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also speaking of nazis and science, reminder that one of the most famous nazi book burning images is them burning books and studies about gender theory and biology, thus erasing generations of work on the study of gender identity and culture around it and giving rise to the squealing hordes saying 'this trans stuff is just a new fad we've always known there's just two binary genders!!!' You know, normal science stuff.
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Oct 21, 2018 15:49
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Loomer posted:Personally, I'm disappointed the world never got to see a fistfight between literal Space-Wizard Jack Parsons, the true father of the space age, and Wernher von Braun, the sinister nazi saboteur. It really says a lot that people are more comfortable talking about and giving credit to an ex-nazi than a sex wizard.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:12
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I expect that might shift a little with Strange Angel being broadcast, but yeah. It's kind of like we've been staring at the Lost Cause historiography equivalent for Nazi Science over the last sixty years.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:28
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:I dunno, DCC roleplaying is pretty great. For one, I like that classes are all really powerful, and they all feel like specific archetypes. Fighters in other games feel like guys that hit hard, but with Deeds, lucky weapons(which are also named in the Lankhmar rules), and the absolutely horrendous amount of damage you can deal, it really does feel like an amalgamation of Aragorn, Conan, etc. You're not "a guy dat fights with a sord!" you're a legendary hero. Thieves, with their luck gambling and "backstabs are always crits and your weapons die get better" are much more threatening than any rogue, you got wizards feeling like warlocks and witches, less "gandalf but with a five minute work day" and there are actual pacts with demons unlike 5e which makes warlocks a damage class that gets 'pacts' as part of mechanics and nothing else. Clerics feel like paladins and holy warriors, and the Elves genuinely feel like the iron-fearing, magic working casters of faerie. Dwarves are sadly generic. DCC is hands down the best D&D-like game I've ever played, I was an instant and permanent convert. Unfortunately I've heard mutant crawl classics was a bit lackluster but I haven't laid hands on the book so I can't speak from my own experience.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:55
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neaden posted:It really says a lot that people are more comfortable talking about and giving credit to an ex-nazi than a sex wizard. I'm genuinely shocked there's never been an Oatmeal Reddit style "LISTEN UP FUCKBOYS HERE'S SOME MOTHER loving HISTORY WITH SWEARS" comic about Parsons. Like, why is only Tesla the one to get that treatment, this guy was a literal gently caress mage who made rockets and the fuel what makes them go. I guess it's harder to spin "THE REAL NERD GOD GOT IGNORED WHILE THE CHAD EDISON STOLE EVERYTHING" kinda poo poo from a guy who did have a successful life and all but seriously how is 'the gently caress wizard who made rockets and pioneered its fuel source' left in the shadows of a nazi? The dude was targeted by McCarthy and died in a garage explosion while doing off the books rocket research despite being banned from rocketry poo poo. How is that not a better story that a loving baron who maybe kinda decided not to be a TOTAL nazi??
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Oct 21, 2018 17:04
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sexpig by night posted:how is 'the gently caress wizard who made rockets and pioneered its fuel source' left in the shadows of a nazi? kind of supplied your own answer there
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Oct 21, 2018 17:05
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oh right I always forget a not minor amount of people still genuinely believe McCarthy was right
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Oct 21, 2018 17:09
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sexpig by night posted:oh right I always forget a not minor amount of people still genuinely believe McCarthy was right I mean, McCarthy was an evil piece of poo poo but maybe the fact that Parsons was super into occult stuff might be a bigger factor in why the internet scientist fanclub doesn't make a big deal about the guy? The kind of people who do those bombastic-comedy-history-lesson things seem like they would be fairly dismissive of a dude who did wizard rituals and then got his life savings stolen by famed hack, L. Ron Hubbard. Its a good story but its not like the Alan Turing thing where he was a martyr that was inhumanly destroyed by society despite contributing immensely to the war effort and science in general because of bigotry.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:27
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There is a pretty good Dollop on the guy anyway.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:35
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andrew smash posted:DCC is hands down the best D&D-like game I've ever played, I was an instant and permanent convert. Unfortunately I've heard mutant crawl classics was a bit lackluster but I haven't laid hands on the book so I can't speak from my own experience. It's not a full rules set. It really requires you to know DCC and have a DCC corebook to play. The rules for understanding technology are really rough. And some of the classes are just, very barebones. The Shaman needs to roll like 30+ on his patron check to get 'spells'. When combined with DCC, it's a great rules set. But it requires more effort.
