responses to the horror. Overall, escapism in games is great and I enjoy it too. But there's also a place for catharsis in games and sometimes that means taking on difficult topics through the lens of the game. For this reason, I don't think rape/sexual violence should be avoided all of the time, with no exceptions at all. (There's a lot of subtext in Vampire based games, for one.) But it is playing with fire; I agree that virtually all adventures that try to do so, do it poorly. To me it's both lazy and offensive to use rape as a short-hand for "this is horrifying now." Too many fantasy authors are also guilty of this. And as Antivehicular gets at, the whole thing is way more out of the blue in an escapist game - it's jarring and tone-breaking at best in a fantasy dungeon crawl. I do not expect to be playing a catharsis game on D&D/F20 night. Anyways! I actually came to the thread for a whole different question: I recently played a con game with Kevin Kulp, author of TimeWatch (it's good, check out his game! it has psychic dinosaurs and time traveling cockroaches) and he had these action cards for players and GM characters. They were green on one side for "action" and red on the other for "done." You flipped them over once you took your action so the GM could immediately see who still had to go. These would be super useful for all sorts of things, but I forgot where he got them from. Does anyone know what I'm talking about here or a site that might have them? Googling "rpg action cards" or variants thereof is a lesson in futility. Sionak fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 03:55
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Sionak posted:Anyways! I actually came to the thread for a whole different question: I recently played a con game with Kevin Kulp, author of TimeWatch (it's good, check out his game! it has psychic dinosaurs and time traveling cockroaches) and he had these action cards for players and GM characters. They were green on one side for "action" and red on the other for "done." You flipped them over once you took your action so the GM could immediately see who still had to go. These would be super useful for all sorts of things, but I forgot where he got them from. Does anyone know what I'm talking about here or a site that might have them? Googling "rpg action cards" or variants thereof is a lesson in futility. 
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Aug 23, 2017 04:06
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Offhand, No Thank You Evil is probably the highest profile RPG that's explicitly for kids. Don't know a ton about it, though.Tuxedo Catfish posted:Sure, but it goes back to what I was saying about delivering what your players signed up for. I'm running Demon: The Descent and while I can kind of justify the first antagonists the players met being kind of silly (because today's silly-spooky obstacles are tomorrow's sympathetic victims) I do eventually need to bring some of the paranoia and dread the game aims for. I don't need to be viscerally gross or anything, but I do need to set the stakes a little more convincingly. You know, I think you're actually on the right track. Demon's style of horror isn't about visceral, Aliens-style terror. Demon is all about the crushing realization that you are up against something that's big, weird, threatening, and horribly indifferent. Letting the players play scooby-doo one episode and then throwing old man Jenkins into the wood chipper the next sounds like the perfect way to hammer home the tone of the game.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:22
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Sionak posted:Kevin Kulp, author of TimeWatch (it's good, check out his game! it has psychic dinosaurs and time traveling cockroaches) Glad to hear TimeWatch is good. The adventure for it in Pelgrane's Free RPG Day publication looks like fun, so I'll have to check out the full game now.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:24
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Haystack posted:Offhand, No Thank You Evil is probably the highest profile RPG that's explicitly for kids. Don't know a ton about it, though. I feel like the actually "horror" element of Demon has very little to do with the God-Machine in the ineffable cosmic horror sense because, I mean, you and your fellow PCs are all biomechanical monster-angels your own selves. I would say far more of the game's tension springs from its deep cover espionage stylings. Horror in Demon is about discovering that what you were fighting to accomplish was actually playing into the God-Machine's agenda all along or the realization that someone you had slowly come to trust over weeks and months was always working for the other side. It's more about paranoia and the crushing isolation of pretty much everywhere you could go effectively being enemy territory.
