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I'd say that'd be the case if it was Critical Role playing it themselves. But this was just Matt being invited to a game by another PoC led AP group to play an NPC character as far as I can tell.
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Nov 13, 2020 05:29
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thetoughestbean posted:Not only is it kind of fraught to start demanding that certain jobs only be filled by people of certain ethnicities, it’s really weird when a it’s demanded by a group of largely white people. Yeah I'm aware of the issues of non-white people trying to get work in...well every single field of work basically, but I'm not sure going so far the other way is uh...not incredibly weird. Especially when it's kind of ideas like this theironjef posted:I would also be okay with Asian-Canadians, perhaps even Asians from Australia. Where it's gotta be exactly with the same heritage of the character to voice them (Assuming you even mean that and not just like, any asian VA voicing any person from Asia which is itself kind of fraught with weirdness) Sorry you don't have the blood quantums to voice the cartoon stabby Yakuza Joker. Which tbf Mercer might not have. Like all the dubs of Yakuza related are kind of just bad or there at best so it's hard to compete with Hidenari Ugaki's iconic performances. ZenMasterBullshit fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 06:08
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Kai Tave posted:This is, I think, the big crux of the matter that a lot of people have been discussing. There's a difference, a fairly significant one, between doing something in a home game and doing something in a wildly popular youtube series that for all intents and purposes is basically a TV show. Whether or not Critical Role used to be some gee-shucks bunch of friends just having fun and incidentally recording themselves, they occupy a much different place in the elfgameosphere now than some random person playing D&D around the kitchen table. If they were starting a new game, then yeah inclusiveness is definitely some tipping they need to pay attention to and if you look at their guest spots and one shots, it seems like they’ve made a conscious effort to cast POCs. But their appeal lies so much in the cast interactions and relationships that they can’t recast the main campaign. So they’re in a situation where either Matt or the players have to play POC or LGBTQ+ characters or they don’t exist at all.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:37
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Dexo posted:I'd say that'd be the case if it was Critical Role playing it themselves. Yeah it's not really a clear-cut situation like "this dude was doing blackface as a hilarious joke, please eject them into the sun," and the takes on it have generally reflected that it's something that's got a few different angles to it.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:40
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pseudodragon posted:If they were starting a new game, then yeah inclusiveness is definitely some tipping they need to pay attention to and if you look at their guest spots and one shots, it seems like they’ve made a conscious effort to cast POCs. But their appeal lies so much in the cast interactions and relationships that they can’t recast the main campaign. So they’re in a situation where either Matt or the players have to play POC or LGBTQ+ characters or they don’t exist at all. Right, which theoretically oughta trigger in everyone's head that Mercer has a huge gently caress-off platform and probably has several other potential ways to help push the project without specifically playing in it. I think when discussing this one specific situation that's probably the fail point.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:54
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah it's not really a clear-cut situation like "this dude was doing blackface as a hilarious joke, please eject them into the sun," and the takes on it have generally reflected that it's something that's got a few different angles to it. Is this thread still on the whole color corrected photo as evidence of black face angle? I really hoped we'd stopped that once the original Green paint screenshots emerged.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:00
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Is this thread still on the whole color corrected photo as evidence of black face angle? I really hoped we'd stopped that once the original Green paint screenshots emerged. https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/critical-role-sam-riegel-blackface-video/ quote:Critical Role's Sam Riegel has apologized for his role in a 2010 video in which he portrayed a parody of Tiger Woods.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:05
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This sucks. Big time.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:07
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Is this thread still on the whole color corrected photo as evidence of black face angle? I really hoped we'd stopped that once the original Green paint screenshots emerged. Also it's totally fine to reference that "comedic" blackface is bad without it referencing another thing. Because blackface is bad.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:08
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Man, life comes at you fast. I figured you were asking if people were still grumpy about that... what was it, a goblin costume? But no, they have real blackface scandals instead.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:10
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Just to note this was from a couple years back and it didn't result in Riegel being cut, I'm just bringing it up as an example of a thing that is much more clearly a case where you can look at someone doing a thing and say "this isn't a nuanced and complex issue, this just fuckin sucks, stop doing this."
