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Zurui posted:How Can This Be from the master of subtlety that brought us Monte Cook's World Of Darkness ft. The Masquerade Is Over, Just Go Kill Monsters Now. ~who can it be now~ 🎶
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Feb 1, 2019 15:17
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Kurieg posted:It did sort of deliver on the oWoD's oft renegged promise of "FULL CROSSOVER NOW", the problem is that it did this by turning all the splats into classes and then making two of the classes suck out loud due to hilariously bad upkeep requirements.
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Feb 1, 2019 15:42
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Halloween Jack posted:If I needed an experienced designer to balance classes in a new edition, I'd probably fall down the stairs and break my neck in the rush to hire Monte Cook. My favorite part of his balancing of mages means that casting disintegrate is relatively easy but casting control weather runs a serious risk of killing or incapacitating you despite the fact that they're relatively same level spells.
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Feb 1, 2019 15:54
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My favorite part of MCWoD was that casting magic was a skill roll. You could cast magic to increase your bonus to a skill, to increase your stat directly, or to increase your d20 rolls. You could make these spells permanent, so every mage, given a few days, could massively buff their spellcasting skill over what they were "supposed" to have. Also demons had a natural refresh rate on their power pool (called anima) of like 1 per day, base (assuming you made the correct choice at chargen and didnt pick a bane, since that leaves you with no natural refresh). Unless you took the ability to give people any of the following bonuses: +4 to one ability score, +10 on checks with one skill, +10 hit points or darkvision. It costs the demon only 5 anima and it gives the target -2 wisdom, except they can take +4 wisdom. This gives you one point of anima per day while they're alive and nothing stops you from doing this to literally everyone you meet.
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Feb 1, 2019 16:08
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Nuns with Guns posted:GM intrusons also happen every time a player rolls a 1 on a d20. This is a freebie intrusion, too, that the player doesn't get XP for. PCs in Cipher games have a Type (class), Descriptor (basically a profession/trait bonus), and a Focus (basically the D&D 4e themes). Each focus has suggestions for what kind of GM intrusons can happen. So like, if your focus is about using a bow, one of the suggested intrusions is "you shoot another character." Except it doesn't work like that because each of those things has a heap of mechanical information associated with it, all of which you'll need to note down and keep track of, so character generation actually isn't that much faster than, say, 5E D&D. There's less fiddly choices than in D&D, but there's still a stack of little bits of mechanical information you have to keep track of bound up in each Verb, Noun and Adjective; you can't just fall back on "I'm an Adjective Noun who Verbs" and expect to be able to work out your character's capabilities from first principles unless you've actually memorised the book.
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Feb 1, 2019 17:49
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Kurieg posted:It did sort of deliver on the oWoD's oft renegged promise of "FULL CROSSOVER NOW", the problem is that it did this by turning all the splats into classes and then making two of the classes suck out loud due to hilariously bad upkeep requirements. Did high-level vampires have to kill dozens of people to heal all their hit point damage?
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Feb 1, 2019 17:58
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The irony being that "Adjective Noun who Verbs" works in *world games where you can be like "Since I'm 'verb' can I roll my Y to X?" Which, you know, is antithetical to what Alexander seems to want. Lord_Hambrose posted:Did high-level vampires have to kill dozens of people to heal all their hit point damage? They have 1d8+con hit dice per level (and start at level 4, like everyone else) and can spend a blood point to heal... 10 damage. If they invest too much into blood potency they can't feed from humans anymore and eventually can only feed from other supernaturals, then other vampires, then other vampries who can themselves only feed from other supernaturals. one blood point is equal to 2 points of constitution damage, so a high level vampire with even a mediocre amount of constitution investment needs to kill 3 people to heal to full from low health. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 18:00
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Kurieg posted:The irony being that "Adjective Noun who Verbs" works in *world games where you can be like "Since I'm 'verb' can I roll my Y to X?" I really despise the hijacking of the whole simulation/verisimilitude idea by the engineering end of gaming who wants a set of game rules that act more or less like rules of physics and "realism" in the sense of pretending your system is very accurate to real life. In practice it's either a huge lie and your system still has honking great holes or you end up with a system more suited to be the underlying maths of a videogame physics engine than something you can adjudicate by hand at a tabletop session without massively slowing down the flow of play. For the purpose of that sort of game, I'm much more about simulation/verisimilitude in the sense of "Given the IC premises and axioms of the gameworld we've agreed to play in, and the facts as they sit in this situation, is this proposed task going to be easy or difficult?" and then resolving based on that. High-crunch simulationism has got its place (say, if we're talking about something like Ars Magica, where the process of learning and mastering and using magic is meant to be quite an intellectually intensive and academic process so having a complex system handling it helps get that feel across), but it isn't the only flavour of what people call "simulationism" out there and the tarring of that corner of the Forge threefold (or the rec.games.frp.advocacy threefold that preceded it) with the high-crunch brush is infuriating to me.