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Oct 21, 2018 18:46
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Bob Quixote posted:I mean, McCarthy was an evil piece of poo poo but maybe the fact that Parsons was super into occult stuff might be a bigger factor in why the internet scientist fanclub doesn't make a big deal about the guy? The kind of people who do those bombastic-comedy-history-lesson things seem like they would be fairly dismissive of a dude who did wizard rituals and then got his life savings stolen by famed hack, L. Ron Hubbard. Its a good story but its not like the Alan Turing thing where he was a martyr that was inhumanly destroyed by society despite contributing immensely to the war effort and science in general because of bigotry. True but I still think the fact that thought jizz was magic and got scammed hard by Hubbard and worked out of his garage was still a better scientist than most of the nazis we snatched up to keep out of Russia owns on its own. "Yea this guy was insane but lol get owned, nazi scientists our stupid occult weirdo was way smarter than all of yours."
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Oct 21, 2018 18:54
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alg posted:It's not a full rules set. It really requires you to know DCC and have a DCC corebook to play. The rules for understanding technology are really rough. And some of the classes are just, very barebones. The Shaman needs to roll like 30+ on his patron check to get 'spells'. If I ever run it, I’ve given some thought to just smushing all the pure-strain human classes into one. As they are, they range from “meh” to “why would anyone play this class.” Then again, I’ll probably just run Umerican Survival Guide and borrow some of MCC’s ideas.
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Oct 22, 2018 04:30
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Nazi War Occultists: Hunting for the Holy Grail and murdering concentration camp inmates for medical experiments. American War Occultists: FEAR MY ROCKET-POWERED BAZOOKA DICK, HITLER.
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Oct 22, 2018 04:37
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Loomer posted:Nazi War Occultists: Hunting for the Holy Grail and murdering concentration camp inmates for medical experiments. nazi occultism vs american occultism, just in general, really is a real virgin/chad meme situation. "I've studied ancient latin tomes that I frankly don't fully understand but I'm pretty sure they say the cup of christ was buried in Tunisia, let's destroy the nation to check it out so that I may achieve enlightenment." "Yea man satan came to me in a dream and said you need to give me all your money and let me gently caress your wife in my cabin in the woods where I'm also building a jetpack for some reason"
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Oct 22, 2018 04:45
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Reminder: Jack Parsons once masturbated furiously in order to summon a storm and stop L. Ron Hubbard from escaping the US with his stolen money on a boat. And a storm happened.
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Oct 22, 2018 13:36
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That's a hell of a roll
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Oct 22, 2018 13:45
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Parsons features in the last episode of the new season of Lore TV, apparently.
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Oct 22, 2018 14:18
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unseenlibrarian posted:Parsons features in the last episode of the new season of Lore TV, apparently. does it talk about how he basically said under oath at congress that his greatest accomplishment wasn't even working with the rocket program, but actually was summoning a sexy demon he totally boned and you guys are just jealous?
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Oct 22, 2018 15:06
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sexpig by night posted:does it talk about how he basically said under oath at congress that his greatest accomplishment wasn't even working with the rocket program, but actually was summoning a sexy demon he totally boned and you guys are just jealous? He's not wrong, I *am* jealous
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Oct 22, 2018 15:23
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I'm not sure if this is the correct place to talk about this, but I recently put up a blog post about strategies that game designers and runners can employ to make their games less appealing to fascists.
