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unseenlibrarian posted:Wait, I thought Rolling Thunder was all Ryan Dancey, not Wick. Wick was just story team, not the business end. Yeah, Rolling Thunder was a Ryan Dancey thing, I don't recall Wick ever had anything to do with it.
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May 31, 2018 01:37
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God, I just looked at the book. They didn't mention that all these ridiculous plots come from one NPC, "Jefferson Carter". - A PC superhero took a dependent NPC grandma who was unaware of her secret identity. The player mentioned going out to dinner with the grandma. "Carter" paid a guy to plant a bomb on the roof of the restaurant, wait for the PC to switch to superheroine identity, then hit her with a paralyzing ray, rip her mask off and throw her through the glass roof of the restaurant. With apparent glee he described the grandmother dying of a heart attack while the heroine lay paralyzed. - A PC took the disadvantage of going berserk whenever he saw a trolley car. Carter had a mind controller guy project an infinite loop of trolley cars into his brain so he attacked the other PCs until they turned him in to jail. - A PC took a disadvantage of a code of honor to never strike a woman, so he had a villainess routinely show up and humiliate him - then had someone else drug him to go berserk and beat the crap out of her next time she showed up. Then revealed her secret identity was his love interest. - Suggesting that if a player takes Luck, they might duck out of a bomb explosion at the last minute - thus preventing them helping the rest of their team escape from the bomb, so they all get killed, and then landing solo in a mob of supervillains. - If a PC takes Find Weakness, he'll send them against villains where their weakness is so dramatic that attacking it kills the villain instantly, and then the PC superhero is a murderer. (He later wrote a follow-up article explaining that it was all totally cool because the PCs did eventually defeat Carter and were super happy about it.) That said, I do wish there was a better GMing guide that covers the balance between nice and nasty a bit better. Another poster pointed me to Play Unsafe, but it has the same thing many do, where it mentions getting the players in trouble then has a section with the guidelines "give them what they want" and "lose gracefully". But what about "win gracefully"?
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May 31, 2018 01:38
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The "Immunity" thing is just impossibly, mind-bendingly stupid. It's so nonsensical that it's extremely difficult to come up with descriptive metaphors for it that scan as English sentences. It's like, many heroes have the ability to fly, so Mr. Carter dug a pit that only flying people could fall into,
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May 31, 2018 02:04
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Halloween Jack posted:His writing on L5R was marked by extreme favoritism toward the Scorpion and a preoccupation with Bayushi Kachiko, who was, pretty much by his own admission, his Dragon Lady masturbation fantasy. Good poo poo. quote:Imagining a guy defending his Killer DM style, and bragging about the time his wife bought him a lapdance from an Asian stripper, in that grating shopworn style. quote:bragging about the time his wife bought him a lapdance from an Asian stripper quote:his wife bought him a lapdance quote:from an Asian stripper Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood poo poo.
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May 31, 2018 02:05
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Upon more reflection, the other thing that gets me about the Champions player-fuckery is that it all seems calibrated to be as uninteresting as possible, with no ways for the player to react besides "poo poo, I suffer, I guess." Take the example with the character getting unmasked in front of Grandma. There are plenty of interesting negative consequences that could come from that! "Grandma is upset and judgmental and disowns you/forbids you from superheroing/tells other judgmental authority figures" is the obvious one, but there are others. Maybe Grandma gets paranoid about being a supervillain target and stops going out in public. Maybe Grandma is proud and supportive but absolutely cannot keep a secret, and it's only a matter of time before someone bad overhears. There are a thousand things you could do there that would be both negative for the PC and potentially fun for the player, and "Grandma just dies" is the most boring possible option, in addition to being anti-fun. Then again, I guess if Wick was going with the "billionaire philanthropist is secretly an evil puppetmaster with infinite resources to gently caress with you, just because he wants to" angle, creativity or interest probably wasn't a priority.