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Nov 13, 2020 07:14
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theironjef posted:Right, which theoretically oughta trigger in everyone's head that Mercer has a huge gently caress-off platform and probably has several other potential ways to help push the project without specifically playing in it. I think when discussing this one specific situation that's probably the fail point. His platform is specifically tied to having a bunch of people that will watch him play and run games. If he’s not allowed to do either his hands are kind of tied other than empty tweeting “hey, this game is pretty cool”.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:45
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Kai Tave posted:Just to note this was from a couple years back and it didn't result in Riegel being cut, I'm just bringing it up as an example of a thing that is much more clearly a case where you can look at someone doing a thing and say "this isn't a nuanced and complex issue, this just fuckin sucks, stop doing this." How can this possibly be okay to Mercer/the rest of the CR cast? The dude was rapping in blackface and calling himself 'Tigga Hoods'.
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Nov 13, 2020 14:53
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GreenMetalSun posted:How can this possibly be okay to Mercer/the rest of the CR cast? The dude was rapping in blackface and calling himself 'Tigga Hoods'. maybe he can partner with Mearls's character, "MC Killzalot"
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Nov 13, 2020 14:56
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GreenMetalSun posted:How can this possibly be okay to Mercer/the rest of the CR cast? The dude was rapping in blackface and calling himself 'Tigga Hoods'. Probably because of additional context. In 2009 Will.I.Am specifically hired him with no audition. Will also wrote, and produced the bit and song. It was on Will's dumb comedy website and other black people were all over the production doing makeup and everything. Which led to Sam's dumb rear end not pausing and thinking if this was a good idea or not. It's a real loving dumb story where everyone involved was dumb as poo poo. Sam should have extremely known better. And probably deserves almost any poo poo he gets from it. My main takeaway from it is that Will.I.Am is a corny rear end dude holy poo poo.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:39
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Contributing factors and context aside, a person said "yes I will wear blackface and immortalize this online."
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Nov 13, 2020 15:51
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Dexo posted:Probably because of additional context. I think the main thing is that actors that aren’t A-list stars that can pick and choose are hardwired to say yes to any job that comes around because who knows when the next one will come around and it’s the producers job to figure out poo poo like “should we hire a white dude for this?”.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:56
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pseudodragon posted:His platform is specifically tied to having a bunch of people that will watch him play and run games. If he’s not allowed to do either his hands are kind of tied other than empty tweeting “hey, this game is pretty cool”. People will occasionally ask me to review their game on my podcast as a way of getting it some eyes, because my show is a game review show. But we don't review games by request and we don't review games where even a slightly negative review could hurt people's careers. So instead I do an interview episode with them. Outside the regular schedule, made available as a special thing, takes less time than a full review or an AP session. This doesn't happen super often, because we don't have an enormous fanbase or anything. But it's not hard to do and the episodes where we have done have had the same or better download rates than the surrounding review episodes. He's not hamstrung to sitting at a table and rolling dice. He's famous and his fans would watch him do just about anything.
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Nov 13, 2020 16:55
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Glad watching Critical Role directly supports blackface, what the gently caress.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:01
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theironjef posted:So instead I do an interview episode with them. Outside the regular schedule, made available as a special thing, takes less time than a full review or an AP session. This doesn't happen super often, because we don't have an enormous fanbase or anything. But it's not hard to do and the episodes where we have done have had the same or better download rates than the surrounding review episodes.
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Nov 13, 2020 17:22
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opening up the critical role stream and laughing as my stocks in blackface shoot up in value
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Nov 13, 2020 18:02
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Farg posted:opening up the critical role stream and laughing as my stocks in blackface shoot up in value Dump your stocks in Blackface now. Trudeau and Northam provided a solid boost, but it's set to hit a massive downturn going forward.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:09
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pseudodragon posted:Like the show he does where he actually does that? https://youtu.be/zXNJjGY9cW0 Just a quick look at their YouTube channel shows that them playing games = lots of views. Them taking about other stuff, not so much. Probably still more than other gaming channels, but still, if you can get Matt to promote your game and he’s willing to do whatever you want him to do, playing is probably a better bet. I don't... is this supposed to be an own? I guess because I don't actually follow Matt Mercer or his shows, it might seem weird that I didn't know he has a channel for this. But it just makes the whole thing look dumber that not only was an easy solution not that hard to think of, but that they had already thought of it and put it in place, then made the decision not to use it! And obviously him playing was not the better bet, as he pulled his chute and jumped the gently caress away from the whole thing then instant he found out who he was going to be playing.
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Nov 13, 2020 21:09
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theironjef posted:I don't... is this supposed to be an own? I guess because I don't actually follow Matt Mercer or his shows, it might seem weird that I didn't know he has a channel for this. But it just makes the whole thing look dumber that not only was an easy solution not that hard to think of, but that they had already thought of it and put it in place, then made the decision not to use it! No, just saying that saying he has a massive platform of people that will follow him everywhere is highly overated since he has actually tried using his reach outside of playing games no one gives a poo poo outside of a tiny subset of his followers. It’s not even his own channel, it’s the official CR YouTube. He’s a dude that plays games on the internet and not even his fans care what he does when he’s not playing games with his friends.
