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ElectroMagneticJosh posted:The thing that bugged me about Dragonlance was how the DnD alignment and spell systems were part of the story in a way that drew the reader out of the stories. I didn't play DnD (unless you count some of the video games) but quickly realized they were describing game mechanics. A friend of mine wrote a pathfinder book. All actions taken by the characters had to be justfiable based on their character sheets and game rules. I can't imagine anything more stultifying.
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Sep 15, 2020 03:30
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play literally anything but D&D
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Sep 15, 2020 03:33
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Lmao pathfinder ruleset is especially bad for that. You can't even wrassle a guy or do anything cool without spending half of your life's worth of feats
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Sep 15, 2020 03:34
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Imagine having a fanbase so painfully nerdy that you need an editor to check literary adherence to a gaming ruleset.
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Sep 15, 2020 03:38
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Spazzle posted:A friend of mine wrote a pathfinder book. All actions taken by the characters had to be justfiable based on their character sheets and game rules. I can't imagine anything more stultifying.
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Sep 15, 2020 03:38
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GURPS has a really important rule in their basic set that has been there for like 30 years now The rule is called 'When In Doubt, Roll And Shout', which basically means "the rules are here for guidance not strict adherence, if you need the game to keep the flow and remain fun just MAKE poo poo UP and roll some dice who cares what the rules say you can/can't do"
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Sep 15, 2020 03:41
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Honestly I never got the appeal of tabletop novels. I get setting books that say a few paragraphs about each place and add "there's totally a skeleton dungeon here, GMs, go wild" with a wink but anything beyond that is garbage fiction by sellouts
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Sep 15, 2020 03:43
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Spazzle posted:A friend of mine wrote a pathfinder book. All actions taken by the characters had to be justfiable based on their character sheets and game rules. I can't imagine anything more stultifying. When you consider that RPGs like DND were made by people who wanted to play games in the style of their favourite fantasy novels and incorporated ideas from boardgames and table-top wargaming to gamify the experience it is ironic that these same rules would later be forced into novels which guaranteed they would never be as enjoyable as the fantasy novels that originally inspired these games.
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Sep 15, 2020 03:46
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nerds do not seem to understand that, yes, you can turn your Really Cool Original Setting you ran a ton of games in into a series of books, but the thing is that running games is fun in the moment and fond on a re-read only to you and your gaming group you actually have to work and do a lot of revision and management of the ideas to make it interesting as a BOOK TO READ
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Sep 15, 2020 03:52
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Black August posted:nerds do not seem to understand that, yes, you can turn your Really Cool Original Setting you ran a ton of games in into a series of books, but the thing is that running games is fun in the moment and fond on a re-read only to you and your gaming group And I'm using Critical Role as the metric here because it's a successful Actual Play thing, and if that would work badly directly translated to book every Really Cool Original Campaign is going to have at the very least the same problems and likely a lot more.
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Sep 15, 2020 04:00
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I would like to take the time to remind everything this exists still: http://onthecampaigntrail.org/ The best fantasy rpg ever.
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Sep 15, 2020 04:19
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Issekai which is just teleported to DnD novels fo Japanese MMO addicts are massively popular. People love sloppy genre fiction
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Sep 15, 2020 04:50
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Colonel Cancer posted:You can thank that piece of poo poo Vance for most of that tbh the way vance did it was cool and unique in a way nobody had done before. it seems hosed up now because it was shorn of all its context that made it interesting. vance didn't make it as a universal magic system, it was made specifically for the dying earth and vance didn't use it in any of his other settings spells in the dying earth were like powerful ancient relics, that did very specific things and were generally super powerful. the written form of a spell is basically a relic like any other magic item, and wizards are always trading them with each other or stealing them from each other. there's only like 100 spells left in the world that people know of, anything else you have to hope you can dig out of a ruin. because the spells are basically bound instructions to a kind of genie-type magical creature, you're less memorizing the spell and more having the spell live in your brain for a little bit, then when you cast it it leaves. you look at the spell on the page and it kind of tries to burn itself into your brain, and how good a wizard you are depends on how many spells you can keep in your brain at once. all the spells have cool names like 'Phandaal's critique of the chill' or 'call to the violent cloud' and do some crazy poo poo. it's a cool departure from either traditional ritual magic (like people practice in the real world) or the ill-defined sort of magic powers gandalf and people had. its also notable that it's not the only way to use magic in those stories, there are super wizards who bargain and bind the genie creatures directly and have a lot more freeform power because of it. it's not the universal law of magic, its just the way one piece of basically magical technology operates. the trouble is that shorn of 90% of the stuff that makes it cool and dividing it up into levels just makes the magic system seem like an ammo counter for wizards. in the d&d context, vancian magic is maybe the least magical and fun way to do magic. all the characters in the dying earth had poo poo they could do that wasn't casting spells, those stories are mostly about weirdo dickheads tricking each other and pulling scams, but a d&d wizard is just poo poo outta luck once he's out of spell slots. it also adapts horribly to stories about the d&d world, because it is so gamey.
