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DalaranJ posted:I told a friend I wasn’t sure about this detail so it would be nice to have it confirmed. FWIW, when I messaged Mearls, I sent multiple emails. I sent one from my personal account, because it was a story I didn't mind attached to my name. The other, I sent through a throwaway email with a made-up name as an "anonymous tip" because a friend asked me to send it but make sure it didn't get back to them. Mearls responded to both emails with the same form response. Basically "I got this message. Zak was hired for a single project. It was a one-time job." Nothing more than that really. Not too long after I sent those, I got a message to the made-up nobody email basically telling me that I should recant my statement, and something about how lying is dangerous. It was one of those really playgroundish veiled threats. I get that sort of thing fairly frequently, and TBH I didn't think about it much at the time. But I honestly can't imagine a way someone, Zak or otherwise, would have gotten that email address unless Mearls gave it to them. I doubt it was Mearls hamfistedly trying to pressure a recant.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:20
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| # ? May 26, 2024 00:12 |
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I remember when Apocalypse World first hit the scene and RPGSite lost their poo poo over it, mainly because it was different. People were saying things like "how is Hot a stat? What does that mean?", "the game expects characters to have s-s-s-SEX", and a lot of anger over the game explicitly telling you how it's intended to be run (HOW DARE YOU TELL ME HOW TO PLAY YOUR GAME I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS).
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Feb 21, 2019 17:24
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MachineIV posted:
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Feb 21, 2019 17:25
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Dawgstar posted:How on earth did Tarnowski manage to accrue followers? It's the internet. A wet farting noise that sounds vaguely like "your favorite game sucks" could get followers.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:41
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Xelkelvos posted: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. You're really more up against 1e there, not 2e. The 2e mechanics are not evocative or flavorful at all. I mean all the swordsman schools are just 'you get to use this one maneuver twice in a row'.
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Feb 21, 2019 17:42
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dwarf74 posted:This was way back when the proto-OSR was still super mad about 3e. And the Forge. And 'storygames,' always 'storygames.' This all happened in 2006. It also seemed to be a rare place where people seemed to be highly sceptical of Forge theory and disinclined to humour it much, which worked just fine for me. I like some storygames and Forge-derived stuff, but I think Ron Edwards' theorising led a lot of people down a cul-de-sac which didn't pan out. It felt nice to have people who broadly agreed on that. (In retrospect I should have probably gone here instead, but I found the huge long threads intimidating.) Conversations with Pundit himself tended to be really annoying, but there were some posters on there who seemed more chill and I was happy to shoot the poo poo with them, ignore Pundit's flailing (or argue directly with him when I was in the mood to), but bit by bit that got more difficult. Zak got more active on there. GamerGate happened and lots more chuds started coming out of the woodwork. Their bullshit started intruding more and more on the main RPG discussion area than it used to. Pundit shifted further and further to the right. Eventually, I realised that I was only still posting there out of inertia and some residual enjoyment of talking with those posters who hadn't succumbed to the kool-aid - but that these posters were becoming the minority (and indeed were migrating to other communities), and that the longer I stuck around there the more I was implicitly supporting Pundit's bullshit. Eventually Pundit said some vile poo poo which made the scales fall from my eyes and I left.
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Feb 21, 2019 18:02
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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. Yeah 7th Sea is real loving good at transplanting the cultures and history but I never got to play it to see how it goes.
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Feb 21, 2019 18:04
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At least UFOs and bigfoot had something that even remotely resembled evidence. Believing in vampires is just pure delusion/wish fulfillment
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Feb 21, 2019 18:07
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Warthur posted:It's a point of some shame to me that I posted on therpgsite for a while. I also got in on the pre-Pundit ground floor, so I felt like there was a point to being some kind of 'old guard' there to preserve the place's brief, non-awful heritage or whatever. AnEdgelord posted:At least UFOs and bigfoot had something that even remotely resembled evidence. People believe in different weird stuff in different parts of the world. See also, Ireland and fairies. Saudi Arabia and djinn. And so on. dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 18:12
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dwarf74 posted:Nah, I was too for a while, but mostly because I liked arguing with people that new things (and 4e) are actually really good. In retrospect, of course, I could have just got that here. But I was naive and thought all of SA was as threatening as GBS or whatever.