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Oct 22, 2018 16:06
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Meinberg posted:I'm not sure if this is the correct place to talk about this, but I recently put up a blog post about strategies that game designers and runners can employ to make their games less appealing to fascists. What are "emotional safety rules"? Do you have examples of games which include those? I for one am not familiar with the term. I find your discussion of biological determinism superficial to the point of being confusing. If I make ogres stronger than halflings, is that not also biological determinism? Even though I should have none of that, to any degree? Yet I can't think of a good reason to give them similar physical brawn, whether from a "realism" standpoint or genre-emulation. Or is having strong ogres (or giants, or titans, or dragons, whatever) categorically engaging in racism, in your view? Violence. Yeah, you called it, you're gonna get push back. Here it is. I think you're conflating real world violence with sanitized, distant, entertainment fake-violence. D&D combat is no more visceral or traumatic than one chess piece taking another. The same goes for horror, by the way. People get thrills from watching horror movies precisely because it gives them the perceived positive, a thrill, without having to experience any actual danger. People can watch Halloween or John Wick without being harmed or traumatized. While fascist regimes do employ violence to crush dissent, I think you've focused too much on their method rather than their goal. Pretend-violence in tabletop games is not inherently attractive to fascists, I think, only the ideologies which that pretend-violence might (fictionally) serve. Not much to say on the rest. All in all I absolutely do applaud your goals, but I think the article could do with some improvements. I need to be told what emotional safety rules are. I need to more info on biological determinism. And if I'm wrong on violence, I need to be told how and why. Edit: Something else that just popped into my head. You said that violence should be something which "can only be done to protect", but that doesn't help. Real life Nazis for example did think they were protecting their way of life. Protecting it from Jewish conspiracies, from genetic inferiority, from communism, etc. And if the violence is scary and harmful... well, that's a good thing, to them. Those are exactly the feelings they want to instill in their victims. (See also: the proposed deterrent function of putting children into cages.) So I don't see how this solves the problem, sorry to say. Sage Genesis fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Oct 22, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 16:42
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'biological determinism' tends to mean beliefs/behaviors being rooted in biology. For example, 'Orcs are, on average, stronger than Gnomes' is not biological determinism. 'Orcs are, on average, more violent and prone to brutality than gnomes' however is. You can say 'yea Ogres tend to be stronger than Halflings' but it's when you say 'and Halflings are dirty little crooks and Ogres are big savage brutes' that you enter into biological determinism. I'd argue even aside from the fascist poo poo around that stuff it's just poor game design. In the Fatal thread people mentioned how in 3E D&D 'Dwarf wizard' was treated as some insane baffling concept to make even by the devs. Even removing the baggage of 'the stupid dwarfs minds can't handle the arcane arts' that's just...boring? Like, gently caress off why should 'Dwarf wizard' be some crazy idea? You can say 'the majority of Dwarf cultures tend to distrust arcane magic and that gives players breadcrumbs to use in their backgrounds, but outright making it sound like a bad idea to make just limits player choices for no reason. As for violence, again I think the core issue most get at when they talk about it is scale rather than existence. I doubt anyone thinks all tabletop games should be Golden Sky Stories style pacifism focused games, but yea if a game is made to put someone in the mindset that the default problem solution should be 'alright but who do I kill' that's kinda a bad thing. Again, not even going into the fascism stuff, but just as pure game design that's a dumb mindset. That functionally tells players unless your character is mainly built around either A) killing things or B) healing the guys killing things you're just gonna be kinda useless. Why does it have to be that way though? You can experience danger and horror and all without a focus on violence, why do we need to pretend just because the iconic D&D had its roots as functionally a wargame that violent problem solving is just part and parcel with RPGs? Also emotional safety rules tend to just be communication and respect, really. Ask people if they have any triggers to be aware of, warn people if a story is going to involve some stuff they may not like, make it clear if someone's uncomfortable they can say 'woah nope this isn't cool, I the actual human playing this magic elf am having a Bad Time now' and things will stop, that stuff.
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Oct 22, 2018 17:57
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Dwarf wizards were seen as a crazy, groundbreaking thing because up until 3e dwarves' racial abilities made arcane spellcasting backfire completely on them.2e PHB posted:By nature, dwarves are nonmagical and never use magical spells (priest spells are allowed however). This gives a bonus to dwarves' saving throws against attacks from magical wands, staves, rods, and spells. This bonus is +1 for every 3 - ½ points of Constitution score. Thus, for example, if a dwarf has a Constitution score of 7 he gains +2 on saving throws. These bonuses are summarized on Table 9.