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Nov 13, 2020 21:34
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CR's last episode was sponsored by Cam Banks' Cortex and it would be interesting to see if there was a measurable boost of any kind.
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Nov 14, 2020 00:26
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Is it still not possible to just buy the pdf for cortex or are they still doing the thing where you have to buy a physical copy and enter a code on the website?
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Nov 14, 2020 01:18
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Kwyndig posted:Is it still not possible to just buy the pdf for cortex or are they still doing the thing where you have to buy a physical copy and enter a code on the website? I think November 20th is the date that public orders for the core book go live. Backers of the KS got a code to grab the pdf and each physical book has a code for a pdf version in it too. I got my physical book but haven't used either code yet since the only way to log in to redeem the code right now is to use your Facebook or Google credentials. I don't know if that's better than having to sign up for yet another service, but I don't like either option right now. Based on what I have seen from Cam and/or the Fandom people, it sounds like you will only be able to get the pdf from the website in the future, which I'm not happy about either. I think it would be better for them overall to offer it on Drivethrurpg and/or itch.io, but I guess they decided having control over the distribution of digital copies is better than making more sales of the digital book. The KS funded some other books in addition to the core book, but I assume they will be handled the same way when they are released. None of them are done to my knowledge, since the core book is just getting released.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:34
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Kwyndig posted:Is it still not possible to just buy the pdf for cortex or are they still doing the thing where you have to buy a physical copy and enter a code on the website? PDFs are available now through the Cortex website, which is supposed to be a repository for all the rules but felt really incomplete poking around it earlier. Getting the PDF worked fine though! (Disclaimer: I won one of the copies in their Twitter giveaway to promote the digital release.)
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Nov 14, 2020 07:05
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Night10194 posted:Ethics change when it's paid work with a limited number of opportunities for people to get in it and be seen by millions, I think. It's a simple way to put it, but it works out. Say you are writing your NaNoWriMo at the moment, and you have zero intention of actually publishing or showing it to anyone, it is solely an exercise in honing writing skills and experimenting with stuff for you. You've got no responsibility to anyone for anything you write. Maybe, if you find your writing starts bringing out some deep fascination with horrible behaviour which you start fantasising about doing for real, you should think about backing off and maybe getting some therapy, but outside of that edge case anything goes. Next layer out. You are running a home game for friends. Nobody's recording it, nobody's watching who isn't a participant, your major responsibility is to the players at the table and nobody else. This is where X-card mechanics and similar work best, this is where it's fine for someone to play a character of a different gender or race or cultural background or whatever to them so long as everyone else at the table is fine, particularly since if, say, there's no black players at the table then the only way you're going to have black player characters showing up is if someone plays a different race from their own. Chris Spivey wrote an entire section in Harlem Unbound on this. Next layer out. You are running a con game for strangers. Nobody who is not participating in the game is going to be watching closely, but you are out in public at a con and you don't closely know the players. More responsibility comes in. Maybe don't bring your most hardcore Kult adventure to this one, maybe try to dial it back if the players are going in a direction which might make passers-by uncomfortable. Next layer out. Your group is streaming, but it is on a hobby basis and it's just you and your existing friends. You are specifically soliciting an audience, who could be anyone in the world. More responsibility comes in still. Now you need to make sure that not only are your players comfortable with the content you are bringing out, but you need to craft content guidance for the online audience as well. Unless you are particularly lucky in your group's makeup there will likely be sections of your audience who are not represented by you and your players, because the odds of representing every gender, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, and nationality in a group of six or so people is basically zero; some consideration needs to be made about how that impacts things. Next layer out. You're a professional streamer. For the reasons you've mentioned, there's further considerations still. tl;dr: privacy and social responsibility are hooked in to the same slider; if you crank the privacy of your gaming down, the social responsibility considerations go up, and vice versa if it goes in reverse.
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Nov 14, 2020 18:58
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You can buy Cortex on the cortexrpg.com website. The PDF is really nice, the physical book is great craftsmanship. The "compendium" (which, right now, is just the rules for the main book) is better than anything like it on the market (that I know of). fatesrd.com comes really close, but lacks the art. The Cortex Compendium is all the art, all the fluff, it's the entire book rendered in responsive design, which is the ideal way to read it (short of a physical book). But you still get a PDF so that in ten years when Cortex is a fart in the wind you can still read it. It feels like the Fandom/marketing engine's gearing up, but it's also felt that way for a few years, so 
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Nov 15, 2020 20:02
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What is the pitch for Cortex system?
