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Also responsible for the best magic item from the last print issue of Dragon magazine.
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Aug 30, 2017 05:54
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:
not a dog kobold, 0/10
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Aug 30, 2017 07:12
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neongrey posted:not a dog kobold, 0/10 aren't those gnolls?
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Aug 30, 2017 08:04
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Goa Tse-tung posted:aren't those gnolls?
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Aug 30, 2017 08:07
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They were always reptilian, but in older editions they were described as being somewhat dog-like in appearance, basically dog-faced lizards. The Suikoden videogames interpreted that as "literally dogs that walk around like people."
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Aug 30, 2017 08:09
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The "kobolds are dogs" things is pretty common in asian games in general, like here's kobolds in Ragnarok Online  I personally like it more than lizard kobolds
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Aug 30, 2017 08:20
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moths posted:Street level Shadowrun sounds like such a better way to explore the setting. Fiasco with the potential to go Lord of the Rings levels of wrong. It's a lot more fun. My favorite campaign to GM ever was a street level Shadowrun game where the players were jumped up gangers in a gang war and I took my directoral queues from Escape From LA. Total Pink Mohawk shenanigans, but everyone had a blast.
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Aug 30, 2017 08:54
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moths posted:Street level Shadowrun sounds like such a better way to explore the setting. Fiasco with the potential to go Lord of the Rings levels of wrong. One of the problems with cyberpunk RPGs is that most of them are about forming This is why Technoir remains the only good cyberpunk game.
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Aug 30, 2017 09:15
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FMguru posted:Gnolls are hyena-people. Gnolls are Gnome Trolls. Wait, someone said dog reptile kobolds, I assumed we were talking about ODD.
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Aug 30, 2017 15:47
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Countblanc posted:The "kobolds are dogs" things is pretty common in asian games in general, like here's kobolds in Ragnarok Online the patient zero for this is wizardry, which stayed huge in japan in a way that it never did in english
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Aug 30, 2017 15:51
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Cease to Hope posted:the patient zero for this is wizardry, which stayed huge in japan in a way that it never did in english There's also a dog-eared kobold in 1981's Moldvay D&D Basic. I didn't have the 1977 one, so I don't know whether that picture was in there too. Edit: it's the top hit for "Moldvay Basic Kobold." Not full dog, but dog-eared. homullus fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 16:31
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homullus posted:There's also a dog-eared kobold in 1981's Moldvay D&D Basic. I didn't have the 1977 one, so I don't know whether that picture was in there too. dog-kobalds were all over the place in early D&D. the reason kobalds = dogs in japan is wizardry.
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Aug 30, 2017 16:49
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Cease to Hope posted:dog-kobalds were all over the place in early D&D. the reason kobalds = dogs in japan is wizardry. I was suggesting that dog-kobolds in Wizardry may have been due to D&D, making Wizardry not patient zero.
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Aug 30, 2017 16:51
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ProfessorCirno posted:Funny enough, one of the few things they did right with 5e is HOW they handled GOD. Basically, when you're being mostly legal, you're fine. Once you start hacking, however, you essentially get a timer. The timer's going down regardless, and the more openly illegal poo poo you do, the faster it goes down. I mean, up, since it's additive, not subtractive, but you get the idea. When it hits it's threshold, you have now caught GOD's attention, and it's a Bad Thing that means, amongst other stuff, it's time to stop hacking and get the gently caress out of wherever you are. Older editions of Shadowrun would describe all kinds of security measures, some of which were baroque and expensive--like lining every wall of your facility with magic algae to prevent astral intrusion--but some of which seemed to be omnipresent, with no guidance regarding what that means for the PCs. Abstracting this kind of thing into a tension timer is the way to go. DivineCoffeeBinge posted:While over-reliance on the "Mr. Johnson fucks over the PCs" trope is stupid, the fact that it exists isn't necessarily an issue; the PCs' careers should be abnormal based solely on the fact that they're PCs, so of course they're going to get backstabbing Mr. Johnsons; a long series of perfectly ordinary and sensible runs gets boring, because it's... ordinary. Johnson withholds information because they know you'll ask for more pay, and Johnson doesn't know every potential security issue. That's par for the course. potatocubed posted:It makes me think that maybe there's two different games in Shadowrun -- the high-end chrome-plated heist game, all assault rifles and slick plans and Force 6 elementals, and the low-end game of desperate scum with guns and the bare minimum of infosec trying to get themselves on the ladder and ending up in way over their heads. Like, for example, here's a blast from years past I was instantly able to Google: quote:In general, if a runner wants to stay at something higher than Low lifestyle, they’re probably going to need to set themselves up with a cover identity. It seems sensible for a runner team to set up a group of companies. A common plan is to set up two offshore companies (in different nations) and one local one. When you get paid for your run, you shunt the funds into your first offshore company, have that company then shunt them over to the second one, and have the second one send the funds to the local one, which then disburses effective “salaries” and “bonuses” to the runners, paying their taxes. With a believable job and bills, a runner’s ID will generally be safe— as long as they don’t give anyone on the streets a chance to point them out.
