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What sort of utterly credulous rubes was Mark hanging out with in the early 1990s, such that he thought that an appreciable number of people actually thought vampires might be real? EDIT: Oh, wait: V:tM superfans. That'd be it.
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Feb 21, 2019 15:12
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hangedman1984 posted:Wait, who seriously thought that vampires were actually real? people in the...1700s and... ...people in the 1700s. e: also he's acting like there's no demons in Vampire
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Feb 21, 2019 15:12
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hangedman1984 posted:Wait, who seriously thought that vampires were actually real? Vampire players in their early 20s during the 2000's were... A bit odd. Like, back at my home country we managed to gather lots of roleplayers under a forum I created and formed a community. We decided to set up a weekend to get together from different cities, know each other and play for 48h straight. One dude from my city asked around and found the Prince of the city the meet up was taking place at. He asked for his permission to enter the territory and got denied, so he didn't go. 
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Feb 21, 2019 15:14
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Pope Guilty posted:I absolutely knew people around 1999-2002 who believed in basically every kind of supernatural weirdness. I had weird friends.
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Feb 21, 2019 15:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:Polygon now has an article out on D&D's response to the current moment: https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/20/18232181/dungeons-dragons-zak-smith-sabbath-abuse-accusations-players-handbook This article is Not Great. It treats Zak with approximately equal weight as his accusers, spends all its time on the folks denouncing Zak rather than anyone else...like, literally more time is spent on the OneBookShelf response than on Mandy, who doesn't even get named or talked about in the words she specifically asked people to share. e: which they don't link, but they do link Zak's response.
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Feb 21, 2019 15:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:Polygon now has an article out on D&D's response to the current moment: https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/20/18232181/dungeons-dragons-zak-smith-sabbath-abuse-accusations-players-handbook Feels a bit generous to say that Ken Hite was "among the first" to speak up about it Oh, and Vincent Baker made a tweet thread about Zak constantly pressuring him to publicly decry PbtA fans and support Zak until Vincent finally left G+ over it https://twitter.com/lumpleygames/status/1098230729102815232
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Feb 21, 2019 15:17
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Kurieg posted:or sent the e-mails they received in confidence on to Zak so Zak could go on to harass these people more (the incredibly dumb and stupid thing that mike mearls did). Kai Tave posted:Everybody always says that Pundit started out as someone who was just performing some self-aware shtick and gradually fell down the rabbit hole but there's no evidence that he was ever anything other than what he appears to be, a dumb delusional rear end in a top hat who just happened to plant his flag on the hill of being mad about elfgames. I was a member of TheRPGSite before nisarg took over, there. (And boy is there some history!) Basically, it was an extremely quiet thing that probably would have died before long, but nisarg decided to point his followers to it via xanga (lol) after he got banned from rpgnet. So all of a sudden it was overrun by horrible grogs. The site's owner and him got into a bunch of fights, and then the owner decided to quit - and basically said, "Here, you think you can do a better job? You take it." And so we have the cesspit it is today. He was much less of a "here are my awful political opinions" dude back then and more angry about RPGs, but he was awful from the beginning, and I can't honestly say he's any different now than he was back then. Except maybe more extreme. FactsAreUseless posted:Has 7th Sea gotten a Fantasy Flight remake like L5R? I remember Winston raving about it years ago but I've never had the chance to play it.
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Feb 21, 2019 15:24
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It also links to his web series, doesn't mention Mearls, and just calls him "controversial" instead of a radioactive sack of used condoms. E: I think Mearls forwarding the emails was confirmed when Zak (posing as Mandy) posted Ettin's personal info on Tumblr along with a throwaway "I'm not doxxing because this is public, uh, somewhere." moths fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 15:25
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moths posted:E: I think Mearls forwarding the emails was confirmed when Zak (posing as Mandy) posted Ettin's personal info on Tumblr along with a throwaway "I'm not doxxing because this is public, uh, somewhere."