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Feb 1, 2019 18:10
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So how does combat feeding work, can vamps kill better just be latching on then any normal fighting?
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Feb 1, 2019 18:18
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Did high-level vampires have to kill dozens of people to heal all their hit point damage? Vampires were the only non humans with a decent refresh. Werewolves got a point for the first time they see the moon each night an an extra during their phase of the moon, so like 1/4 of the time, and could eat a freshly killed human heart for another point, so they could barely ever get points. A demon could either have a bane that hurt it or a requirement to eat a specific thing every day, and if they picked the eating thing they got one point a day, and they could eat one soul after a combat for a point, assuming they roll a nat 20, (eating a soul requires 10 minutes, souls hang around for 10 minutes), but the boon thing I mentioned above means even if you just boost party members you have 4-5 per day. Vampires, on the other hand, can drink one point of vitae per 2 points of constitution drain, and so the average person can supply 5 vitae. Of course, fixing constitution is extremely easy for a mage so any party with a mage has infinite blood. Did I mention that mages can cast a spell to recover the resources they use to cast spells? Because they can. Also cows can survive complete blood loss. I did a Fatal and Friends of MCWoD that I gave up on because mages are broken as gently caress in that game.
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Feb 1, 2019 18:19
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Rules-as-physics always results in at least a couple problems, one of them major. First, total thematic letdown: you can't make a superhero game where Batman and Superman are on the same footing, for example, if you're allergic to narrative or at least highly abstracted mechanics. Second, you are going to wind up with those weird holes where a normal person can throw a baseball 10 miles or whatever.
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Feb 1, 2019 18:21
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I'm reminded of why TVtropes had its initial appeal; it presents a view of media that doesn't purely revolve around 'who would win' scenarios and technicalities but in which actual thematic devices, archetypes and story structures are important. Such a goddamn break from nerds who saw literally everything as a wargame and desperately crammed square pegs into round holes on a daily basis.
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Feb 1, 2019 18:43
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm reminded of why TVtropes had its initial appeal; it presents a view of media that doesn't purely revolve around 'who would win' scenarios and technicalities but in which actual thematic devices, archetypes and story structures are important. Such a goddamn break from nerds who saw literally everything as a wargame and desperately crammed square pegs into round holes on a daily basis. Except now they're back doing that, except with Tropes this time.
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Feb 1, 2019 19:09
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Halloween Jack posted:Rules-as-physics always results in at least a couple problems, one of them major. First, total thematic letdown: you can't make a superhero game where Batman and Superman are on the same footing, for example, if you're allergic to narrative or at least highly abstracted mechanics. Second, you are going to wind up with those weird holes where a normal person can throw a baseball 10 miles or whatever. Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm reminded of why TVtropes had its initial appeal; it presents a view of media that doesn't purely revolve around 'who would win' scenarios and technicalities but in which actual thematic devices, archetypes and story structures are important. Such a goddamn break from nerds who saw literally everything as a wargame and desperately crammed square pegs into round holes on a daily basis.