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Aug 23, 2017 04:44
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Sionak posted:I disagree that horror is a lovely genre for collaborative gaming. That said, it really does have to be collaborative - everyone has to really want to play a horror game (otherwise there will be tone-breaking jokes or no real buy-in) and it requires a tremendous amount of trust from your group. Like, say, your group to trust the GM that they're not going to go straight for rape-as-shock crap. As GM, you have to trust your players not to spoil the mood, but they are always putting more trust in you that you won't cross certain boundaries - whether personal or good taste or whatever. Not trying to shut you down on this line of conversation, but I don't think anyone has been arguing against horror gaming conceptually. Like, I am full on reviled against that grimdark lovely OSR poo poo but all about some horror gaming where everyone wants to be creeped the gently caress out. (Within limits. Gross gore porn and rape is at the very best super lazy, "that's the best you can do?", and then all of the actual, real objective crap. Hey! Guys! Maybe try tension instead!). Like I think this is more implementation than conceptual, especially vis a vis genre. At least to me it seems to be "tentacle rape titty beasts shouldn't be standard in D&D" vs Arivia and some other rear end in a top hat I can't remember. Not "scary things shouldn't exist". But what do I know. Also those cards are dumb. As a colorblind person jesus loving christ we're 5% of the population why, dear god why, can't you pick anything besides red and green. gently caress!
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Aug 23, 2017 05:30
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Serf posted:real-world problems i want to deal with in an rpg: capitalism Things That the RPG Medium is Poorer for Not Addressing: Class conflict Things That the RPG Medium is Not Poorer for Not Addressing: Oompa Loompa gang rape This is really not that hard.
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Aug 23, 2017 05:37
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Yo I'm just saying, "actually we should have stories about rape, it's super dramatic and fitting" was literally motherfucking Desborough’s thing.
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Aug 23, 2017 05:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:Not trying to shut you down on this line of conversation, but I don't think anyone has been arguing against horror gaming conceptually. Like, I am full on reviled against that grimdark lovely OSR poo poo but all about some horror gaming where everyone wants to be creeped the gently caress out. (Within limits. Gross gore porn and rape is at the very best super lazy, "that's the best you can do?", and then all of the actual, real objective crap. Hey! Guys! Maybe try tension instead!). Like I think this is more implementation than conceptual, especially vis a vis genre. It's me, I'm the one arguing against horror gaming conceptually. I'm also willing to admit that it's because of my lovely experiences with horror gaming, so I should walk back from the cliff and say horror is a lovely genre for the gaming I like to do.
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Aug 23, 2017 06:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:From an eagle's eye view, Starfinder is really just Pathfinder In Space, so if you already didn't like the idea of playing Pathfinder, you're not really getting anything new To add something to this list, they've removed 9 level casters. I haven't actually read through the entire drat spell list to see if this actually changes all that much (given that in Pathfinder there was a least one 6 level caster that was really a 9 level caster in disguise), but if it isn't just a facade that's them actually toning down what a caster can do for a change.
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Aug 23, 2017 06:32
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Okay, so Charnel Houses of Europe exists and is somehow pretty good, but still almost no one wants to touch it. That's a game book about the goddamn Holocaust. Despite this, pretty much any time it might come up—not that it really does because this is such a settled issue—you don't get any pushback when you suggest that the Holocaust is prima facie too heavy and fraught to even bother attempting to tackle. I feel like rape and other forms of sexual violence in RPGs should be in a similar situation. Except instead there is no surprisingly good, big game/supplement about rape, and lots of people still want to put it in their games, even to the point of surprising fellow participants with it. When someone creates The Good Rape Game, we'll probably know, and it'll still probably get plenty of pushback just like Charnel Houses, because holy poo poo of course. Until then it is a safe bet that racist caricatures doing the raping in a "twist" on a popular children's story isn't it, and heaping opprobrium on such things is not going to enter into the canon of stare decisis that prevents the existence of whatever could possibly even be a "good" rapegame, let alone the mere existence of sex and sexual content.
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Aug 23, 2017 06:36
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We already have the good rape game, it's changeling: the lost.