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Feb 21, 2019 15:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:Editing this post because everyone deserves a good MR*H laugh in these dark times I really wish MR*H would realize that while he did do the incredibly daring thing of acknowledging that LGBT people exist was in fact transgressive and progressive back in 1990's. He currently doesn't have nearly the amount of clout that he currently has. Also: Given what happened in Chechnya after his last attempt to speak truth to power. Maybe he should rethink his current plan.
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Feb 21, 2019 15:57
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dwarf74 posted:As everyone else has said by now, it is pretty bad. Some people have apparently run it and had fun with it, but between giving away the entire game line to everyone who might be interested, and releasing a game with really janky and sometimes impenetrable mechanics, it is dying. I backed it and have zero interest in trying to run it, ever. 7th Sea 1e was the first RPG I ever played and I was excited to back the kickstarter. It's had some pretty art here and there, but the system is baffling and the setting changes did not inspire me to run it. At least I got every pdf of 1st edition in the kickstarter.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:05
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Pope Guilty posted:I absolutely knew people around 1999-2002 who believed in basically every kind of supernatural weirdness. I had weird friends. If you go back a few years from there to the early-mid 90’s there absolutely was a swell of interest in the paranormal. It was a time when Coast to Coast AM was at its peak, when New Age sensibilities thrived in popular culture. Psychic hotlines, spiritualism, and even Scientology were regularly advertised on cable. One of the reasons the X-Files got so huge was that it tapped into that particular zeitgeist at the perfect time. I don’t really remember vampires being a particularly dominating belief but hey, a lot of people were believing a lot of weird poo poo.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:16
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Octavo posted:7th Sea 1e was the first RPG I ever played and I was excited to back the kickstarter. It's had some pretty art here and there, but the system is baffling and the setting changes did not inspire me to run it. At least I got every pdf of 1st edition in the kickstarter. Oh yeah that was one of the weirdest parts. It's not really a recognizable iteration of the 1e system. (Which was really flawed, but still.) The resolution system was flipped from something fairly traditional to a weird narrative mix that is strangely crunchy in parts and foggy and unfinished in others. It is also really demanding on the GM, which I just don't have time for anymore.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:21
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Octavo posted:7th Sea 1e was the first RPG I ever played and I was excited to back the kickstarter. It's had some pretty art here and there, but the system is baffling and the setting changes did not inspire me to run it. At least I got every pdf of 1st edition in the kickstarter. That's me too. I grew up with 7th Sea 1e and was incredibly excited for the kickstarter. The game's setting was always the best part of 1e but 2e made it just feel unexciting and didn't replace the mechanics with anything better. My breaking point was a kickstarter update (the text of which made it to print) which scolded players for wanting maps in the city-specific supplements, because that would just strip imagination away from the game and google has maps for free anyway. e: ^^^ "strangely crunchy in parts" is the perfect way to describe that system. It talks the talk of a narrative system that lets you do whatever you want in a freeform manner...and then ties it to a strict resource economy that puts limits on the GM's ability to add and remove elements from the scene. wizzardstaff fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 16:22
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Nuns with Guns posted:Editing this post because everyone deserves a good MR*H laugh in these dark times One of the ironies here is that the peak WW era actually had prompted some loonies running around claiming that VtM ripped off "real world vampirism". They'd show up here and there on usenet, and claimed that the whole political structure was real or only slightly modified. IIRC there was also some crime tragedy vaguely similar to the ones that prompted the DnD backlash as well, with some kid taking things too seriously. It didn't get as much play, because the hysteria over RPGs was past by then, but the notion that WW games actually reduced the number of people believing in vampires is profoundly silly. Then again, all of M*RH's antics lately seem to be a desperate attempt to claim relevance and not understanding why his still-rooted-in-the-90s politics aren't setting the world on fire.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:22
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dwarf74 posted:Oh yeah that was one of the weirdest parts. It's not really a recognizable iteration of the 1e system. (Which was really flawed, but still.) The resolution system was flipped from something fairly traditional to a weird narrative mix that is strangely crunchy in parts and foggy and unfinished in others. It is also really demanding on the GM, which I just don't have time for anymore. It sucks because I promised to run it for members of our old 1e group and had to just back out and say, "sorry, I couldn't install it in my brain." Hmm, I wonder if there are any well known house rules or patches that fix the holes in 1e.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:24
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Octavo posted:It sucks because I promised to run it for members of our old 1e group and had to just back out and say, "sorry, I couldn't install it in my brain." Hmm, I wonder if there are any well known house rules or patches that fix the holes in 1e. And I get it, Wick wanted to try something new. But probably 80% of the backers or more were backing it off of their 7s1e nostalgia, and were (justifiably) expecting a system that at least resembled it in more than just the broadest outlines. If the system had turned out great anyways, it probably still could have made it - but. Well.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:29