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Sep 15, 2020 04:58
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there's actually an isekai webnovel about a guy becoming his pnp d&d character in a more standard fantasy world which doesn't work under the same systems at all. however, his character was a max level wizard with vancian magic and everything that entails. it was all very silly.
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Sep 15, 2020 05:27
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juggalo baby coffin posted:the trouble is that shorn of 90% of the stuff that makes it cool and dividing it up into levels just makes the magic system seem like an ammo counter for wizards. in the d&d context, vancian magic is maybe the least magical and fun way to do magic. all the characters in the dying earth had poo poo they could do that wasn't casting spells, those stories are mostly about weirdo dickheads tricking each other and pulling scams, but a d&d wizard is just poo poo outta luck once he's out of spell slots. it also adapts horribly to stories about the d&d world, because it is so gamey. Vancian casting is so bad that any minor change is an improvement. Pathfinder's first edition had the Magus, which had a bonus energy pool and one of its uses was to cast extra copies of any spell they'd prepared that day. The old system really needs to be cut from D&D and its clones entirely.
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Sep 15, 2020 05:34
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:there's actually an isekai webnovel about a guy becoming his pnp d&d character in a more standard fantasy world which doesn't work under the same systems at all. however, his character was a max level wizard with vancian magic and everything that entails. it was all very silly. For some reason I'm reminded of some dumb book I read where magic was math, like quadratic equations were spells. The plot was some Xena-like warrior woman had come from her magical world to ours, and when her wizard nemesis follower her his spellbook turns into a TI-80.
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Sep 15, 2020 06:02
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Empty Sandwich posted:A kender stole my last gold coin This is my favorite thing in the thread so far
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Sep 15, 2020 06:07
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yeah gygax and co really managed a neat trick where they made magic suck rear end in the name of balance while also failing to balance it a system that is simultaneously bad for gaming AND bad for using in books. it's not fun to use in the game and it immediately ruins all immersion if you reference it in prose. magic is pretty hard to handle well though. if you make your magic system too logical you reduce magic to something mundane, but if you don't have any rules for it at all it just comes off like random bullshit. you also need a good reason for not everyone to be doing it all the time, and 90% of fantasy books just use 'you need a natural talent for it' which sucks total rear end. like there's no real reason in the d&d universe that everyone wouldn''t just be a level 1 wizard because the cantrips you can get are so useful for everyday life. there'd be a real impetus to set up an education system if school taught you how to magically repair any mundane object at will, or produce light on demand in a pre-electricity world. edit: the other thing im real fuckin tired of at this point is the 'magic is computer programming' fad that is all over the loving place now keep your boolean logic out of spells, its not cool or fun, its just lame.
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Sep 15, 2020 06:08
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Ars Magica , babeh
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Sep 15, 2020 06:12
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For that matter, the Mage: the Ascension rule book can help you cast spells in real life, if you have a rad enough mind
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Sep 15, 2020 06:13
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juggalo baby coffin posted:yeah gygax and co really managed a neat trick where they made magic suck rear end in the name of balance while also failing to balance it This is admittedly one of the cooler things about the Elder Scrolls setting. Basically everyone can do a little fire spell. It's anything more complex that takes learning.
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Sep 15, 2020 06:26
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hey quick question were the prydain books actually good or was i just a stupid kid with no standardsSpazzle posted:stultifying
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Sep 15, 2020 06:56
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I mean its not a given that if you make magic simple/logical enough literally everyone will do it because to be quite frank there is going to be a fairly decent chunk of people who don't give a poo poo or can't be bothered. Like holy poo poo is there a surprising amount of people who own cars who can't change a tire or know how to jump a car, or a billion other relatively easy processes.
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Sep 15, 2020 07:13
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I assume there are probably books out there with a similar idea, but I always thought that magic as a replacement for infrastructure made sense. Like instead of the power company you paid the magic guild to keep your light spells going, keep the water flowing, and so on. Like a utility. This would also go a long way to explain why everyone and their uncle doesn't use magic - it's controlled and licensed and if you go against the guild they will gently caress you up either literally or legally, depending on how the society is structured.
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Sep 15, 2020 07:19
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I assume there are probably books out there with a similar idea, but I always thought that magic as a replacement for infrastructure made sense. Like instead of the power company you paid the magic guild to keep your light spells going, keep the water flowing, and so on. Like a utility. This would also go a long way to explain why everyone and their uncle doesn't use magic - it's controlled and licensed and if you go against the guild they will gently caress you up either literally or legally, depending on how the society is structured. The Baldur’s Gate 2 approach if you dare cast a spell in the early game
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Sep 15, 2020 08:38
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PMush Perfect posted:hey quick question were the prydain books actually good or was i just a stupid kid with no standards They're not as good as their held aloft as a standard bearer of fantasy like when I was a kid, but they aren't embarrassingly bad. They have some neat, accidental intrigue due to how we expect stories to go nowadays but that is a polite way of saying they are traditional without being embarassing.