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Aug 23, 2017 07:00
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still blows my mind that someone is septupling down on defending the german immigrant worker rape gang adventure, let alone that it exists and won an ennie
Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 07:31
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ProfessorCirno posted:Is this really the comparison you want to make? It suddenly got intensely White Wolf in here.
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Aug 23, 2017 07:58
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Cease to Hope posted:still blows my mind that someone is septupling down on defending the german immigrant worker rape gang adventure, let alone that it exists and won an ennie God, I hadn't even thought of that element. I think pseudo-Germany is lotfp's default setting so I think it's more an unfortunate implication as opposed to the module's for sure deliberate grossness, but still...
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Aug 23, 2017 08:11
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Are the Ars Magica bundles worth picking up? I know nothing about the system but I'm vaguely interested.
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Aug 23, 2017 08:42
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Serf posted:The latter sounds hell of a lot more fun to play than the former. Splicer fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 08:45
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That Old Tree posted:Okay, so Charnel Houses of Europe exists and is somehow pretty good, but still almost no one wants to touch it. That's a game book about the goddamn Holocaust. Despite this, pretty much any time it might come up—not that it really does because this is such a settled issue—you don't get any pushback when you suggest that the Holocaust is prima facie too heavy and fraught to even bother attempting to tackle. Don't forget the wonderful moment in Shadowrun history where a writer decided to put in a dungeon crawl titled 'Arbeit Macht Frei' where the PCs dive into a death camp to beat the ghosts of murdered Jews in order to get ahold of not!Mengele's scalpel, which is a magic artifact. I poo poo you not, that's a thing that happened. In a game system whose primary non-US (and likely primary world) market is Germany.
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Aug 23, 2017 08:49
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starfinder has a weapon tag for weapons that light up an area when they are used. lasers and flamethrowers don't get it
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Aug 23, 2017 10:11
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Splicer posted:Same all over. I really like the class setup and such but I'm just not into that kind of world. e: playing fantasy heroes in that kind of world I mean. I'm gonna keep running these games so that I can get a better feel for the system, but I already see ways to change the tone pretty easily. Strip out Insanity and Corruption, axe the Forbidden tradition of magic, reflavor frightening creatures as intimidating etc. I'll probably write up a hack at some point.
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Aug 23, 2017 10:48
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There's nothing to hack really, just ignore the fluff and run whatever setting/tone you'd run in D&D with it. Just ignore sanity for the most part and keep it as a gimmick for particular spooky scary dungeon. Honestly, if anything needs hacking for tonal purposes, it's the loving mech pilot class sneaked in between all the fantasy stuff.
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Aug 23, 2017 11:16
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Haystack posted:Offhand, No Thank You Evil is probably the highest profile RPG that's explicitly for kids. Don't know a ton about it, though. It's high profile because it's from Monte Cooke Games. The game is a heavily watered-down Cypher system, which is honestly an improvement on that side. I'd be shocked if it's ever played as intended, with age categories and "increasing complexity" because playing at "lower complexities" actually makes the game harder. It leans heavily on the GM making everything up because a lot of the equipment has no set mechanics behind it. The powers and archetypes that do have rules are really unbalanced against one another. Archetypes sometimes have powers that don't even use their primary stat. There's a great review of it in the F&F archive.
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Aug 23, 2017 12:16
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If somebody wants to literally run that Gunshow Piss Wizard game and have mechanical conflicts resolved with a round of soggy sao more power to them, I say. But maybe people can just admit that they really just want to roleplay their fetishes instead of bullshitting that it's about deep and meaningful themes or avant-garde creativity? Like, only a complete idiot would claim that Blood in the Chocolate with its rapist oompa-loompas is a respectful treatment of sexual assault or anti-colonialist/capitalist in any way. Edit: Also, even without the gross stuff Blood and Chocolate is garbage because the module actively punishes players who acknowledge that it's a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory homage. Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 12:17
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