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Expanding the world beyond "Europe and some cartoon doodles of all the non-white parts of Earth" and creating map that was less ridiculous and also better lent itself to using boats in the swashbuckling pirate adventure game were good ideas, but 7th Sea 2e definitely overreached itself especially for the timeline they'd set to get the game out the door. Sinking tons of time and money into ~trans media franchising~ was way too optimistic, too.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:31
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dwarf74 posted:Hey, if this is the case I'm happy to be wrong here. I have no desire to carry water for Mearls or Zak in any capacity. I'm not a hundred percent sure this was the smoking gun - but Mandy's revelation that Zak authored "her" MAD ABOUT D&D posts made it a lot easier to connect the dots. After the complaints, "Mandy" suddenly has access to real names and who uses which handles - which (of course) got posted publically to direct his troll legion.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:31
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dwarf74 posted:I was a member of TheRPGSite before nisarg took over, there. (And boy is there some history!) Basically, it was an extremely quiet thing that probably would have died before long, but nisarg decided to point his followers to it via xanga (lol) after he got banned from rpgnet. So all of a sudden it was overrun by horrible grogs. The site's owner and him got into a bunch of fights, and then the owner decided to quit - and basically said, "Here, you think you can do a better job? You take it." And so we have the cesspit it is today. How on earth did Tarnowski manage to accrue followers?
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Feb 21, 2019 16:32
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Dawgstar posted:How on earth did Tarnowski manage to accrue followers? (parts of the) OSR was born out of the reactionary reaction to 4e, and Tarnowski being one of the loudest proponents of OSR meant that he got people to follow him in much the same way that Paizo managed to convince people that their 3e knock-off was Actually True D&D
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Feb 21, 2019 16:40
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Nuns with Guns posted:Expanding the world beyond "Europe and some cartoon doodles of all the non-white parts of Earth" and creating map that was less ridiculous and also better lent itself to using boats in the swashbuckling pirate adventure game were good ideas, but 7th Sea 2e definitely overreached itself especially for the timeline they'd set to get the game out the door. Sinking tons of time and money into ~trans media franchising~ was way too optimistic, too. The world writing was really good, and the line was extremely good about representation and hiring authors who studied and often were from the cultures they were adapting. Unfortunately, the budgeting was...not sufficient, especially for the sheer level of production quality.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:44
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moths posted:E: I think Mearls forwarding the emails was confirmed when Zak (posing as Mandy) posted Ettin's personal info on Tumblr along with a throwaway "I'm not doxxing because this is public, uh, somewhere." I told a friend I wasn’t sure about this detail so it would be nice to have it confirmed.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:49
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Mors Rattus posted:The world writing was really good, and the line was extremely good about representation and hiring authors who studied and often were from the cultures they were adapting. Unfortunately, the budgeting was...not sufficient, especially for the sheer level of production quality. Were there any books or sections in particular you liked in 2e? I'll admit I kinda checked out after I saw that the 2e core completely upended the 1e version of Eisen and replaced it with The Witcher.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:50
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Dawgstar posted:How on earth did Tarnowski manage to accrue followers? 2) He was very forceful and provocative and sure of himself, and for a lot of people that's enough to qualify as an Admirable Leader - especially one that's relentless about stoking the lizard-brain resentments mention in the first point. Basically, there was an inchoate mass of dipshit nerds in the RPG community and Tarnowksi put in the work to structure and focus their complaints (Real RPGers vs the Storyteller Swine) and relentlessly kept at it for years and years.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:52
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Octavo posted:Were there any books or sections in particular you liked in 2e? I'll admit I kinda checked out after I saw that the 2e core completely upended the 1e version of Eisen and replaced it with The Witcher. I was a huge fan of the Not Africa and Not Middle East books, though Not Egypt in the Not Africa book was slightly disappointing. The expanded write-ups for most of the Not Europe nations are also exceptional, with the exceptions of Vodacce, which is still Wick's private baby and too much like its old self, and Avalon (which is okay, it's just...it's not that interesting to me?). Eisen's expanded writeup does a much better job of showing that 1e Eisen is still around but with more monsters now. The South America book and Caribbean book were also good but I was less excited by them because they aren't my historical area of interest. e: I think my absolute favorite location was Not Mali.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:54
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Unfortunately, so much of his poo poo was behind the scenes that it's impossible to know when exactly he got names. As far as I know, he wasn't publicly disclosing critics' real names until after the Mearls email fumble. It might be worth a deep dive for someone who can stomach him, though.