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Aug 30, 2017 17:44
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Lemon-Lime posted:One of the problems with cyberpunk RPGs is that most of them are about forming The problem there of course is that Shadowrun doesn't have a good XP model for that, and character creation/bookkeeping is way too involved. Honestly I keep hoping that, instead of a million versions of Same Game Now With More Tables and Dare You Enter My Magical Realm, someone in the OSR will actually go back and mine old school concepts and use modern game design techniques to create something that caters to those assumptions. TTRPGs evolved in a particular way and there's good reasons for that, but that wasn't the only way they could have developed, and in some cases modern design techniques could make old ideas that didn't really work at the time enjoyable to play. But that's not what OSR is, sadly.
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Aug 30, 2017 17:50
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homullus posted:I was suggesting that dog-kobolds in Wizardry may have been due to D&D, making Wizardry not patient zero. sure, okay. we don't really disagree about that.
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Aug 30, 2017 17:58
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Comrade Gorbash posted:That is, rotating GMs and character rosters, with each player maintaining a stable of 2-3 characters they can pick from each adventure.
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Aug 30, 2017 18:07
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Cease to Hope posted:the patient zero for this is wizardry, which stayed huge in japan in a way that it never did in english Having the kobolds in Baldur's Gate literally look like yapping dog men probably didn't help either.
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Aug 30, 2017 18:07
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Lotta talk about where dog kobolds come from, not a lot of talk about how they are objectively superior. 
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Aug 30, 2017 18:33
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Cease to Hope posted:the patient zero for this is wizardry, which stayed huge in japan in a way that it never did in english Of course, pre-D&D kobolds were a kind of sprite from Germanic mythology, more like a brownie but with the ability to turn into a candle for some reason. But there's a massive number of things from mythology that were either ill-defined or just different, and the D&D version became the more iconic one.
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Aug 30, 2017 18:33
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Ewen Cluney posted:As far as I can tell, Wizardry is much more important for how the western fantasy genre developed in Japan than D&D or even Tolkien.
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Aug 30, 2017 18:52
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Given Neuromancer is basically that same plotline Not really. Neuromancer is about low-lives running a series of heists and backstabbing each other, not about a party of heavily-armed and -armoured killers treating corporate arcologies like D&D dungeons.
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Aug 30, 2017 18:52
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Halloween Jack posted:
Yeaj, the actual in-game answer is Certifed Cred. Bearer bonds are good poo poo, even in a functionally cashless society. Comrade Koba posted:Having the kobolds in Baldur's Gate literally look like yapping dog men probably didn't help either. IIRC those models were straight referenced off the D&D arcade games. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 18:54
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neongrey posted:Lotta talk about where dog kobolds come from, not a lot of talk about how they are objectively superior. The only thing I like about lizard kobolds is the dragon worship angle. D&D has plenty of lizard baddies otherwise, and Hotelling's Law is not a sound basis for trash mob design.
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Aug 30, 2017 18:59
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I only know lizard kobolds from D&D and mole kobolds from WoW and I much prefer D&D's lizard kobolds. They're one of my favorite D&D species.
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Aug 30, 2017 19:01
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Halloween Jack posted:This seems kind of silly to me. TSR bungled their chance to expand into Japan, but Wizardry was part of the genre of computer games that were just unlicensed D&D games. It's hard to overstate D&D's influence on early video gaming, and even a lot of current-gen shooters owe a debt to D&D.
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Aug 30, 2017 19:34
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The 1E monster manual shows them as being scaly midgets with horns and doggish faces, and I remember being vaguely confused by the BECMI description of the fuckers. Something about metal scales? DiTerlizzi's rendition for the Monstrous Manual looks almost more rattish than anything else, but there's still some dog in there if you squint. Thinking about the hellish yapping underneath the Firewine Bridge is going to give me flashbacks, so I won't. Past that... I dunno. The midget dragonborn look just doesn't do it for me. It feels like they took that 'dragon encounters at every level!' to an absurd extreme.