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Feb 21, 2019 18:15
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FMguru posted:Yeah, he marginalized himself out of influence a long time ago - even people who largely agree with him got tired of his endless self-aggrandizement. He's the emperor of a tiny little island that no one visits any more or even bothers to put on the map. And you're 100% right, his recent actions are pure flop-sweaty "notice me senpai!" efforts to recover his long-faded relevance. That explains his hate boner for Critical Role in general and Matt Mercer in general. It's easier to get his name up in lights, although I think that backfires too because if somebody dislikes Mercer and everything for the reasons Tarnowski does then they're probably already a devotee. Everybody else either likes CR or doesn't care. (See also Jeremy "TheQuartering" Hambly's attempt to go after pro fighter and god of destruction SonicFox.)
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Feb 21, 2019 18:42
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Warthur posted:"I liked arguing" kind of sums up some of the charm of the place, actually: it was a place where if two people wanted to pull their sleeves up and really go at it on a subject, they could do so to their heart's content without RPG.net-style moderation tossing cold water on them. In fact, on checking some of my earliest posts there I now recall that my main motive was rocking up to argue with Pundit and call him a weird paranoid who cried about being oppressed by indie games with print runs in the low thousands at best, in a forum where precisely because of the principles he was espousing he couldn't just ban me, then I got talking to other moderate sorts on the forum who turned out to be OK to talk to.
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Feb 21, 2019 18:48
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Dawgstar posted:That explains his hate boner for Critical Role in general and Matt Mercer in general. It's easier to get his name up in lights, although I think that backfires too because if somebody dislikes Mercer and everything for the reasons Tarnowski does then they're probably already a devotee. Everybody else either likes CR or doesn't care. (See also Jeremy "TheQuartering" Hambly's attempt to go after pro fighter and god of destruction SonicFox.) Did he really? What an idiot.
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Feb 21, 2019 18:57
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AnEdgelord posted:At least UFOs and bigfoot had something that even remotely resembled evidence. It's more accurate to say they had much better hoaxes backing them up. Ghosts, too. The real problem with pop culture vampires is that they can't just easily vanish into the woods or underworld or sky. You'd have to accuse a real person of being a vampire or point to an offending coffin, and that's hard to back up. Not to say there aren't little packs of believers. And of course, some people have stumbled on the brilliant gimmick of saying they're psychic vampires, which is the kind of vampire that conveniently feeds invisibly and leaves no evidence. The key to these sorts of things is complete unverifiablity.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:13
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MachineIV posted:
I was never positive whether Mearls just shared enough to identify the victims of fuckhead's harassment campaigns, or actually shared the emails, but that's absolutely clear that it's what he did. Nevermind that he's a poo poo designer who hosed over 4e and is taking credit for the biggest growth of D&D that he has nothing to do with and is utterly irrelevant for (like where do you even see him appearing in anything prominent?), he's a loving shitstain that needs to be gone. Also do you mind if I quote this places? PST fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 19:16
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's more accurate to say they had much better hoaxes backing them up. Ghosts, too. also i think 'psychic vampires' had a lot of early 2000s overlap with 'toxic individuals.' Most people describing them were loosely using a kind of folk psychology to come to what now might be called (non-clinically) a narcissist or (more reasonably) a toxic person.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:21
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Liquid Communism posted:Did he really? What an idiot. If you're referring to Hambly, yeah. The tweets are gone now because they were reported as racist (shock) and in general it is a thousand years too early for him to take on SonicFox.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:36