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Oct 22, 2018 18:02
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I don't think the article needs to treat its readers like they're idiots. The X card is not a new concept. Biological determinism is a discredited 19th century theory that is fairly well-defined and -understood, and a basic tenet of eugenics. The satanic panic is over and people don't need to argue that pushing for games where conflict resolution isn't predicated on murder first and foremost is going to result in the police coming to take away everyone's RPGs. None of that needs explaining in an article aimed at people who are clued-in enough to want to make their games less appealing to nazis. Meinberg posted:I'm not sure if this is the correct place to talk about this, but I recently put up a blog post about strategies that game designers and runners can employ to make their games less appealing to fascists. It's a solid introduction to the concept, though I would make a point about embracing queer narratives separately from the one about gender essentialism. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Oct 22, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 18:08
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andrew smash posted:DCC is hands down the best D&D-like game I've ever played, I was an instant and permanent convert. Unfortunately I've heard mutant crawl classics was a bit lackluster but I haven't laid hands on the book so I can't speak from my own experience. MCC sucks. It's lazy. It's boring. Most of the classes do little to interest you, and none of them have the "archetypes shining brightly at their niche" that DCC has. There's only two level 0 occupations, hunter and gatherer, but honestly if you're looking for neolithic "jobs" people in those times did more than just kill animals and pick berries. The modules are idiotic(there is a zero level adventure made to have up to 25 0-level pcs...why? Twelve to sixteen is the sweet spot), the mutations are boring. Instead of interesting, well thought out spells, there's a small blurb that says "more spells coming soon in further module releases"(paraphrased). Which is pretty irritating, it really feels like a first, incomplete draft that got rushed out and slathered in the excellent GG production values. There's a lot of winks and nods and references, which are fun to read, but it's not a very good game. Also, the creator doesn't react to criticism of his product very well, I was quite annoyed when people offered nice, polite, friendly feedback on the game he responded with an image of a girl in a wheelchair(the complainers) being shoved off of a cliff by someone(the creator). There is no need to be that God drat Rude and it's a lack of class that makes me cringe, considering this comment is from a man in his fifties with decades of RPG experience. At some point though, I feel like the scale of the game changed. ALG is wrong in that you don't need DCCRPG to play, all of the core concepts in DCC needed for MCC are actually explained in the corebook, which makes a man think that what they did was change it from "setting book" to "this is actually an entire product line now with its own merchandise, including shirts and dice and a module line." It's kind of sad because the Umerican Survival Guide also did post apoc, and it manages to do everything much better, with a ton of interesting classes and cool things. There's even fun little nods, like "sp" means "shots and powder" and "gp" meaning Gas something ticket, which allows you to trade it for gasoline, the most useful thing in that particular setting. Basically, I don't like MCC, and I don't even like the name. What the gently caress is a "mutant crawl"?
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Oct 22, 2018 19:43
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FWIW, I'll add to the "MCC Sucks" chorus. I simply did not expect it to be simultaneously bland while also nonsensical, nor for it to be gigantic while also incomplete. DCC is fantastic, but MCC just doesn't work the same way (although it gives a half-hearted try). The classes/races are all really stupid and boring. Pure-strain humans are awful across the board, mostly being really bad versions of DCC classes. And somehow talking plants and beast-people are dull and uninspiring. I mean, not even mutations are all that well-handled, and that's core to the game itself. We all know how spells work in DCC, so MCC took that and ran with it. For the Activated mutations, that is ... fine if also a bit discordant. (The beauty of mutations IMO has always been in the weird superhero-like variety, not in how you can accidentally melt your face off if you botch.) For Constant mutations, you still roll - once when you get it, but you also have the option of re-rolling every level. Importantly, you can still Glowburn (aka Spellburn) and use Luck to increase your rolls. Which leads to a front-loaded version of the old "spellburn yourself into oblivion at the boss fight" problem in DCC, and makes managing downtime between adventures super weird.
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Oct 22, 2018 21:01
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Sage Genesis posted:Violence. Yeah, you called it, you're gonna get push back. Here it is. I think you're conflating real world violence with sanitized, distant, entertainment fake-violence. D&D combat is no more visceral or traumatic than one chess piece taking another. The same goes for horror, by the way. People get thrills from watching horror movies precisely because it gives them the perceived positive, a thrill, without having to experience any actual danger. People can watch Halloween or John Wick without being harmed or traumatized. While fascist regimes do employ violence to crush dissent, I think you've focused too much on their method rather than their goal. Pretend-violence in tabletop games is not inherently attractive to fascists, I think, only the ideologies which that pretend-violence might (fictionally) serve. I do think that people sometimes underestimate the degree to which the media consumes their thinking. Not necessarily in a "violent games make people violent" direct correlary, but to the degree that unexamined notions about violence may impact the way that people view violence in the real world. I believe strongly that the sanitized violence of D&D and similar games, especially where the narrative and mechanics present violence as an inherent good, is a not great, especially in aggregate. In D&D, the solution to almost all problems is to make that problem dead, which I think is a structure that is worthy of further examination, and one which I believe supports an heroic view of violence. And the point I was trying to make is that violence should be impactful to the person doing the violence, not necessarily to the person receiving the violence. I will definitely be exploring the topic of violence in further depth in a future blog, I think it's one of the more critical understandings that designers need to embrace. The choices that a game makes about violence is inherent to that game's world view. sexpig by night posted:As for violence, again I think the core issue most get at when they talk about it is scale rather than existence. I doubt anyone thinks all tabletop games should be Golden Sky Stories style pacifism focused games, but yea if a game is made to put someone in the mindset that the default problem solution should be 'alright but who do I kill' that's kinda a bad thing. Again, not even going into the fascism stuff, but just as pure game design that's a dumb mindset. That functionally tells players unless your character is mainly built around either A) killing things or B) healing the guys killing things you're just gonna be kinda useless. Why does it have to be that way though? You can experience danger and horror and all without a focus on violence, why do we need to pretend just because the iconic D&D had its roots as functionally a wargame that violent problem solving is just part and parcel with RPGs? Not every game needs to be Golden Sky Stories, I agree with that absolutely. I do wish that more games took the Unknown Armies approach to violence over the D&D approach. Lemon-Lime posted:It's a solid introduction to the concept, though I would make a point about embracing queer narratives separately from the one about gender essentialism. That is a good point, I will probably expand those out into separate posts that go into further detail about how to avoid gender essentialism in design and how to explicitly incorporate queer narratives and queer themes.