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Feb 1, 2019 19:48
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Warthur posted:So the whole "playing X game gives you brain damage thing" was obnoxious and wrong when Ron Edwards said it, and it would be just as obnoxious and wrong to say it about TVTropes Nah, TVTropes and D&D both give you brain damage. We've seen it first hand. The whole Heisenberg infinite bear space bullshit was obviously the product of a mind infected by D&D. Also, I had a dumb sarcastic post typed up about the whole scansion thing but forgot to hit post this morning and now it's too late. So you all can thank whatever powers you worship that providence has spared you that particular shitpost.
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Feb 1, 2019 20:45
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Warthur posted:So the whole "playing X game gives you brain damage thing" was obnoxious and wrong when Ron Edwards said it, and it would be just as obnoxious and wrong to say it about TVTropes, but god drat there are a lot of people out there who have entirely trained themselves to discuss media solely in terms of TVTropes ideas, to the point where the concept of stuff which doesn't lean heavily on tropes seems alien to them and they seem to think that the creative process entails picking a bunch of tropes and tacking a skin on them (which I guess is true if you're going for a mass-appeal formula blockbuster but is less true if you're dealing with eg. highly experimental literature or whatever). Like you implied, in both cases it's a matter of a limited exposure (conscious and subconscious) to a flawed system of meta analysis. This actually ties back into that discussion from last week about D&D as the starter RPG. I don't agree with the necessity of it but I do agree the reality of it, and it's important to consider what sort of impressions D&D leaves players and DMs with. Not just when approaching mechanics or rules, but in attitudes towards fictional settings, the NPCs that inhabit it, and how the player characters interact with both. People joke about players being prone to violence and explosions, but that is the square peg D&D hands every PC to plug holes with after all. Jimbozig posted:Nah, TVTropes and D&D both give you brain damage. We've seen it first hand. The whole Heisenberg infinite bear space bullshit was obviously the product of a mind infected by D&D. It's really cool how we keep earnestly perpetuating Ron Edwards' hot take about how X RPG leaves you with permanent mental trauma directly equivocal to childhood sexual abuse. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 20:54
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Jimbozig posted:Nah, TVTropes and D&D both give you brain damage. We've seen it first hand. The whole Heisenberg infinite bear space bullshit was obviously the product of a mind infected by D&D. As for the "infinite bear" stuff, last time I checked on Trollman's forum it's literally impossible to read. They've gone completely down the rabbit hole of creating new Capitalized Jargon, based on other jargon, based on jargon Trollman made up, so as to be completely inaccessible to anybody who isn't already part of their weird cult.
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Feb 1, 2019 20:59
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's really cool how we keep earnestly perpetuating Ron Edwards' hot take about how X RPG leaves you with permanent mental trauma directly equivocal to childhood sexual abuse. I wouldn't call it earnest. It is a classic hot take from the days before the internet was full of nonstop hot takes and the fact that it makes grogs so mad is why it's funny. I also don't remember anything about CSA being involved. If Ron compared it to CSA, that's really hosed up.
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Feb 1, 2019 21:51
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's really cool how we keep earnestly perpetuating Ron Edwards' hot take about how X RPG leaves you with permanent mental trauma directly equivocal to childhood sexual abuse. I would like to know more about this. I don't know who Ron is or what he 's on about.
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Feb 1, 2019 21:51
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posted here http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18707.0Ron Edwards posted:It is not challenging the principles of awareness, critique, and mutual appreciation of functional play to point out other phenomena, dysfunctional ones. I am saying there is one "way" in particular for which I have not been able to identify a single fun quality even for its staunchest advocates, based on their very words, and now, at this late date, I have concluded that it is demonstrably damaging. It is, to use my jargon terms, Broken Narrativism, with all the features of Prima Donna and Typhoid Mary described in my essay, but wrapped up in a subcultural package and reinforcing procedures that impair normal human mental function as consistently as, for instance, inappropriate sexual experiences prior to a certain age. seems more of an artifact of the pre-woke era of discussion about sexual assault than anything else but it is a weird comparison to make, regardless.