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May 31, 2018 02:20
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unseenlibrarian posted:Wait, I thought Rolling Thunder was all Ryan Dancey, not Wick. Wick was just story team, not the business end.
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May 31, 2018 02:28
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The thing that gets me about Wick's "Grandma gets a heart attack" story is this: John Wick has stated many times that he hates players who don't have ties to the setting through NPC relations and such. In the Champion stories, John uses these NPC ties as weapons and brags that after the gramma incident nobody ever bought a dependent NPC again.
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May 31, 2018 02:49
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Evil Mastermind posted:The thing that gets me about Wick's "Grandma gets a heart attack" story is this: Honestly, the reference to a dude who goes berserk if he sees trolley cars makes me assume there was a lot of "let's take the chintziest disadvantages we can think of to give our shithead GM as few openings as possible" going on in that game. Normally that kind of PC behavior is aggravating, but in this case it seems like logical self-defense.
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May 31, 2018 03:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:The thing that gets me about Wick's "Grandma gets a heart attack" story is this: Yeah, I mentioned this a page back or so but I'm convinced that the reason Wick actually dislikes players that do the "loner orphan" thing is they aren't giving him any immediately obvious things he can use to gently caress them over with. John Wick does, or did but I have no idea how much this has actually changed since Play Dirty, view the GM/Player dynamic as a game of one-upsmanship and he's the sort of guy who very obviously loves to win.
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May 31, 2018 04:06
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Antivehicular posted:Honestly, the reference to a dude who goes berserk if he sees trolley cars makes me assume there was a lot of "let's take the chintziest disadvantages we can think of to give our shithead GM as few openings as possible" going on in that game. Normally that kind of PC behavior is aggravating, but in this case it seems like logical self-defense. See, my assumption was it was someone who became a superhero dedicated to saving everyone, everywhere from the trolley problem by destroying all trolleys.
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May 31, 2018 06:00
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, Rolling Thunder was a Ryan Dancey thing, I don't recall Wick ever had anything to do with it. Yeah, here's the relevant posting by Dancey. Wick was largely just a fiction / RPG author / occasional event host for Legend of the Five Rings. Kai Tave posted:John Wick does, or did but I have no idea how much this has actually changed since Play Dirty, view the GM/Player dynamic as a game of one-upsmanship and he's the sort of guy who very obviously loves to win. I did a read of 2016's Play Dirty 2 so you don't have to.
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May 31, 2018 06:08
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My favorite John Wick bit was him saying on RPG.net that Seventh Sea was obviously not a game about Age of Sail piracy and the model for piracy in it that GMs should use was bronze age Chinese river piracy. Which makes perfect goddamn sense.
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May 31, 2018 06:21
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Ratoslov posted:My favorite John Wick bit was him saying on RPG.net that Seventh Sea was obviously not a game about Age of Sail piracy and the model for piracy in it that GMs should use was bronze age Chinese river piracy. Which makes perfect goddamn sense. Cuz god knows when I hear the phrase "scourge of the Seven Seas," I certainly don't think Blackbeard or Francois l'Olonnais, I think... insert joke here because I actually couldn't find any info on "bronze age Chinese river piracy" anywhere on the internet.
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May 31, 2018 06:31
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MockingQuantum posted:Cuz god knows when I hear the phrase "scourge of the Seven Seas," I certainly don't think Blackbeard or Francois l'Olonnais, I think... insert joke here because I actually couldn't find any info on "bronze age Chinese river piracy" anywhere on the internet. You're supposed to think the Scarlet Pimpernel or Three Musketeers or Zorro. It's a game all about swashbuckling adventure, which apparently Wick never got the memo that when you say the word 'swashbuckling' anywhere vaguely near the word 'sea', people are going to immediately think of Errol Flynn.