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Impermanent posted:also i think 'psychic vampires' had a lot of early 2000s overlap with 'toxic individuals.' Most people describing them were loosely using a kind of folk psychology to come to what now might be called (non-clinically) a narcissist or (more reasonably) a toxic person. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRTqDG9Mo18
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Feb 21, 2019 19:42
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Zak's alternate twitter account @IHitItWithMyAxe / playingdndwithpornstars has been 'restricted' because of the number of complaints against it in a short period of time, also had 4 days worth of tweets deleted. I think, at this point, he's largely done and is going to go Desborough, in that he'll still exist, still be on the fringes because he's incapable of giving up, but that 24-hour twitter timeout for spamming stopped him being able to change the narrative, and his general toxic bullshit meant even the OSR who seem to love edgelord behaviour had just had enough of his poo poo. What Mandy and Vivka and Hannah and Jennifer did was an Augean stables moment where those who had other grudges against him could speak out and say 'gently caress no' without the worry of being dogpiled or harassed. Which means he's going to linger and linger for months and need repeated pushback, just like Holden has. BUt in terns of any influence or prominence in the industry, he's done.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:44
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PST posted:I was never positive whether Mearls just shared enough to identify the victims of fuckhead's harassment campaigns, or actually shared the emails, but that's absolutely clear that it's what he did. Nevermind that he's a poo poo designer who hosed over 4e and is taking credit for the biggest growth of D&D that he has nothing to do with and is utterly irrelevant for (like where do you even see him appearing in anything prominent?), he's a loving shitstain that needs to be gone. He also hasn't tweeted in 9 days after his piss poor apology.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:44
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Kurieg posted:He also hasn't tweeted in 9 days after his piss poor apology. I wonder if that's mandated or he knows if he tries to he'll just get pounced on. And rightly so.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's more accurate to say they had much better hoaxes backing them up. Ghosts, too.
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Feb 21, 2019 20:18
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Zereth posted:I believe UFO sightings have gone down since carrying cameras around at all times has become widespread.
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Feb 21, 2019 20:20
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Impermanent posted:also i think 'psychic vampires' had a lot of early 2000s overlap with 'toxic individuals.' Most people describing them were loosely using a kind of folk psychology to come to what now might be called (non-clinically) a narcissist or (more reasonably) a toxic person. The last self-described "psychic vampire" I knew tolerated and covered for a pedophile, so that squares.
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Feb 21, 2019 20:27
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FMguru posted:Cryptids, too. Bigfoot/yeti/mothman/chupacabra/Nessie sightings have all crashed to zero. Well the Mothman stuff was far weirder than just a cryptid sighting. It was both insanely localized and only happened during a very short period of time and involved a ton of Men in Black sightings. It was probably either mass hysteria or some sort of elaborate prank.
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Feb 21, 2019 20:50
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AnEdgelord posted:Well the Mothman stuff was far weirder than just a cryptid sighting. It was both insanely localized and only happened during a very short period of time and involved a ton of Men in Black sightings. See also the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.
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Feb 21, 2019 21:01
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AnEdgelord posted:Well the Mothman stuff was far weirder than just a cryptid sighting. It was both insanely localized and only happened during a very short period of time and involved a ton of Men in Black sightings. Yeah Indrid Cold itself scares me far more than the actual Mothman ever did.