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Sep 15, 2020 08:49
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Barudak posted:They're not as good as their held aloft as a standard bearer of fantasy like when I was a kid, but they aren't embarrassingly bad. They have some neat, accidental intrigue due to how we expect stories to go nowadays but that is a polite way of saying they are traditional without being embarassing.
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Sep 15, 2020 09:09
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Colonel Cancer posted:Lmao pathfinder ruleset is especially bad for that. You can't even wrassle a guy or do anything cool without spending half of your life's worth of feats yeah pathfinder is really something, but i've yet to find a game with even half decent wrestling rules
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Sep 15, 2020 10:35
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Cowslips Warren posted:I would like to take the time to remind everything this exists still: made by a furry who was into loving animals, ie. a furry
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Sep 15, 2020 10:41
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ChubbyChecker posted:yeah pathfinder is really something, but i've yet to find a game with even half decent wrestling rules
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Sep 15, 2020 10:42
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3 / 3.5 Ed. wrestling or grappling rules were, iirc, so  that it was literally better to just attack with your weapon instead.I think White Wolf games had simple grapple/break grapple mechanics but again, when you can like Str+2 aggravated claw damage (usually 8 to 10 in Garou form) that can easily delete anything in one shot including other supernaturals, why bother?
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Sep 15, 2020 10:44
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My favorite magic system is the Unwords in Dan Abnett's inquisitor novels. One of the antagonists is trying to master the use of these magic words, sounds that basically just do magic, generally destructive. The user can kill someone with a word, but it will (presumably only if they haven't mastered them) gently caress them up, and one character speaking unwords had their lips shredded by it.
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Sep 15, 2020 10:49
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hah, haven't tried those PMush Perfect posted:hey quick question were the prydain books actually good or was i just a stupid kid with no standards they were good children's books with no creepy poo poo, iirc
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Sep 15, 2020 10:54
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ChubbyChecker posted:they were good children's books with no creepy poo poo, iirc
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Sep 15, 2020 10:57
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I grew up classic b&w Conan comics and magic in those were almost always evil and harmed the caster or required some heinous activities but also quite powerful. Like, during one story Conan was leading a rebellion against the king of Aquilonia (the King Conan storyline) cheated and tried to kill him and the wizard ruling the king casted a spell that caused a massive rockfall. The wizard had to sacrifice all the peaceful satyrs living in the nearby forest to fuel the magic. Also many wizards were straight up priests of either ancient gods or cosmic entities including Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian horrors. Regular people trying to dabble in magic almost always got hosed up in the worse ways.
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Sep 15, 2020 11:00
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Galewolf posted:I grew up classic b&w Conan comics and magic in those were almost always evil and harmed the caster or required some heinous activities but also quite powerful. that's the magic style i also prefer, the old ray harryhausen films had it too someone in the newspaper comics thread is posting old conan comics: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3908728&userid=149043&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post504761797
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Sep 15, 2020 11:06
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juggalo baby coffin posted:ive never been a fan of sex scenes in books that arent specifically erotica, they are usually poorly written and awkward and extremely rarely have anything to do with the plot. i dont think ive seen one in a book where it couldn't just be substituted with 'and they hosed' and not harm the book at all. i think most writers are pretty visually-minded people, which helps for describing fantastical cityscapes, not so much for conveying sex, which is an almost entirely kinesthetic experience. its how you end up with a lot of 'glistening manhoods' and weird tab-a into slot-a type prose. For all his faults Robert Jordan in the Wheel of Time books did a good job with both by leaving most of the sex and sword moves (lol) to the readers imagination.
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Sep 15, 2020 11:09
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Horizon Burning posted:Big yikes from me, dog. If you were going to try and link the modern fantasy genre to anything, you'd link it to Tolkein. There's a difference between 'young adult' and Young Adult and Outsiders, Judy Blume, etc. get labelled as distinct from the Young Adult genre these days. Whenever people play this card, they're just trying to legitimize their tropetastic genre by saying Divergent is the same as Catcher in the Rye. man all Im gonna say is I read the Chocolate Wars expecting some high school hijinks. MISTAKE.
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Sep 15, 2020 11:12
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Something something I’ll leave my sword moves in your imagination innuendo innuendo
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Sep 15, 2020 11:13
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Telsa Cola posted:I mean its not a given that if you make magic simple/logical enough literally everyone will do it because to be quite frank there is going to be a fairly decent chunk of people who don't give a poo poo or can't be bothered. In D&D if you do not have a high enough stat you literally cannot use magic. If I remember right an average human could master 0 level spells and that is it. It is doubtful that you will find anyone to teach you wizard lore or let you into the temple if that is the extent of your potential.
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