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May 31, 2018 06:39
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Was his Martin Luther-nailing-a-critique-to-the-Church-door weird rant about D&D3 before or after What's That Smell? was met with a thunderous "meh"? Or was it mostly unrelated? I can't remember and I couldn't begin to Google the original "essay." EDIT: I will say, either thanks to taking a step back and sort of becoming a figurehead in light of 7th Sea 2E's runaway success, or an actual change in attitude for that or other reasons, his more recent expressed opinions on the Right Kind of Gaming are not quite so objectionable. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 06:52 on May 31, 2018 |
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May 31, 2018 06:48
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The first product for the 7th Sea product line was the (huge, successful for a time) CCG - which was all about pirates and buried treasures and press gangs and belaying pins and running out the guns and preparing to repel boarders and bosun's mates and pieces of eight. You moved your (multi-masted, square-rigged) ships around the various seas and accomplished objectives and literally every piece of artwork, flavor text, ad copy, and rule indicated that this was a fantastic version of the European Age of Sail. There wasn't a single hint of ancient Chinese river piracy, apart from a couple of references to the distant not-China of the setting (Cathay). When the RPG came out shortly afterwards, it had almost no pirates (the emphasis was on Musketeer-style swashbuckling) and worse, there was no reason for the setting (one big blobby continent, no equivalent to the New World or Mediterranean) to ever develop anything more sophisticated that simple shore-hugging junks or dhows, people were baffled, and Wick's "it's actually about Chinese river piracy, duh" comment was his response to their bafflement. That Old Tree posted:Was his Martin Luther-nailing-a-critique-to-the-Church-door weird rant about D&D3 before or after What's That Smell? was met with a thunderous "meh"? Or was it mostly unrelated? I can't remember and I couldn't begin to Google the original "essay."
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May 31, 2018 06:53
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Zurui posted:You left out the best part: Man if I ever played with him, the session would probably end with me beating him senseless with the nearest blunt object
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May 31, 2018 07:10
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The cat one-shot put me in mind that crossing Call of Catthulhu or its like with CJ Cheryh's cat wizards series would seriously own.
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May 31, 2018 07:12
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Here's Wick's existential scream against D20 and Ryan Dancey: https://pastebin.com/R7b1HgyT
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May 31, 2018 07:17
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My favorite Wick thing is that he named his samurai game Blood And Honor.
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May 31, 2018 07:19
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Ok maybe our racists have different dogwhistles, but I feel like having the point to "What's that smell?" Be "a black person" seems a bit of an unfortunate choice.
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May 31, 2018 07:23
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quote:If D&D3 is a rules set for generic fantasy roleplaying. And, like every other generic fantasy game that has released in the last ten years, it should financially fail. However, this is not any other generic fantasy game.
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May 31, 2018 07:24
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There's so much implied setting material in D&D's rules you barely have to give it it's own section
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May 31, 2018 07:41
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I did a read of 2016's Play Dirty 2 so you don't have to. I got about halfway through before I remembered that in addition to Wick being a bad GM he's also a really bad and tedious writer, so there's that too.
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May 31, 2018 07:45
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I'm starting to think my wife dodged a bullet by not working for the guy, at least in some small way.
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May 31, 2018 07:47
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MockingQuantum posted:I'm starting to think my wife dodged a bullet by not working for the guy, at least in some small way.
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May 31, 2018 08:33
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In other (good) news, a new campaign framework just got released for Spire: Kings of Silver, PWYW.
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May 31, 2018 10:19
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I'd probably be down for a game of Chinese river piracy. Get shanghaied in Shanghai on a junk full of junk, twice.
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May 31, 2018 11:44
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There were some pretty famous Chinese river pirates who got cool stories and stuff about them, like Ching Shih. There were also some pretty vicious coastal pirates working in SE Asia and along the East Asian coastlines: Wakou. None of that makes Wick's response make a lick more sense. I have often played Civ games on either large continent or Pangaea mode because building ships and loading troops on them is a huge pain even in the modern era but this isn't a 4X game. Does 7th Sea have any rules for cavalry? They're not as romanticized in our era but they would be both a really necessary thing on a huge landmass like that and an obvious archetype from history.