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Nov 15, 2020 22:45
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Lord_Hambrose posted:What is the pitch for Cortex system? They have a literal "what's the pitch" page on their site: https://www.cortexrpg.com/compendium/explore-the-rules/
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Nov 15, 2020 23:55
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Lemon-Lime has served you up, but for me... Cortex (Prime) hits a sweet spot, for me, between Fate and PbtA. It's a dice pool system, so mechanically it's not really like either. If you don't like dice pools and dice tricks, it's probably not the system for you. But like Fate, it's a nice narrative game with a lot of player declarations and narrative control, without all the bidding and aspect crap I don't like. However, while Fate can have any Skills/Approaches, whatever, it's not in the game's DNA. You look at all the "Worlds of Fate" and they all use the same two frameworks ("I roll Fight" or "I roll Forceful"). In a game of PbtA, you can tell what the game is about based on its stats and its moves, and while the core of PbtA is constant, each (good) game is tweaked to really reflect the genre. Similarly, in Cortex, different games have completely different traits that are measured. Looking only at the most recent official versions, to fix a broken car engine you might roll...
Each setting is defined by its traits, and it has a lot of dials you can tweak to make each game feel on trope and in genre (like PbtA). Unlike PbtA, it's a big generic system, so you can spin up a game easily* if there isn't one already going for you. It was published by Margaret Weis Productions for years, who were pretty good at getting licenses. After a rocky kickstarter, it got bought by Fandom, who seem to be really good at licensing. Fandom makes D&D Beyond and sees how much that tool is used and how much of the money WotC makes, and apparently decided they wanted in on that, so they bought Cortex to be their house system. Inbound IPs include all versions of He-Man and the Netflix Dragon Prince show. According to Discord they've got a few more IPs locked down but they're not ready to make an announcement yet. It's not for everybody, but I think it's my go to "there isn't a system for this yet, so what do I hack" system. * I'm not saying spinning up a PbtA game is hard, but it's also not something obvious to someone new to the system. CitizenKeen fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 00:19
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i've been prodding at cortex prime for a while now after backing it, trying to beat it into shape for a star trek game i'd like to run. the good thing about the system is that its wide open and you can do all sorts of things with it. the bad part is that the pdf is poorly organized (seriously people, get your bookmarking poo poo together) and the fact that its so open means that to run a game you're going to basically end up writing an entire game document yourself to keep track of which rules and mods you're using for your game. due to the aforementioned poor organization you'd be better off transcribing all that rather than hunting for it through the pdf. i'm also not a big fan of the gm having to assemble and roll dice pools for every task, luckily there's a fixed difficulty mod you can use instead but the math on it seems poorly thought out at some point i realized that sentinels uses cortex as its basis, and if you want to see a really successful implementation of the system you can look there. i've been using that as a guide for what i'm doing, especially when it comes to how foes work.
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Nov 16, 2020 00:30
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What're your complaints about the book's organization? What're your complaints about the bookmarking? I haven't used the PDF much (between the compendium and the physical book I haven't had much need). Sentinels is a lot of fun (I'm running a campaign right now), but to be clear, it's not a Cortex game. It's written by some of the same people with similar ideas, but it does a lot of things very differently. For those following along at home, Sentinels has about as much in common with Cortex as Blades does with Apocalypse World. Serf's comments about making your own game being a pain in the rear end are spot on. It's a bit of a slog. I think Fandom would rather have released a real game first, but fulfilling the Kickstarter (which was for a broad guide to the whole system in all its iterations) was something Fandom promised to do first. Reading a book that's just the rules you need to run one specific game. One of the digital tools they've advertised is essentially a "build a rule book", e.g., I pick which part of the system I'm using (since the game has a few different ways you can do task resolution), and the website spits out just those sections of the rules. I feel like that would help GMs spin things up a lot, but if promises were horses...