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Oct 22, 2018 21:49
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The thing is that UA doesn’t necessarily cop to its view of violence; the first page of the combat rules does, but little of the supporting material supports it. To actually solve most problems you end up having to either use violence or do magic, both of which UA says are ultimately terrible ideas. And as for “don’t say that orcs are brutes” that’s a bad case of a reinforcing metaphor. If there was a second sentient species that was just better at violence than humans then it would be more violent because it works. (Edit) The whole idea that such a species can be a metaphor for certain subsections of people is itself embracing a decent chunk of the racist viewpoint. Lydia Bugg posted:Yet it's the kind of parable that turns up over and over again in science fiction and fantasy stories that are reportedly trying to convey a message of tolerance. "Look, we get that you're having trouble seeing minorities as humans, so perhaps it would help if you imagined them as something that is A) objectively not human and B) inherently dangerous." hyphz fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 23:00
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That’s because the gameplay of UA is literally about playing people engaging in terrible ideas, that’s the entire thrust of the game. Not going to touch that second point with a ten foot pole but c’mon.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:07
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yea UA lets you solve everything with violence BECAUSE it's dumb
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Oct 22, 2018 23:41
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I'll embrace non-violent TRPGs the day someone makes a TRPG where non-violence is as mechanically interesting as violence is in my high-crunch game of choice. Burning Wheel's probably close, honestly, I need to give that a more serious read-over or find someone to actually run it for me.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:13
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Before you literally said Burning Wheel I was about to slide in with Burning Wheel. The main problem with BW is that chargen is extremely Not Fun.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'll embrace non-violent TRPGs the day someone makes a TRPG where non-violence is as mechanically interesting as violence is in my high-crunch game of choice. Crunch is definitely harder to pull off outside of combat. In combat related scenarios, there's generally an accepted level of narrative control given over to the mechanics of the game. The dice determine whether or not a character gets hit and to what intensity. When it comes to modeling more social dynamics, players aren't usually as ready to give up that much control to the system; if the systems says that a character is intimidated, the player still gets to determine what exactly being intimidated means. It would be possible to create a more crunch-heavy non-violent system, but it'd take a lot of work on the hands of the designers and a lot of trust from the players and game runners. It also seems that low-crunch is the watchword for indie designers these days, and I can definitely see how it makes the design process easier. I'm definitely interested in looking at ways of systemizing non-violent actions on a level of greater granularity, but all of those ideas are floating in my head still. Edit: It doesn't help that elements of play that receive a lot of mechanical focus are going to be ones that have high narrative impact. It's easy to see how violence has a high narrative impact. It's harder to see how, for example, a high crunch farming system would have that same sort of impact. And then there's the matter of spectacle, which further incentivizes putting systems design into potentially super flashy combat rather than other kinds of activities which are rarely presented in media as being as impressive with their imagery. Magic comes close, but typically only combat magic, though Ars Magica might take a stand for a high-crunch game that doesn't rely on violence as its only means of conflict resolution. Meinberg fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 02:26
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I feel like one of the reasons violence is so acceptably game-able, ie abstract-able in an acceptable way is it’s distance from our general day to day existence. We gamify and abstract, and we do so in a way that satisfies us because the actual experience is most often one that is alien to us in our day to day lives. Even those of us who engage in martial arts are not in that life or death, do or die sort of situation that is part and parcel of dramatic story telling in our culture. On the other hand, important things like argument, persuasion, seduction, craft, or the practice of skills,they are more part of the daily lives of people, and even where they are not, they are not so alien to the day to day of even the most sheltered person. These things are less satisfying to abstract because we have a first hand experience of the actual thing, in comparison, the abstraction feels lacking in a way it does not with violence. This is just a dumb theory of mine, but I feel similarly about video games. We gamify violence as in depth as we can manage, but the trend as regards to social and physical, non violent action is to just simplify it