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Feb 21, 2019 21:28
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Small data point, but there are absolutely still True Believers in Bigfoot, UFOs, etc. My wife and I took a camping trip to the woods of northern Oregon to see the eclipse a couple years back. Our first-choice of camping area was closed due to a fire, so we wound up just camping in national forest land off of a random forestry service dirt road a day before the eclipse. The next day we scouted out a nearby hill up the road looking for a good spot to see the show, and randomly came across a large encampment that turned out to be a Bigfoot Club. People who get together to talk about Bigfoot and go camping to find him and stuff. They were genuinely affable and nice people, they immediately invited us to join them for the eclipse, and they had a sort of mild self-effacing sense of humor about the whole thing, like, self-aware enough to know that their fandom of Bigfoot was vaguely silly. But, a small amount of polite and gentle probing revealed that at least most of them definitely, absolutely 100% believed that Bigfoot is Real, and that if they spent enough time wandering around the forests of the pacific northwest, they might actually catch a glimpse of him. There are people like this for every cryptid, conspiracy theory, alternate fact, etc. under the sun. The vast majority are basically harmless cranks, at least if you exclude the highly racist or politically motivated conspiracies like "pizzagate" etc. It is of course absurd for a RPG author to try to take direct credit for turning down the knob on a given superstitious belief, but the general idea that mild, unfocused ridicule and normalization of the, I guess you could say "mythedness" of it all, probably puts downward pressure on the ability of those myths to propagate is likely correct. What conspiracy theorists, myth-believers, etc. really want is not just for their special thing to be true: it's for belief in that thing to make them special, because they are the keepers of important knowledge and will be exonerated when everyone else finds out how right they were all along. It's a grasping for validity and importance against the broad theme of being a nobody in an enormous world full of things that cannot be adequately understood, a coping mechanism for personal fears and feelings of inadequacy. Among other reasons, anyway. On that basis, when the reaction to your secret knowledge from others is rejection, that serves to validate the feeling of having valuable knowledge. But when the reaction is sort of bemused pity, or worse, ridicule, while that probably feels really really bad, it is at least not reinforcing of the belief itself.
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Feb 21, 2019 21:52
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I want to point out again that a significant subset of cryptid enthusiasts are also young earth creationists. Because if you can prove Bigfoot then something something evolution is wrong.
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Feb 21, 2019 21:55
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Kurieg posted:He also hasn't tweeted in 9 days after his piss poor apology. He has for some reason liked some posts calling out both him and WotC on not saying more. I have no idea what to make of that.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:07
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Nickoten posted:He has for some reason liked some posts calling out both him and WotC on not saying more. I have no idea what to make of that.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:10
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Nickoten posted:He has for some reason liked some posts calling out both him and WotC on not saying more. I have no idea what to make of that. Guilt combined with cowardice or passive aggression? Yeah, I dunno. EDIT: dwarf74 posted:He's bookmarking them for later. ... You think he'd pick a less public way of doing this, but it's Mearls we're talking about here.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:11
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MachineIV posted:FWIW, when I messaged Mearls, I sent multiple emails. I sent one from my personal account, because it was a story I didn't mind attached to my name. The other, I sent through a throwaway email with a made-up name as an "anonymous tip" because a friend asked me to send it but make sure it didn't get back to them. Mearls responded to both emails with the same form response. Basically "I got this message. Zak was hired for a single project. It was a one-time job." Nothing more than that really. Same, kinda. The only thing I ever used one particular email account for was receiving D&D playtest emails and writing to Mearls when he asked for stories. I got similarly worded messages to what you describe, a couple times over several years. Starting around the same time, one of my friends who's also emailed their story was harassed to the point that they're still not on social media and had asked others involved not to ever talk about it. Recently that friend told me that they didn't mind me mentioning the basics of what happened if others also spoke up with similar stories, but please to not share any details. I've wanted to post this for a couple of days now but I also wanted to run to past them first.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:19
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About four years ago, a co-worker with a master's degree said to me, "You know, I think maybe dragons aren't real."
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Feb 21, 2019 22:26
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Zereth posted:I believe UFO sightings have gone down since carrying cameras around at all times has become widespread. Sightings of drones has gone up though, even when somehow no one ends up getting a picture of them or finding any evidence they were there.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:27
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Wait, was he saying that vampires in entertainment stuff was real world? I thought he meant that in the context of the World of Darkness nobody believed in vampires, but I only sorta skimmed it because ugh.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:27
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homullus posted:About four years ago, a co-worker with a master's degree said to me, "You know, I think maybe dragons aren't real." Pancryptia strikes again!
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Feb 21, 2019 22:29
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Gencon ban followup 
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Feb 21, 2019 22:35
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I was just coming here to post that. Actually a very strong statement.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:42
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They shoulda opened with that but I am not going to say this one's not sufficient.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:46
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