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Feb 1, 2019 22:00
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Jimbozig posted:I wouldn't call it earnest. It is a classic hot take from the days before the internet was full of nonstop hot takes and the fact that it makes grogs so mad is why it's funny. I also don't remember anything about CSA being involved. If Ron compared it to CSA, that's really hosed up. Patreons are a lot like Community-Supported Agriculture
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Feb 1, 2019 22:01
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As I recall, he didn't equate it to childhood sexual abuse, but he definitely compared it being an amputee and likened many narrative games (including his own Sorcerer) as "prosthetics" designed to help people raised on a certain D&D playstyle to function as they should. Here we go: Vincent Baker posted:I was searching through the past of the Forge and I came across this that I wrote back in May of last year: Ron Edwards posted:My response, which is actually a diagnosis of the existing activity: I get the point that he's trying to make, but yikes. And the general uproar led him to dig himself deeper and deeper and insist that what he said was not offensive and if you see an attack on vulnerable people here those are your dirty thoughts and shame on you you are disgusting. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 22:02
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Finster Dexter posted:I would like to know more about this. I don't know who Ron is or what he 's on about. Ok, it wasn't D&D, it was Vampire, and he talked about it here https://archive.org/details/TheoryFromTheCloset/tftc_show008.mp3 . Basically, the claim was that the first edition Vampire told everyone they could make a story of literary artistic quality by role-playing, and also became Goth gear for a whole so that everyone's Gothy friends would be going on about the awesome stories they were making - except that Vampire's mechanics don't really do that, so they got massive confusion and social disconnection at the table. And this constituted "brain damage" because it happened during their teens and behavior cannot be proved non physiological or something. Heck, I didn't even know he was still writing. Spione actually came out, and he even did a game he described himself as a Fantasy Heartbreaker. hyphz fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 22:43
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Halloween Jack posted:As I recall, he didn't equate it to childhood sexual abuse, but he definitely compared it being an amputee and likened many narrative games (including his own Sorcerer) as "prosthetics" designed to help people raised on a certain D&D playstyle to function as they should. It's right here http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18707.0 And yeah the root of the "brain damage" take was the way the Storyteller games misrepresent themselves as narrative games, not the impact of D&D on one's psyche. e - pulled the quote out: quote:Now for the discussion of brain damage. I'll begin with a closer analogy. Consider that there's a reason I and most other people call an adult having sex with a, say, twelve-year-old, to be abusive. Never mind if it's, technically speaking, consensual. It's still abuse. Why? Because the younger person's mind is currently developing - these experiences are going to be formative in ways that experiences ten years later will not be. I'm not sure if you are familiar with the characteristic behaviors of someone with this history, but I am very familiar with them - and they are not constructive or happiness-oriented behaviors at all. The person's mind has been damaged while it was forming, and it takes a hell of a lot of re-orientation even for functional repairs (which is not the same as undoing the damage). Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Feb 2, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 22:46
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Impermanent posted:seems more of an artifact of the pre-woke era of discussion about sexual assault than anything else but it is a weird comparison to make, regardless. The end of one of those threads was him saying people he respects enough to make him reconsider his choice of words WTF'd at him, and after careful thought he decided, no, he was right after all. gently caress him.
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Feb 2, 2019 01:49
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"Critical Role is to Normal D&D as Pornography is to Normal Sex." -RPGPundit, Year of Our Lord 2019
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Feb 2, 2019 03:19
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Dawgstar posted:"Critical Role is to Normal D&D as Pornography is to Normal Sex." Yes, Critical Role is a rather profitable venture.
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Feb 2, 2019 03:35
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That's not a completely terrible analogy and I hate that because RPGPundit. On the other hand RPGPundit means it as a damning denunciation instead of simply descriptive, which is ridiculous,
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Feb 2, 2019 03:37
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Impermanent posted:seems more of an artifact of the pre-woke era of discussion about sexual assault than anything else but it is a weird comparison to make, regardless. I think we can easily replace the thing that we mean with the expression "READ ANOTHER BOOK"
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Feb 2, 2019 03:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think we can easily replace the thing that we mean with the expression "READ ANOTHER BOOK"  Same problem, different context.