as much as possible, in order to frame and supplement the violence, but also to get it out of the way so we can get back to fighting. Mind, in games, tabletop and otherwise, violence and non violence is still very framed as part of a power fantasy, violence just get a ton of attention paid as regards mechanics, while you just pick one of three dialog options, all of which make you come across as a cool customer. None of this even gets at the fact that violence is very visual, we know what it looks like, or at least we think we do. It is one thing as well, where non combat activity gets treated like one thing, it is very much not. To gamify non violent action at a level that is comparable to violent action, we find ourselves having to split nonviolent action into its components parts, it isn’t one thing, it’s a million things, and they all work differently, and not all of them are so visually stimulating. Please excuse my rambling. This is not an attempt to make a grogish statement about roll playing and role playing. I don’t think only combat matters, and would like to find enjoyable game mechanics for non combat activities, I just wanted to express my ideas as to why I think it is much harder to do. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 03:09
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Reene posted:Before you literally said Burning Wheel I was about to slide in with Burning Wheel. Whaaaaaaaaaaat??? Obviously we have very different tastes in chargen. I could go and spend an hour creating BW characters for fun any day. Compare that to spending an hour looking through lists of feats and gear for a D&D-like game and it's no contest. I'll slog through the latter to play 4e because 4e is fun to play, but it will only ever be a slog for me. Also compare to something like FATE, which has a bit of a problem of being too open and too much of a blank slate for my tastes. If I have a character concept in mind, I can make it in FATE, but usually I just have this vague amorphous thought about something I'd like to explore in the game and Burning Wheel's chargen does a great job at showing me the connections that a character of that type must have with the world, which feeds back into having cool ideas to use to go deeper into the chargen process. I only wish I could have taken more of what makes BW chargen fun for me when I made Strike!, but it clashes with the actual focus of the design. Chargen in Burning Wheel puts you into the setting, while Strike is setting-agnostic. When I make a game with a specific setting, I only hope my chargen will be as good at evoking that setting as BW's is at evoking the late European medieval period.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:14
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I’ve been thinking about making a thread about non-combat systems in games, it’s an interesting part of rpg design that doesn’t get much attention.Reene posted:Before you literally said Burning Wheel I was about to slide in with Burning Wheel. http://charred.herokuapp.com/#/ There’s an online character maker that’s absolutely essential, and kind of fun to gently caress around with Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 23, 2018 03:15
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Personal preference here, but the more character gen is tied to the setting, the better it is by my reckoning. This means that by default, the wider a scope a game looks to cover, the less interesting it will be be to make a character for me. GURPS is so wide and generic that everything has to come from nothing, D&D on the other hand has some basic setting in place, so character creation is slightly more to my taste, but it fails in actually using that connection in any meaningful way, Traveller on the other hand, or Artesia, those games make me want to build characters, even if I don’t necessarily even want to play the game because of it’s rules.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:21
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Wrestlepig posted:I’ve been thinking about making a thread about non-combat systems in games, it’s an interesting part of rpg design that doesn’t get much attention. Yeah gonna second that some people love making characters in BW. I’m not that into generally making characters, but I’ll flip through those lifepaths for hours. I didn’t know about that online character creator and I might stay up way too late loving with it cause that poo poo is basically my nerd cocaine.
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Oct 23, 2018 04:24
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Going through BW life paths and stuff is a lot of fun as a solitary activity, but trying to get a group of people to roll up some characters at the start of a session just means no session. BW in general suffers from being quite complicated and not that intuitive. I would love a BW Express that took lessons from Apocalypse World.
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Oct 23, 2018 07:40
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Relatedly, part of the reason Mouse Guard was a successful system (IMO) is because you all go through chargen together, going down lists of questions. BW just kind of throws you into it. There's a lot to take in and yeah, I don't really enjoy doing that sort of thing, much less herding a few friends into it.
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Oct 23, 2018 08:45
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