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Nov 16, 2020 00:37
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CitizenKeen posted:What're your complaints about the book's organization? What're your complaints about the bookmarking? I haven't used the PDF much (between the compendium and the physical book I haven't had much need). grouping mods with the core rules irks me. mods should be broken out into their own section because when you're trying to read through the core rules you get sidetracked by pages of optional rules or twists on those rules, and it makes learning the system more complicated than it needs to be. but the pdf bookmarks' biggest sin is in the defining characters section. each prime set option should get its own bookmark, because these are the core of every character and are the thing that is going to need to be referenced the most. so why are these pages not easily accessible? having to dig past ten pages of rules i'm not using to get to skills is annoying, and slows down the process of creating a game even more when you're constantly having to cross-reference stuff and flip back and forth between sections. if distinctions are the prime set that 99% of games are going to be using, why are they not bookmarked, or presented front and center? i get the appeal to organizing things alphabetically, but it seems like if you call out one aspect of the game as near-universally applicable it should be at the top so that you can more easily get to it (again, this could all be solved with more bookmarks). the character creation section suffers from this as well, as archetypes, scratch-built, and pathways should all have bookmarks. CitizenKeen posted:Sentinels is a lot of fun (I'm running a campaign right now), but to be clear, it's not a Cortex game. It's written by some of the same people with similar ideas, but it does a lot of things very differently. For those following along at home, Sentinels has about as much in common with Cortex as Blades does with Apocalypse World. the main difference between cortex and sentinels is that sentinels has a better core mechanic (which is still just a variant on cortex's core mechanic)
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Nov 16, 2020 00:52
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Serf posted:grouping mods with the core rules irks me. mods should be broken out into their own section because when you're trying to read through the core rules you get sidetracked by pages of optional rules or twists on those rules, and it makes learning the system more complicated than it needs to be. but the pdf bookmarks' biggest sin is in the defining characters section. each prime set option should get its own bookmark, because these are the core of every character and are the thing that is going to need to be referenced the most. so why are these pages not easily accessible? having to dig past ten pages of rules i'm not using to get to skills is annoying, and slows down the process of creating a game even more when you're constantly having to cross-reference stuff and flip back and forth between sections. if distinctions are the prime set that 99% of games are going to be using, why are they not bookmarked, or presented front and center? i get the appeal to organizing things alphabetically, but it seems like if you call out one aspect of the game as near-universally applicable it should be at the top so that you can more easily get to it (again, this could all be solved with more bookmarks). the character creation section suffers from this as well, as archetypes, scratch-built, and pathways should all have bookmarks. Ah, yeah, I see that now. The PDF bookmarking seems inferior to the Compendium, for sure. I've often complained that the Prime Handbook isn't designed for people to learn from, and I think it's more of a design/hacker's guide for long-time fans than an intro to the system, that has subsequently been shoe-horned into the role of also teaching the game. quote:the main difference between cortex and sentinels is that sentinels has a better core mechanic (which is still just a variant on cortex's core mechanic) I've actually found the Sentinels mechanic lacking. It seems really strong, and I really like the whole "Mid die" math, but there's a couple areas it really falls flat for me. Of note, I loathe not being able to penalize overconfidence in Attacks. After years of PbtA and Cortex and Blades, never being able to say "You succeed but" unless you're rolling to Overcome really irks me. I do really like GYRO and the Fate-style action breakdown, though, as it's really convenient for hanging mechanics off of. The game isn't balanced at all though. Garbage-tier balance, which I find increasingly frustrating with each session.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:12
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CitizenKeen posted:Ah, yeah, I see that now. The PDF bookmarking seems inferior to the Compendium, for sure. I've often complained that the Prime Handbook isn't designed for people to learn from, and I think it's more of a design/hacker's guide for long-time fans than an intro to the system, that has subsequently been shoe-horned into the role of also teaching the game. yes, exactly. the book kinda reminds me of the fragged books in how it basically isn't set up to be learned, its to be referenced. but i think i have a handle on the cortex system, unlike fragged which still eludes me CitizenKeen posted:I've actually found the Sentinels mechanic lacking. It seems really strong, and I really like the whole "Mid die" math, but there's a couple areas it really falls flat for me. Of note, I loathe not being able to penalize overconfidence in Attacks. After years of PbtA and Cortex and Blades, never being able to say "You succeed but" unless you're rolling to Overcome really irks me. I do really like GYRO and the Fate-style action breakdown, though, as it's really convenient for hanging mechanics off of. really? what are your criticisms of sentinels' balancing? i know i've had my frustrations with pbta and fitd in the past, where if players stack their stats/moves in just the right ways it becomes very difficult to challenge them
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Nov 16, 2020 01:28
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I would also like to know what "penalizing overconfidence in attacks" is. Actually it looks like it's not being able to do "You succeed with a but" type stuff. Still though, what's overconfidence specifically in this context? theironjef fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 03:53
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theironjef posted:Still though, what's overconfidence specifically in this context? A slow and insidious killer.
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Nov 16, 2020 06:56
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