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Feb 21, 2019 16:58
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I wonder how feasible it would be to take the 7th Sea 2e setting and transplant it onto a working system like ORE or PbtA (the latter requiring far more work than the former)
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Feb 21, 2019 16:58
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Dawgstar posted:How on earth did Tarnowski manage to accrue followers? He gets mad about stuff and he rants. There weren't actually a ton of people doing anything similar back then - hence his "RPG Pundit" nom de plume. gradenko_2000 posted:(parts of the) OSR was born out of the reactionary reaction to 4e, and Tarnowski being one of the loudest proponents of OSR meant that he got people to follow him in much the same way that Paizo managed to convince people that their 3e knock-off was Actually True D&D I actually found a pretty good rundown of all of this. I was a regular semi-lurker on Nutkinland and Nothingland. (And basically all the diaspora sites until they all became depopulated/horrible.) https://annex.fandom.com/wiki/Nutkinland
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Feb 21, 2019 16:59
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Mors Rattus posted:I was a huge fan of the Not Africa and Not Middle East books, though Not Egypt in the Not Africa book was slightly disappointing. The expanded write-ups for most of the Not Europe nations are also exceptional, with the exceptions of Vodacce, which is still Wick's private baby and too much like its old self, and Avalon (which is okay, it's just...it's not that interesting to me?). Eisen's expanded writeup does a much better job of showing that 1e Eisen is still around but with more monsters now. The South America book and Caribbean book were also good but I was less excited by them because they aren't my historical area of interest. Thanks. I'll give those a look.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:00
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Xelkelvos posted:I wonder how feasible it would be to take the 7th Sea 2e setting and transplant it onto a working system like ORE or PbtA (the latter requiring far more work than the former) Your main challenge would be finding a way to transplant the Sorceries, Swordsman Schools and Poet Duel Schools in a way that was fun and cool.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:00
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Desiden posted:One of the ironies here is that the peak WW era actually had prompted some loonies running around claiming that VtM ripped off "real world vampirism". They'd show up here and there on usenet, and claimed that the whole political structure was real or only slightly modified. IIRC there was also some crime tragedy vaguely similar to the ones that prompted the DnD backlash as well, with some kid taking things too seriously. It didn't get as much play, because the hysteria over RPGs was past by then, but the notion that WW games actually reduced the number of people believing in vampires is profoundly silly. You're thinking of the Vampire Clan killings.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:03
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The Caribbean book is also important for introducing the Atabean Trade Company, which was clearly intended to be a major settingwide villain. It was the Evil Capitalism to Vendel's possibly-not-totally-awful capitalism, run by a literal Objectivist and the driving force behind slavery in the setting.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:(parts of the) OSR was born out of the reactionary reaction to 4e, and Tarnowski being one of the loudest proponents of OSR meant that he got people to follow him in much the same way that Paizo managed to convince people that their 3e knock-off was Actually True D&D It’s always confused me that from the perspective of reading OSR blogs Tarnowski hardly existed. They never mentioned him, are those two parts of the community completely separate, or is the influence entirely one directional, or is just that Tarnowski was only ever complaining about 4e, a topic of zero interest to the blog community?