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May 31, 2018 11:57
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Isn't 7th Sea 2e piratey now?
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May 31, 2018 12:53
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Hel posted:Ok maybe our racists have different dogwhistles, but I feel like having the point to "What's that smell?" Be "a black person" seems a bit of an unfortunate choice. What's that smell and "The Last Paladin" are basically orthogonal in that both were Wick writing in reaction to D&D 3 but I don't think they're tied together. And really the key takeaway from the Last Paladin isn't that "Surprise, the paladin is black", since that's pretty much said as part of his initial description. What Wick -really- wants you to know is that the inn-keeper has a wide fuckin' chest, as he described as "The wide-chested man" or "The Wide-chested innkeeper" in literally every sentence he's mentioned.
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May 31, 2018 13:49
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FMguru posted:Here's Wick's existential scream against D20 and Ryan Dancey: https://pastebin.com/R7b1HgyT quote:ALL YOU SUCKERS WHO BOUGHT ALL THREE BOOKS PAID FOR EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES OF RULES!!!
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May 31, 2018 13:57
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Wick is the kind of guy who thinks crossing his arms, leaning back with a wry grin and saying "D&D isn't a real RPG" is a devastating truth bomb that will destroy his enemies and rock the industry to its foundations and the reason no one has said it before is that they're just too scared
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May 31, 2018 14:09
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Lightning Lord posted:Isn't 7th Sea 2e piratey now? I'm very much not a fan of 7th Sea 2e's mechanics, and I haven't yet had a chance to have a closer look at the setting sourcebooks (despite being a KS backer for 2e). I like some of the things I know about the setting changes and dislike others, but at least it's much more expansive these days. Maybe Mors Rattus will one day repeat the feat of heroism once done for 1e.
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May 31, 2018 14:20
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, I mentioned this a page back or so but I'm convinced that the reason Wick actually dislikes players that do the "loner orphan" thing is they aren't giving him any immediately obvious things he can use to gently caress them over with. John Wick does, or did but I have no idea how much this has actually changed since Play Dirty, view the GM/Player dynamic as a game of one-upsmanship and he's the sort of guy who very obviously loves to win.
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May 31, 2018 14:29
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FMguru posted:Here's Wick's existential scream against D20 and Ryan Dancey: https://pastebin.com/R7b1HgyT It went something along the lines of "When John Wick's blood is up, he takes on the persona of The Wick, who he imagines is some gatecrashing amalgam of Hunter S. Thompson and Hugh Hefner who has everyone in awe of his roguish wit, drinking wine in the hot tub with the ladies, while that geek Ryan Dancey slinks off muttering curses under his breath. John Wick is my friend, but The Wick is a real rear end in a top hat." John Wick liked this so much that he started invoking it occasionally.
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May 31, 2018 14:57
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Halloween Jack posted:I wish I could find Ryan Dancey's response to this. It's been years since I read it, but it was a pretty good takedown. Did anyone ever F&F Orkworld?
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May 31, 2018 15:11
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I remember the time Wick reviewed the review someone did of Orkworld on RPG.net and implied that non-game designers shouldn't review games.
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May 31, 2018 15:17
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unseenlibrarian posted:I remember the time Wick reviewed the review someone did of Orkworld on RPG.net and implied that non-game designers shouldn't review games. It wasn't an implication, he outright stated as much.
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May 31, 2018 15:45
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LongDarkNight posted:A Venture Bros game would best be played with the Duckman RPG system. Late to the party on this, but some dude ran a Venture Bros game at GenCon last year in Savage Worlds and it was still pretty OK. We were all The Monarch's henchmen and we just (barely) made it out of The Liberace Museum with Liberace's most gaudy piano ever. Definitely could've been done better, but I totally respect the fact that the guy running it looked like your stereotypical OSR dude in his 50s, but didn't run that stuff at all.
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May 31, 2018 15:50
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