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Feb 2, 2019 03:42
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Comrade Gorbash posted:That's not a completely terrible analogy and I hate that because RPGPundit. I've seen sentiments to that effect around the internet for a solid two years now, so it's thankfully not an original thought.
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Feb 2, 2019 04:15
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Dawgstar posted:"Critical Role is to Normal D&D as Pornography is to Normal Sex." That's not a hot take. Come on. It's an obvious observation and reasonable comparison. We've got a classic nuclear take on this page comparing RPGs to both brain damage and childhood sexual assault trauma, and you post this luke-warm piss? Go back to the grog mines.
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Feb 2, 2019 04:41
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Nuns with Guns posted:And yeah the root of the "brain damage" take was the way the Storyteller games misrepresent themselves as narrative games, not the impact of D&D on one's psyche. Ron Edwards posted:Now that I've compared people who don't roleplay right to the disabled, let's compare games I don't like to pedophilia
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Feb 2, 2019 04:44
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Jimbozig posted:That's not a hot take. Come on. It's an obvious observation and reasonable comparison. We've got a classic nuclear take on this page comparing RPGs to both brain damage and childhood sexual assault trauma, and you post this luke-warm piss? Go back to the grog mines. Oh, you mistook me. This is not dinner time and thus I was not trying to serve a spicy meatball. No, I was bringing to the light that the Pundit had what might have been an interesting topic for discussion that instead he boils down to 'they aren't playing the way I like!' With added snit fit of him being upset that "interlopers" are influencing the hobby far more than he ever has or will.
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Feb 2, 2019 04:50
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Dawgstar posted:Oh, you mistook me. This is not dinner time and thus I was not trying to serve a spicy meatball. No, I was bringing to the light that the Pundit had what might have been an interesting topic for discussion that instead he boils down to 'they aren't playing the way I like!' With added snit fit of him being upset that "interlopers" are influencing the hobby far more than he ever has or will. It's sort of hilarious that he can trip over the pretty basic observation that Actual Play groups don't really sound like any table anyone who has played a tabletop RPG (and one that, to my knowledge, most Actual Play groups are very up front about "making good radio" and "having a fun gaming session" being two very different experiences), and the takeaway is somehow "And thus Actual Play podcasts are bad for the hobby."
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Feb 2, 2019 05:16
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Halloween Jack posted:I knew he had done that "System Does Matter" rant on Vampire, but didn't put the pieces together. Thing is, I think the two are related--he's also written about how D&D was originally a very wide-open and varied thing from group to group, based on people's personal experiences and what materials they had access to, but unfortunately when the playstyle became more standardized, it was a pretty lovely adversarial and punitive one. And Vampire and its coattail-riders mostly continued that. There is a distinct through-line between D&D and Vampire, even as much as Vampire (and White Wolf as a whole) liked to pretend there wasn't. Edwards wasn't wrong that for all it's claims to artistry and story telling, Vampire was a game nominally about navigating the shadowy politicking of a hidden society of immortals that still felt it needed exacting combat rules and pages overflowing with spells, alternate class features, gear, and a character progression that generally mirrored the expectations of a successful D&D adventurer.
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Feb 2, 2019 05:46
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Pundit's hate has convinced me to finally check out Critical Role.
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Feb 2, 2019 05:56
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Lumbermouth posted:I've seen sentiments to that effect around the internet for a solid two years now, so it's thankfully not an original thought. Pundowski's never had an original thought in his life.
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Feb 2, 2019 06:04
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Dawgstar posted:"Critical Role is to Normal D&D as Pornography is to Normal Sex." Imagine unironically using the term “normal sex” in TYOOL 2019. 
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Feb 2, 2019 10:10
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Okay, I was probably very drunk when making that post (and to be fair, I also am when making this one. I'm Australian) but entirely fair on TVtropes just being a different flavour of brain damage. Albeit a more fun one. Much like alcohol. I think I may possibly have something resembling a point in that a narrative-based view was a huge loving breath of fresh air compared to the long and storied history of people who treat games as physics engines, and frequently mistake overcomplication for 'realism'.
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Feb 2, 2019 10:33
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