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Feb 21, 2019 17:07
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Mors Rattus posted:Your main challenge would be finding a way to transplant the Sorceries, Swordsman Schools and Poet Duel Schools in a way that was fun and cool. I'd imagine that it'd be extremely doable in PbtA framework, but it'd take a bit of work to flesh everything out into specific Moves. In ORE, the Reign book gives guidelines for how to make systems like those but it probably wouldn't be as evocative or as flavorful as what 7th Sea currently has (but it might be more mechanically sound)
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Feb 21, 2019 17:09
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FMguru posted:1) He articulated what a lot of dumb nerds were feeling - that RPGs were getting too politically correct, that they were being put upon and pushed around by a bunch of phony johnny-come-latelies who don't even play "real" RPGs, that all this talk about inclusiveness and representation was at the expense of cishet white men and it was time to fight back, etc etc. Bascially, the same retrograde culture war crap that played out in other nerd subfields as things like GamerGate and the Sad Puppies and the Fake Geek Girls. I think it's also important to note that people might have nodded along with his essays bashing 4e D&D, but everyone sees through his poo poo now and tells him to gently caress off if he tries pushing out of the little hateful niche he occupies. His audience isn't growing, and a lot of the reason he's angry about these new waves of D&D players is he knows they're not the types that would sustain his bile, either. G+ is vanishing soon. He shouts a lot on Twitter, but there's not much of a regressive tabletop gaming scene there and he has to resort to "sempai notice me!!" at comicsgators and gamergators (who largely ignore him). His forum is still around but afaik a lot of the people on it tell him to shut up, too. He was stirring stuff up about secret Mearls emails because he's trying to inject himself into the discourse and raise his public profile. He's just dipping his toes into YouTube, so I guess we'll have to see how well he does there. Xelkelvos posted:I wonder how feasible it would be to take the 7th Sea 2e setting and transplant it onto a working system like ORE or PbtA (the latter requiring far more work than the former) The setting is easy to lift. Like I said before, Honor + Intrigue works fine with 7th Sea. Someone has probably done a PbtA hack somewhere, too.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:09
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DalaranJ posted:It’s always confused me that from the perspective of reading OSR blogs Tarnowski hardly existed. They never mentioned him, are those two parts of the community completely separate, or is the influence entirely one directional, or is just that Tarnowski was only ever complaining about 4e, a topic of zero interest to the blog community? He was also a hooray-for-3E guy who hated 4E, while most OSRies disdained 3E and wanted to go back to OD&D/BX/AD&D 1E or whatever. e: quote:I think it's also important to note that people might have nodded along with his essays bashing 4e D&D, but everyone sees through his poo poo now and tells him to gently caress off if he tries pushing out of the little hateful niche he occupies. His audience isn't growing, and a lot of the reason he's angry about these new waves of D&D players is he knows they're not the types that would sustain his bile, either. G+ is vanishing soon. He shouts a lot on Twitter, but there's not much of a regressive tabletop gaming scene there and he has to resort to "sempai notice me!!" at comicsgators and gamergators (who largely ignore him). His forum is still around but afaik a lot of the people on it tell him to shut up, too. He was stirring stuff up about secret Mearls emails because he's trying to inject himself into the discourse and raise his public profile. He's just dipping his toes into YouTube, so I guess we'll have to see how well he does there. FMguru fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 17:11
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Being a vocal gamergater also made a lot of people drop him. That's a large part of the rift between him and Zak. At first they were backing each other up and mocking people mad at their 5e consultation on Pundit's forums. Zak uses a lot of the same tactics as gg but outwardly he disapproved of it because he knew he had to keep appearances up.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:14
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moths posted:Unfortunately, so much of his poo poo was behind the scenes that it's impossible to know when exactly he got names. So, either Mearls gave Zak the names or Zak already had the names and this event got him angry enough to reveal them. Thanks.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:16
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Also a lot of the OSR community/blogs is genuinely just interested in DIY gaming content over and over and over again, and the drama that Zak and Pundit inject is just poisonous, as Chris McDowell said. Zak stuck around longer and better because he played in peoples' games and actually contributed content, while Pundit just shits in the corner over and over again.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:16
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