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Aug 30, 2017 19:46
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homullus posted:The only thing I like about lizard kobolds is the dragon worship angle. D&D has plenty of lizard baddies otherwise, and Hotelling's Law is not a sound basis for trash mob design. They should be dogs that worship dragons And wear costumes
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Aug 30, 2017 19:48
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This is a good kobold:
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Aug 30, 2017 19:51
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Although I was kind of thrown when I was 6 years old and reading the B/X rules for the first time -- I thought they were supposed to be really tall because that guy clearly reaches all the way up to the ceiling.
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Aug 30, 2017 19:53
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Liquid Communism posted:Yeaj, the actual in-game answer is Certifed Cred. Bearer bonds are good poo poo, even in a functionally cashless society. Oh wait, this is a libertarian shithole, that's the point. Lemon-Lime posted:Not really. Neuromancer is about low-lives running a series of heists and backstabbing each other, not about a party of heavily-armed and -armoured killers treating corporate arcologies like D&D dungeons.
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Aug 30, 2017 20:25
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Neuromancer is all anyone cares about. When someone says "Lovecraftian" they generally don't mean the Dream Cycle, same idea here.
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Aug 30, 2017 20:28
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The good and worthwhile parts of cyberpunk aren't the parts about tooled-up cyber-assassins violently murdering people, they're the bits about two-bit drug addicts or struggling mothers getting involved in stuff that's five orders of magnitude larger than anything they could ever comprehend because they had to score or put food on the table this week. They're about desperate people trying to survive in a near-future dystopia, breaking the law and ending up in serious trouble because it was literally their only option to make ends meet. That's exactly the kind of stuff that would make for a great PbtA game, but sadly The Sprawl didn't get the memo and chose to be PbtA Shadowrun Without The Magic.  It's doubly sad because Apocalypse World on its own already nails a good chunk of what makes good cyberpunk (i.e. an environment where the rules of civilised society don't apply, power structures are deeply unjust, and people fight each each other for scarce resources), so it's a good basis for building a cyberpunk game.
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Aug 30, 2017 20:33
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Lemon-Lime posted:The good and worthwhile parts of cyberpunk aren't the parts about tooled-up cyber-assassins violently murdering people, they're the bits about two-bit drug addicts or struggling mothers getting involved in stuff that's five orders of magnitude larger than anything they could ever comprehend because they had to score or put food on the table this week. They're about desperate people trying to survive in a near-future dystopia, breaking the law and ending up in serious trouble because it was literally their only option to make ends meet.  From what I've seen, most published TG cyberpunk stuff tend to be all cyber and little to no punk.
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Aug 30, 2017 20:53
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Comrade Koba posted:
It is super weird that Punk generally means "themed" rather than any anti establishment ideas. How many Steampunk games are actually about over throwing society as anarchist?
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Aug 30, 2017 20:56
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Lord_Hambrose posted:How many Steampunk games are actually about over throwing society as anarchist? Steampunk is even more dumb when it comes to this, because it's always about fetishizing the Victorian upper class in various ways.
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Aug 30, 2017 21:10
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Halloween Jack posted:What's odd is that I hear CP2020 and Shadowrun called "Gibsonian" cyberpunk, when only Neuromancer and Count Zero are heist narratives. The Sprawl is actually more Gibsonian, albeit with more cyber and guns. You're probably also aware that Gibson himself hates the very concept of Shadowrun, so people calling it Gibsonian is a pretty big misnomer. I am currently reading The Sprawl, and I would concur with your assessment. It's also refreshing to read a cyberpunk RPG that doesn't have its head up its own rear end.
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Aug 30, 2017 21:21
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Comrade Koba posted:Steampunk is even more dumb when it comes to this, because it's always about fetishizing the Victorian upper class in various ways.
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Aug 30, 2017 21:22
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Halloween Jack posted:I've never understood this. There's such a range of possible plot hooks besides "Johnson betrays you" or "Everything goes exactly as planned." No, I get that and I agree with you; I'm just saying that your (perfectly valid!) point of "Mr. Johnson should almost never betray the shadowrunners he hires because that is loving stupid" should not, of necessity, be applied to PCs. Just by being PCs, they live in that "almost."
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Aug 30, 2017 21:28
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| # ? May 25, 2024 21:49 |
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Great, now I wasted the afternoon writing an essay about kobolds, and I'm not even finished and I have to wait until after I go to the gym to post it.
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Aug 30, 2017 22:12
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